Had D-Day failed where would the twentieth century have run, what depths of evil would we have seen? Would there have been a will to try again and again until the Atlantic Wall was finally breached? Would that failure have cemented and paved the way for further German advancements (and atrocities). How different would our world look if it were not for those brave souls that ran headlong into hell on earth. It’s remarkable even miraculous that the operation succeeded and unthinkable that we could live with a world where it failed.

Several days ago I saw a bumper sticker that said “war sucks, why fight it?” While it’s a trite little quote and I’m sure it’s a popular thought, the person that has affixed that to their car is in desperate need of a history lesson. No one in their right mind likes war. It is merciless, does not discriminate victims, the innocent and the guilty can suffer in disproportionate ways with the innocent and blameless usually seeing the worst effects while the guilty perpetrators live the high life. I worry for our future though when there are many people that don’t realize that sometimes there are times that a free society HAS to stand up and fight because as terrible as war is, the consequences of NOT fighting are unimaginable. The fight against Germany in World War II was that kind of fight, the consequences of failure to stop them were unthinkable.

Today we are fighting extremism of a different kind, but it is the kind that has far reaching goals. Religious extremism from what some people term islamic fascists has among it’s goals the restructuring of our world order where their vision of Islam rules and those that don’t follow their religious path are killed or subservient to their worldview. Do you remember in the 1990′s the Talibans rule of Afghanistan? Now, imagine a world governed by those rules. Unthinkable. Now, I know that all Muslims do not think as the extremists do. Our war is not against a religion, but against fanatics that have used this religion to further their own power in an attempt to mold the world into their dim and narrow view of how things should be. Our war is against those that would direct teenagers and younger to blow themselves up at checkpoints and shopping centers, pizza places and dance clubs.

The extremists terrorists of today do not count on the vast armies and weapons stores that Germany in 1944 did and perhaps that’s why it’s so easy to be indifferent. It’s certainly easy to fear the power of a giant with a large build and towering muscles, todays jihadist’s certainly don’t appear to be sweeping over parts of the world as German armies did in the 30s and 40s. My concern though is that indifference will lead to their opportunity and the world may in the not so distant future again face the unimaginable. We may yet again face a world wide war against those that wish to impose their will upon ALL free nations. Would we today be able to rise up and face that?

The years after World War II, there was a mantra of never letting such a thing happen again and while certainly there have been wars, there have not been any on the scope and destruction of the Second World War. May we pray that we never again see such a spilling of blood, but may we also pray that we be prepared to make the same sacrifices in the cause of liberty and freedom for future generations if our fates demand it. The consequences of losing our freedoms and liberties are truly unimaginable.

I would like to express the greatest and deepest thanks to all of those that, over the many years have risen to the task to save our society, as vapid, self absorbed and narcissistic as we many times are. I notice today that Google which many times changes their logo on their search engine to commemorate a memorable day, today is commemorating the 25th anniversary of the game Tetris…. The fact that we have the freedoms to be so trivial as well as to reach such great heights as we have in the 65 years since D-Day would be impossible to imagine without great sacrifices such as those in Normandy 65 years ago today. I suppose in many ways it’s fitting that it is just another day to so many people. That is, I suspect, EXACTLY what those people were fighting for, so that life would be about a picnic, or working in the garden, reading a book, going to work or simply playing a game. Really, they fought that day, as strange as it sounds, so that we, today, could have peace.

The Confederates attacked a still sleeping and unprepared Union camp. Kilpatrick escaped in his nightshirt to a nearby swamp before reorganizing his unit. The battle allowed the Confederate Infantry to escape Fayetteville with equipment across the Cape Fear River. More information can be found at this National Park Service Site and this historynet.com article

If my memory is correct, I had three ancestors that spent time in Camp Douglas as prisoners during the Civil War (one spending over 2 years there.) I find it quite sad that there is no formal historical site in Chicago to mark the place other than some tombstones. But then, maybe it is for the best as so many cruel things happened there. We ought not forget though.

More information can be found at this link.

“King George and Broadswords!” shouted Loyalists as they charged across partially dismantled Moores Creek bridge on February 27, 1776. Just beyond the bridge nearly a thousand North Carolina Patriots waited quietly with cannons and muskets poised to fire.

The Loyalists, mostly Scottish Highlanders wielding broadswords, expected to find only a small Patriot force. As the Loyalists advanced across the bridge, Patriot shots rang out and dozens of Loyalists fell, including their commanders. One commander was Col. Allan Macdonald, the husband of the famous Flora Macdonald of Highland lore who aided Prince Charles Esward Stuart, (a.k.a. Bonnie Prince Charlie) following the Jacobite defeat at Culloden Moor in 1746.

Stunned, outgunned and leaderless, the Loyalists surrendered, retreating in confusion. Wagons, weapons and British sterling worth more than $1 million by today’s value were seized by the Patriots in the days following the battle.

This dramatic victory ended British authority in the colony and greatly influenced North Carolina to be the first colony to vote for independence. The Battle of Moores Creek Bridge, coupled with the Battle of Sullivans Island near Charleston, South Carolina a few months later, ultimately led the Thirteen Colonies to declare independence on July 4, 1776.

Today

Throughout the park, remnants remain of the 1776 road traveled by Patriot and Loyalist forces. A 1-mile (1.6 km) trail with wayside exhibits leads through the battlefield and across Moores Creek. The historic bridge site is located along the trail.

The park offers a visitor center with exhibits and audio-visual program; a 0.3 mile (0.5 km) colonial forest trail, and a picnic area.
Source Wikipedia

The Battle of Kings Mountain was a fight in the Southern campaign of the American Revolutionary War, fought on October 7, 1780. American Patriot militia forces overwhelmed the loyalist militia, led by Major Patrick Ferguson. In his history The Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt wrote of Kings Mountain: “This brilliant victory marked the turning point of the American Revolution.”

From the American Patriot perspective, this might be called The Battle of the Colonels as there was no overall command structure. Colonels William Campbell, John Sevier, Joseph McDowell, Benjamin Cleveland, James Williams, and Isaac Shelby each appeared in command of parts of their militia units. Even some of lesser rank, such as Captain Joseph Winston, Edward Lacey, and Frederick Hambright commanded largely autonomous units.

Contents

1 Background

2 Forces

3 Description of the battle

4 Aftermath

5 External links

6 Further reading

Background

After the defeat of Horatio Gates’s Patriot army at the Battle of Camden, British General Cornwallis was convinced that Georgia and South Carolina had been brought back under British control, and he began working on plans to move into North Carolina. However, a brutal civil war between the rebel colonists and loyalists (known as Tories), continued to rage all over South Carolina. The Whig frontiersmen, led by a group of self-proclaimed colonels of the rebellion—Isaac Shelby, Elijah Clark, and Charles McDowell—conducted hit-and-run raids on Loyalist outposts. To protect his western flank against the rebel American colonists, Cornwallis employed Major Patrick Ferguson to command the Loyalist militia.

Cornwallis invaded North Carolina on September 9, 1780, and reached Charlotte on September 26, 1780. Ferguson followed and established a base camp at Gilbertown and issued a challenge to the Patriot leaders to lay down their arms or he would: “lay waste to their country with fire and sword.” But the tough-talking words only outraged the frontiersmen of the Appalachian Mountains who decided to bring the battle to Ferguson himself rather than wait for him to come to them.

Learning of the Patriot approach from a deserter, Ferguson withdrew towards Charlotte, but he stopped at Kings Mountain, a rocky forested hill less then a mile south of the South Carolina border, to face his enemies.

Forces

With the exception of Major Patrick Ferguson, all of the participants of the battle were Americans. Ferguson commanded over 1,000 Loyalist well trained and drilled milita, while the rebel Patriots, about 900 strong, were under the command of a group of frontiersmen colonels.

Description of the battle

The battle opened on October 7, 1780 where 900 Colonial frontiersmen approached the base of Kings Mountain in the early dawn hours. The rebel army split up in eight groups of 100 to 200 men intended to surround the mountain and destroy Ferguson’s Loyalists in detail. Two storming parties, led by Colonels John Sevier and William Campbell, would assault the ‘high heel’ of the mountain, the smallest area but highest point, while six additional storming groups, led by Colonels Shelby, Williams, Cleveland, Chronicle, McDowell and Winston, would attack the main Loyalist group around the ‘ball’ base beside the ‘heel’ crest of the mountain.

The frontiersmen crept up the hill in Indian-fashion and opened fire on the scarlet-red clad Loyalists from cover of the rocks and trees. Ferguson rallied his troops together and launched a bayonet charge against the attacking frontiersmen being led by Campbell and Sevier. With no bayonets of their own, the frontiersmen were forced to retreat down the hill and back into the woods. But Campbell rallied his troops as soon as the Loyalist charge spent itself and returned to the base of the hill to open fire again against the Loyalists. Two more times, Ferguson launched bayonet attacks against the attacking rebel colonists advancing up the hill. During one of the charges, Colonel Williams was killed, and Colonel McDowell was wounded. But each time, the frontiersmen retreated deep into the woods and returned to the base of the hill once the Loyalist counter-assaults were spent.

By this time, Loyalist casualties were increasing, and the situation was becoming increasingly grim for Ferguson. As the frontiersmen began to overrun the positions, Ferguson rode back and forth across the hill trying to rally his men to stand and fight by yelling orders and blowing his silver whistle used to signal charges. But at the crest, as the frontiersmen began over running the Loyalists positions, Ferguson was struck by about a dozen rifle balls fired by the frontiersmen and fell dead off his horse.

After seeing their leader fall, most of the Loyalists lost heart and began to raise their arms signaling their surrender. But this time, it was the Patriot frontiersmen who wouldn’t stop firing. Seeing the Loyalists beginning to surrender, they continued firing at them and even began shouting “Give ‘em Tarleton’s Quarter!” Many of the rebel frontiersmen, eager to avenge their fellow Patriot’s defeats at the Waxhaw Massacre and elsewhere where in no mood to take prisoners. But after a few more minutes of bloodletting, the several American Patriot colonels began to slowly get their men under control and rounded up over 600 Loyalist prisoners.

On the Loyalist side, 157 were killed and 163 were seriously wounded, and the remainder (698 men) were taken prisoner. The Patriot frontiersmen lost 28 killed and 62 wounded. Those Loyalist prisoners well enough to walk were herded away to camps several miles away. The dead and wounded were left behind on the battlefield. As many as nine of the Loyalists were hanged when several frontiersmen discovered that they originally fought for the Rebellion and then changed sides.

Aftermath

In 1931, the Congress of the United States created the Kings Mountain National Military Park on the site of the battle. The park is headquartered in Blacksburg, South Carolina and hosts over a quarter of a million visitors each year.

Source Wikipedia

The battle

On the 15th of March the two armies met at Guilford Court House, North Carolina (near the present Greensboro, North Carolina), and a virtually drawn battle was fought. The British, by holding their ground with their accustomed tenacity when engaged with superior numbers, were tactically victors, but were further weakened by a loss of nearly 600 men. Greene, cautiously avoiding another Camden, retreated with his forces intact. With his small army, less than 2000 strong, Cornwallis declined to follow Greene into the back country, and retiring to Hillsborough, North Carolina, raised the royal standard, offered protection to the inhabitants, and for the moment appeared to be master of Georgia and the two Carolinas. In a few weeks, however, he abandoned the heart of the state and marched to the coast at Wilmington, North Carolina, to recruit and refit his command.

At Wilmington the British general faced a serious problem, the solution of which upon his own responsibility unexpectedly led to the close of the war within seven months. Instead of remaining in Carolina he determined to march into Virginia, justifying the move on the ground that until Virginia was reduced he could not firmly hold the more southern states he had just overrun. This decision was subsequently sharply criticized by Clinton as unmilitary, and as having been made contrary to his instructions. To Cornwallis he wrote in May: “Had you intimated the probability of your intention, I should certainly have endeavoured to stop you, as I did then as well as now consider such a move likely to be dangerous to our interests in the Southern Colonies.” The danger lay in the suddenly changed situation in that direction; as General Greene, instead of following Cornwallis to the coast, boldly pushed down towards Camden and Charleston, South Carolina, with a view to drawing his antagonist after him to the points where he was the year before, as well as to driving back Lord Rawdon, whom Cornwallis had left in that field. In his main object, the recovery of the southern states, Greene succeeded by the close of the year; but not without hard fighting and repeated reverses. “We fight, get beaten, and fight again,” were his words. On the April 25, 1781 he was surprised in his camp at Hobkirk’s Hill, near Camden, by Lord Rawdon and was defeated, both sides suffering about an equal loss.

Re-enactments

Every year, on or about March 15, re-enactors in period costumes replay the battle on-site.

Source Wikipedia

The lead up to the war began with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 which was met with immediate economic sanctions by the United Nations against Iraq. Hostilities commenced in January 1991, resulting in a decisive victory for the coalition forces, which drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait with minimal coalition deaths. The main battles were aerial and ground combat within Iraq, Kuwait and bordering areas of Saudi Arabia. The war did not expand outside of the immediate Iraq/Kuwait/Saudi border region, although Iraq fired missiles on Israeli cities.

