Vietnam War

World History

1900 - Present: The Recent Past

The Cold War

Communism
Korean War Overview
Bay of Pigs Invasion
Cuban Missile Crisis
Vietnam War
Allende and Pinochet in Chile
Pattern of US Cold War Interventions

Vietnam War Overview of the Vietnam War

Back

Vietnam War

⇐ Use this menu to view and help create subtitles for this video in many different languages. You'll probably want to hide YouTube's captions if using these subtitles.

In order to have a respectable understanding of the Vietnam War,
we have to rewind all the way back to the late 1800s,
when France was colonizing Southeast Asia--
and in particular colonizing what is now Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia.
They were collectively called French Indo-China.
We can see Cambodia here, and Vietnam along the coast,
and then Laos right over here.
France stayed a colonizing power
--I have a gap in my timeline here--
And they stayed a colonizing power
all the way through WWII.
And so you can imagine that during WWII
France was quickly overrun by the Germans.
The Vietnamese wanted their independence,
and so you have a liberation movement that rises up,
and it was led by the Viet Minh,
and the Viet Minh were led by Ho Chi Minh.
This right here is a picture of Ho Chi Minh.
Besides being a liberation movement,
they were also Communists,
which you could imagine later on,
during the Cold War,
would kind of bias the US against them.
But you fast-forward through WWII,
eventually the Japanese take control
over Indo-China, over Vietnam,
But by the time '45 rolls around, or it's the end of '45,
we know that the US defeats Japan,
Now all of a sudden, the Viet Minh are able to
declare a somewhat temporary independence.
And it is temporary because shortly after that,
the region is occupied temporarily by
the Chinese in the North
and the British in the South
--who were part of the Allied Forces against the Axis.
But eventually, you have the French coming back.
They want to re-assert their control
over their former colony.
And you have this war that develops,
the First Indochina War,
between the French, and people sympathetic to the French,
the Vietnamese who are loyal to the French, and the North.
And the French--just to make clear how it sets up--
when, at the end of WWII,
when you had temporary occupiers
--the British and the Chinese--
the Chinese obviously had more influence in the North;
the British had more influence in the South.
When the French come back,
they essentially are able to reinstate control over the South.
So, right when the Indochina War is beginning,
the French already have more control over the South.
And actually, historically the French
had more influence in the South as well.
During French colonial rule
it was the southern third of Vietnam
where you had a lot of French influence.
And this is a current map,
and the current map doesn't have this orange boundary over here
that we'll talk about in a second--
Vietnam is now all unified.
But before the Vietnam War,
this was not Ho Chi Minh City, this was Saigon.
And Saigon was kind of
where most of the French control was centered.
But you fast-forward to 1954,
this ends up in a stalemate.
And so you have the Geneva Conference of 1954
that partitions Vietnam along the 17th parallel
between North Vietnam and South Vietnam.
The whole point of this partition
was really just to allow for a cooling-off period--
a period where you can have things settling down,
and then having elections--
it wasn't meant to be a permanent partition.
But there was a 300-day period
where people could move across the partition.
And during that partition, you actually had 900,000 people,
mainly Catholics, move from the North to South.
You also have several hundred thousand people
moving from the South to the North,
so it wasn't a one-way movement.
But net-net, most of the movement
by Roman Catholic Vietnamese
was from the North to the South.
You fast-forward a little bit, you eventually have
--and I'm sure I'm butchering the pronunciation--
Ngo Dinh Diem takes control,
He starts off as Prime Minister in ' 54,
eventually he takes control and becomes President in '55.
This is him right here.
He takes control of South Vietnam.
And this guy is not a big fan of things
like elections or non-corrupt government, and all of the rest...
and he takes control of South Vietnam,
but you could imagine that
the US is positively inclined to him.
One, he dresses in nice Western suits and all of that,
and nicely combed hair,
but he was also anti-Communist.
And in this time period, the US is starting to think
in terms of Cold War
and in terms of how do we stop Communism,
and how do we contain it,
this whole theory of Containment,
that the best way to stop the Soviet Union
is just to make sure that Communism cannot spread--
that it gets contained,
that we have the Domino theory in the US,
that if one country falls to Communism in a region,
that the rest of the countries will eventually fall--
and that is not good for Containment.
So we did not want South Vietnam to fall,
we essentially start supporting these characters over here.
Even from the early 50's,
the US starts supporting the anti-Communists.
And at first, this support is in the guise of " advisers."
But these advisers, one, we start sending
more and more aid, more and more advisers.
And these advisers start getting
more and more involved in the actual conflict.
And so after this partition, you can imagine that
you still have an ongoing conflict
between the North and the South,
and on top of that you have actors
who are sympathetic to the North,
sympathetic to the Viet MInh,
sympathetic to Ho Chi Minh in the South.
Some of them were in the North,
they had come back to the South;
some of them were just in the South
