The book I read was titled Here There are Tigers, The Secret Air War in Laos, 1968-69. It was written by Reginald Hawthorn and is his personal experience as a Major in the Air Force. I wanted to know an Air Force pilot’s perspective since I read about so much bombing going on during the Vietnam War. He was an FAC (Forward Air Controller) and flew an O-2 single prop airplane during Vietnam from 1968-1969. Major Reginald Hathorn was an instructor at Laughlin Air Force Base when he got the call on Friday of January 1968 that he would have to leave his wife and two daughters to fight in Vietnam.…
Operation Ranch Hand; 1961-1972; The heart of the Vietnam War, and the U.S. needs an advantage. “[The military] sprayed more than 19 million gallons of herbicides over 4.5 million acres of land in Vietnam...Agent Orange, which contained the chemical dioxin, was the most commonly used of the herbicide mixtures, and the most effective,” (“Agent”). In total, this agent accounted for 11-13 million gallons of the total herbicides released. Agent Orange was later found to be the origin of various health problems; these include tumors, birth defects, skin irritation, psychological changes, and cancer. The herbicides main purpose was to clear the vegetation, allowing the front line to detect approaching enemies in time for defensive action; the…
In addition, another reason for Johnson escalating US involvement in Vietnam at the time was mainly because the idea of containment was a big issue in America at the time among the US Cold War policy. Johnson had the idea of by showing North Vietnam they couldn’t win the war they would eventually begin peace talks. He did this by continuous bombing of North Vietnam, also known as ‘Operation Rolling Thunder.’ This…
This war between the Australians, Papuans and the Japanese took place around the Kokoda Trail and specifically Port Moresby on the 21st of July 1942 and ended in November in the same year. It was also apart of World War II. The Kokoda Trail is a pathway that stretches out about 96km long. (Show parts of the trail) At one end, there is Ower’s Corner, which is 40 kilometers North East of Port Moresby (Show image of Owers Corner) and on the other side is a small village named Wairopi…
Operation Rolling Thunder, launched on the 7th of February in 1965, involved widespread bombing of military and industrial bases occupied by the North Vietnamese. Initially, Operation Rolling Thunder was to last eight weeks as a method of demoralizing the North Vietnamese people and forcing them to negotiate. However it had detrimental effects and instead lasted until 1968.…
In March of 1965, President Johnson sent close to a million troops to mediate the civil war happening in Vietnam. This was known as Operation Rolling Thunder. The United States sided with South Vietnam in fighting against the communist backed North Vietnam. The Vietnam War consisted of several battles within Vietnam and the surrounding area of Laos and Cambodia. The battles further included air raids over North Vietnam.…
The United States strategy in Vietnam from 1965 to 1968 went through various changes and revisions as leadership tried to find a feasible plan of action. US Army General William Westmoreland and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara were two of the major forces in US leadership that would shape the war effort. They devised a military strategy of attrition through tactics of search and destroy, covert operations, and other factors in hopes of wearing out the enemy. While their strategy found some success on the battlefields, the ineffectiveness of search and destroy missions, the over emphasis on body counts, and the disconnect between everyday soldiers and their superiors about defining success would doom the US war effort.…
On October 31, 1968 President Johnson brought the bombing to a stop five days before the presidential election. The North vietnamese raid was said to be completely stopped on November 1, 1968. They called this action Operation Rolling Thunder. The only way he was able to stop this was by getting the Hanoi to let the South Vietnamese join into the peace talks. President Johnson did not have many rejections he had most people's support in the situation. The one person that did not like his action was Saigon. He thought the U.S had made an unclear declaration of stopping the…
The US military methods failed, but still had an effect on the war. The main reason that they failed was because they couldn't find the enemies. The Viet Cong hid in under ground tunnels, in the jungle or in the villages with the normal innocent civilians, so the US couldn't differentiate between them. Napalm failed because it hardly killed any enemies, and burnt many innocent people alive, this made the Vietnamese civilians disapprove of the Americans. So they thought that they would use defoliants to destroy the jungle, they used a defoliant called 'Agent Orange'. But even after they had destroyed the jungle they still couldn't find the enemies, and because Agent Orange got into the water supplies and cause many birth defects this, again annoyed the civilians. Rolling Thunder failed because it was very expensive and would have been useful but they couldn't hit the target. Search and Destroy missions failed because they were always ambushed. Because of all of the methods used by the Americans, the Vietnamese had stopped supporting them and started to support the Viet Cong, this then made it harder for the US to fight the Viet Cong as they had more support. After the My Lai massacre on the 16 March 1968, the US had killed over 347 innocent civilians and raped and mutilated many of them.…
Operation Frequent Wind was the US plan on the evacuation of American civilians and at risk South Vietnamese in the inevitable fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces. The operation was carried out successfully and created a number of iconic photos. On April 29th, evacuations by helicopter from Tan Son Nhut Airport and the US embassy in saigon began. Preliminary evacuations on fixed wing aircraft had already carried some 50,000 people to safety. The operation carried on through the night until the Evening of April 30th. The helicopter evacuations carried a total of 1,373 Americans and 5,595 Vietnamese and third country nationals through some 682 sorties. Operation Frequent Wind was a success, possibly the greatest success of the entire…
At public briefings, colloquially given the name “The Five O’clock Follies”, reporters were handed official information packets which were the “official word on the day’s events”. It was said these stories were carefully worded because “anyone could get their hands on these” and could be sold to the Vietcong and their sympathizers (Steinman 33). But, it is just as reasonable to believe that these briefings were about control of information.…
The Vietnam War was considered one of the longest foreign wars that the United States fought in, up until the Afghan War. Like most wars there is many events that occur during them and for the Vietnam one event that stood out was the Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive was an attempt for Vietnamese communist to gain back control and cause a wedge between the U.S. and the South Vietnamese. To develop a better perspective of the Tet Offensive, it would help to Know the Vietnamese communist perspective, What the Americans were being told, an individual who experienced it and how it still affects us today. Developing an opinion that is not solely based off biased information we need to hear what happened from many different perspectives.…
Operation Rolling Thunder was significant in that it, along with U.S. troop commitment, “Americanized” the war. What could have been seen as a civil war between North and South, or a war of national reunification, was now clearly an American war against the communist Hanoi…
Enveloped in a state of domestic and international crisis, 1968 America was divided. The Tet Offensive ended the country’s feint hope that the war could be over soon, and racial tensions left many Americans either feeling ignored or fearful for their lives. Constant protest and riots concerning race and the Vietnam War brewed a feeling of insecurity in the country. The feelings of intense nationalism and American pride seemed to have dissolved in the wake racial conflict and Vietnam. The American virtues of freedom and equality seemed to fall wayward, and the government did not act like it was any concern. The dirge of protests concerning Black Power, the Vietnam War, and civil rights were nearly unacknowledged by Lyndon Johnson. The people…
From 1963 to 1973, the U.S. intermittently bombed North Vietnam, killing up 150,000 Cambodian peasants. In 1975, the U.S. had withdrawn its troops from Vietnam and Cambodia’s government plagued by corruption and incompetence, so lost its American military support.…