Other common names for the conflict include the Gulf War, War in the Gulf, Iraq-Kuwait Conflict, UN-Iraq conflict, Operations Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Desert Sabre, 1990 Gulf War (for the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait), 1991 Gulf War (1990-1991), the Second Gulf War (to distinguish it from the Iran-Iraq war) and Gulf War Sr. and First Gulf War (to distinguish it from the 2003 invasion of Iraq). In Iraq, the war is often colloquially called simply Um M’aārak (“the Mother of All Battles”).

Contents

1 Causes
2 Iraq and the United States pre-war
3 Invasion of Kuwait
4 Diplomacy
5 Air campaign
6 Ground campaign
7 Coalition involvement
7.1 Canada
8 Casualties
8.1 Casualties During the War
8.2 The Post-War Effects of Depleted Uranium
9 Cost
10 Media
11 Consequences
12 Technology
13 Military awards

Causes

Prior to World War I, under the Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1913, Kuwait was considered to be an autonomous caza within Ottoman Iraq. Following the war, Kuwait fell under British rule and later became an independent emirate. However, Iraqi officials did not accept the legitimacy of Kuwaiti independence or the authority of the Kuwaiti Emir. Iraq never acknowledged Kuwait’s right to be an independent nation and in the 1960s, the United Kingdom deployed troops to Kuwait to deter an Iraqi annexation.

During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Kuwait was allied with Iraq, largely due to desiring Iraqi protection from Islamic Iran. After the war, Iraq was extremely indebted to several Arab countries, including a $14 billion debt to Kuwait. Iraq hoped to repay its debts by raising the price of oil through OPEC oil production cuts, but instead, Kuwait increased production, lowering prices, in an attempt to leverage a better resolution of their border dispute. In addition, Iraq began to accuse Kuwait of slant drilling into neighboring Iraqi oil fields, and furthermore charged that it had performed a collective service for all Arabs by acting as a buffer against Iran and that therefore Kuwait and Saudi Arabia should negotiate or cancel Iraq’s war debts. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s primary two-fold justification blended the assertion of Kuwaiti territory being an Iraqi province arbitrarily cut off by imperialism, and the use of annexation as retaliation for the “economic warfare” Kuwait had waged through slant drilling into Iraq’s oil supplies while it had been under Iraqi protection.

The war with Iran had also seen the destruction of almost all of Iraq’s port facilities on the Persian Gulf, cutting off Iraq’s main trade outlet. Many in Iraq, expecting a resumption of war with Iran in the future, felt that Iraq’s security could only be guaranteed by controlling more of the Gulf Coast, including more secure ports. Kuwait thus made a tempting target.

Ideologically, the invasion of Kuwait was justified through calls to Arab nationalism. Kuwait was described as a natural part of Iraq carved off by British imperialism. The annexation of Kuwait was described as a step on the way to greater Arab union. Other reasons were given as well. Hussein presented it as a way to restore the empire of Babylon in addition to the Arab nationalist rhetoric. The invasion was also closely tied to other events in the Middle East. The First Intifada by the Palestinians was raging, and most Arab states, including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, were dependent on western alliances. Saddam thus presented himself as the one Arab statesman willing to stand up to Israel and the U.S.

Iraq and the United States pre-war

Prior to the Iran-Iraq War, U.S.-Iraqi relations were cool. The U.S. was concerned with Iraq’s belligerence toward Israel and disapproval of moves towards peace with other Arab states. It also condemned Iraqi support for various Arab and Palestinian nationalist groups such as Abu Nidal, which led to its inclusion on the incipient State Department list of states that sponsor terrorism on December 29, 1979. The U.S. remained officially neutral during the outbreak of hostilities in the Iran-Iraq War, as it had previously been humiliated by a 444 day long Iran hostage crisis and expected that Iran was not likely to win. In March 1982, however, Iran began a successful counteroffensive (Operation Undeniable Victory). In a bid to open the possibility of relations to Iraq, the country was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Ostensibly this was because of improvement in the regime’s record, although former United States Assistant Secretary of Defense Noel Koch later stated, No one had any doubts about [the Iraqis'] continued involvement in terrorism….The real reason was to help them succeed in the war against Iran.

With Iran’s newfound success in the war and its rebuff of a peace offer in July, arms sales from other states (most importantly the USSR, France, Egypt, and starting that year, China) reached a record spike in 1982, but an obstacle remained to any potential U.S.-Iraqi relationship – Abu Nidal continued to operate with official support in Baghdad. When the group was expelled to Syria in November 1983, the Reagan administration sent Donald Rumsfeld as a special envoy to cultivate ties.

From 1983 to 1990, the US government approved around $200 million in arms sales to Iraq, according to the Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPRI). These sales amounted to less than 1% of the total arms sold to Iraq in the relevant period, though the US also sold helicopters which, although designated for civilian use, were immediately deployed by Iraq in its war with Iran.

An investigation by the Senate Banking Committee in 1994 determined that the U.S. Department of Commerce had approved, for the purpose of research, the shipping of dual use biological agents to Iraq during the mid 1980s, including Bacillus Anthracis (anthrax), later identified by the Pentagon as a key component of the Iraqi biological warfare program, as well as Clostridium Botulinum, Histoplasma Capsulatum, Brucella Melitensis, and Clostridium Perfringens. The Committee report noted that each of these had been “considered by various nations for use in war.” Declassified U.S. government documents indicate that the U.S. government had confirmed that Iraq was using chemical weapons “almost daily” during the Iran-Iraq conflict as early as 1983.

Chiefly, the U.S. government provided Iraq with economic aid. Iraq’s war with Iran, and the consequent disruption in its oil export business, had caused the country to enter a deep debt. U.S. government economic assistance allowed Hussein to continue using resources for the war which would have otherwise had to have been diverted. Between 1983 and 1990, Iraq received $5 billion in credits from the Commodity Credit Corporation program run by the Department of Agriculture, beginning at $400 million per year in 1983 and increasing to over $1 billion per year in 1988 and 1989, finally coming to an end after another $500 million was granted in 1990. Besides agricultural credits, the U.S. also provided Hussein with other loans. In 1985 the U.S. Export-Import Bank extended more than $684 million in credits to Iraq to build an oil pipeline through Jordan with the construction being undertaken by Californian construction firm Bechtel Corporation.

Following the war, however, there were moves within the Congress of the United States to isolate Iraq diplomatically and economically over concerns about human rights violations, its dramatic military build-up, and hostility to Israel. Specifically, the Senate in 1988 unanimously passed the “Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988,” which would have imposed sanctions on Iraq. The legislation died when the House balked as a result of intense lobbying against it by the Reagan administration.

These Congressional moves were disowned by some Congressmen such as US Senator Robert Dole, who, according to an Iraqi transcript of a meeting with Iraqi President Hussein, stated that “Congress does not represent U.S. President George H. W. Bush or the government” and that Bush would veto any move toward sanctions against Iraq. Some US officials, such as Reagan’s head of Policy Planning Staff at the State Dept. and Assistant Secretary for East Asian Affairs Paul Wolfowitz disagreed with US support for the Iraqi regime.

The relationship between Iraq and the United States remained collaborative until the day Iraq invaded Kuwait. On October 2, 1989, President George H.W. Bush signed secret National Security Directive 26, which begins, “Access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in the area are vital to U.S. national security.” With respect to Iraq, the directive stated, “Normal relations between the United States and Iraq would serve our longer term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East.”

In late July, 1990, as negotiations between Iraq and Kuwait stalled, Iraq massed troops on Kuwait’s borders and summoned American ambassador April Glaspie for an unanticipated meeting with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Two transcripts of that meeting have been produced, both of them controversial. According to the transcripts, Saddam outlined his grievances against Kuwait, while promising that he would not invade Kuwait before one more round of negotiations. In the version published by The New York Times on September 23, 1990, Glaspie expressed concern over the troop buildup, but went on to say:

But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late ’60s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via [Chadli] Klibi [then Arab League General Secretary] or via President Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly.

Some have interpreted these statements as signalling a tacit approval of invasion, although no other evidence of this has been presented. Although the State Department did not confirm the authenticity of these transcripts, US sources say that she had handled everything “by the book” (in accordance with the US’s neutrality on the Iraq-Kuwait issue) and had not signaled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein any approval for defying the Arab League’s Jeddah crisis squad, which had conducted the negotiations. Many believe that Saddam’s expectations may have been influenced by a perception that the US was not interested in the issue, for which the Glaspie transcript is merely an example, and that he may have felt so in part because of US support for the reunification of Germany, another act that he considered to be nothing more than the nullification of an artificial, internal border. Others, such as Kenneth Pollack, believe he had no such illusion, or that he simply underestimated the extent of American military response.

In November 1989, CIA director William Webster met with the Kuwaiti head of security, Brigadier Fahd Ahmed Al-Fahd. Subsequent to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Iraq claimed to have found a memorandum pertaining to their conversation. The Washington Post reported that Kuwaiti’s foreign minister fainted when confronted with this document at an Arab summit in August. Later, Iraq cited this memorandum as evidence of a CIA-Kuwaiti plot to destabilize Iraq economically and politically. The CIA and Kuwait have described the meeting as routine and the memorandum as a forgery. The purported document reads in part:

We agreed with the American side that it was important to take advantage of the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq in order to put pressure on that country’s government to delineate our common border. The Central Intelligence Agency gave us its view of appropriate means of pressure, saying that broad cooperation should be initiated between us on condition that such activities be coordinated at a high level.

Invasion of Kuwait

At the break of dawn on August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops crossed the Kuwaiti border with armor and infantry, occupying strategic posts throughout the country, including the Emir’s palace. The Kuwaiti Army was quickly overwhelmed, though they bought enough time for the Kuwaiti Air Force to flee to Saudi Arabia. Troops looted medical and food supplies, detained thousands of civilians and took over the media. Iraq detained thousands of Western visitors as hostages and later attempted to use them as bargaining chips. Hussein then installed a new Iraqi provincial governor, describing this as “liberation” from the Kuwaiti Emir; this was largely dismissed as war propaganda.

Diplomacy

Within hours of the initial invasion, the Kuwaiti and United States of America delegations requested a meeting of the UN Security Council, which passed Resolution 660, condemning the invasion and demanding a withdrawal of Iraqi troops. On August 3, the Arab League passed its own resolution condemning the invasion and demanding a withdrawal of Iraqi troops. The Arab League resolution also called for a solution to the conflict from within the Arab League, and warned against foreign intervention. On August 6, the Security Council passed Resolution 661, placing economic sanctions on Iraq.

The decision by the West to repel the Iraqi invasion had as much to do with preventing an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia, a nation of far more importance to the world than Kuwait. The rapid success of the Iraqi army against Kuwait had brought Iraq’s army within easy striking distance of the Hama oil fields, Saudi Arabia’s most valuable. Iraqi control of these fields as well as Kuwait and Iraqi reserves would have given it an unprecedented monopoly in the vital commodity. Saudi Arabia could put up little more resistance than Kuwait and the entire world believed the temptation for Saddam to further advance his ambitions would prove too great. The United States, Europe, and Japan in particular saw such a potential monopoly as dangerous.

Iraq had a number of grievances with Saudi Arabia. The concern over debts stemming from the Iran-Iraq war was even greater when applied to Saudi Arabia, which Iraq owed some 26 billion dollars. The long desert border was also ill-defined. Rapidly after his victory over Kuwait Saddam began verbally attacking the Saudi kingdom. He argued that the American-supported Kingdom was an illegitimate guardian of holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Saddam combined the language of the Islamist groups that had recently fought in Afghanistan with the rhetoric Iran had long used to attack the Saudis.

The addition of Allahu Akbar to the flag of Iraq and images of Saddam praying in Kuwait were seen as part of a plan to win the support of the Muslim Brotherhood and detach Islamist Mujahideen from Saudi Arabia. There was further escalation of such propaganda attacks on Saudi Arabia as western troops poured into the country.

President George H. W. Bush quickly announced that the US would launch a “wholly defensive” mission to prevent Iraq from invading Saudi Arabia – Operation Desert Shield, and US troops moved into Saudi Arabia on August 7. On August 8, Iraq declared parts of Kuwait to be extensions of the Iraqi province of Basra and the rest to be the 19th province of Iraq.

The United States navy mobilised two naval battle groups, USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and USS Independence, to the area [NAVY], where they were ready by August 8. The United States also sent the battleships USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin to the region, and they would later become the last battleships to actively participate in a foreign war. Military buildup continued from there, eventually reaching 500,000 troops. The consensus among military analysts is that until October, the American military forces in the area would have been insufficient to stop an invasion of Saudi Arabia had Iraq attempted one.

A long series of UN Security Council and Arab League resolutions were passed regarding the conflict. One of the most important was Resolution 678, passed on November 29, giving Iraq a withdrawal deadline of January 15, 1991, and authorizing “all necessary means to uphold and implement Resolution 660″, a diplomatic formulation authorizing the use of force.

