Vietnam War

Extracted Attributes

• Outcome

  North Vietnamese victory, Reunification of North and South Vietnam into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam

• Duration

  19 years, 5 months and 29 days

• End Date

  1975-04-30

• Start Date

  1955-11-01

• Other Names

  American War in Vietnam, War Against the Americans to Save the Nation, Second Indochina War

• Broader Location

  South China Sea, Gulf of Thailand

• Primary Location

  Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia

• Type of Conflict

  Armed conflict, Second Indochina War, Proxy war of the Cold War, Postcolonial war of national liberation, Civil war

• Post-war Impact (US)

  Vietnam Syndrome (aversion to overseas military involvement), contributed to crisis of confidence in the 1970s

• Post-war Impact (Vietnam)

  Indochina refugee crisis (millions left, ~250,000 perished at sea), widespread use of toxic herbicides (20% of South Vietnam's jungle sprayed, long-term health problems)

• Post-war Impact (Cambodia)

  Cambodian genocide, Cambodian–Vietnamese War

• US Service Member Casualties

  58,220 deaths

• Laotian Casualties (estimated)

  20,000–62,000 deaths

• Cambodian Casualties (estimated)

  275,000–310,000 deaths

• Vietnamese Casualties (estimated)

  970,000 to 3 million deaths (soldiers and civilians)

• US Service Members Missing in Action

  1,626

Timeline

• First Indochina War begins, leading to Vietnam's independence from French colonial rule. (Source: summary, wikipedia)

  1946

• Battle of Dien Bien Phu: French Union defeated, ending French colonial rule in Indochina. (Source: web_search_results)

  1954-05

• Geneva Conference: Vietnam gains independence but is divided at the 17th parallel, with Ho Chi Minh leading North Vietnam and the US supporting South Vietnam. (Source: summary, wikipedia)

  1954

• Official start of the Vietnam War. (Source: summary, wikipedia)

  1955-11-01

• The Viet Cong, a southern dissident group directed by North Vietnam, intensifies its guerrilla war in the south. (Source: summary, wikipedia)

  1957

• North Vietnam invades Laos and establishes the Ho Chi Minh Trail to supply the Viet Cong. (Source: summary, wikipedia)

  1958

• US military advisors in South Vietnam number just under a thousand. (Source: dbpedia)

  1959

• US military advisors in South Vietnam increase to 900. (Source: wikipedia)

  1960

• US military advisors are introduced on a large scale. (Source: web_search_results)

  1961

• North Vietnam covertly sends 40,000 soldiers of its People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), armed with Soviet and Chinese weapons, to fight in the insurgency in the south. (Source: summary, wikipedia)

  1963

• US military advisors increase to 16,000 under President John F. Kennedy. (Source: summary, wikipedia)

  1963

• Ngo Dinh Diem, leader of South Vietnam, is killed in a US-backed military coup, adding to the south's instability. (Source: summary, wikipedia)

  1963

• US military advisors increase to 23,000. (Source: dbpedia)

  1964

• Gulf of Tonkin incident occurs, leading to a US Congressional resolution. (Source: summary, wikipedia)

  1964-08

• US Congress passes a resolution granting President Lyndon B. Johnson authority to increase military presence without a formal declaration of war. (Source: summary, wikipedia)

  1964

• Direct US military involvement escalates significantly, with President Johnson launching a bombing campaign against North Vietnam and deploying combat troops. (Source: summary, wikipedia)

  1965

• US troop deployment dramatically increases to 184,000. (Source: wikipedia, dbpedia)

  1966

• North Vietnam launches the Tet Offensive, a coordinated series of attacks on over 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam, which, despite being a tactical defeat for North Vietnam, erodes American public support for the war. (Source: summary, wikipedia, web_search_results)

  1968-01-31

• US troop deployment reaches 536,000. (Source: wikipedia)

  1969

• President Richard Nixon initiates 'Vietnamization,' a policy of gradually withdrawing US forces while expanding the South Vietnamese army's role. (Source: summary, wikipedia)

  1969

• A coup d'état in Cambodia results in a PAVN invasion and a US-South Vietnamese counter-invasion, escalating the Cambodian Civil War. (Source: summary, wikipedia)

