In many ways the Tet Offensive was a turning point in the Vietnam War which led to the withdrawal of American troops; however there is also evidence to suggest otherwise. This is caused by the undeniable fact that America suffered a major loss during the surprise attack but, they also came out on top and survived the ambush. The main reason to agree with this statement is that America heavily suffered from the attack in which many lives were lost, ammunition wasted and the government was shown in a new light. This light was that they were not on top of the Vietcong’s tactics and did not know what they were planning. As well as this the fighting itself was filmed and broadcasted in North Vietnam to show that they had successfully attacked and breached the American defences.
The war was pointless in the American’s eyes and they thought that America had no right to impose its views on Vietnam. Napalm, a jellied gasoline, was used in the Vietnam as tactic for the Americans. As they drop Napalm onto Vietnam, it lures out the Vietcong from their hiding places due to the black smoke spreading from the explosion. But by doing that, the bomb killed many innocent villagers, children and women that had nothing to do with the war. Source A suggests that US used the air raid for chasing out the Vietcong that were hiding because it shows in the source that many Vietnamese Children are running away from the danger that the American troops are causing.
It embarrassed the young Kennedy administration and Kennedy was blamed for not giving it adequate support. The Cuban exile leader Jose Miro Cardona blamed the failure on the CIA and the refusal of Kennedy to authorize air cover for the invasion force, but the main reason for failure was because the exiles had been counting on a local uprising to help them. The Bay of Pigs invasion also made Castro wary of the U.S. He was convinced that the Americans would try to take over the island again. There were many reasons for the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Kennedy thought that in order to stop the communist soldiers, then the US and the South Vietnamese should use their own techniques in warfare in order to stop them. The USA also developed strategic hamlets to combat the communist insurgency by means of population transfer, the movement of large groups of people from one area to another. These hamlets were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by troops, American and South Vietnamese, to isolate NLF guerrillas from political recruits and other resources. In 1961, U.S. advisors in South Vietnam, along with the Diem regime, began the implementation of a plan attempted to isolate rural peasants from contact with and influence by the NLF. Furthermore, in November 1961, 2 years before Kennedy’s assassination, Kennedy agreed to provide aircraft, intelligence equipment and additional economic aid.
This is a really hard argument because if you attack the enemy army which is attacking you, you have to think about the deaths of your own men. Since bombings where so unaccurate they might have missed and hit themselfs. But if you do attack factories you can slow down the production of weapons. The attack on Japan was not acceptable. The U.S did not have to kill millions of innocent civillians just to make Japan surreneder.
The US in fighting communism, was fighting the wrong enemy, they were arrogant and thought that they knew best. 2. Use of military firepower - bombing villages, towns, the Ho Chi Minh trail. This killed a lot of South Vietnamese people, destroyed their farms and livelihoods etc. It's best not to antagonise the people you are trying to help.
The air at the scene was still thick with the smell of whatever was dropped that day; it is hard to imagine or to describe the horrors of what the pilot did. The headmaster said he felt helpless. He was too afraid to give his name. "The worst thing in life is for someone to die before our eyes. "People burning in front of you.
Nobody was listening to each other and there was no order in what was happening. Yeats goes on to explain how ‘anarchy is loosed upon the world’, implying that before WW1 the world was peaceful but suddenly it has been ruined. He also talks about ‘blood-dimmed tide’ being loosed, which shows the gory side to the war and just how dangerous it was. ‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned’ also connotes a more powerful image of the war. It is suggesting that many innocent people have been killed and as a result, even more innocent people have been hurt or corrupted.
For example, they did not work to their full ability, and sabotaged themselves, by burning down their own crops and slaughtering livestock in acts of strong resistance to the collectivisation scheme. Peasants even went to the extremes of eating their own livestock. For example, as quoted from Sholokov's, 'Virgin Soil Upturned' book, peasants 'suffered from greasy mouths' and both the 'young and old suffered from indigestion'. Peasants did this with the hope it would prevent their livestock being handed over to the collective, but this was a short term thought, as it ultimately prevented reproduction. However, it is a good example in demonstrating the extremes
There would be no relief for front line troops for weeks on end. A near miss from an artillery shell could collapse a trench or cause dugouts to collapse burying alive those inside. The nearness of death, the fear of it and smell of it, the horrific sights of shattered bodies, the screams of friends cut in half and the constant shelling combined to send many men insane either at the time or later in life. Considering all these conditions, I think the worst thing about being in the trenches was the diseases which spread like wildfire throughout the trenches, due to the unhygienic conditions. There was also no way of preventing these diseases from spreading, as the medic’s in the trenches barely had any medicine to treat all of soldiers who caught diseases.