The Vietnam War

Read this article on the history of the Vietnam War. What began as a conflict over decolonization became a Cold War battlefield by the late 1960s, with U.S. troops fighting communist North Vietnamese troops, who were given weapons and support from China and the Soviet Union.

Notes

Casualties

The actual number of people killed in the conflict remains uncertain. Published statistics vary and do not include all civilian casualties, those of the various irregular forces involved, or victims of the civil war in Cambodia. The following statistics are from Summers (1985):

  • U.S. military fatalities, including missing in action, 57,690;
  • South Vietnamese military, 243,748;
  • Australia and New Zealand military, 469;
  • The Vietnamese Peoples' Army and NLF, 666,000;
  • South Vietnamese civilians, 300,000;
  • North Vietnamese civilians, 65,000.


Names for the Conflict

Various names have been applied to the conflict, and these have shifted over time, although the Vietnam War is the most commonly used title in English. It has been variously called the Second Indochina War, the Vietnam Conflict, the Vietnam War, and, in Vietnamese, Chiến tranh Việt Nam (The Vietnam War) or Kháng chiến chống Mỹ (Resistance War Against America).

  1. Second Indochina War: places the conflict into context with other distinctive but related and contiguous conflicts in Southeast Asia. Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia are seen as the battlegrounds of a larger Indochinese conflict that began at the end of World War II and lasted until communist victory in 1975. This conflict can be viewed in terms of the demise of colonialism and its after-effects during the Cold War.

  2. Vietnam Conflict: largely a U.S. designation, it acknowledges that the U.S. Congress never declared war on North Vietnam. Legally, the President used his constitutional discretion – supplemented by supportive resolutions in Congress – to conduct what was said to be a "police action."

  3. Vietnam War: the most commonly-used designation in English, it suggests that the location of the war was exclusively within the borders of North and South Vietnam, failing to recognize its wider context.

  4. Resistance War Against the Americans to Save the Nation: the term favored by North Vietnam (and after North Vietnam's victory over South Vietnam, by Vietnam as a whole); it is more of a slogan than a name, and its meaning is self-evident. Its usage has been abolished in recent years as the communist government of Vietnam seeks better relations with the United States. Official Vietnamese publications now refer to the conflict generically as "Chiến tranh Việt Nam" (Vietnam War).