The United States, especially Secretary of State James Baker, assembled a coalition of forces to join it in opposing Iraq, consisting of soldiers from 34 countries: Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Greece, Hungary, Honduras, Italy, Kuwait, Morocco, The Netherlands, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States itself. US troops represented 74% of 660,000 troops in the theater of war. Many of the coalition forces were reluctant to join; some felt that the war was an internal Arab affair, or feared increasing American influence in Kuwait. In the end, many nations were persuaded by Iraq’s belligerence towards other Arab states, and offers of economic aid or debt forgiveness.

The United States went through a number of different public justifications for their involvement in the conflict. The first reasons given were the importance of oil to the American economy and the United States’ longstanding friendly relationship with Saudi Arabia. However, some Americans were dissatisfied with these explanations and “No Blood For Oil” became a rallying cry for domestic opponents of the war, though they never reached the size of opposition to the Vietnam War. Later justifications for the war included Iraq’s history of human rights abuses under President Saddam Hussein, the potential that Iraq may develop nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction, and that “naked aggression will not stand.”

Although the human rights abuses of the Iraq regime before and after the Kuwait invasion were well-documented, the government of Kuwait set out to influence American opinion with a few spectacular, but embellished and false accounts. Shortly after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the organization Citizens for a Free Kuwait was formed in the US. It hired the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton for about $11 million, money from the Kuwaiti government. This firm went on to manufacture a campaign which described Iraqi soldiers pulling babies out of incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and letting them die on the floor. A video news release was widely distributed by US TV networks; false supporting testimony was given before Congress and before the UN Security Council. The fifteen-year-old girl testifying before Congress was later revealed to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States; the supposed surgeon testifying at the UN was in fact a dentist who later admitted to having lied. (For more, see Nurse Nayirah.)

Various peace proposals were floated, but none were agreed to. The United States insisted that the only acceptable terms for peace were Iraq’s full, unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait. Iraq insisted that withdrawal from Kuwait must be “linked” to a simultaneous withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon and Israeli troops from the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and southern Lebanon. Morocco and Jordan were persuaded by this proposal, but Syria, Israel, and the anti-Iraq coalition denied that there was any connection to the Kuwait issue. Syria joined the coalition to expel Saddam but Israel remained officially neutral despite rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. The Bush administration persuaded Israel to remain outside the conflict with promises of increased aid, while the PLO under Yasser Arafat openly supported Saddam Hussein, leading to a later rupture in Palestinian-Kuwaiti ties and the expulsion of many Palestinians from Kuwait.

On January 12, 1991 the United States Congress authorized the use of military force to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. Soon after the other states in the coalition did the same.

Air campaign

A day after the deadline set in Resolution 678, the coalition launched a massive air campaign codenamed Operation Desert Storm: more than 1,000 sorties per day, beginning early morning on January 17, 1991. Weapons used included smart bombs, cluster bombs, daisy cutters and cruise missiles. Iraq responded by launching 8 Scud missiles into Israel the next day. The first priority for coalition forces was destruction of the Iraqi air force and anti-aircraft facilities. This was quickly achieved and for the duration of the war Coalition aircraft could operate largely unchallenged. Despite Iraq’s better-than-expected anti-aircraft capabilities, only one coalition aircraft was lost in the opening day of the war. Stealth aircraft were heavily used in this phase to elude Iraq’s extensive SAM systems and anti-aircraft weapons; once these were destroyed, other types of aircraft could more safely be used. The sorties were launched mostly from Saudi Arabia and the six coalition aircraft carrier groups in the Persian Gulf.

The next Coalition targets were command and communication facilities. Saddam had closely micromanaged the Iraqi forces in the Iran-Iraq War and initiative at the lower levels was discouraged. Coalition planners hoped Iraqi resistance would quickly collapse if deprived of command and control. The first week of the air war saw a few Iraqi sorties but these did little damage, and thirty-eight Iraqi MiGs were shot down by Coalition planes. Soon after, the Iraqi airforce began fleeing to Iran. On January 23, Iraq began dumping approximately 1 million tons of crude oil into the gulf, causing the largest oil spill in history.

The third and largest phase of the air campaign targeted military targets throughout Iraq and Kuwait: Scud missile launchers, weapons of mass destruction sites, weapons research facilities and naval forces. About one third of the Coalition airpower was devoted to attacking Scuds. In addition, it targeted facilities useful for both the military and civilians: electricity production facilities, nuclear reactors, telecommunications equipment, port facilities, oil refineries and distribution, railroads and bridges. Electrical power facilities were destroyed across the country. At the end of the war, electricity production was at four percent of its pre-war levels. Bombs destroyed the utility of all major dams, most major pumping stations and many sewage treatment plants.

In most cases, the Allies avoided hitting civilian-only facilities. However, on February 13, 1991, two laser-guided “smart bombs” destroyed the Amiriyah bunker facility, which the Iraqis claimed was for the auspices of an air shelter. U.S. officials claimed that the bunker was a military communications center, but Western reporters have been unable to find evidence for this. The White House claims, in a report titled Apparatus of Lies: Crafting Tragedy, that US intelligence sources reported the bunker was being used for military command purposes. In his book, Saddam’s Bombmaker, the former director of Iraq’s nuclear weapon program, who defected to the west, supports the theory that the facility was used for both purposes.

We sought refuge several times at the shelter…. But it was always filled…. The shelter had television sets, drinking fountains, its own electrical generator, and looked sturdy enough to withstand a hit from conventional weapons. But I stopped trying to get in one night after noticing some long black limousines slithering in and out of an underground gate in the back. I asked around and was told that it was a command center. After considering it more closely, I decided it was probably Saddam’s own operational base.

Iraq launched missile attacks on coalition bases in Saudi Arabia and on Israel, in the hopes of drawing Israel into the war and drawing other Arab states out of it. This strategy proved ineffective. Israel did not join the coalition, and all Arab states stayed in the coalition except Jordan, which remained officially neutral throughout. On January 29, Iraq attacked and occupied the abandoned Saudi city of Khafji with tanks and infantry. However, the Battle of Khafji ended when Iraqis were driven back by Saudi and Qatari forces supported by US Marines with close air support over the following two days.

The effect of the air campaign was to decimate entire Iraqi brigades deployed in the open desert in combat formation. The air campaign also prevented effective Iraqi resupply to forward deployed units engaged in combat, as well preventing the large (450,000) battle-hardened Iraqi troops from achieving force concentration essential to victory.

The air campaign had a significant effect on the tactics employed by opposing forces in subsequent conflicts. No longer were entire divisions dug in the open facing U.S. forces but rather were dispersed, e.g. Serbian forces in Kosovo. Opposing forces also reduced the distance of their supply lines and area defended. This was seen during the war in Afghanistan when the Taliban preemptively abandoned large swaths of land and retreated into their strongholds. This increased their force concentration and reduced long vulnerable supply lines. This tactic was also observed in the Second Gulf War whereby the Iraqi forces retreated from northern Iraqi Kurdistan into the cities.

The success of the air campaign has had the adverse effect for the American military of forcing all potential opposing forces of embracing tactics which minimize the effects of air power.

Ground campaign

On February 22, 1991, Iraq agreed to a Soviet-proposed cease-fire agreement. The agreement called for Iraq to withdraw troops to pre-invasion positions within three weeks following a total cease-fire, and called for monitoring of the cease-fire and withdrawal to be overseen by the UN Security Council. The US rejected the proposal but said that retreating Iraqi forces would not be attacked, and gave twenty-four hours for Iraq to begin withdrawing forces.

On February 24, the US began Operation Desert Sabre, the ground portion of its campaign. US forces pulled plows along Iraqi trenches, burying their occupants alive. Soon after, a convoy of Marines penetrated deep into Iraqi territory, collecting thousands of deserting Iraqi troops, weakened and demoralized by the extensive air campaign. The US anticipated that Iraq might use chemical weapons; General Colin Powell later suggested that a US response to such an act might have been to destroy dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, drowning Baghdad in water, though this was never fully developed as a plan.

The United States originally hoped that Saddam would be overthrown in an internal coup, and used CIA assets in Iraq to organize a revolt. When a popular rebellion against Saddam began in southern Iraq, the United States did not support it due to the fact that the coalition refused to aid in an invasion. As a result, not only was the rebellion brutally subdued, but the main CIA operative who was tasked with organizing the revolt was disavowed and accused of “disobeying orders to not organize a revolt”.

In their cowritten 1998 book, “A World Transformed” George Bush and Brent Scowcroft discussed the possibility of overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 1991:

Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guidelines about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in ‘mission creep’, and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs… Would have have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, there was no viable ‘exit strategy’ we could see, violating another of our principles… Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different – and perhaps barren – outcome.. (quoted in Losing America, pg 154)

Iraq did not use chemical weapons and the allied advance was much swifter than US generals expected. On February 26, Iraqi troops began retreating out of Kuwait, setting fire to Kuwaiti oil fields as they left. A long convoy of retreating Iraqi troops — along with Iraqi and Palestinian civilians — formed along the main Iraq-Kuwait highway. This convoy was bombed so extensively by the Allies that it came to be known as the Highway of Death. One hundred hours after the ground campaign started, President Bush declared a ceasefire and on February 27 declared that Kuwait had been liberated. Journalist Seymour Hersh has charged that, two days after the ceasefire was declared, American troops led by Barry McCaffrey engaged in a systematic massacre of retreating Iraqi troops, in addition to some civilians. McCaffrey has denied the charges and an army investigation has cleared him. (Forbes, Daniel)

A peace conference was held in Iraqi territory occupied by the coalition. At the conference, Iraq won the approval of the use of armed helicopters on their side of the temporary border, ostensibly for government transit due to the damage done to civilian transportation. Soon after, these helicopters — and much of the Iraqi armed forces — were refocused toward fighting against a Shiite uprising in the south. In the North, Kurdish leaders took heart in American statements that they would support an uprising and began fighting, in the hopes of triggering a coup. However, when no American support was forthcoming, Iraqi generals remained loyal and brutally crushed the Kurdish troops. Millions of Kurds fled across the mountains to Kurdish areas of Turkey and Iran. These incidents would later result in no-fly zones being established in both the North and the South of Iraq. In Kuwait, the Emir was restored and suspected Iraqi collaborators were repressed. Eventually, over 400,000 people were expelled from the country, including a large number of Palestinians (due to PLO support for Saddam Hussein).

Iraqi forces were heavily outnumbered from the start – approximately 750,000 Allied troops to approximately 450,000 Iraqi troops. A further 100,000 Turkish troops were deployed along the common border of Turkey and Iraq. This caused significant force dilution of the Iraqi military by forcing it to deploy its forces along all its borders (except ironically its bitter enemy Iran). This allowed the main thrust by the Americans to not only possess a significant technological advantage but also a large advantage in force numbers.

The main surprise of the ground campaign was relatively low Allied casualties. This was due to some tactical errors on the part of the Iraqis such as deploying tanks behind sand berms which offered no protection against the kinetic energy rounds of the Abraham tanks and also gave away the position of the Iraqi tanks from a great distance. The Iraqi forces also failed to utilize urban warfare in Kuwait City, which could have inflicted significant casualities on the attacking forces. Urban combat would have reduced the greatest advantage of the Allies, long range killing. In the desert Abraham tanks scored kills out to 4 kilometers. Rarely in urban combat does fighting range exceed 1 km, a range at which theoretically the Abraham tank was vulnerable to the 125mm gun of the T-72 tanks that the Iraqis possessed.

On March 10, 1991, Operation Desert Farewell began to move 540,000 American troops out of the Persian Gulf.

Coalition involvement

Members of the Coalition included Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and the United States of America. Germany and Japan provided financial assistance instead of military aid.

Canada

Canada was one of the first nations to agree to condemn Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and it quickly agreed to join the U.S. led coalition. In August Prime Minister Brian Mulroney sent the destroyers HMCS Terra Nova and HMCS Athabaskan to enforce the trade blockade against Iraq. The supply ship HMCS Protecteur was also sent to aid the gathering coalition forces.

After the UN authorized full use of force in the operation Canada sent a CF18 squadron with support personnel. Canada also sent a field hospital to deal with casualties from the ground war. When the air war began, Canada’s planes were integrated into the coalition force and provided air cover and attacked ground targets. This was the first time since the Korean War that Canadian forces had participated in offensive combat operations.

Canada suffered no casualties during the conflict but since its end many veterans have complained of suffering from Gulf War Syndrome.

Casualties

Casualties During the War

Gulf War casualty numbers are controversial. Coalition military deaths seem to be around 378, with US forces suffering 148 battle-related and 145 non-battle-related deaths (included in the 378). The UK suffered 47 deaths, the Arab contingents had about 40 killed, and France lost 2 men. The largest single loss of Coalition forces happened on February 25, 1991 when an Iraqi Scud missile hit an American military barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia killing 28 U.S. Army Reservists from Pennsylvania. The number of coalition wounded seems to have been less than 1,000.

