Overview

This excellent book by the U.S. Army provides a unique view of the early days of the Vietnam War. Contents: Strategic Setting * Operations * The First Combat Troops Arrive * The Start of Offensive Operations * First Blood * A Flurry of Engagements * Year of the Horse: 1966 * Renewed Emphasis on Pacification * Building the Infrastructure * Analysis In January 1965, the principal U.S. ally against communism in Southeast Asia, the Republic of (South) Vietnam, appeared to be headed for collapse. Armed revolutionaries fighting a proxy war on behalf of Communist North Vietnam held the political and military initiative. The insurgents controlled nearly half of South Vietnam's countryside and almost a third of its population. The U.S.-trained South Vietnamese Army was losing soldiers and equipment at an alarming rate. Regiment-size enemy units threatened the nation's capital, Saigon, and the fractious coalition of civilian and military officials who governed the country seemed unable to deal with the crisis. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his National Security Council concluded that the Republic of Vietnam could only survive if the United States took a more active part in the war. America's military involvement in Vietnam began twenty years earlier when a team of agents from the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, parachuted into northern Vietnam during the closing months of World War II. The team formed an alliance with Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh (Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, or League for the Independence of Vietnam) guerrilla army, which had been fighting the Japanese troops occupying the former French colony since 1941. Needing the Viet Minh's help in rescuing downed Allied airmen, the United States overlooked the fact that Ho Chi Minh was also a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary who had been trying to end French colonial rule since the 1920s. That became impossible to ignore in late August 1945, however, when Japan surrendered to the Allies and Ho's victorious army seized control of Hanoi. France, still stinging from its wartime humiliation, demanded the restoration of its Indochinese colonies. Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh army retreated to the countryside, but neither the Communists nor many Vietnamese nationalists were willing to abandon the dream of Vietnamese independence. Within two years, Ho and his followers were at war with the French colonial government.

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9781976832253

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