How Communist Forces Overcame US and South Vietnamese Forces in the Vietnam War Essay

The Vietnam War was, in the words of historian John Prados, ‘unwinnable’ for the United States; no matter how many casualties they inflicted upon the North Vietnamese communists, there was always a steady flow of replacements available. By the 1970s this became increasingly obvious to the US public which, along with very unreliable media coverage – particularly during the communist Tet Offensive of 1968 – stating that US troops were struggling to survive, sparked a mass-anti-war movement on the US home front. The pressures this placed upon US military and political officials, including the President, was one of the major reasons for US implementation of their policy of Vietnamisation – effectively a planned withdrawal from Vietnam by the US, leaving vast amounts of high-quality armaments in the hands of the poorly trained South Vietnamese military. It is due in large part to the collapse of the American home front that the communists overcame US forces; subsequently, the catastrophic failures of US Vietnamisation resulted in the communists overcoming the remaining South Vietnamese troops and placing all of Vietnam under communist control by 3 May 1975.
The beginning of the end for US involvement in Indochina arguably occurred during and immediately following the communist Tet Offensive of 1968. In militaristic terms, the communist assault was a catastrophic failure, from which – in the words of North Vietnamese DRV’s Minister of Defence Truong Minh Tang – ‘the Vietcong could never recover’. However, the American media, granted almost limitless access and not restricted to designated military escorts, portrayed the offensive as a communist victory. The Vietnam War was the first ‘living room war’ in which American citizens were confronted with the realities of war – graphic images and film reels depicting the carnage taking place in Vietnam. Thus, the American public became increasingly convinced that their soldiers were facing a brutal communist onslaught and were...