America at War since 1945 by Gary A. Donaldson

Author:Gary A. Donaldson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Carrel Books
Published: 2016-02-27T05:00:00+00:00

9

THE LAST ACT

At the end of March 1972, the Communists struck hard at American and ARVN forces throughout South Vietnam. It was their chance to show the world that their fighting ability was still well intact, and to show the American public (by defeating ARVN troops in the field) that the policy of Vietnamization had failed and that the time had come to negotiate seriously for a U.S. withdrawal. Equipped with Soviet-made rockets, artillery, and tanks, the Communist advance defeated ARVN forces in the northern provinces of South Vietnam, overrunning in just two days twelve bases that U.S. Marines had recently turned over to ARVN. With little effort, the Communists took Quangtri province and held it through summer and into fall. In response, ARVN performed poorly in almost every sector of the Communist advance. With only 6,000 U.S. combat troops left in Vietnam, there was little standing in the way of the Communist push. In Washington, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird declared the South Vietnamese military performance “astonishingly successful.”1

In May, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho held another secret meeting in Paris. It was becoming a desperate time for Nixon and Kissinger. Congress repeatedly threatened to cut spending for the war and bring an abrupt end to U.S. involvement. Kissinger presented North Vietnam with the most comprehensive plan for peace yet placed on the table: in exchange for U.S. prisoners of war, Kissinger agreed to withdraw all U.S. troops from Vietnam within seven months after the signing of a ceasefire. This simple agreement was an abandonment of the long-standing American demand for a withdrawal of all combat troops from both sides, and for the first time the United States agreed to allow Communist troops to remain in the South after the U.S. withdrawal. This was a major concession, but Le Duc Tho had come to believe that political forces in the United States would soon coerce the Nixon administration into withdrawing unconditionally and he rejected the proposal—demanding that the United States also drop support for the Thieu government. That was unacceptable to Kissinger and Nixon, but Kissinger believed that a deadlock had been broken and that the two sides were on the verge of a settlement. However, the place of the Thieu regime after the U.S. withdrawal brought the talks to a halt—and pushed Nixon to act. He had to implement an end-the-war strategy.

With his leverage against Hanoi quickly evaporating, Nixon, on May 8, ignored the advice of Laird and CIA director Richard Helms and ordered an intensive B-52 bombardment of military targets in North Vietnam, a naval blockade of the North, and the mining of Haiphong harbor, all in hopes of breaking the diplomatic stalemate. He had escalated the war again, but this time it was generally successful. The Communist offensive that began in March was stalled by the U.S. air strikes, and Quangtri province fell back into ARVN’s hands in September. From this experience, the success or failure of Vietnamization became perfectly clear: without U.S. air power ARVN was vulnerable—no match for the enemy.

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