Vietnam by Nigel Cawthorne Read Free Book Online Page A

arrived in Vietnam in February 1965. They first came under fire on 3 April, by which time there were 200 in country. At the peak of their commitment, 44,829 ROKs controlled a coastal strip of II CTZ. Thailand sent 11,568 troops and allowed American bombers, fighters, and reconnaissance planes to use their airbases. They also allowed an Infiltration Surveillance Center and other US intelligence outfits to operate from their territory. President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines sent 2,000 men. The Republic of China (Taiwan) sent thirty-one and Fascist Spain sent a thirteen-man medical team. More bizarrely, Morocco sent 10,000 cans of sardines, while the Swiss sent microscopes for Saigon University.
    Alongside these foreign troops were South Vietnam's forces, the ARVN, who numbered around 620,000 men. But they were not terribly effective. While 90 per cent of American largest-scale operations managed to make contact with the enemy, less than half of ARVN operations did. Officers sold drugs and prostitutes and the desertion rate ran at over twenty per cent. Under Westmoreland's new search-and destroy strategy, the ARVN were relegated to searching for guerrillas in areas cleared by US forces in major operations. But their performance did not improve and their assignment was quickly nicknamed 'search and avoid'. However, the ARVN did have some successes. On 4 April, they destroyed a Vietcong enclave in the U Minh forest, a Communist stronghold in the Mekong Delta to the south of Saigon, killing 238 VC. On 29 April they killed another eighty-four and took thirty-one prisoner, while US air support claimed a further seventy VC dead. And the ARVN claimed another 250 VC dead in the Mekong Delta on 13 August.
    On 21 April, the restrictions limiting the Marines to the eight square miles around the Da Nang airbase were lifted, so that they could support the ARVN. The following day another Buddhist monk burnt himself to death publicly in Saigon in protest at the war. The picture was carried in the press around the world. It did nothing to halt the escalation.
    On the 24th, Johnson stepped up the bombing campaign and declared the whole of Vietnam a combat zone, meaning that all US servicemen serving there would receive combat pay and get tax advantages. Already the war was costing America $15 billion a year, McNamara announced. Congress quickly approved a further $700 million for the war but on 1 June Johnson asked for another $89 million in economic aid.
    Warnings by Cyrus Eaton, a millionaire industrialist newly returned from a peace mission to Moscow, that the USSR would start a nuclear war if US aggression continued were ignored, and a British MP who went to Hanoi in an attempt to open peace negotiations was rebuffed.
    The Vietcong stepped up its attacks, scoring major victories. In mid-June, the Vietcong attacked a Special Forces camp and the district headquarters of the ARVN at Dong Xoai, besieging it for four days. In the heaviest fighting so far, the ARVN suffered 900 casualties. The VC were eventually driven off by heavy US air strikes, losing 350 in the fighting on the ground and maybe twice that number in the bombing.
    The Roman Catholic opposition forced Prime Minister Quat from office. He was replaced by the flamboyant South Vietnamese air force chief General Nguyen Cao Ky, who was installed as the head of a military regime in Saigon on 18 June. Known for his mirrored shades and his good-looking wife, he was later reported saying that Adolf Hitler was one of his 'heroes'. Ky urged the US to stage an all-out invasion of the North. Politically, this was out of the question. Nevertheless Johnson upped the draft from 17,000 a month to 35,000. The US ground forces also abandoned their defensive posture, and at the end of June launched a major offensive on a Vietcong enclave twenty miles northeast of Saigon, which failed to make contact with the enemy. The VC could fade away at will.
    By this time the Marines in Da Nang were getting