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.
After that, nation after nation might fall to Communism. Communism is a political and economic system that the United States strongly opposed. Vietnam had been split in half in 1954, after fighting a war to gain independence from France. When French forces withdrew the US felt they needed to take matters into their own hands but the Vietnamese Communists gained control of North Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh was the leader of the North Vietnamese Communists.
This affected black Americans and ethnic minorities because most of the people that came under that class were on the poverty program, so they opposed the war. The public opinion of the war in America was mainly against the US involvement in Vietnam. When the public heard that America were pulling out of the war they felt as if all the men who had died, had died for nothing. The tactics of the Vietcong were guerilla warfare. This was the type of warfare that the American’s were not use to fighting in.
At the same time they tried to create a strong non-communist South Vietnam under the leadership of Diem. By the late 1950s, the communist rebels in South Vietnam declared a revolutionary struggle against Diem, so as to reunify Vietnam under communist rule. In turn, by the 1960s the USA became more and more alarmed at this prospect, leading to further intervention in Vietnam to stop this. When Kennedy was inaugurated he inherited many crises around the globe, the most pertinent was the loss of Cuba. After the well known Bay of Pigs fiasco, he felt he was advised that he needed a foreign policy success.
Many of the cities were occupied by Vietcong for many hours, or days. The US and South Vietnamese showed victory in regaining all the cities back, but they suffered many losses and lost almost all the American public support. The TET Offensive showed the American public the truth of Vietnam, and not what the Military wanted the people to hear. To many, the war was a lost cause, a waste of money and resources. Later, in March of 1968 the My Lai Massacre devastated a town of North Vietnamese citizens.
But United States leaders had other concerns. No sooner had World War II ended, then a "Cold War," between the forces of democracy and communism began (Schomp The Vietnam War 5). Long years of fighting had devastated the democratic nations of Western Europe, which left the communist Soviet Union as the dominant power in Europe and Asia (Schomp The Vietnam War 5). The Soviet Union had already over run most of Eastern Europe; now they seemed determined to spread communism all around the globe (Schomp The Vietnam War 5). To help counter that threat Truman started secretly sending money as well as supplies to help back the French forces against Ho Chi Minh's forces (Schomp The Vietnam War 5).
Since Japan did the bombing in Pearl Harbor, many Americans believed that Japanese Americans could not be trusted. Japanese fought because there was “A Tremendous Hole” in the Constitution and they would not tolerate being treated as less than a citizen. By the end of the war in Europe, the soldiers in 442nd, consisting most of Japanese Americans, were told by President Truman “you fought for the free nations of the world…you fought not only the enemy, you fought prejudice-and you won” (Takaki 349). Yet discrimination still existed. African Americans found themselves being targeted by hate crimes and violence.
The US felt they had no other choice but to act on their policy of containment and fear of the Domino Theory. The Vietnam War also brought about worries of the Domino Theory, as communism was already present in the North, and so they wished to prevent it from spreading to neighboring countries e.g. Laos and Cambodia and evidently also the South. This is the main reason as to why the Americans began to become involved in the Vietnam War. Therefore, the Vietnam War can be said to be part of the Cold War due to the Americans acting upon their policy of containment and fear of the Domino Theory.
However, you shouldn't make the assumption that devotion to ideology was all that was behind Cold War animosity; countries tend to be more complaint trading partners with countries that share their political systems and both Stalin and the Cold War Era presidents in the US knew this. The tension eventually built, but no one wanted to go to actual war again after the colossal massacre of WWII, hence the term Cold War. 2. Describe and explain the ideological differences between the United Stated and the Soviet Union. In 1917, Russia became a communist country with an agenda of converting the world to communism.
Some of these groups and people included ‘Malcolm X’, Rosa Parks, and ‘The Black Panthers’. Malcolm X saw King’s campaign as trying to persuade the African American citizens to forget the days of slavery, and forget what the white men had done to their people. His stance was passive/aggressive and wanted equality by any means, including violence. Malcolm X was assassinated by a white supremacist during a speech and died of bullet wounds. Also, ‘The Black Panthers’ were a very violent group and saw King’s campaign as time consuming and feared it being forgotten in the process.