To stop communism from spreading across South-East Asia and beyond, the United States (US) and its allies, including Australia, backed the Republic of South Vietnam in its civil war with North Vietnam. Despite heaps of fighting, they couldn't beat the North’s resourceful tactics. Public support for the war tanked after the Tet Offensive, leading to the gradual withdrawal of US and allied troops in 1971. The North finally won when it captured Saigon in 1975.
The Vietnam War, essentially a conflict between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, had wider implications because of North Vietnam's communist associations. In the wake of the Second World War, with the USSR dominating Eastern Europe and China dominant in North Asia, Western fears of communist expansion throughout Asia ran high. The United States (US) was concerned that, should North Vietnam prevail and turn Vietnam into a communist state, neighbouring countries such as Laos, Cambodia and Thailand were also likely to succumb in what was called the 'domino effect'. As an ally of the US and with its own interest in seeing the South-East Asian region free of communism, Australia was an enthusiastic supporter of American policy in Vietnam.
America's fear of a North Vietnamese victory and its implications for regional politics led to its involvement in the war in Vietnam as an ally and supporter of the anti-communist South Vietnamese regime. Australia quickly followed suit, offering military trainers to assist South Vietnamese forces in a move aimed at supporting US policy and addressing Australia's own regional concerns.
Over the following years, both the US and Australia increased their commitment to South Vietnam, including the use of conscripts in combat. Military might, however, was not sufficient to prevail over either southern communist insurgents or the North Vietnamese Army. Even when US and South Vietnamese forces did inflict a major battlefield defeat on their enemies during the 1968 Tet Offensive, popular opinion in the US and Australia turned against the war. The propaganda victory won by the communist forces ultimately proved to be of greater moment than their military defeat. After 1968 the US began withdrawing its forces from Vietnam until, by late 1972, the carriage of the war had been placed in the hands of South Vietnam, which in 1975 was defeated by the North.
Troops of 1RAR landed in June 1965, with military police from the American 173rd Airborne Brigade keeping watch. The battalion was comprised entirely of regular troops during its first deployment, and was maintained and supplied by the Americans. Unfortunately, much of its equipment was old or not well suited to the war, and it was found that Australian and American doctrine and tactics differed markedly. The battalion saw some hard fighting and lost 23 men killed before returning to Australia in June 1966. AWM DNE/65/0002/VN
Western fear of communism
In the wake of the Viet Minh victory over France in 1954, concern at communism’s growing influence in Asia was widespread as people sought both explanation and remedy.
An experienced diplomat and influential figure, Carlos P. Romulo wrote an article for the RSL’s monthly magazine, Reveille, 27(12), published in August 1954. He had spent time in Australia during World War II as General MacArthur’s aide-de-camp, but his career encompassed much more. Romulo had, among other things, been a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, editor and academic. During World War II, he attained the rank of general in the US Army. After the war, he became Head of the Philippines Delegation to the United Nations (UN) before becoming President of the UN General Assembly.
Despite being a great admirer of the US, the colonial master of the Philippines for many decades, Romulo was nevertheless a staunch advocate for the freedom of subject peoples. In his article, he suggested that only when their own freedom from colonialism was assured would the people of South-East Asia help the West in its fight against communism. With hindsight, Romulo’s suggestion that the US was unlikely to commit to an all-out intervention in Vietnam was erroneous. However, his article indicates how an experienced, senior diplomat viewed the threat of communism in Asia after the French defeat in Vietnam.
Paper declarations of independence and other self-serving evidence by the colonial powers may dramatise the sham of puppetry, but will not change the age-old suspicions of peoples, who have ceased to be gullible … On nothing less than freedom, completely removed from the odious associations of colonialism, could the West go to the parliament of South East Asia and win a vote of confidence … I wish to underline the confidence which such a conference is bound to generate. With out it no call for collective action against Commun ism in South East Asia will, evoke any response … It would be sheer waste of time and effort to try to enlist native support while a suspicion remains that colonialism is fighting Communism … To the people of Australia and New Zealand, to the men of Anzac, I em phasise the real and pre sent danger of Communism, in Asia … They, more than others, will understand the menace to their region of the Communist advance in South-East Asia … How shall the free world save South-East Asia? … Not merely by denouncing Communism, but by winning the confidence of the Asian peoples on the basis of an indubitable guarantee of their freedom … Once this is accomplished, it would be time to launch a military coalition, not for the purpose of negotiating with Communist intransigents, but to stop Communism right in its tracks … Communism cannot be stopped in South-East Asia unless the Asians themselves give their consent and co-operation.
