and South Vietnamese planes responded by bombing several targets in the North. This campaign was triggered by a February Viet Cong attack on American barracks in the South Vietnamese city of Pleiku. In early 1965, the United States took a bold step forward in its defense of South Vietnam by launching a sustained campaign of bombing attacks against North Vietnam. By the end of 1967, the war had become a military stalemate (a standstill, with no side emerging victorious) in VietnamĪnd a source of explosive unrest back in the United States. Dedicated to their cause, they used guerrilla tactics to neutralize America's huge advantages in mobility and firepower. officials continued with their efforts to rebuild South Vietnam's weak and unpopular government.ĭespite all of these activities, however, the Communists remained strong. It also sent hundreds of thousands of American soldiers into South Vietnam to fight Viet Cong guerrillas (small groups of fighters who launch surpriseĪttacks) and North Vietnamese troops. The United States launched a long and deadly air bombing campaign against North Vietnam during this time. Over the next few years, so-called "Americanization" of the Vietnam War developed rapidly. "Abandoning the concept of stability in the South before escalation against the North, policymakers now embraced the concept of stability through escalation, in the desperate hope that military action against Hanoi would prompt a stubbornly elusive political order in Saigon." involvement considerably in an effort to arrest Saigon's political failure," writes Brian VanDeMark in Into the Quagmire. "South Vietnam's accelerating crisis alarmed American policymakers, driving them to deepen U.S. officials and military leaders supported this "escalation" in American activity because they worried that South Vietnam's crumbling government would otherwise fall to the North Vietnamese Communists. Vietnam Becomes an American War (1965–67)īeginning in 1965, the United States dramatically increased its involvement in the war in Vietnam.
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