Vietnam War Escalation: US Combat Troops Deploy
The United States put combat troops into Vietnam in March 1965 and had 184,000 there by the end of the year. The commitment before that had been advisory: some 16,000 personnel training and directing a South Vietnamese army that was losing. Two things changed it. The Gulf of Tonkin incidents in August 1964 — one attack on an American destroyer that happened and a second that almost certainly did not — produced a congressional resolution authorising the president to take all necessary measures, passed with two dissenting votes and never repealed by Congress until 1971. And the government in Saigon was collapsing, with seven changes of leadership in eighteen months. Operation Rolling Thunder, a bombing campaign against the north, began in March 1965 and ran three and a half years. The marines who landed at Da Nang that month were sent to guard the airbase, and the mission was extended to offensive operations within weeks. Westmoreland's strategy was attrition measured by body count, on the assumption that the North could be made to lose more than it would bear, and Hanoi's calculation was that it would bear more than the United States would. By 1968 there were 536,000 American troops in the country. The bombing dropped more tonnage on Indochina than was dropped by all sides in the Second World War. Johnson had told an aide that he felt like a man on a road with no way to turn. The escalation was also deliberately concealed from the American public in its scale and its cost. Johnson wanted his domestic programme passed and calculated that a declared war would consume it, and the credibility gap that opened is the phrase the period gave to the language.
- Year: 1965 CE
- Category: Military
