America, as Harman describes, was seemingly invincible, until its involvement in the Vietnam War. In the 1950s, France had already been at war which divided Vietnam into the North and South. France was backed by the U.S. who funded a majority of the war effort and helped take over South Vietnam. But according to Harman, “The US was trapped in a war of attrition from which there was no easy way out,” (Harman 572). He sees the Vietnam War on the whole as not only a waste of time, men, and resources for the Americans, but also a cause of “huge fissures …in US society” (Harman 572).
How the Vietnam War started The Vietnam War was the longest and most unpopular war in the American history. It was also the only war that the U.S. lost. The whole war for Vietnam was for independence, but for the U.S. it was about stopping communism, and so the war itself started due to the two rival governments, the French occupation, and the interruption of foreign powers. A conflict was sparked by the two rival governments that were present in Vietnam. One government was led by a communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, who wanted to unite the country and help spread communism.
(Vietnam-ustrade.org) Soon after, the country plunged into another war against the French attempting to re-colonize, which lasted for another nine years. That war ended in 1954, leaving the country divided at the 17th parallel. The north remained as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, led by the communists, while the south fell under the influence of the West, namely the United States. (Vietnam-ustrade.org) The United States involvement in Vietnam grew in the 1950s and escalated into a full-fledged war in March 1965 when the first U.S. troops landed in Vietnam. Although U.S. troops were completely withdrawn by the end of March 1973 as a result of the Paris Peace Accords, the war continued until the spring of 1975, when the south was liberated.
The empire was then declared war on by Britain, Russia, Prussia, Sweden, and Austria. Quickly putting an army together of untrained and horribly prepared soldiers he faced the other European nations in Leipzig, a city in Germany. In 1814 Napoleon was denied the access to keep fighting and surrendered. Then he was exiled to Elba and was thought to never be a threat again. However when he heard of New king Louis XVIII struggling for power, Napoleon escaped Elba and returned to be welcomed again by France.
It was only a few days until the NLF troops had been beaten back and the American troops once again occupied Saigon and their own embassy. The Americans were not Militarily defeated, in actual fact defeating and killing 58,000 north Vietnamese troops (Wiest, 2008) however this attack is ranked high above others as the start of the downward spiral that ended the war. Despite the offensive by the North Vietnamese forces the standoff had not changed anything, Lawrence in, the Vietnam War a concise international history, claims it “merely changed the nature of the stalemate” and that the Tet offensive was “confirming opposition to the war among American public.” (Lawrence, 2008 P116). The North Vietnamese forces being able to take and hold the supposed hub of American power in Saigon, to then have the image of the Vietcong on the roof waving the flag of the opposing army is crushing blow to the American public. This Kind of image and media brought about the anti war movement that believed the war was a ‘quagmire’ and needed to be
War by Edwin Starr The Vietnam War took place around 1945. France owned the whole area for a long time, however they had problems during WWll. Japan comes in and takes control for a while, and then Japan loses WWll. France therefore tried to regain control. Ho Chi Minh asks the United States to tell France to leave them alone.
In the years that followed France declared war on Britain beginning a series of wars that lasted twenty-two years. This created fear in the people effectively crushing all hope for reform in British society. William Pitt leader of the Tory government outlawed all talks of parliament out side of the parliament halls. All liberal- minded Briton had no social outlet for their hopes and dream in politics. Most of which turned to the arts and literature as their only outlet.
Notes on Background of Nationalist Movement in Vietnam * Vietnam was once ruled by the Han and Tang Dynasties of China for over 900 years a millennium ago: as such the Vietnamese had a strong sense of national identity, and also frequently put up violent resistance to the foreign rulers. * Early resistance to the French, led by patriotic Confucianist elites, was put down in the mid-1880s when guerrilla forces were defeated in Central Vietnam * Reforms by the French undermined the status of the traditional Confucianists and their power in Vietnam, and also eroded traditional customs, such as the replacement of the Chinese script, the traditional way of transmitting Confucian doctrine in Vietnam, by a transliteration based on the Latin alphabet, the kind we see used in Vietnam today. * After 1900 a new generation of revolutionaries arose in Vietnam, of which the most famous was Phan Boi Chau, a republican influenced by Sun Yat-sen and also the Meiji Restoration in Japan. These radicals were influenced by Chinese reformist intellectuals’ writings, but their knowledge of mass politics, understanding of the new world outside Vietnam, and use of strategy was indeed very limited. They later lost influence very quickly after Chau was arrested in South China, 1914.
The Battle of Dien Bien Phu (French: Bataille de Diên Biên Phu; Vietnamese: Chiến dịch Điện Biên Phủ) was the climactic confrontation of the First Indochina War between the French Union's French Far East Expeditionary Corps and Viet Minh communist-nationalist revolutionaries. The battle occurred between March and May 1954 and culminated in a comprehensive French defeat that influenced negotiations over the future of Indochina at Geneva. Military historian Martin Windrow wrote that Dien Bien Phu was "the first time that a non-European colonial independence movement had evolved through all the stages from guerrilla bands to a conventionally organized and equipped army able to defeat a modern Western occupier in pitched battle. "[12] As a result of blunders in French decision-making, the French began an operation to support the soldiers at Dien Bien Phu, deep in the hills of northwestern Vietnam. Its purpose was to cut off Viet Minh supply lines into the neighboring Kingdom of Laos, a French ally, and tactically draw the Viet Minh into a major confrontation that would cripple them.
On the 7th of December 1941 Japanese imperial bombers attacked the American naval base at Perl harbour in Hawaii in an aim to cripple the US fleet in the pacific. This attack was triggered by the Japanese military’s need for the pacific islands and the fact that the Japanese could not occupy the islands while the USA’s naval presence was so strong. Another event that triggered the Japanese’s attack on the base was the freezing of all Japanese assets in America and the implementation of an trade embargo. The results of the attack were that hundreds of lives were lost and several battle ships sunk the attack also brought the US war machine into WWII and resulted in the first use of an atomic weapon in an act of war. The Americans had long before the attack realised that the Japanese where a serious threat to their security and after the invasion of Manchuria America proceeded to freeze all Japanese assets in America as a punishment for the invasion of Manchuria they also stopped the sending over of scrap metal and rubber this severely set back the Japanese military effort because the Japanese relied on the scrap metal because they melted it down and used it to make their planes and Ships and as a result of this the Japanese army which held a huge amount of power became increasingly hostile to America.