Why did America fight in the Vietnam War?
The United States entered the war to stop the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia. American leaders feared that Communist forces would gain control of Vietnam. 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, Vietnamese Communists gained control of North Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh was the leader of the North Vietnamese Communists. South Vietnam had a non-Communist government. This government was weak. But the United States supported it in order to keep the Communists from taking control of all of Vietnam.
At first, the United States supported South Vietnam with only money and military advisers. The number of advisers in Vietnam jumped from 800 to nearly 17,000 during the early 1960s while John F. Kennedy was U.S. president. In 1964, U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson reported that North Vietnam had attacked U.S. Navy ships along Vietnam's coast. Nearly 80,000 U.S. troops were in South Vietnam by the end of 1965. . The United States conducted a brutal air war against North Vietnam. In one year, the air force flew 150,000 bombing missions. By 1967, the United States had dropped more bombs on North Vietnam than it dropped on its enemies during World War II (1939-1945). By 1969, at the height of the war, the United States had about 543,000 troops in Vietnam. Many of them were teenagers. The average age of Americans fighting in Vietnam was 19. Although Nixon increased the bombing of North Vietnam, he began withdrawing U.S. troops. Without U.S. support, South Vietnam's government collapsed. North Vietnam won the war in 1975. Vietnam was reunited as a Communist nation. Millions of people died in the Vietnam War. Many of them were civilians, not soldiers. The war created about 10 million homeless Vietnamese refugees. It left hundreds of thousands of orphans.
http://www.vvaw.org/about/warhistory.php
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/vietnam.htm