  1970

• US ground forces are largely withdrawn from Vietnam, with operations limited to air support, artillery, advisors, and materiel shipments. (Source: summary, wikipedia, dbpedia)

  1972

• Paris Peace Accords are signed, formalizing the departure of all US forces from Vietnam. (Source: summary, wikipedia, web_search_results)

  1973-01

• Phnom Penh falls to the Khmer Rouge, marking the end of the Cambodian Civil War. (Source: wikipedia, dbpedia)

  1975-04-17

• Fall of Saigon: North Vietnamese forces capture Saigon, marking the end of the Vietnam War. (Source: summary, wikipedia)

  1975-04-30

• North and South Vietnam are reunified into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. (Source: summary, wikipedia)

  1976

• The Cambodian–Vietnamese War begins. (Source: summary, wikipedia)

  1978

• China invades Vietnam in response to the Cambodian–Vietnamese War. (Source: summary, wikipedia)

  1979

• Sino-Vietnamese border conflicts last until this year. (Source: summary, wikipedia)

  1991

Vietnam War

The Vietnam War (1 November 1955 – 30 April 1975) was an armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fought between North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam) and their allies. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union and China, while South Vietnam was supported by the United States and other anti-communist nations. The conflict was the second of the Indochina wars and a proxy war of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and US. The Vietnam War was one of the postcolonial wars of national liberation, a theater in the Cold War, and a civil war, with civil warfare a defining feature from the outset. Direct US military involvement escalated from 1965 until its withdrawal in 1973. The fighting spilled into the Laotian and Cambodian Civil Wars, which ended with all three countries becoming communist in 1975. After the defeat of the French Union in the First Indochina War that began in 1946, Vietnam gained independence in the 1954 Geneva Conference but was divided in two at the 17th parallel: the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, took control of North Vietnam, while the US assumed financial and military support for South Vietnam, led by Ngo Dinh Diem. The North Vietnamese supplied and directed the Viet Cong (VC), a common front of dissidents in the south which intensified a guerrilla war from 1957. In 1958, North Vietnam invaded Laos, establishing the Ho Chi Minh trail to supply the VC. By 1963, the north had covertly sent 40,000 soldiers of its People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), armed with Soviet and Chinese weapons, to fight in the insurgency in the south. President John F. Kennedy increased US involvement from 900 military advisors in 1960 to 16,000 in 1963 and sent more aid to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), which failed to produce results. In 1963, Diem was killed in a US-backed military coup, which added to the south's instability. Following the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, the US Congress passed a resolution that gave President Lyndon B. Johnson authority to increase military presence without declaring war. Johnson launched a bombing campaign of the north and sent combat troops, dramatically increasing deployment to 184,000 by 1966, and 536,000 by 1969. US forces relied on air supremacy and overwhelming firepower to conduct search and destroy operations in rural areas. In 1968, North Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive, which was a tactical defeat but convinced many Americans the war could not be won. Johnson's successor, Richard Nixon, began "Vietnamization" from 1969, which saw the conflict fought by an expanded ARVN while US forces withdrew. The 1970 Cambodian coup d'état resulted in a PAVN invasion and US–ARVN counter-invasion, escalating its civil war. US troops had mostly withdrawn from Vietnam by 1972, and the 1973 Paris Peace Accords saw the rest leave. The accords were broken and fighting continued until the 1975 spring offensive and fall of Saigon to the PAVN, marking the war's end. North and South Vietnam were reunified in 1976. The war exacted an enormous cost: estimates of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed range from 970,000 to 3 million. Some 275,000–310,000 Cambodians, 20,000–62,000 Laotians, and 58,220 US service members died. Its end would precipitate the Vietnamese boat people and the larger Indochina refugee crisis, which saw millions leave Indochina, of which about 250,000 perished at sea. 20% of South Vietnam's jungle was sprayed with toxic herbicides, which led to significant health problems. The Khmer Rouge carried out the Cambodian genocide, and the Cambodian–Vietnamese War began in 1978. In response, China invaded Vietnam, with border conflicts lasting until 1991. Within the US, the war gave rise to Vietnam syndrome, an aversion to American overseas military involvement, which, with the Watergate scandal, contributed to the crisis of confidence that affected the United States throughout the 1970s.