and they did not like the Diem government,
besides just being sympathetic to Ho Chi Minh.
Diem was a fairly corrupt autocratic ruler,
who wasn't a big fan of democracy.
And so, these players in the South,
who started to rise up against President Diem,
were the Vietcong.
So, this really sets up what the Vietnam War is all about.
You have the Communist, Ho Chi Minh-controlled North,
those fighting a conventional war against the South.
You have this partition on the 17th-parallel,
and on top of that,
you have an unconventional fighting force
--I guess you could call them "guerrillas,"--
in the South of Vietnam called the Vietcong.
So, there were two things the South had to fight against:
The North officially,
and also this insurrection
that was occurring within the South.
So the whole time,
the US did not want this insurrection to succeed.
They did not want all of Vietnam to become Communist.
We keep sending more and more advisers.
It actually started even before Kennedy.
but Kennedy escalates the number of advisers that get sent.
It's still not, at this point, a formal war.
We haven't officially declared war.
We don't have officially soldiers in battle.
You fast-forward to 1963,
Besides all of the great characteristics of Diem
that I already mentioned,
he also was into persecuting Buddhists.
so, to make matters worse, not only was he corrupt,
not only did he not like elections,
he liked persecuting his own people.
And by 1963 this kind of got out of hand.
His level of persecution of the Buddhists:
he started ... storming temples and all the rest,
and so, he was assassinated, leaving a power vacuum.
You have all these people jockeying for control.
None of these really were
especially savory characters inside the South.
These two guys eventually come to power:
Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thiev
Wait a few years, Nguyen Van Thiev was able to
get this guy out of the picture,
and by 1967--I don't have it over here--
you have Thiev,..he has now taken control.
But during that period,
actually before Ky and Theiv take power,
in 1964 you have one of the shadiest incidents in American history.
As you can imagine, we in our function as advisers,
we had sent ships into the Gulf of Tonkin,
right off the coast of North Vietnam.
And, so the original story goes,
and this is a very suspect original story,
in 1964, the US Maddox--and this is the original story--
claimed that it was attacked,
or it was claimed that the US Maddox was attacked
by North Vietnamese patrol boats,
and that there was little bit of a skirmish.
There was exchange of fire.
And it was also claimed that a few days later,
another boat in the Gulf of Tonkin, another US vessel
was attacked by a North Vietnamese boat.
That was the original story.
This angered Congress.
This angered the American people, you know.
How dare they attack ships
war ships that are sitting off the coast?
And so this kind of gave the emotional fuel
to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
So these purported incidents,
is kind of an attack on the USS Maddox
and this other thing that might have happened
--this was called the Gulf of Tonkin Incident--
this angered Congress, angered the American people,
So, we passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
And what's relevant about it is that
it gave LBJ here, it gave him the authority
to officially engage in a war in Vietnam,
to officially escalate to an actual war
that the US was involved in.
And this whole time I've been saying that
it's shady because it's now been shown that,
One, the gulf of Tonkin, well,
it's not clear that really anything happened.
there might have been some firing from the USS Maddox
they might have actually engaged
the North Vietnamese patrol boats
The other possibility that might have happened
is that nothing happened.
So, but, either way you look at it,
it's now been fairly established that
it was not a real incident.
It was not really North Vietnam attacking the US.
But it was relevant because it really escalated the War.
So now you have Johnson.
Did I say North Korea originally? I apologize for that.
We are talking about North Vietnam.
I don't remember what my brain actually said.
Of course North Vietnam.
But it gave Johnson the power to escalate the war.
So his administration is really the heart of the Vietnam War.
When the War was really escalated,
we eventually get to 500,000 US troops.
But the whole time this is happening,
you can imagine that Johnson and the military leaders in Vietnam
and the American military leaders in Vietnam
are telling the American people,
"Oh, we're fighting Communism."
"We're about to win. This is a noble war."
And you fast-forward, and you know,
especially the part "about to win,"
You fast-forward to 1968,
and all of a sudden you have the Vietcong,
whom the American leaders have told
the American people and Congress
they are about to be defeated.
And then in 1968 the Vietcong orchestrate the Tet Offensive,
which is this massive coordinated attack
on a bunch of targets throughout South Vietnam.
And so, even though it wasn't a completely successful militarily,
the intent of the Tet Offensive was
kind of to completely turn the tides of the War.
It made the American People and Congress rightfully suspicious,
You, you know, Mr. Johnson,
you'd told us that we were about to win the War,
and the Vietcong were almost defeated,
and all of a sudden they orchestrate
this sophisticated attack on us.
it rightfully made the American public suspicious.
On top of that, this probably made matters a lot worse,
the My Lai Massacre comes out.
And in every war there are massacres,
but the US at least believes that
its soldiers can kinda take the high-road,
that they don't engage in these types of things.
But the My Lai Massacre shows that