Independent analysts generally agree the Iraqi death toll was well below initial post-war estimates. In the immediate aftermath of the war, these estimates ranged as high as 100,000 Iraqi troops killed and 300,000 wounded. According to “Gulf War Air Power Survey” by Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, (a report commissioned by the U.S. Air Force; 1993-ISBN 0-16-041950-6), there were an estimated 10-12,000 Iraqi combat deaths in the air campaign and as many as 10,000 casualties in the ground war. This analysis is based on enemy prisoner of war reports.

The Iraqi government claimed that 2,300 civilians died during the air campaign.

One infamous incident during the war highlighted the question of large-scale Iraqi combat deaths. This was the `bulldozer assault’ in which two brigades from the U.S. 1st Infantry Division (Mechanized) used anti-mine plows mounted on tanks and combat earthmovers to bury Iraqi soldiers defending the fortified “Saddam Line.” While approximately 2,000 of the troops surrendered, escaping burial, one newspaper story reported that the U.S. commanders estimated thousands of Iraqi soldiers had been buried alive during the two-day assault February 24-25, 1991. However, like all other troop estimates made during the war, the estimated 8,000 Iraqi defenders was probably greatly inflated. While one commander, Col. Anthony Moreno of the 2nd Brigade, thought the numbers might have been in the thousands, another reported his brigade buried between 80 and 250 Iraqis. After the war, the Iraqi government claimed to have found 44 such bodies.

The Post-War Effects of Depleted Uranium

In 1998, Saddam government doctors reported that Coalition use of depleted uranium caused a massive increase in birth defects and cancer among Iraqis, particularly leukemia. The government doctors claimed they were unable to provide evidence linking depleted uranium to the cancer and birth defects because the sanctions prevented them from obtaining necessary testing equipment. Subsequently, a World Health Organization team visited Basra and proposed a study to investigate the causes of higher cancer rates in southern Iraq, but Saddam refused.

The World Health Organization was nonetheless able to assess the health risks of Depleted Uranium in a post-combat environment thanks to a 2001 mission to Kosovo. A 2001 WHO fact sheet on depleted uranium concludes: “because DU is only weakly radioactive, very large amounts of dust (on the order of grams) would have to be inhaled for the additional risk of lung cancer to be detectable in an exposed group. Risks for other radiation-induced cancers, including leukaemia, are considered to be very much lower than for lung cancer.” In addition, “no reproductive or developmental effects have been reported in humans” as a result of DU exposure.

The U.S. Department of State has also published a fact sheet on depleted uranium. It states: “World Health Organization and other scientific research studies indicate Depleted Uranium poses no serious health risks” and “Depleted Uranium does not cause birth defects. Iraqi military use of chemical and nerve agents in the 1980′s and 1990′s is the likely cause of alleged birth defects among Iraqi children.” In regard to cancer claims, the fact sheet states that “[a]ccording to environmental health experts, it is medically impossible to contract leukemia as a result of exposure to uranium or depleted uranium,” and “[c]ancer rates in almost 19,000 highly exposed uranium industry workers who worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory projects between 1943 and 1947 have been examined, and no excess cancers were observed through 1974. Other epidemiological studies of lung cancer in uranium mill and metal processing plant workers have found either no excess cancers or attributed them to known carcinogens other than uranium, such as radon.”

However, some claim that the effect is more severe as the Depleted Uranium ammunition would fragment into tiny particles when it hit the target.

Cost

The cost of the war to the United States was calculated by Congress to be $61.1 billion. Other sources estimate up to $71 billion. About $53 billion of that amount was paid by different countries around the world: $36 billion by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States; $16 billion by Germany and Japan (which sent no forces due to the treaties that ended WWII). About 25% of Saudi Arabia’s contribution was paid in the form of in-kind services to the troops, such as food and transportation.

US troops represented about 74% of the combined force, and the global cost was therefore higher. The United Kingdom, for instance, spent $4.1 billion during this war.

Media

The Gulf War was a heavily televised war. For the first time people all over the world were able to watch live pictures of missiles hitting their targets and fighters taking off from aircraft carriers. Allied forces were keen to demonstrate the accuracy of their weapons.

The big-three network anchors led the network news coverage of the war. ABC’s Peter Jennings, CBS’s Dan Rather, and NBC’s Tom Brokaw were anchoring their evening newscasts when air strikes began on January 16, 1991. ABC News correspondent Gary Shepard, reporting live from Baghdad, told Jennings of the quietness of the city. But, moments later, Shepard was back on the air as flashes of light were seen on the horizon and tracer fire was heard on the ground. On CBS, viewers were watching a report from correspondent Allen Pizzey, who was also reporting from Baghdad, when the war began. Rather, after the report was finished, announced that there were unconfirmed reports of flashes in Baghdad and heavy air traffic at bases in Saudi Arabia. On the “NBC Nightly News”, correspondent Mike Boettcher reported unusual air activity in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Moments later, Brokaw announced to his viewers that the air attack had begun. But it was CNN who gained the most popularity for their coverage. CNN correspondents John Holliman and Peter Arnett and CNN anchor Bernard Shaw relayed telephone reports from the Al-Rashid Hotel as the air strikes began. Newspapers all over the world also covered the war and TIME Magazine published a special issue dated January 28, 1991, the headline “WAR IN THE GULF” emblazoned on the cover over a picture of Baghdad taken as the war began.

US policy regarding media freedom was much more restrictive than in the Vietnam War. The policy had been spelled out in a Pentagon document entitled Annex Foxtrot. Most of the press information came from briefings organized by the military. Only selected journalists were allowed to visit the front lines or conduct interviews with soldiers. Those visits were always conducted in the presence of officers, and were subject to both prior approval by the military and censorship afterward. This was ostensibly to protect sensitive information from being revealed to Iraq, but often in practice it was used to protect politically embarrassing information from being revealed. This policy was heavily influenced by the military’s experience with the Vietnam War, which it believed it had lost due to public opposition within the United States.

At the same time, the coverage of this war was new in its instantaneousness. Many American journalists remained stationed in the Iraqi capital Baghdad throughout the war, and footage of incoming missiles was carried almost immediately on the nightly television news and the cable news channels such as CNN. A British crew from CBS News (David Green & Andy Thompson) equipped with satellite transmission equipment travelled with the front line forces and having transmitted live TV pictures of the fighting en route, arrived the day before the forces in Kuwait City, transmitting live television from the city and covering the entrance of the Arab forces the following day.

Consequences

Following the uprisings in the North and South, no-fly zones were established to help protect the Shi’ite and Kurdish groups in South and North Iraq, respectively. These no-fly zones (originally north of the 36th parallel and south of the 32nd parallel) were monitored mainly by the US and the UK, though France also participated. Combined, they flew more sorties over Iraq in the eleven years following the war than were flown during the war. These sorties dropped bombs nearly every other day. However, the greatest amount of bombs was dropped during two sustained bombing campaigns: Operation Desert Strike, which lasted a few weeks in September 1996, and Operation Desert Fox, in December 1998.

Widespread infrastructure destruction hurt the Iraqi population. Years after the war electricity production was less than a quarter its pre-war level. The destruction of water treatment facilities caused sewage to flow directly into the Tigris River, from which civilians drew drinking water, resulting in widespread disease.

Economic sanctions were kept in place following the war, pending a weapons inspection regime with which Iraq never fully cooperated. Iraq was later allowed to import certain products under the UN’s Oil for Food program. A 1998 UNICEF report found that the sanctions resulted in an increase in 90,000 deaths per year. Many argue that the sanctions on Iraq and the American military presence in Saudi Arabia contributed to an increasingly negative image of the United States in the Arab world.

A United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) on weapons was established, to monitor Iraq’s compliance with restrictions on weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. Iraq accepted some and refused other weapons inspections. The team found some evidence of biological weapons programs at one site and non-compliance at many other sites.

In 1997, Iraq expelled all US members of the inspection team, alleging that the United States was using the inspections as a front for espionage; members of UNSCOM were in regular contact with various intelligence agencies to provide information on weapons sites back and forth. The team returned for an even more turbulent time period between 1997 and 1999; one member of the weapons inspection team, US Marine Scott Ritter, resigned in 1998, alleging that the Clinton administration was blocking investigations because they did not want a full-scale confrontation with Iraq. He also alleged that the CIA was using the weapons inspection teams as a cover for covert operations. In 1999, the team was replaced by UNMOVIC, which began inspections in 2002. In 2002, Iraq — and especially Saddam Hussein — became targets in the United States’ War on Terrorism, leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, led by the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom.

Many returning coalition soldiers reported illnesses following their participation in the Gulf War, a phenomenon known as Gulf war syndrome. The number of children born in soldier’s families with serious congenital defects or serious illnesses is also alarmingly high, 67%, according to a study by the Department of Veterans Affairs. [17] There has been widespread speculation and disagreement about the causes of the syndrome and birth defects (though the government has attempted to downplay the seriousness of the situation). A report published in 1994 by the Government Accountability Office said that American troops were exposed to 21 potential “reproductive toxicants”. Some factors considered as possibly causal include exposure to radioactive depleted and non-depleted uranium used in munitions, oil fires, or the anthrax vaccine.

The People’s Republic of China (whose army in many ways resembled the Iraqi army) was surprised at the performance of American technology on the battlefield. The swiftness of the coalition victory resulted in an overall change in Chinese military thinking and began a movement to technologically modernize the People’s Liberation Army.

A crucial result of the Gulf War, according to Gilles Kepel, was the sharp revival in Islamic extremism. The change of face by Saddam’s secular regime did little to draw support from Islamist groups. However, it, combined with the Saudi Arabian alliance with the United States and Saudi Arabia being seen as being on the same side of Israel dramatically eroded that regime’s legitimacy. Activity of Islamist groups against the Saudi regime increased dramatically. In part to win back favour with Islamist groups Saudi Arabia greatly increased funding to those that would support the regime. Throughout the newly independent states of Central Asia the Saudis paid for the distribution of millions of Qur’ans and the building of hundreds of mosques for extremist groups. In Afghanistan the Saudi regime became a leading patron of the Taliban in that nation’s civil war, and one of the only foreign countries to officially recognize the government.

Technology

Precision guided munitions (PGMs, also “smart bombs”), such as the United States Air Force guided missile AGM-130, were heralded as key in allowing military strikes to be made with a minimum of civilian casualties compared to previous wars. Specific buildings in downtown Baghdad could be bombed whilst journalists in their hotels watched cruise missiles fly by. PGMs amounted to approximately 7.4% of all bombs dropped by the coalition. Other bombs included cluster bombs, which break up into clusters of bomblets, and daisy cutters, 15,000-pound bombs which can disintegrate everything within hundreds of yards.

Among the numerous special forces from the United States, the Light Armored Recon (LAR) played a powerful role in the removal of Iraqi troops. Light Armored Vehicles (LAV) provided logistic command centers, logistics posts, mortar positions and long range suppressing fire with their powerful 50mm guns.

Scud is a low-technology rocket bomb that Iraq used, launching them into both Saudi Arabia and Israel. Some bombs caused extensive casualties, others caused little damage. Concerns were raised of possible chemical or biological warheads on these rockets, but if they existed they were not used.

America’s Patriot missile defense was used for the first time in combat. The US military claimed to have shot down many Scud rockets in flight, with an effectiveness of 100%. Afterwards, it was demonstrated that the Patriots’ effectiveness was primarily psychological: some claim that their effectiveness was as low as between 0% to 10%. However, there really is no good evidence to prove whether the Scuds were intercepted or not, so no figures are really backed up by undisputed facts. The higher figures tend to be calculated based on the percentage of Scud warheads which were known to have impacted and exploded compared to the number of Scud missiles launched, but due to factors such as duds, misses and impacts which were not reported, this is not really a good way to measure effectiveness. The lowest figures are typically based upon the number of interceptions where there is proof that the warhead was hit by at least one missile, but due to the way the poorly built Al-Hussein (Scud derivative) missiles broke up in flight, it was often hard to tell which piece was the warhead, and there were few radar tracks which were actually stored which could be analyzed later, hence the very low figures. Realistically the actual performance was probably somewhere in between. The US Army maintains the Patriot delivered a “miracle performance” in the Gulf War.

Global Positioning System units were key in enabling coalition units to navigate easily across the desert. Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) and satellite communication systems were also important.

Military awards

The U.S. Southwest Asia Service Medal was established in March of 1991 to recognize those U.S. military members who had participated in the Gulf War. The governments of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait also issued a medal, known as the Kuwait Liberation Medal, which was first created in 1994 and is an authorized foreign military decoration for wear on U.S. military uniforms.

