Vietnam War

US soldiers and helicopters in Vietnam, 1966.

The Vietnam War is mostly associated with the second half of the 1960s, when the draft and opposition to it were at their most severe in the United States. But in reality, the war raged for nearly three decades in one form or another, as the Vietnamese first freed themselves from French colonial rule between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s and then were thrown into a conflict with the US from the mid-1950s as the country became divided between a communist North Vietnam and a democratic, US-backed South Vietnam. The war would last for twenty years, with the USA becoming more and more entrenched in a conflict it could not win. The brutality of it led to migration from Vietnam, exacerbated by other conflicts in neighboring Laos and Cambodia. A large proportion of these were the so-called 'Boat People' who left South Vietnam from the mid-1970s onwards fleeing the communist takeover.

Chronology of events

The Vietnam War was in many ways a by-product of French colonization of Indochina in the nineteenth century. Beginning in 1858, France had begun establishing itself in Vietnam and gradually over the next three decades it conquered the country along with neighboring Laos and Cambodia. Indochina remained a zone of French colonial influence until 1940 when the Empire of Japan occupied the region. Like many other former colonies, calls for independence in Indochina were very loud after the end of the Second World War. In Vietnam, this led to the outbreak of the First Indochina War in 1946 as communist-backed rebels led by Hồ Chí Minh demanded independence. A lengthy conflict finally ended in 1954 in the Geneva Conference, which divided Vietnam into the communist-run Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the Western-backed State of Vietnam in the south. Today, these two states are more commonly known as North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

A U.S. B-66 Destroyer and four F-105 Thunderchiefs dropping bombs on North Vietnam.

The United States replaced France as the western state which was primarily involved in Vietnam in 1955 when it began offering military support to South Vietnam after the Viet Cong, a North Vietnam-supported armed communist organization, began efforts to conquer the south and unite Vietnam under communist rule. The resulting war, which is also known as the Second Indochina War or the American War from the Vietnamese perspective, would last for the next two decades. It started with minimal US involvement, with the administration of President Eisenhower primarily offering logistical and tactical support. There were still less than a thousand US soldiers in South Vietnam in 1960. All that would change under the leadership of his successors as president, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy began the process of turning the Second Indochina War from a minor zone of US military activity into one which defined American life in the 1960s. By 1962, a year and a half after he took office, US troop levels in Vietnam had increased to over 10,000 and this had nearly doubled again by the time he was assassinated in November 1963. Johnson increased the US military participation significantly, to the point that in 1965 troop levels hit 180,000, peaking in 1968 at over half a million US Marines on the ground in Vietnam. The end result of all of this was pronounced violence and displacement across North and South Vietnam as guerilla warfare, indiscriminate bombings, and the use of compounds such as Agent Orange and Napalm increased exponentially.

Despite the fact that the US government was conscious that it could not win the war in Vietnam by as early as 1965, American involvement there continued through the 1960s and into the 1970s, even in the face of a wide-ranging anti-war movement back home. However, a troop reduction and gradual withdrawal did begin under President Richard Nixon and by 1972, the number of American GIs in South Vietnam had fallen to approximately 25,000. When the US made its final withdrawal of soldiers and administrators in the spring of 1975, Saigon quickly fell to the Vietcong on the 30th of April 1975. The war had all been for nothing except the death of at least one million people and perhaps as many as three million; estimates vary greatly on this issue. In the course of the war and especially as it came to an end in the 1970s, millions of people were displaced or chose to leave Vietnam to avoid persecution and punishment for their collaboration with the US during the conflict.

Extent of migration

The 'Boat People' fleeing Vietnam in the late 1970s.

Although some people were displaced within Vietnam and left the country during the Vietnam War, the vast majority of the migration associated with it actually occurred following the cessation of hostilities in 1975, as over 2.5 million people sought to flee the communist takeover of South Vietnam. The peak of the migration of the so-called ‘Boat People’ occurred in the late 1970s, when hundreds of thousands left the country every year, but it continued into the 1980s and even the early 1990s; some others fled by land over the borders into Cambodia, Laos or China. On top of those who were eventually re-settled in other countries, it is estimated that between 200,000 and 400,000 people lost their lives trying to flee from Vietnam, primarily in the South China Sea, in one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the era. Eventually, in 1979 the Vietnamese and US governments agreed to set up the Orderly Departure Program in order to end the chaotic migration and allow people to leave Vietnam in safe circumstances and be re-settled elsewhere.

Demographic impact

The demographic impact of the migration which followed the end of the Vietnam War has been felt in a wide array of geographically dispersed countries. Much of this, for obvious reasons, was felt in countries neighboring Vietnam. Half a million people or more, for instance, fled westwards into Cambodia, which continues to have a strong Vietnamese overseas population down to the present day, while Taiwan, Laos, and Thailand are also important centers of the Vietnamese diaspora today. However, the epicenter of the migration from Vietnam was to the United States, which felt it had an obligation to take in hundreds of thousands of its former allies once the war ended. For instance, in the course of the 1980s and early 1990s, the US took in nearly half a million Vietnamese through the Orderly Departure Program and this was supplemented by hundreds of thousands more who arrived through less official channels. As a result, the Vietnamese American community today exceeds 2.3 million people, making it a major minority community within the United States. There are important diaspora communities in a wide range of other countries including France (c. 350,000 people), Japan (c. 450,000 people), Germany (c. 200,000 people), Canada (c. 250,000 people), the United Kingdom (c. 90,000 people), and the Eastern European nations of Poland (c. 50,000 people) and Czechia (c. 80,000 people), where the first Vietnamese arrived in the 1980s as part of student exchange programs taking place within the Communist Bloc

See also

• Cambodian genocide

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References

References

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