It's 50 years since two
battalions of US Marines landed on beaches near Danang, heralding the direct
involvement of American combat units in the Vietnam War.
By Chas Early
America finally signalled its
intention to become fully committed to war in Vietnam with the arrival of 3,500
combat troops just north of Da Nang, on this day in 1965.
Men of the 9th Marine
Expeditionary Brigade were met by South Vietnamese officers, girls carrying
leis, sight-seers and four US soldiers holding a sign saying ‘Welcome, Gallant
Marines’.
It was all much to the dismay
of General William Westmoreland, the senior US officer in the country at that
time.
Both Westmoreland and General
Nguyen Van Thieu, chief of the South Vietnamese Armed Forces Council, had asked
for the troops to be "brought ashore in the most inconspicuous way
feasible".
Under the previous US president, John F.
Kennedy, the number of American military ‘advisors’ in the country had risen to
16,000.
The day after Kennedy’s
assassination, new president Lyndon Johnson stated that "the battle
against communism... must be joined... with strength and determination".
Throughout 1964 Johnson faced
pressure from domestic and foreign sources to negotiate a peaceful solution,
but after attacks on US ships off Vietnam in the ‘Gulf of Tonkin incident' in
August, Congress gave him the powers to take any action he deemed necessary to
protect South Vietnam.
By the following year it was
clear that South Vietnam, riven by internal dissent and unfocused leadership,
was losing its war with the communist North. And, with US air bases in the
country regularly being targeted for attacks, Johnson sent in the 3,500 marines
initially as a defensive security force.
The deployment was met with
anger from many quarters, with China and the Soviet Union threatening
intervention. Some 2,000 demonstrators including Vietnamese and Chinese
students attacked the US Embassy in Moscow, while a car bomb outside its Saigon
embassy killed 22 people.
Do you remember the US combat
troops arriving in Vietnam? Do you think anything could have been done to
prevent the war's escalation? Let us know in the comments section below.
Vietnam War escalation - Did
you know?
President Kennedy had wanted to
draw ‘a line in the sand’ over the spread of communism, and the aim of US
involvement in the country was to keep South Vietnam ‘free’ from the communist
North.
Kennedy had been keen to ensure
that US military personnel be deployed only to help train the South Vietnamese
Army; he had advocated a slow withdrawal of the advisors until 1965.
By early 1964, American
diplomats in Saigon and most of President Johnson’s advisors were advocating an
escalation of US military involvement in the conflict as the only way to secure
South Vietnamese neutrality.
Johnson was keen to avoid any
sign that he was committing to a war before the presidential election in
November 1964. Nevertheless, he stepped up bombing raids and covert operations
in the wake of the Tonkin Gulf incident in August.
There had been an engagement
with North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Tonkin Gulf on August 2, but a
reported second engagement on August 4 (which prompted the Congressional
resolution) was later revealed to be false.
In September, UN Secretary
General U Thant secured agreement from North Vietnam to engage in talks with
the US. Though Secretary of State Dean Rusk was informed, there is no evidence
that President Johnson ever learned of the offer.
There were 23,000 US military
personnel in Vietnam at the end of 1964. By the end of 1965 that figure had
risen to nearly 185,000.