Source Wikipedia

1 Overview
2 Background
3 The War Begins
3.1 NLF in the South
3.2 John F. Kennedy and Vietnam
3.3 Combatants in the war
3.4 Escalation
4 American Intervention
4.1 Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin
4.2 Operation Rolling Thunder
4.3 U.S. Forces Committed
5 The Tet Offensive
5.1 Tet Aftermath
6 Opposition to the war
7 Pacification and the “Hearts and Minds”
8 “Vietnamization”
9 The end of the war
9.1 Fall of Saigon
10 Casualties
11 Domestic effects and aftermath in Indochina
11.1 Vietnam
11.2 Cambodia
12 Domestic effects and aftermath in the United States
12.1 War powers
12.2 Social impact
12.3 Social attitudes and treatment of veterans
12.4 Contemporary status of Vietnam veterans
13 Common military medals of the Vietnam War

Overview

Time period placement for the Vietnam War is unclear. Some consider the Vietnam War to have begun in 1946 with the French attempt to re-establish control over their colony. This definition comes from those who tend to include the war with France, the war between the two Vietnams after 1954, and the war with the American troops until the fall of Saigon in 1975. Many more people separate the 29-year conflict in Vietnam into two separate wars, First Indochina War which was with the French and the Second Indochina War which was with the Americans. The difficulty in this is establishing a beginning and an end. The fighting with the French was more clear-cut (beginning in 1946 when the Vietnemese wrote their constitution and lasting until 1954 and the Geneva Peace Accord.) The fighting with the Americans was less distinct. The American government began funding the French fight in the early 1950s. After the peace agreement, American troops were stationed in South Vietnam. From there on, the American involvement escalated. Many Americans consider the Vietnam War, the conflict between US and PAVN troops, not to have begun until 1965 after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the U.S. claimed North Vietnamese forces attacked U.S. Navy ships twice. That report would come under scrutiny and eventually prove to be false.

The war was fought on the ground in South Vietnam and bordering areas of Cambodia and Laos and in the strategic bombing of North Vietnam. For more details of the events during the war, see: Timeline of the Vietnam War. Many experts consider the Vietnam War to just be one frontline in the larger Cold War.

Fighting on one side was a coalition of forces including the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam or the “RVN”), the United States, South Korea, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines. Participation by the South Korean military was financed by the United States, but Australia and New Zealand fully funded their own involvement. Other countries normally allied with the United States in the Cold War, including the United Kingdom and Canada, refused to participate in the coalition, although a few of their citizens volunteered to join the US forces. Canada, in fact, led peace talks between the two countries for years.

Fighting on the other side was a coalition of forces including the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the National Liberation Front, a South Vietnamese opposition movement with a guerrilla militia known in the Western world as the “Viet Cong”. The USSR provided military and financial aid, along with diplomatic support to the North Vietnamese and to the Viet Cong, partly as support against the U.S. and South Vietnamese government and partly as a counter to Chinese influence in the region.

The Vietnam War is classed as the second war of the Indochina Wars and was in many ways a direct successor to the French Indochina War in which the French, with the financial and logistical support of the United States, fought a losing effort to maintain control of her former colony of French Indochina.

France had gained control of Indochina in a series of colonial wars beginning in the 1840s and lasting until the 1880s. During World War II, Vichy France had collaborated with the occupying Imperial Japanese forces. Vietnam was under effective Imperial Japanese control, as well as de facto Japanese administrative control, although the Vichy French continued to serve as the official administrators. After the Japanese surrender, the Vietnamese had hoped to move to formal independence from France. Political events outside Asia, however, dictated that this would not come easily.

On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh organized a ceremony to herald the coming of an independent Vietnam. In his speech, he even cited the American Declaration of Independence, and a band played “The Star Spangled Banner.” Ho had hoped that the United States would be his ally in the movement for Vietnamese independence, basing his supposition on the notion that President Franklin Roosevelt had repeatedly spoken against the continuation of European imperialism after the armistice with Germany and Japan.

Background

After the Viet Minh’s historic victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu in the First Indochina War all of Indochina was granted independence, including Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. However, Vietnam was partitioned at the 17th parallel in which North the former Vietminh would establish a Communist state and South an anti-communist state by Emperor Bao Dai. As dictated in the Geneva Accords of 1954 the division was meant to be temporary pending free elections for national leadership. These did not occur, however, because the United States believed that Ho Chi Minh could easily win merely with his status as a national hero. Whatever the case, neither of the new Vietnamese countries signed the election clause in the agreement. Thus in South Vietnam Ngo Diem, who had ousted Bao Dai, consolidated his repressive regime while Ho Chi Minh continued a totalitarian rule in the North.

The War Begins

NLF in the South

In 1957 the communists began their Revolutionary War against the South Vietnamese government. Two years later came the founding of the NLF, or National Liberation Front, an organization of South Vietnamese communists committed to establishing a communist state in South Vietnam. The organization was under tight scrutiny of Hanoi, who began to supply the NLF in 1959 via the Ho Chi Minh Trail which began in North Vietnam and moved southward into Laos and Cambodia (thus violating their neutrality) finally exiting into South Vietnam. Over time the trail would be improved and it became a vital lifeline for communist forces in South Vietnam. The Americans would try numerous times to cut the trail solely by airpower, but guerrillas only required a small portion of what went down the trail to conduct operations. Further supplies were sent by sea to Sihanoukville in Cambodia until that outlet was closed by Lon Nol in 1970. Eventually the Trail would be used by the North Vietnamese to infiltrate their own army.

Phase I of the communist vision of revolutionary warfare was thus beginning. Phase I involved a pure insurgency by the NLF to weaken the South Vietnamese government. In Phase II the North Vietnamese army would assist these operations to slowly eradicate government forces. Phase III would witness an all out invasion by North Vietnam and final victory.

At first Diem was able to cope with the insurgents, and by 1962, with the aid of American advisors, seemed to be winning the war. Senior U.S. military leaders were receiving positive reports from the American commander, Gen. Paul D. Harkins of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. In truth, the situation on the ground was much worse. This disconnect between the rosy situation reports and reality began to make itself known with the disastrous Battle of Ap Bac in early 1963. All through the year the communists managed to inflict major defeats on the South Vietnamese army, profiting from the turmoil and corruption in the government.

John F. Kennedy and Vietnam

In June 1961, John F. Kennedy met with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, where Khrushchev sought to bully the young American president into conceding to the Soviets certain key contests, notably Berlin, where large numbers of skilled workers had been escaping to the West. Kennedy left the meeting agitated, and quickly determined that Khrushchev’s attitude towards him would make an armed conflict virtually unavoidable in the near future. Some claim that Kennedy and his advisers soon decided that any such conflicts had better follow the Korea model, being confined to conventional weaponry, through proxy parties, as a way to mitigate the threat of direct nuclear war between the two superpowers. Some speculate that it must have been decided that the most likely theatre for such a conflict would be in Southeast Asia. By the political calculations of his administration, the U.S. had to work quickly to create a “valve” to release any built-up political pressures.

The North may have felt that the South was prepared to vote for a communist government. The U.S. cared little for Diem, but forged its alliance with his government out of fear that an easy Communist victory would only bolster the perceived bravado that Khrushchev had shown to Kennedy at Vienna. The U.S. fatefully decided that an immediate stand against Soviet expansion was both prudent and necessary, regardless of, or perhaps underestimating, the human cost.

The Kennedy administration, in terms of foreign policy, never fully emerged from the shadow of Harry Truman, in the sense that the domestic crisis unleashed by the alleged failure of the last Democratic administration to prevent the fall of China to the Communists in 1949 prompted Kennedy to resist as strongly as possible any potential gains by Communist movements. In 1961, moreover, Kennedy found himself faced with a tripartite crisis that appeared to him very similar to that faced by Truman in 1949-1950. In that year, Truman sought to counterbalance the fall of China and the detonation of the first Soviet atomic bomb with a firm stand in Korea. From Kennedy’s perspective, 1961 had already seen the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the construction of the Berlin Wall, and a negotiated settlement between the pro-Western government of Laos and the Pathet Lao Communist movement. Fearing that another failure on the part of the United States to stop Communist expansion would fatally damage his and Washington’s reputation, Kennedy placed a new emphasis on preventing a Communist victory in Vietnam.

Eventually, the Kennedy administration grew increasingly frustrated with Diem. In 1963, Diem’s forces launched a violent crackdown on Buddhist monks protesting the government’s policies. This caused a wave of self-immolations by monks, pictures of which splashed on the front pages of newspapers worldwide, leading to embarrassing American press coverage. Since Vietnam was a predominantly Buddhist nation while Diem and much of the ruling structure of South Vietnam was Roman Catholic, this action was viewed as further proof that Diem was completely out of touch with his people. U.S. messages were sent to South Vietnamese generals encouraging them to act against Diem’s excesses. Though there is some debate as to whether or not this was Kennedy’s intention, the South Vietnamese military interpreted these messages as a call to arms, and staged a violent coup d’etat, overthrowing and killing Diem on November 1, 1963.

Far from uniting the country under new leadership, the death of Diem made the South even more unstable. The new military rulers were very inexperienced in political matters, and were unable to provide the strong central authority of Diem’s rule. Coups and counter-coups plagued the country, and though the immediate aftermath of Diem’s death took much of the impetus away from the Viet Cong, since it no longer had the person of Diem around which to rally resentment, Hanoi quickly stepped up its efforts to escalate the war against the South in order to exploit the vacuum.

Three weeks after Diem’s death, Kennedy himself was assassinated, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was suddenly thrust into the war’s leadership role. Newly sworn-in President Johnson confirmed on November 24, 1963 that the United States intended to continue supporting South Vietnam militarily and economically.

Combatants in the war

In major combat there were, depending upon one’s point of view, two to four major combatant organizations; the four being the United States armed forces and allied forces; the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN—the South Vietnamese Army, pronounced Arvin); the NLF (better known as the Viet Cong,) a group of South Vietnamese guerrilla fighters supported and later directed by the PAVN; and the People’s Army of Viet Nam (PAVN—the North Vietnamese Army, pronounced Pahvin). The PAVN received military aid from the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (though aid from the latter waned following the Sino-Soviet split.)

Arguments over which of these four were the actual combatants was a major political focus of the war. The U.S. sought to depict the war as one between ARVN defenders with U.S. help against PAVN forces, thus depicting the NLF a puppet or shadow army and the war as a South Vietnamese defense against North Vietnamese aggression.

The North Vietnamese portrayed the conflict as one between the indigenous South Vietnamese NLF and the United States, with the noncombat support of North Vietnam and its allies. This view held ARVN to be a puppet of the U.S.

These conflicting propaganda stances were later played out in early peace talks in which arguments were made over “the shape of the [negotiating] table” in which each side sought to depict itself as two distinct entities opposing a single entity, ignoring its “puppet”.

Escalation

U.S. involvement in the war followed a strategy of escalation, using the analogy of an escalator rising slowly but steadily to increase war pressure on the enemy, as opposed to the traditional declaration of war with the usual massive attack using all available means to secure victory.

Under escalation, U.S. involvement increased over a period of years, beginning with the deployment of non-combatant military advisors to the South Vietnamese army, to use of special forces for commando-style operations, to introduction of regular troops whose purpose was to be defensive only, to using regular troops in offensive combat. Once U.S. troops were engaged in active combat, escalation shifted to the addition of increasing numbers of U.S. troops .

The policy of escalation helped complicate the ambiguous legal status for the war. Since the U.S. had pre-existing treaty agreements with the Republic of Viet Nam, each escalation was presented as simply another step in helping an ally resist Communist aggression. The U.S. Congress continued to vote appropriations for war operations, and the Johnson Administration claimed these actions as a proxy, along with Tonkin, for the Constitutionally mandated requirement that Congress retain war power.

By keeping its involvement limited, it was hoped, the United States could buttress the government of South Vietnam without provoking a major response from China or the Soviet Union, as had happened the previous decade in Korea. Johnson attempted to tread a line between keeping Beijing and Moscow out of the war while retaining an independent, pro-Western South Vietnam-seen as crucial to US prestige threatened by Soviet actions, especially in Cuba, but also in Europe and elsewhere. In this sense, Johnson saw Vietnam just as Kennedy had: the American response to the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Escalation caused serious friction between the American armed services and the civilian authorities in Washington. Military officials such as General William Westmoreland resented the Johnson Administration’s restraints on their operations, yet at the same time were wary of speaking out, lest they suffer the same fate as General Douglas MacArthur, who had been dismissed by Truman for insubordination during the Korean War.

In U.S. political debate, the advantage of escalation to those who wanted to be engaged in the war was that no individual instance of escalation dramatically increased the level of U.S. involvement. The U.S. populace was led to believe that the most recent escalation would be sufficient to “win the war” and therefore would be the last. This theory, combined with ready availability of conscripted troops, reduced grassroots political opposition to the war until 1968, when the Johnson Administration considered increasing the troop levels from approximately 550,000 in-country to about 700,000. This was the “straw” that broke the back of U.S. support for the war. The troop increase was abandoned and by the end of 1969, under the new administration of Richard M. Nixon, U.S. troop levels had been reduced by 60,000 from their wartime peak.

American Intervention

Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin

Main article: Gulf of Tonkin Incident

Johnson raised the level of U.S. involvement on July 27, 1964 when 5,000 additional US military advisors were ordered to South Vietnam which brought the total number of US forces in Vietnam to 21,000.