Web Search Results

• Vietnam War - Wikipedia

  The Vietnam War (1 November 1955 – 30 April 1975) was an armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fought between North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam) and their allies. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union and China, while South Vietnam was supported by the United States and other anti-communist nations. The conflict was the second of the Indochina wars and a proxy war of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and US. The Vietnam [...] War was one of the postcolonial wars of national liberation, a theater in the Cold War, and a civil war, with civil warfare a defining feature from the outset. Direct US military involvement escalated from 1965 until its withdrawal in 1973. The fighting spilled into the Laotian and Cambodian Civil Wars, which ended with all three countries becoming communist in 1975. [...] | | | | --- | | Date | 1 November 1955 – 30 April 1975(19 years, 5 months and 29 days) | | Location | South Vietnam North Vietnam Cambodia "Cambodia (1953–1970)") Laos South China Sea Gulf of Thailand (spillover conflict in China, and Thailand) | | Result | North Vietnamese victory | | Territorialchanges | Reunification of North Vietnam and South Vietnam into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976 | | | Belligerents |

• Vietnam War: Dates, Causes & Facts | HISTORY

  The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. More than 3 million people (including over 58,000 Americans) were killed in the Vietnam War, and more than half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians. [...] After Ho’s communist forces took power in the north, armed conflict between northern and southern armies continued until the northern Viet Minh’s decisive victory in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. The French loss at the battle ended almost a century of French colonial rule in Indochina. [...] On January 31, 1968, some 70,000 DRV forces under General Vo Nguyen Giap launched the Tet Offensive (named for the lunar new year), a coordinated series of fierce attacks on more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam. Taken by surprise, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces nonetheless managed to strike back quickly, and the communists were unable to hold any of the targets for more than a day or two.

• Vietnam War | Facts, Summary, Years, Timeline ... - Britannica

  Vietnam War, (1954–75), a protracted conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, known as the Viet Cong, against the government of South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. Called the “American War” in Vietnam (or, in full, the “War Against the Americans to Save the Nation”), the war was also part of a larger regional conflict (see Indochina wars) and a manifestation of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union [...] By nearly every metric, the Vietnam War was, in the common sense of the word, a war. The United States committed some 550,000 troops to the Vietnam front at the height of the conflict, suffered more than 58,000 casualties, and engaged in battle after battle with communist forces in the region until its withdrawal in 1973. However, from a constitutional perspective, this conflict did not technically count as a war. The U.S. Constitution grants Congress sole authority to issue declarations of [...] At the heart of the conflict was the desire of North Vietnam, which had defeated the French colonial administration of Vietnam in 1954, to unify the entire country under a single communist regime modeled after those of the Soviet Union and China. The South Vietnamese government, on the other hand, fought to preserve a Vietnam more closely aligned with the West. U.S. military advisers, present in small numbers throughout the 1950s, were introduced on a large scale beginning in 1961, and active

• What were the causes and consequences of the Vietnam War?

  For Vietnam, the war — often referred to as the Second Indochina War or the American war in Vietnam — was the latest in a series of conflicts that stretched even further back. All told, the United States lost much more than it gained. January 2023 marked the 50th anniversary of the peace treaty, which ended America's war in Vietnam. [...] But from Vietnam's perspective, the war was partly the continuation of an anti-colonial struggle, which stretched at least as far back as its resistance against French imperialism. ## Anti-Imperialism By the end of the 1800s, France had come to control territory in Southeast Asia, referred to as French Indochina. But opposition brewed. Vietnam's independence was a principal concern for Nguyen Sinh Cung, later known as Ho Chi Minh. Minh was involved in anti-colonial and socialist causes. [...] Approximately two million North and South Vietnamese civilians died. Civilians were at times deliberately killed by both sides, such as in the My Lai Massacre. Among those who fought, roughly 1,100,000 North Vietnamese fighters and South Vietnamese insurgents died. Among South Vietnam's military, around 200,000 - 250,000 were killed. Unexploded landmines and other explosions have killed more than 40,000 people since the end of the war.

