Breaker of Armies: Air Power in the Easter Offensive and the Myth of Linebacker I and II in the Vietnam War

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 139-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phil Haun ◽  
Colin Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Control System ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Air Power ◽  
The North ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
North Vietnam ◽  
Air Control

Most traditional accounts identify the Linebacker I and Linebacker II campaigns as the most effective and consequential uses of U.S. air power in the Vietnam War. They argue that deep interdiction in North Vietnam played a central role in the defeat of the Easter Offensive and that subsequent strategic attacks on Hanoi forced the North Vietnamese to accept the Paris accords. These conclusions are false. The Linebacker campaigns were rather ineffective in either stopping the Communist offensive or compelling concessions. The most effective and consequential use of U.S. air power came in the form of close air support and battlefield air interdiction directly attacking the North Vietnamese Army in South Vietnam. The success of these air strikes hinged on the presence of a U.S.-operated tactical air control system that incorporated small numbers of ground advisers, air liaison officers, and forward air controllers. This system, combined with abundant U.S. aircraft and a reasonably effective allied army, was the key to breaking the Easter Offensive and compelling Hanoi to agree to the Paris accords. The effectiveness of close air support and battlefield air interdiction and the failure of deep interdiction and strategic attack in the Vietnam War have important implications for the use of air power and advisers in contemporary conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.

The Vietnam War

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Gawthorpe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Mass Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
The South ◽  
Communist State ◽  
The North ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
North Vietnam

From 1965 to 1973, the United States attempted to prevent the absorption of the non-Communist state of South Vietnam by Communist North Vietnam as part of its Cold War strategy of containment. In doing so, the United States had to battle both the North Vietnamese military and guerrillas indigenous to South Vietnam. The Johnson administration entered the war without a well-thought-out strategy for victory, and the United States quickly became bogged down in a bloody stalemate. A major Communist assault in 1968 known as the Tet Offensive convinced US leaders of the need to seek a negotiated solution. This task fell to the Nixon administration, which carried on peace talks while simultaneously seeking ways to escalate the conflict and force North Vietnam to make concessions. Eventually it was Washington that made major concessions, allowing North Vietnam to keep its forces in the South and leaving South Vietnam in an untenable position. US troops left in 1973 and Hanoi successfully invaded the South in 1975. The two Vietnams were formally unified in 1976. The war devastated much of Vietnam and came at a huge cost to the United States in terms of lives, resources, and political division at home. It gave birth to the largest mass movement against a war in US history, motivated by opposition both to conscription and to the damage that protesters perceived the war was doing to the United States. It also raised persistent questions about the wisdom of both military intervention and nation-building as tools of US foreign policy. The war has remained a touchstone for national debate and partisan division even as the United States and Vietnam moved to normalize diplomatic relations with the end of the Cold War.

How Wars Have Ended

Worldview ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 20-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gil Elliot
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
News Media ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Prisoner Of War ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
North Vietnam ◽  
The U.S

Historians may conclude that the Vietnam war ended some time during the week beginning March 25, 1973. Certainly in the news media—and no war has had its signposts so vividly marked out by press and television—it was ending throughout that week with increasingly complex last-minute drama, right up to the conclusive pictures of “one of the last U.S. soldiers out of South Vietnam” and “the last prisoner out of North Vietnam.” The last prisoner, more than anything, was the definitive image. Other official aspects of impending peacetreaty negotiations, troop withdrawals, cease-fires, lulls, resumptions, “peace in our time” speecheswere worn thin by months of assertion and publicity. They were no longer quite powerful enough to symbolize finality. It was the last prisoner of war physically out of North Vietnam that allowed the New York Times to announce on March 30 that “the U.S. war role in Vietnam is ended.”

scholarly journals From Geneva to Geneva: A Discourse on Geo-Political Dimension of Conflict in Laos: 1954–1962

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patit Paban Mishra
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
Constant Feature ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
North Vietnam ◽  
Geneva Conference ◽  
External Actors

During the cold war period, the problem of Laos was exacerbated due to strategic location of Laos and national interest of external actors. The present paper would analyze various ramifications of the conflict in Laos. Beginning from First Indochina War (1946-1954), fate of Laos was linked very closely with that of Vietnam. With the escalation of conflict, a solution to problem of Laos was nowhere in sight. The Geneva Conference of 1954 did not solve the problem. The three major strands in Laos; Pathet Lao, neutralists and the rightists became a constant feature of Lao politics. Both the United States and North Vietnam came into conflict, as they were committed to help their respective allies in Laos, and regarded the other’s action in Laos as harmful to their interest in South Vietnam. An agreement on Laos became contingent upon ending the war in Vietnam. The net result of outside intervention was prolongation of conflict in Laos. A solution to Lao conflict was in sight after the Geneva accords of 1962. However, the gradual linkage of the country with the Vietnam War made the solution of dependent upon the outcome of conflict in Vietnam. Laos was going to be embroiled in the Vietnam War and there was no peace in sight unless a solution was there in Vietnam. Laos became a sideshow in Vietnam War.  