really no soldiers are immune to massacres,
and this is really a disgusting massacre,
and it was documented.
And if you really want to be disturbed,
do a google search for images of the My Lai massacre.
It will ruin your weekend. It will depress you.
It's US soldiers killing a village of innocent women and children.
There's pictures of dead babies. It's horrible.
To make matters worse, or even add insult to injury,
the soldiers who committed--
There's actually a few who tried to defend the villagers.
When they came back,
they were treated almost like traitors.
But the soldiers who actually did the attack,
only one of them got jail time.
and it was only a couple of years of jail time--
and this is for massacring a village of women and children.
So already, you have the Tet Offensive
makes the American public suspicious of
whether we can actually even win this war,
and then we have the My Lai Massacre
which disgusts the public,
and makes people realize that we're involved in a war
--not even clear who are the good guys anymore--
not even clear what the real goals are.
To make matters worse, you fast-forward to 1971,
the Pentagon papers get leaked to the NY Times,
and these pretty much articulate
--it's a classified document--
that articulates that the leadership,
the military and non-military leadership of the Vietnam War
was to some degree lying to Congress and the American people.
who's lying about how the War was going.
who's lying about what activities it was doing.
It did not tell the American people and Congress that
it was actually engaged in war in Laos and Cambodia.
And a lot of reason why we were engaged in Laos and Cambodia
is because that's where the supply routes were
between the North and the South,
They ran through Laos and Cambodia.
The most famous of them,
and you might have heard of it,
is the Ho Chi Minh trail.
It wasn't just one trail.
It was actually a network of trails.
So a lot of activity that was going on in Laos and Cambodia
was kind of carpet bombing of
what the US thought were some of these supply routes.
--we never really got a good...we never--
--well that's a whole other debate--
it wasn't just one trail that was easily bombed,
it was all of these footpaths and all these other things
where arms were able to be transported
from the North to the South.
But the Pentagon-made papers
rightfully made the American people even more suspicious.
And now we are entering into Nixon's administration,
and he was still doing the carpet bombing,
still atrocities going on,
but his whole goal was to kind of wind down the War,
bring the troops out on a timetable
without kind of an official defeat.
So you fast-forward to 1973,
you have the Paris peace accords,
where officially, there is peace
between the North, the South, the North and the Americans,
you can imagine from the North's point of view,
they were like, "Sure, we'll sign some peace accords."
"It'll make the Americans go away."
Once the Americans go away,
they won't be able to come back.
Since this was such a hugely unpopular war--
it was such a waste for America on so many dimensions,
especially on America's prestige as a global actor.
"We'll just wait for them to leave."
"Then we can overrun the South after that."
And that's essentially what happens.
In 1975 the North just overruns the South.
And then, later that year,
you have Saigon falling to the North,
and then it becomes Ho Chi Minh City.
In just this whole period,
you have President Thiev who is in power.
Just to show where his priorities are, right near the end,
right when the South is falling to the North Vietnam,
and you can kinda see the writing on the wall,
he gives a speech to the Vietnamese people,
saying that he'll never desert them.
But then when it becomes clear that
Saigon is going to fall to the North Vietnamese.
He gets on a big US transport plane
with literally 15 tons of luggage.
I"ll let you think about how much luggage that is.
And 15 million dollars worth of gold--
This is 15 million dollars worth of gold in 1975.
So you can imagine
how much he really cared about the Vietnamese people.
And he eventually ends up settling in Massachusetts
and he died there about 10 years ago.
So you can imagine that
this was an ugly incident for the world,
an ugly, super ugly incident for the Vietnamese people,
a super ugly chapter in the American history.
It was the first war that, one, America lost.
But more, it hurts prestige.
It hurts America's ability to influence
what was going on in other parts of the world.
You know, you had the containment theory,
that we had to stop Communism from spreading,
and the Domino theory that
if one country would fall to Communism,
then the other ones--that didn't happen!
The South did fall, but we didn't have
the rest of Southeast Asia falling to Communism.
So it kind of disproved the Domino theory,
especially because after the Vietnam War,
the US would not be able
to enter another war like it for some time,
because the American people wouldn't let it happen.
So, to some degree, it would've been easier for Communism to spread,
because people would've known that the US couldn't engage it,
but despite of that the Domino theory didn't happen.
But it was all around ugly, just the size of the massacres,
the raping, the pillaging of innocents
that happened really on all sides of this.
You have 1 to 3 million Vietnamese
No one really knows the the actual count.
That's a huge number. 1 to 3 million Vietnamese were killed.
You have 58,000 American troops being killed.
You have hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and Laotians,
who were never really formally involved in the War,
they were killed especially due to this carpet bombing.
These are atrocious numbers.
Really one of the worst and ugliest chapters in US history.