On July 31, 1964, the American destroyer USS Maddox, continued a reconnaissance mission in the Gulf of Tonkin well offshore in international waters, a mission that had been suspended for six months. Some critics of President Lyndon Johnson say the purpose of the mission was to provoke a reaction from North Vietnamese coastal defense forces as a pretext for a wider war. Responding to an attack, and with the help of air support from the nearby carrier USS Ticonderoga, Maddox destroyed one North Vietnamese torpedo-boat and damaged two others. Maddox, suffering only superficial damage by a single 14.5-millimeter machine gun bullet, retired to South Vietnamese waters, where she was joined by USS C. Turner Joy.

On August 3, GVN again attacked North Vietnam; the Rhon River estuary and the Vinh Sonh radar installation were bombarded under cover of darkness.

On August 4, a new DESOTO patrol to the North Vietnam coast was launched, with Maddox and C. Turner Joy. The latter got radar signals later claimed to be another attack by the North Vietnamese. For some two hours the ships fired on radar targets and maneuvered vigorously amid electronic and visual reports of torpedoes. Later, Captain John J. Herrick admitted that it was nothing more than an “overeager sonarman” who “was hearing ship’s own propeller beat”. This was not, however, clear at the time. In fact, it was later speculated that Johnson concocted the entire Gulf of Tonkin story. There was no alleged torpedo attack, and Johnson may have required these attacks to win approval of the Senate to intensify American attacks in Vietnam. Others may rebut in Johnson’s defense saying that the crew of the two ships had also believed they were under attack at the time.

The U.S. Senate then approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on 7 August 1964, which gave broad support to President Johnson to escalate U.S. involvement in the war “as the President shall determine”. In a televised address Johnson claimed that “the challenge that we face in South-East Asia today is the same challenge that we have faced with courage and that we have met with strength in Greece and Turkey, in Berlin and Korea, in Lebanon and in Cuba,” a dangerous misreading of the politics of the Vietnamese conflict in some people’s minds. National Security Council members, including Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, and Maxwell Taylor agreed on November 28, 1964 to recommend that President Johnson adopt a plan for a two-stage escalation of bombing in North Vietnam.

Operation Rolling Thunder

Operation Rolling Thunder was the code name for the non-stop, but often interrupted bombing raids in North Vietnam conducted by the United States armed forces during the Vietnam War. Its purpose was to destroy the will of the North Vietnamese to fight, to destroy industrial bases and air defenses (SAMs), and to stop the flow of men and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Starting in March 1965 Operation Rolling Thunder gradually escalated in intensity in the hope that the Communists would negotiate. Although half the bridges were destroyed and many supply depots hit, North Vietnam’s Communist allies were always able to resupply them. The two principal areas where supplies came from, Haiphong and the Chinese border, were off limits to aerial attack. Restrictions on civilian areas also enabled the North Vietnamese to put military targets in them, such as anti-aircraft guns on schools.

In March 1968 Operation Rolling Thunder was suspended after the North agreed to negotiate in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive.

U.S. Forces Committed

In February of 1965 the U.S. base at Pleiku was attacked twice killing over a dozen Americans. This provoked the reprisal airstrikes of Operation Flaming Dart in North Vietnam. It was the first time an American airstrike was launched because its forces had been attacked in South Vietnam. That same month the U.S. began independent airstrikes in the South. An American HAWK team was sent to Da Nang, a vulnerable airbase if Hanoi intended to bomb it. One result of Operation Flaming Dart was the shipment of anti-aircraft missiles to North Vietnam which began in a few weeks from the Soviet Union.

On March 8, 1965, 3,500 United States Marines became the first American combat troops to land in South Vietnam, adding to the 25,000 US military advisers already in place. The air war escalated as well; on July 24, 1965, four F-4C Phantoms escorting a bombing raid at Kang Chi became the targets of antiaircraft missiles in the first such attack against American planes in the war. One plane was shot down and the other three sustained damage. Four days later Johnson announced another order that increased the number of US troops in Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000. The day after that, July 29, the first 4,000 101st Airborne Division paratroopers arrived in Vietnam, landing at Cam Ranh Bay.

Then on August 18, 1965, Operation Starlite began as the first major American ground battle of the war when 5,500 US Marines destroyed a Viet Cong stronghold on the Van Tuong peninsula in Quang Ngai Province. The Marines were tipped-off by a Viet Cong deserter who said that there was an attack planned against the US base at Chu Lai. The Vietcong learned from their defeat and tried to avoid fighting a US-style war from then on.

By this time the North Vietnamese had also commited their forces to South Vietnam beginning in late 1964 to begin “Phase II” or the use of guerilla and regular forces to wear down and inflict defeats on the South Vietnamese. But other schools of thought believed that they should go straight to Phase III, conventional invasion. Thus a plan was drawn up to use PAVN forces to split South Vietnam in two at the Central Highlands, and then to defeat each in detail. This climaxed into the battle of Ia Drang Valley when the PAVN was defeated by an American force they vastly outnumbered. Thus the communists returned to guerilla tactics.

The Pentagon told President Johnson on November 27, 1965 that if planned major sweep operations needed to neutralize Viet Cong forces during the next year were to succeed, the number of American troops in Vietnam needed to be increased from 120,000 to 400,000. By the end of 1965, 184,000 US troops were in Vietnam. In February 1966 there was a meeting between the commander of the U.S. effort, head of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam General William Westmoreland and Johnson in Honolulu. Westmoreland argued that the US presence had prevented a defeat but that more troops were needed to take the offensive, he claimed that an immediate increase could lead to the “cross-over point” in Vietcong and NVA casualties being reached in early 1967. Johnson authorized an increase in troop numbers to 429,000 by August 1966.

On 12 October 1967 US Secretary of State Dean Rusk stated during a news conference that proposals by the U.S. Congress for peace initiatives were futile because of North Vietnam’s opposition. Johnson then held a secret meeting with a group of the nation’s most prestigious leaders (“the Wise Men”) on November 2 and asked them to suggest ways to unite the American people behind the war effort. They concluded that the American people should be given more optimistic reports on the progress of the war. Then based on reports he was given on November 13, Johnson told his nation on November 17 that, while much remained to be done, “We are inflicting greater losses than we’re taking…We are making progress.” Following up on this, General William Westmoreland on November 21 told news reporters: “I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing.” Two months later the Tet Offensive made both men regret their words. Although the communists were taking a major beating, true victory could not come until the country was pacified.

The Tet Offensive

Continued escalation of American military involvement came as the Johnson administration and Westmoreland repeatedly assured the American public that the next round of troop increases would bring victory. The American public’s faith in the “light at the end of the tunnel” was shattered, however, on January 30, 1968, when the enemy, supposedly on the verge of collapse, mounted the Tet Offensive (named after Tet Nguyen Dan, the lunar new year festival which is the most important Vietnamese holiday) in South Vietnam, in which nearly every major city in South Vietnam was attacked. During their temporary occupation of Huế, Communists allegedly killed 3,000 civilians who were then buried in mass graves, the worst single massacre against civilians in the war (see Massacre at Hue). Although neither of these offensives accomplished any military objectives, the surprising capacity of an enemy that was supposedly on the verge of collapse to even launch such an offensive convinced many Americans that victory was impossible. There was an increasing sense among many people that the government was misleading the American people about a war without a clear beginning or end. When General Westmoreland called for still more troops to be sent to Vietnam, Clark Clifford, a member of Johnson’s own cabinet, came out against the war.

Tet Aftermath

Soon after Tet, Westmoreland was replaced by his deputy, General Creighton W. Abrams. Abrams pursued a very different approach to Westmoreland, favoring more openness with the media, less indiscriminate use of airstrikes and heavy artillery, elimination of bodycount as the key indicator of battlefield success, and more meaningful co-operation with ARVN forces. His strategy, although yielding positive results, came too late to sway a domestic US public opinion that was already solidifying against the war.

Facing a troop shortage, on October 14, 1968 the United States Department of Defense announced that the United States Army and Marines would be sending about 24,000 troops back to Vietnam for involuntary second tours. Two weeks later on October 31, citing progress with the Paris peace talks, US President Lyndon B. Johnson announced what became known as the October surprise when he ordered a complete cessation of “all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam” effective November 1. Peace talks eventually broke down, however, and one year later, on November 3, 1969, then President Richard M. Nixon addressed the nation on television and radio asking the “silent majority” to join him in solidarity on the Vietnam War effort and to support his policies.

The credibility of the government suffered when The New York Times, and later The Washington Post, and other newspapers, published The Pentagon Papers. It was a top-secret historical study, contracted by the Pentagon, about the war, that showed how the government was misleading the US public, in all stages of the war, including the secret support of the French in the first Vietnam War.

Opposition to the war

Small scale opposition to the war began in 1964 on college campuses. This was happening during a time of unprecedented leftist student activism, and of the arrival at college age of the demographically significant Baby Boomers. Growing opposition to the war is attributable in part to the much greater access to information about the war available to college age Americans compared with previous generations because of extensive television news coverage.

The draft itself also initiated protests when on October 15, 1965 the student-run National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam staged the first public burning of a draft card in the United States. The first draft lottery since World War II in the United States was held on 1 December 1969 and was met with large protests and a great deal of controversy; statistical analysis indicated that the methodology of the lotteries unintentionally disadvantaged men with late year birthdays. This issue was treated at length in a 4 January 1970 New York Times article titled “Statisticians Charge Draft Lottery Was Not Random”.

The U.S. people became polarized over the war. Many supporters of the war argued for what was known as the Domino Theory, which held that if the South fell to communist guerillas, other nations, primarily in Southeast Asia, would succumb in short succession, much like falling dominoes. Military critics of the war pointed out that the conflict was political and that the military mission lacked clear objectives. Civilian critics of the war argued that the government of South Vietnam lacked political legitimacy, or that support for the war was immoral. President Johnson’s undersecretary of state, George Ball, was one of the lone voices in his administration advising against war in Vietnam.

The growing anti-war movement alarmed many in the US government. On August 16, 1966 the House Un-American Activities Committee began investigations of Americans who were suspected of aiding the NLF, with the intent to introduce legislation making these activities illegal. Anti-war demonstrators disrupted the meeting and 50 were arrested.

On 1 February 1968, a suspected NLF officer was summarily executed by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a South Vietnamese National Police Chief. Loan shot the suspect in the head on a public street in front of journalists. The execution was filmed and photographed and provided another iconic image that helped sway public opinion in the United States against the war. Photographs do not tell the whole story, Lem was captured near the site of a ditch holding as many as thirty-four bound and shot bodies of police and their relatives, some of whom were the families of General Loan’s deputy and close friend.

On 15 October 1969, hundreds of thousands of people took part in National Moratorium antiwar demonstrations across the United States; the demonstrations prompted many workers to call in sick from their jobs and adolescents nationwide engaged in truancy from school – although the proportion of individuals doing either who actually participated in the demonstrations is in doubt. A second round of “Moratorium” demonstrations was held on November 15, but was less well-attended.

However, anti-war feelings also began to rise. Many Americans opposed the war on moral grounds, seeing it as a destructive war against Vietnamese independence, or as intervention in a foreign civil war; others opposed it because they felt it lacked clear objectives and appeared to be unwinnable. Some anti-war activists were themselves Vietnam Veterans, as evidenced by the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Some of the Americans opposed to the Vietnam War, as for instance Jane Fonda, stressed their support for ordinary Vietnamese civilians struck by a war beyond their influence. The anti-war sentiments gave reason to a perception among returning soldiers of being spat on.

On April 22, 1971, John Kerry became the first Vietnam veteran to testify before Congress about the war, when he appeared before a Senate committee hearing on proposals relating to ending the war. He spoke for nearly two hours with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in what has been named the Fulbright Hearing, after the Chairman of the proceedings, Senator J. William Fulbright. Kerry presented the conclusions of the Winter Soldier Investigation, where veterans had described personally committing or witnessing war crimes.

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson began his re-election campaign. A member of his own party, Eugene McCarthy, ran against him for the nomination on an antiwar platform. McCarthy did not win the first primary election in New Hampshire, but he did surprisingly well against an incumbent. The resulting blow to the Johnson campaign, taken together with other factors, led the President to make a surprise announcement in a March 31 televised speech that he was pulling out of the race. He also announced the initiation of the Paris Peace Talks with Vietnam in that speech. Then, on August 4, 1969, US representative Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese representative Xuan Thuy began secret peace negotiations at the apartment of French intermediary Jean Sainteny in Paris. This set of negotations failed, however, prior to the 1972 North Vietnamese offensive.

Pacification and the “Hearts and Minds”

The U.S. realized that the South Vietnamese government needed a solid base of popular support if it was to survive the insurgency. In order to pursue this goal of “winning the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people, units of the United States Army, referred to as “Civil Affairs” units, were extensively utilized for the first time for this purpose since World War II.

Civil Affairs units, while remaining armed and under direct military control, engaged in what came to be known as “nation building”: constructing (or reconstructing) schools, public buildings, roads and other physical infrastructure; conducting medical programs for civilians who had no access to medical facilities; facilitating cooperation among local civilian leaders; conducting hygiene and other training for civilians; and similar activities.