[Romulo's paper quoted in 'RED DANGER STRESSED', Daily Mirror, 2 August 1954, p 7 (Cable Edition 2)]
The American War
The war that is known around the world as the 'Vietnam War' is referred to in Vietnam as the 'American War'. In this way, the conflict between communist forces in South Vietnam and the North Vietnamese Army on one hand, and the US and its allies on the other, is distinguished from the eight-year-long war against France that ended in 1954 and the 5-year-long Japanese occupation during the Second World War. US military intervention in Vietnam began in 1961, when advisers were sent to South Vietnam to bolster that country's defences against a communist-backed insurgency sponsored by North Vietnam.
Some 3 million US personnel served in Vietnam over the 10 years of American involvement. American military planners and political leaders – from the wealthiest, most technologically and militarily advanced nation on earth – expected to defeat the communists in Vietnam – a land peopled mainly by rural peasants – with relative ease. But as the war dragged on, and as ever-increasing numbers of American soldiers were deployed to Vietnam, it became apparent that the Vietnamese communists were a tougher, more resourceful enemy than had been imagined. Using equipment supplied by the Soviet Union and China, the North Vietnamese Army and the South Vietnamese communists, known as the Vietcong, were able to frustrate the Americans, who were rarely able to draw their opponents into open battle.
Mounting losses and a growing sense that the war was not being won, despite assertions to the contrary by leading political and military figures in the US, gave strength to anti-war activists in America. When communist forces launched the Tet Offensive in February 1968, attacking major centres and infiltrating the American embassy in Saigon, American public opinion turned decisively against the war. The Tet Offensive was a military defeat for the Vietcong, who never recovered from the losses they suffered. However, it was also a propaganda victory from which the US could not recover.
After 1968, the number of Americans in Vietnam decreased year by year. Fighting continued. Mostly, by now, it was against the North Vietnamese Army. US aircraft and naval vessels continued to operate against targets in North and South Vietnam, but American ground forces became fewer and fewer, replaced by a growing, but relatively ineffective, South Vietnamese army.
Communist forces continued to reach South Vietnam from the North despite US and South Vietnamese attempts to cut off supply routes. In 1970, the American president, Richard Nixon, expanded military operations into neighbouring Laos and Cambodia. Both countries were used as transit routes for North Vietnamese troops and supplies, but for their civilian populations the widening conflict brought disaster. Ultimately this attempt to disrupt North Vietnam's efforts in the South failed. Laos fell to communist forces in 1975, as did Cambodia, whose population, already torn apart by the war, went on to experience suffering on a scale that horrified the world.
The conflict in Vietnam divided American society and the military alike. In the final period of the war, during the early 1970s, insubordination and drug use were increasingly common among US soldiers in Vietnam. Troops were reportedly refusing to go on patrol or place themselves in dangerous situations. Many were conscripts, and none wished to die in a war that, to many, seemed pointless and which was clearly coming to an end.
By the end of 1972, few US ground troops remained in Vietnam. In January 1973, peace talks that had been taking place in Paris resulted in a ceasefire being agreed to by the US, North Vietnam and, reluctantly, by South Vietnam. For the Americans, this meant 'peace with honour'. For the North and South Vietnamese, it meant less.
The war continued until April 1975 when Saigon fell to a North Vietnamese offensive. Over many years of US involvement in the war, some 60,000 Americans were killed. However, the heaviest combat losses were borne by the people of Vietnam. North Vietnamese estimates put the Vietnamese civilian death toll at 4 million.