Questions
Tips & Feedback

Be specific, and indicate a time in the video:

At 5:31, how is the moon large enough to block the sun? Isn't the sun way larger?

Have something that's not a question about this content?

Post a tip or feedback
General discussion about the site
Report a technical problem with the site
Request a video or feature

This discussion area is not meant for answering homework questions.

Formatting tips

Cancel or

( total)

Share a tip

When naming a variable, it is okay to use most letters, but some are reserved, like 'e', which represents the value 2.7831...

Suggest a fix

At 2:33, Sal says "double bonds" but should say "single bonds."

Have something that's not a tip or feedback about this content?

Ask a question
General discussion about the site
Report a technical problem with the site
Request a video or feature

This discussion area is not meant for answering homework questions.

Formatting tips

Cancel or

Discuss the site

For general discussions about Khan Academy, visit our Reddit discussion page.

Flag inappropriate posts

Here are posts to avoid making. If you do encounter them, flag them for attention from our Guardians.

abuse

disrespectful or offensive
an advertisement

not helpful

low quality
not about the video topic
soliciting votes or seeking badges
a homework question
a duplicate answer
repeatedly making the same post

wrong category

a tip or feedback in Questions
a question in Tips & Feedback
an answer that should be its own question

about the site

a question about Khan Academy
(Visit our FAQ)
a post about badges
a technical problem with the site
(Report a problem)
a request for videos or features