This policy of attempting to win the “Hearts and Minds” of the Vietnamese people, however, often was at odds with other aspects of the war which served to antagonize many Vietnamese civilians. These policies included the emphasis on “body count” as a way of measuring military success on the battlefield, the accidental bombing of villages (symbolized by journalist Peter Arnett’s famous quote, “it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it”), and the killing of civilians in such incidents as the My Lai massacre. In 1974 the documentary Hearts and Minds sought to portray the devastation the war was causing to the South Vietnamese people, and won an Academy Award for best documentary amid considerable controversy. The South Vietnamese government also antagonized many of its citizens with its suppression of political opposition, through such measures as holding large numbers of political prisoners, torturing political opponents, and holding a one-man election for President in 1971. Despite this, the government captured a large percentage of the votes of the large percentage of the Vietnamese that participated.

“Vietnamization”

Nixon was elected President and began his policy of slow disengagement from the war. The goal was to gradually build up the South Vietnamese Army so that it could fight the war on its own. This policy became the cornerstone of the so-called “Nixon Doctrine”. As applied to Vietnam, the doctrine was called “Vietnamization”. The stated goal of Vietnamization was to enable the South Vietnamese army to increasingly hold its own against the NLF and the North Vietnamese Army. The unstated goal of Vietnamization was that the primary burden of combat would be returned to ARVN troops and thereby lessen domestic opposition to the war in the U.S.

During this period, the United States conducted a gradual troop withdrawal from Vietnam. Nixon continued to use air power to bomb the enemy, along with an American troop incursion in Cambodia. Ultimately more bombs were dropped under the Nixon Presidency than under Johnson’s, while American troop deaths started to drop significantly. The Nixon administration was determined to remove American troops from the theater while not destabilizing the defensive efforts of South Vietnam.

Many significant gains in the war were made under the Nixon administration, however. One particularly significant achievement was the weakening of support that the North Vietnamese army received from the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China. One of Nixon’s main foreign policy goals had been the achievement of a “breakthrough” in U.S. relations with the two nations, in terms of creating a new spirit of cooperation. To a large extent this was achieved. China and the USSR had been the principal backers of the North Vietnamese army through large amounts of military and financial support. The eagerness of both nations to improve their own US relations in the face of a widening breakdown of the inter-Communist alliance led to the reduction of their aid to North Vietnam.

The morality of US conduct of the war continued to be an issue under the Nixon Presidency. In 1969, American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh exposed the My Lai massacre and its cover-up, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. It came to light that Lt. William Calley, a platoon leader in Vietnam, had led a massacre of several hundred Vietnamese civilians, including women, babies, and the elderly, at My Lai a year before. The massacre was only stopped after two American soldiers in a helicopter spotted the carnage and intervened to prevent their fellow Americans from killing any more civilians. Although many were appalled by the wholesale slaughter at My Lai, Calley was given a life sentence after his court-martial in 1970, and was later pardoned by President Nixon. Cover-ups or soft treatments of American war crimes also happened in other cases, e.g. as revealed by the Pulitzer Prize winning article series about the Tiger Force by the Toledo Blade in 2003. But My Lai was the worst.

In 1970, Prince Sihanouk was deposed by Lon Nol in Cambodia, who became the chief of state. The Khemer Rouge guerillas with North Vietnamese backing began to attack the new regime. Nixon ordered a military incursion into Cambodia in order to destroy NLF sanctuaries bordering on South Vietnam and protect the fragile Cambodian government. This action prompted even more protests on American college campuses. Several students were shot and killed by National Guard troops during demonstrations at Kent State.

One effect of the incursion was to push communist forces deeper into Cambodia, which destabilized the country and in turn may have encouraged the rise of the Khmer Rouge, who seized power in 1975. The goal of the attacks, however, was to bring the North Vietnamese negotiators back to the table with some flexibility in their demands that the South Vietnamese government be overthrown as part of the agreement. It was also alleged that American and South Vietnamese casualty rates were reduced by the destruction of military supplies the communists had been storing in Cambodia. All U.S. forces left Cambodia on June 30.

In an effort to help assuage growing discontent over the war, Nixon announced on October 12, 1970 that the United States would withdraw 40,000 more troops before Christmas. Later that month on October 30, the worst monsoon to hit Vietnam in six years caused large floods, killed 293, left 200,000 homeless and virtually halted the war.

Backed by American air and artillery support, South Vietnamese troops invaded Laos on 13 February 1971. On August 18 of that year, Australia and New Zealand decided to withdraw their troops from Vietnam. The total number of American troops in Vietnam dropped to 196,700 on 29 October 1971, the lowest level since January 1966. On November 12, 1971 Nixon set a 1 February 1972 deadline to remove another 45,000 American troops from Vietnam.

In the 1972 election, the war was once again a major issue in the United States. An antiwar candidate, George McGovern, ran against President Nixon. Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, declared that “peace is at hand” shortly before election day, dealing a death blow to McGovern’s campaign, which was already far behind in opinion surveys. However, the peace agreement was not signed until the next year, leading many to conclude that Kissinger’s announcement was just a political ploy. Kissinger’s defenders assert that the North Vietnamese negotiators had made use of Kissinger’s pronouncement as an opportunity to embarrass the Nixon Administration to weaken it at the negotiation table. White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler on 30 November 1972 told the press that there would be no more public announcements concerning American troop withdrawals from Vietnam due to the fact that troop levels were then down to 27,000. The US halted heavy bombing of North Vietnam on December 30, 1972.

The end of the war

On 15 January 1973, citing progress in peace negotiations, President Nixon announced the suspension of offensive action in North Vietnam which was later followed by a unilateral withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam. The Paris Peace Accords were later signed on 27 January 1973 which officially ended US involvement in the Vietnam conflict. This won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for Kissinger and North Vietnamese Politburo member and lead negotiator Le Duc Tho while fighting continued, leading songwriter Tom Lehrer to declare that irony had died. However, five days before the peace accords were signed, Lyndon Johnson, whose presidency was marred by the war, died. The mood during his state funeral was one of intense sadness and recrimination because the war’s wounds were still raw.

The first American prisoners of war were released on February 11 and all US soldiers were ordered to leave by March 29. In a break with history, soldiers returning from the Vietnam War were generally not treated as heroes, and soldiers were sometimes even condemned for their participation in the war.

The peace agreement did not last.

Nixon had promised South Vietnam that he would provide military support to them in the event of a crumbling military situation. Nixon was fighting for his political life in the growing Watergate Scandal at the time. Economic aid continued, but most of it was siphoned off by corrupt elements in the South Vietnamese government and little of it actually went to the war effort. At the same time aid to North Vietnam from the USSR and China began to increase, and with the Americans out, the two countries no longer saw the war as significant to their US relations. The balance of power had clearly shifted to the North.

In December 1974, Congress completed passage of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974 that voted to cut off all military funding to the Saigon government and made unenforceable the peace terms negotiated by Nixon.

By 1975, the South Vietnamese Army stood alone against the powerful North Vietnamese. Despite Vietnamization and the 1972 victories against the PAVN offensive, the ARVN was plagued with corruption, desertion, low wages, and lack of supplies. Then in early March the PAVN launched a powerful offensive into the poorly defended Central Highlands, splitting the Republic of Vietnam in two. President Thieu, fearful that ARVN troops in the northern provinces would be isolated due to a PAVN encirclement, he decided on a redeployment of ARVN troops from the northern provinces to the Central Highlands. But the withdrawal of South Vietnamese forces soon turned into a bloody retreat as the PAVN crossed the DMZ. While South Vietnamese forces retreated from the northern provinces, splintered South Vietnamese forces in the Central Highlands fought desperately against the PAVN.

On March 11, 1975 Bumnethout fell to the PAVN. The attack began in the early morning hours. After a violent artillery barrage, 4,000- man garrison defending the city retreated with their families. On March 15, President Thieu ordered the Central Highlands and the northern provinces to be abandoned, in what he declared to lighten the top and keep the bottom. General Phu abandoned the cities of Pleiku and Kontum and retreated to the coast in what became known as the column of tears. General Phu led his troops to Tum Ky on the coast, but as the ARVN retreated, the civilians also went with them. Due to already destroyed roads and bridges, the column slowed down as the PAVN closed in. As the column staggered down mountains to the coast, PAVN shelling attacked. By April 1, the column ceased to exist after 60,000 ARVN troops were killed.

On March 20, Thieu reversed himself and ordered Hue, Vietnam’s 3rd largest city be held out at all cost. But as the PAVN attacked, a panic ensued and South Vietnamese resistance collapsed. On March 22, the PAVN launched a siege on Hue, the civilians, remembering the 1968 massacre jammed into the airport, seaports, and the docks. Some even swam into the ocean to reach boats and barges. The ARVN routed with the civilians and some South Vietnamese shot civilians just to make room for themselves. On March 25, after a 3-day siege, Hue fell.

As Hue fell, PAVN rockets hit downtown Da Nang and the airport. By March 28, 35,000 PAVN troops were poised in the suburbs. On March 29, a World Airways jet led by Edward Daley landed in Da Nang to save women and children, instead 300 men jammed onto the flight, mostly ARVN troops. On March 30, 100,000 leaderless ARVN troops surrendered as the PAVN marched victoriously through Da Nang on that Easter Sunday. With the fall of Da Nang, the defense of the Central Highlands and northern provinces collapsed. With half of South Vietnam under their control, PAVN prepared for its final phase in its offensive, the Ho Chi Minh campaign, the plan: By May 1, capture Saigon before South Vietnamese forces could regroup to defend it.

The PAVN continued its attack as South Vietnamese forces and Thieu regime crumbled before their onslaught. On April 7, 3 PAVN divisions attacked Xuan-loc, 40 miles east of Saigon , where they met fierce resistance from the ARVN 18th Infantry division. For 2 bloody weeks. Severe fighting raged in the city as the ARVN defenders in a last-ditch effort tried desperately to save South Vietnam from military and economic collapse. Also, hoping Americans forces would return in time to save them. The ARVN 18th Infantry division used many advanced weapons against the PAVN, and it was in the final phase in which Saigon government troops fought well. But on April 21, the exhausted and besieged army garrison defending Xuan-loc surrendered. A bitter and tearful Thieu resigned on April 21, saying America had betrayed South Vietnam and he showed the 1972 document claiming America would retaliate against North Vietnam should they attack. Thieu left for Taiwan on April 25, leaving control of the doomed government to General Minh.

By now PAVN tanks had reached Bienhoa, they turned towards Saigon, clashing with few South Vietnamese units on the way. The end was near.

Fall of Saigon

By April, the weakened South Vietnamese Army had collapsed on all fronts. The powerful PAVN offensive forced South Vietnamese troops on a bloody retreat that ended up as a hopeless siege at Xuan-loc, a city 40 miles from Saigon, and the last South Vietnamese defense line before Saigon. On April 21, the defense of Xuan-loc collapsed and PAVN troops and tanks rapidly advanced to Saigon. On April 27, 100,000 PAVN troops encircled Saigon, which was to be defended by 30,000 ARVN troops. On April 29, the US launched Option IV, the largest helicopter evacuation in history. Chaos, unrest, and panic ensued as hectic Vietnamese scrambled to leave Saigon before it was too late. Helicopters began evacuating from the US embassy and the airport. Evacuations were held to the last minute because US Ambassador Martin thought Saigon could be held and defended. The operation began in an atmosphere of desperation as hysterical mobs of South Vietnamese raced to takeoff spots designated to evacuate, many yelling to be saved. Martin had pleaded to the US government to send $700 million dollars in emergency aid to South Vietnam in order to bolster the Saigon regime’s ability to fight and to mobilize fresh South Vietnamese units. But the plea was rejected. Many Americans felt the Saigon regime would meet certain collapse. President Ford gave a speech on April 23, declaring the end of the Vietnam War and the end of all American aid to the Saigon regime. The helicopter evacuation continued all day and night while PAVN tanks reached the outskirts of Saigon. In the early hours of April 30, the last US Marines left the embassy as hectic Vietnamese breached the embassy perimeter and raided the place. PAVN T-54 tanks moved into Saigon. The South Vietnamese resistance was light. Tank skirmishes began as ARVN M-41 tanks attacked the heavily armored Soviet T-34 tanks. PAVN troops soon dashed to capture the US embassy, the government army garrison, the police headquarters, radio station, presidential palace, and other vital targets. The PAVN encountered greater-than expected resistance as small pockets of ARVN resistance continued. By now, the helicopter evacuations that had saved 7,000 American and Vietnamese had ended. The presidential palace was captured and the Vietcong flag waved victoriously over it. President Duong Van Minh surrendered Saigon to PAVN colonel Bui Tin. The surrender came over the radio as Minh ordered South Vietnamese forces to lay down their weapons. Columns of South Vietnamese troops came out of defensive positions and surrendered. Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. As for the Americans, many stayed in South Vietnam but by May 1, 1975 most Americans had fled, leaving the city of Saigon forever. The Vietnam War was America’s most humiliating defeat, with over 58,000 dead and many left severely injured. As for the people of South Vietnam, over a million ARVN soldiers died in the 30-year conflict.