Vietnam War in Hollywood Feature Films

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Luhrssen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The South ◽  
Box Office ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
North Vietnam ◽  
North And South

Vietnam was the focal point of a larger set of conflicts that broke out in Indo-China in 1945 and resulted by 1975 with Cambodia and Laos as well as Vietnam falling under the rule of various Communist parties. The first Vietnam War (1945–1954) pitted French colonists and their local allies against Vietnamese Communist rebels. It ended with the French withdrawal from Indo-China and the partition of Vietnam into two states, Communist North Vietnam and pro-Western South Vietnam. In the second Vietnam War (1955–1975), North Vietnam and Communist rebels in the south fought against the US-backed South Vietnamese regime. No conflict in American history since the Civil War was as divisive as Vietnam, yet the war was widely supported until US ground forces entered the fray (1965). Mounting casualties and the threat of conscription fueled a growing antiwar movement that forced Washington to find a way out of the war. After the United States withdrew in 1973, Communist forces overran South Vietnam and reunited the country under their rule in 1975. Films about the Vietnam War were produced in both North and South Vietnam, the Soviet Union (which armed the North) and South Korea and Australia (both dispatched troops to support the South). With few exceptions, many were seldom seen outside their lands of origin. With Hollywood’s dominance of movie markets in much of the world, American stories about the war dominated the imagination of moviegoers in the United States and most other countries. Hollywood took only slight interest in Vietnam during the war’s early years. The first major motion picture about American combat in Vietnam, John’s Wayne’s pro-war The Green Berets (1968), was a box-office hit but universally derided by critics. With the war’s increasing unpopularity and unsuccessful conclusion, the subject was deemed “box-office poison” by the studios for several years. By the late 1970s a rising generation of filmmakers embraced Vietnam as material for displaying American heroism, explaining the US defeat or exploring the ethical basis for war. The commercial breakthrough for Vietnam War movies was achieved by director Sidney Furie’s The Boys in Company C (1978), Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). Each reflected in different ways America’s disillusionment and the physical and psychological toll charged to the men who served in the conflict. The theme continued with Platoon (1986), directed by a Vietnam combat veteran, Oliver Stone. A counter-trend appeared with Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo series (1982–2019), which amplified the resurgent nationalism that began under the Reagan administration. Providing a third perspective, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) presented the war unemotionally as a fact of history. In the 21st century, movies on the Vietnam War continue to be made, if in diminished number. Characteristic of recent films, We Were Soldiers (2002) validates the experience of US servicemen while honoring the heroism of the enemy.

Warring Visions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thy Phu
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Family Life ◽  
War Photography ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
History Of ◽  
International Audience ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
North Vietnam ◽  
Vietnamese Diaspora ◽  
Visual History

In Warring Visions, Thy Phu explores photography from dispersed communities throughout Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, both during and after the Vietnam War, to complicate narratives of conflict and memory. While the visual history of the Vietnam War has been dominated by American documentaries and war photography, Phu turns to photographs circulated by the Vietnamese themselves, capturing a range of subjects, occasions, and perspectives. Phu's concept of warring visions refers to contrasts in the use of war photos in North Vietnam, which highlighted national liberation and aligned themselves with an international audience, and those in South Vietnam, which focused on family and everyday survival. Phu also uses warring visions to enlarge the category of war photography, a genre that usually consists of images illustrating the immediacy of combat and the spectacle of violence, pain, and wounded bodies. She pushes this genre beyond such definitions by analyzing pictures of family life, weddings, and other quotidian scenes of life during the war. Phu thus expands our understanding of how war is waged, experienced, and resolved.

A Testament to a Dying Vision of America

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 285-295
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Musiał
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
History Of ◽  
National League ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
North Vietnam ◽  
The U.S

This article is a review of The League of Wives: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took on the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home (2019) by Heath Hardage Lee. The book presents a popular history of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, an organisation that advocated for the rights of American prisoners of war captured by North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

Why the North Won the Vietnam War (review)

2003 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 638-639
Author(s):  
Erik B. Villard
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
The North ◽  
The Vietnam War

10. The Vietnam War

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Young ◽  
John Kent
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Basic Principle ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
North Vietnam ◽  
Tet Offensive

This chapter focuses on the United States’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Lyndon B. Johnson inherited the Vietnam conflict in difficult circumstances. He had not been elected president in his own right and so, perhaps, believed that he should carry on with John F. Kennedy’s policies. It was unclear what exactly Kennedy would have done in Vietnam, but Johnson retained his predecessor’s foreign policy team and did not question the basic principle of America’s foreign policy, which called for communism to be resisted. The chapter first considers the escalation of US involvement in Vietnam during the period 1963–1965 before discussing the conflict between the US and North Vietnam in the succeeding years, along with the Tet offensive and its implications. It concludes with an assessment of Richard Nixon’s decision to restart large-scale US bombing of North Vietnam.

The Vietnam War and American Military Strategy, 1965–1973

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory A. Daddis
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Power ◽  
Military Strategy ◽  
True Nature ◽  
American Military ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Cold War

For nearly a decade, American combat soldiers fought in South Vietnam to help sustain an independent, noncommunist nation in Southeast Asia. After U.S. troops departed in 1973, the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 prompted a lasting search to explain the United States’ first lost war. Historians of the conflict and participants alike have since critiqued the ways in which civilian policymakers and uniformed leaders applied—some argued misapplied—military power that led to such an undesirable political outcome. While some claimed U.S. politicians failed to commit their nation’s full military might to a limited war, others contended that most officers fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the war they were fighting. Still others argued “winning” was essentially impossible given the true nature of a struggle over Vietnamese national identity in the postcolonial era. On their own, none of these arguments fully satisfy. Contemporary policymakers clearly understood the difficulties of waging a war in Southeast Asia against an enemy committed to national liberation. Yet the faith of these Americans in their power to resolve deep-seated local and regional sociopolitical problems eclipsed the possibility there might be limits to that power. By asking military strategists to simultaneously fight a war and build a nation, senior U.S. policymakers had asked too much of those crafting military strategy to deliver on overly ambitious political objectives. In the end, the Vietnam War exposed the limits of what American military power could achieve in the Cold War era.

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