• How We Oversimplified the History of the Vietnam War | TIME

  Most importantly, the war was not only between Vietnamese and Americans, but rather between two independent Vietnams locked in civil war. While the conflict became a Cold War superpower showdown, its main participants were Vietnamese who fought and died for their respective ideas of sovereignty. [...] Yet, in the United States, as in much of the Western world, the narrative looks remarkably similar: Vietnam was a “bad war” propelled by American hubris, doomed by ignorance and thwarted by unreliable and corrupt South Vietnamese allies against an adversary that many still believe was “more nationalist than Communist.” Indeed, “Vietnam” remains our most evocative shorthand for geopolitical miscalculation and military misadventure. Advertisement

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• Instance Of

  Q864113

The Vietnam War (also known by ) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. The north was supported by the Soviet Union, China, and other communist states, while the south was supported by the United States and other anti-communist allies. The war is widely considered to be a Cold War-era proxy war. It lasted almost 20 years, with direct U.S. involvement ending in 1973. The conflict also spilled over into neighboring states, exacerbating the Laotian Civil War and the Cambodian Civil War, which ended with all three countries becoming communist states by 1975. After the French military withdrawal from Indochina in 1954 – following their defeat in the First Indochina War – the Viet Minh took control of North Vietnam, and the U.S. assumed financial and military support for the South Vietnamese state. The Viet Cong (VC), a South Vietnamese common front under the direction of the north, initiated a guerrilla war in the south. The People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), also known as the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), engaged in more conventional warfare with U.S. and South Vietnamese forces (ARVN). North Vietnam had also invaded Laos in 1958, establishing the Ho Chi Minh Trail to supply and reinforce the VC. By 1963, the north had sent 40,000 soldiers to fight in the south. U.S. involvement increased under President John F. Kennedy, from just under a thousand military advisors in 1959 to 23,000 by 1964. Following the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution that gave President Lyndon B. Johnson broad authority to increase American military presence in Vietnam, without a formal declaration of war. Johnson ordered the deployment of combat units for the first time, and dramatically increased the number of American troops to 184,000. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces relied on air superiority and overwhelming firepower to conduct search and destroy operations, involving ground forces, artillery, and airstrikes. The U.S. also conducted a large-scale strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam, and continued significantly building up it's forces, despite little progress being made. In 1968, North Vietnamese forces launched the Tet Offensive; though it was a military defeat for the north, it became a political victory for them as well, as it caused U.S. domestic support for the war to fade. By the end of the year, the VC held little territory and were sidelined by the PAVN. In 1969, North Vietnam declared the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam. Operations crossed national borders, and the U.S. bombed North Vietnamese supply routes in Laos and Cambodia. The 1970 deposing of the Cambodian monarch, Norodom Sihanouk, resulted in a PAVN invasion of the country (at the request of the Khmer Rouge), and then a U.S.-ARVN counter-invasion, escalating the Cambodian Civil War. After the election of Richard Nixon in 1969, a policy of "Vietnamization" began, which saw the conflict fought by an expanded ARVN, while U.S. forces withdrew in the face of increasing domestic opposition. U.S. ground forces had largely withdrawn by early 1972, and their operations were limited to air support, artillery support, advisors, and materiel shipments. The Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 saw all U.S. forces withdrawn; accords were broken almost immediately, and fighting continued for two more years. Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge on 17 April 1975, while the 1975 spring offensive saw the Fall of Saigon to the PAVN on 30 April, marking the end of the war; North and South Vietnam were reunified the following year. The war exacted an enormous human cost: estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed range from 966,000 to 3 million. Some 275,000–310,000 Cambodians, 20,000–62,000 Laotians, and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict, and a further 1,626 remain missing in action. The end of the Vietnam War would precipitate the Vietnamese boat people and the larger Indochina refugee crisis, which saw millions of refugees leave Indochina, an estimated 250,000 of whom perished at sea. Once in power, the Khmer Rouge carried out the Cambodian genocide, while conflict between them and the unified Vietnam would eventually escalating into the Cambodian–Vietnamese War, which toppled the Khmer Rouge government in 1979. In response, China invaded Vietnam, with subsequent border conflicts lasting until 1991. Within the United States, the war gave rise to what was referred to as Vietnam Syndrome, a public aversion to American overseas military involvements, which, together with the Watergate scandal contributed to the crisis of confidence that affected America throughout the 1970s.