North Vietnam united both North and South Vietnam on 2 July 1976 to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Saigon was re-named Ho Chi Minh City in honor of the former president of North Vietnam. Thousands of supporters of the South Vietnamese government were rounded up and executed, and many more were imprisoned. Communist rule continues to this day.

On 21 January 1977 American President Jimmy Carter pardoned nearly all Vietnam War draft evaders.

Casualties

Estimating the number killed in the conflict is extremely difficult. Official records from North Vietnam are hard to find or nonexistent and many of those killed were literally blasted to pieces by bombing. For many years the North Vietnamese suppressed the true number of their casualties for propaganda purposes. It is also difficult to say exactly what counts as a “Vietnam war casualty”; people are still being killed today by unexploded ordnance, particularly cluster bomblets. More than 40,000 Vietnamese have been killed so far by landmines and unexploded ordnance.

Environmental effects from chemical agents and the colossal social problems caused by a devastated country with so many dead surely caused many more lives to be shortened.

The lowest casualty estimates, based on North Vietnamese statements which are now discounted by Vietnam, are around 1.5 million Vietnamese killed. Vietnam’s Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs released figures on April 3, 1995, reporting that 1.1 million fighters — Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese soldiers — and nearly 2 million civilians in the north and the south were killed between 1954 and 1975. The number of wounded fighters was put at 600,000. It is unclear how many Vietnamese civilians were wounded.

Of the Americans, 58,226 were killed in action or classified as missing in action. A further 153,303 Americans were wounded to give total casualties of 211,529. The United States Army took the majority of the casualties with 38,179 killed and 96,802 wounded; the Marine Corps lost 14,836 killed and 51,392 wounded; the Navy 2,556 and 4,178; with the Air Force suffering the lowest casualties both in numbers and percentage terms with 2,580 killed and 931 wounded.

American allies took casualties as well. South Korea provided the largest outside force and suffered something between 4400 and 5000 killed[3] full details including WIA and MIA appear difficult to find. Australia lost 501 dead and 3,131 wounded out of the 47,000 troops they had deployed to Vietnam. New Zealand had 38 dead and 187 wounded. Thailand had 351 casualties. It is difficult to locate accurate figures for the losses of the Philippines. Although Canada was not involved in the war, thousands of Canadians joined the American armed forces and served in Vietnam. The American fatal casualties include at least 56 Canadian citizens. It is difficult to estimate the exact number because some Canadians crossed the border to volunteer for service under false pretenses whereas others were permanent residents living in the United States who either volunteered or were drafted.

In the aftermath of the war many Americans came to believe that some of the 2,300 American soldiers listed as Missing in Action had in fact been taken prisoner by the DRV and held indefinitely. The Vietnamese list over 200,000 of their own soldiers missing in action, and bodies of MIA soldiers from World War I and II continue to be unearthed in Europe.

Both during and after the war, significant human rights violations occurred. Both North and South Vietnamese had large numbers of political prisoners, many of whom were killed or tortured. In 1970, two American congressmen visiting South Vietnam discovered the existence of “tiger cages”, which were small prison cells used for torturing South Vietnamese political prisoners. After the war, actions taken by the victors in Vietnam, including firing squads, torture, concentration camps and “re-education,” led to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. Many of these refugees fled by boat and thus gave rise to the phrase “boat people.” They emigrated to Hong Kong, France, the United States, Canada, Australia, and other countries, creating sizable expatriate communities, notably in the United States.

Among the many casualties of the war were the people of the neighboring state of Cambodia. Approximately 50,000-300,000 died as a result of US bombing campaigns. The bombing campaigns also drove some Cambodians into the arms of the nationalist and communist Khmer Rouge, who took power after America cut off funds for bombing them in 1973, and continued the slaughter of opponents or suspected opponents. About 1.7 million Cambodians were murdered or fell victim to starvation and disease before the regime was overthrown by Vietnamese forces in 1979.

Domestic effects and aftermath in Indochina

Vietnam

Virtually every Vietnamese, especially South Vietnamese, was affected by the war, having endured relentless bombardments and targeted killings. Many Vietnamese lost relatives as a result of the war. The end of the war marked the first time that Vietnam was not engaged in substantial civil war or active military conflict with an external opponent in many years. North and South Vietnam were reunified under the Socialist Republic of Vietnam following the war.

However, Fear of persecutions caused many highly skilled and educated South Vietnamese connected with the former regime to flee the country during the fall of Saigon and the years following, severely depleting human capital in Vietnam. The new government promptly sent people connected to the South Vietnam regime to concentration camps for “re-education”, often for years at a time. Others were sent to so-called “new economic zones” to develop the undeveloped land. Furthermore, the victorious Communist government implemented land reforms in the south similar to those implemented in North Vietnam earlier. However it is as well to remember that large areas of land in South Viet Nam had already been appropriated by the communists well before the end of the war—and their owners compensated for the loss by the South Vietnamese government. Persecution and poverty prompted an additional 2 million people to flee Vietnam as boat people over the 20 years following unification. The problem was so severe that during the 1980s and 1990s the UN established refugee camps in neighboring countries to process them. Many of these refugees resettled in the United States, forming large Vietnamese-American emigrant communities with a decidedly anti-communist viewpoint.

The newly established Republic of South Vietnam promptly implemented currency reforms. The dong previously used in Vietnam was converted to the “liberation dong” at a rate of 500 old dongs to 1 liberation dong, essentially rendering much of the South Vietnamese money worthless. After unification in 1976, the liberation dong was abandoned in favor of a new unified dong. While the north exchanged at the 1:1 rate, the south had to exchange 10 liberation dong for each 8 unified dong. Private enterprises in the South were socialized. During much of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Vietnam underwent an economic depression and came close to famine.

Ravaged by war, Vietnam is still in the process of recovery. It remains one of the poorest countries in the world, and remittance from overseas Vietnamese constitute a considerable part of the economy. Vietnamese people often make reference to events as happening “before 1975″ or “after 1975″, but life in South Vietnam before 1975 is rarely discussed because newspapers and movies published in the South prior to 1975 are forbidden from circulation. Many people were disabled during war, and continue to be killed and disabled by unexploded ordnance. Agent Orange, used as a defoliant during the war, is alleged by the Vietnamese government to continue to cause birth defects in many children and still preventing any substantial environmental recovery in some areas.

The large number of people born after 1975 may be indicative of a post-war baby boom, and despite the devastating effect of the civil war on their parents’ generation, a general disinterest in politics and recent history among this post-war generation of Vietnamese is notable.

In the late 1980s the government instituted economic reforms known as đổi mới (renovation), which introduced some market elements, achieving some modest results. The Soviet collapse in 1991 left Vietnam without its main economic and political partner, and thus it began to seek closer ties with the West. After taking office, U.S. President Bill Clinton announced his desire to heal relations with Vietnam. His administration lifted economic sanctions on the country in 1994, and in May 1995 the two nations renewed diplomatic relations, with the US opening up an embassy on Vietnamese soil for the first time since 1975.

Cambodia

In 1975, shortly before the end of the war, the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia after a bloody civil war. This led to a genocide that collectively killed some 1.7 million people, one-fifth of the country’s population. The Khmer Rouge were driven from power in 1979 when Vietnam invaded and installed a pro-Vietnam government.

Domestic effects and aftermath in the United States

The Vietnam war had many long term repercussions for American society and foreign policy.

War powers

Politically, the war’s poor planning and legislation that President Johnson regarded as “blank checks” to pursue the war led to Congress reviewing the way that the United States waged war. Due to the Vietnam War buildup, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which curtailed the President’s ability to commit troops to action without first obtaining Congressional approval.

Social impact

From a social point of view, the war was a key time in the lives of many younger Americans, especially the so-called baby boom generation. For protester and soldier alike, the war created many strong opinions in regards to American foreign policy and the justness of war. As a result, the Vietnam War was also significant in showing the degree that the public can influence government policy through mobilization and protest.

The use of the defoliation agent known as Agent Orange, designed to destroy the hiding places of the Viet Cong, has caused many health maladies and birth defects to this day for people on both sides of the conflict.

The war and its aftermath led to a mass emigration from Vietnam, mostly to the United States. They included both Amerasians (the children of Vietnamese young women and US military personnel) and Vietnamese refugees, especially those who had served under South Vietnam, who fled soon after the Communist takeover. During the subsequent years over 1 million of these people arrived in the United States. (see Vietnamese American)

Social attitudes and treatment of veterans

In 1982, construction began on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. (also known as ‘The Wall’) designed by Maya Lin. It is located on the National Mall adjacent to the Lincoln Memorial. The Three Soldiers statue was added later, in 1984.

Service in the war was unpopular, especially among the contemporaries of the soldiers who fought it. Veterans of the war received benefits no better than those in the prior peacetime service period, and in contrast to the generous benefits afforded veterans of World War II. Some of the war’s veterans experienced shunning in the society, and a few had profound difficulties—including homelessness—since returning from Vietnam. Many veterans who had been exposed to “Agent Orange” during service later contracted a number of cancers, skin diseases and other health problems. The U.S. department of Veterans Affairs awarded compensation to 1,800 of some 250,000 claimants.

Also in contrast to the post-World War II period, the great majority of major elected officials in the U.S. have not been war veterans, which was virtually compulsory in the recent past. Each of the eight Presidents from 1945 to 1992 was a veteran of one of the World Wars. George McGovern, the pacifist opponent of Nixon, was a highly-decorated B-24 bomber pilot. Many who did serve during Vietnam served in auxiliary forces such as the National Guard or reserve forces that were minimally called up during the conflict, including current President Bush. Former President Bill Clinton initially signed up for ROTC, but successfully withdrew his commitment, and did not serve at all.

Contemporary status of Vietnam veterans

Vietnam service has become more respected, especially in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and was important to the election of some American politicians; for example, it was a factor in the election of John McCain, a former Vietnam POW, to the US Senate. John F. Kerry became the first Vietnam combat veteran to run as a major party candidate for president and he made his service there a major issue in the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign. His Vietnam record was controversial with veterans coming out for and against the candidate. Whether or not Kerry’s tour of and subsequent protest of Vietnam had any effect on voters, his candidacy did not succeed.

Common military medals of the Vietnam War

During the war, a wide array of military decorations for bravery, meritorious actions, and general service were created by both nations of Vietnam. The United States began issuing combat decorations which were last bestowed in the Korean War as well as several new service medals.

Most South Vietnamese decorations were issued to both members of the South Vietnamese military and the United States armed forces. As such, several of the current U.S. senior military officers, who served during the Vietnam War, can today still be seen wearing South Vietnamese medals on active duty uniforms. Since South Vietnam as a country no longer exists, such medals are in fact considered obsolete and may only be privately purchased.

Source Wikipedia

Allies of North Korea included the People’s Republic of China, which supplied military forces, and the Soviet Union, which supplied combat advisors and aircraft pilots, as well as arms, for the Chinese and North Korean troops. In the United States, the conflict was termed a police action (as the Korean Conflict) under the aegis of the United Nations rather than a war, largely in order to remove the necessity of a Congressional declaration of war.
Contents

1 Origins
2 War begins
3 Western reaction
4 Incheon landing
5 Entrance of the Chinese
6 Stalemate
7 Air War
8 Legacy
8.1 Korea
8.2 United States
8.3 China
8.4 Japan
9 Atrocities and war crimes
10 Artistic depiction
11 Names

Origins

The country of Korea was invaded and effectively ruled by Japan from 1910 until the end of World War II in 1945. After liberation from Japanese rule, the peninsula was divided into North and South by the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States, and was occupied by them. After dividing the nation of Korea, the leading powers of the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, established governments in their respective halves, each one favorable to their political ideology. The Allies agreed that Japanese forces north of 38° north latitude (the 38th parallel) would surrender to the Soviet Union and those south of 38° would surrender to the USA. The Allies pledged that Korea would be a unified, independent country under an elected government but failed to specify the details.

The United Nations held an election in 1948, but the Soviet Union refused to allow participation in their occupied zone. Instead, they handed over power to the North Korean Communist Party under Kim Il-Sung (김일성), who had been in exile in Moscow, Russia. The south elected the nationalist exile Syngman Rhee (이승만), though some observers considered the elections unfair or even fraudulent.

As for the American government, they believed at the time that the communist bloc was a unified monolith, and that North Korea acted within this monolith as a pawn of the Soviet Union. In the 1960s and 1970s, the view that the war was just as much caused by western and South Korean provocation became popular. Today, with the opening of Soviet archives, the war is most often blamed on Kim Il-sung who convinced a reluctant Joseph Stalin to support the venture.

On January 12, 1950 United States Secretary of State Dean Acheson told the National Press Club that America’s Pacific defence perimeter was made up of the Aleutians, Ryukyu, Japan, and the Philippines implying that the U.S. would not fight over Korea, and that the country was outside of American concern in the Pacific. This omission, which was not deliberate, encouraged the North and the Soviets.

South Korean President Syngman Rhee and North Korean General Secretary Kim Il-Sung were each intent on reuniting the peninsula under their own systems. Partly because of Soviet support, the North Koreans were the ones able to go on the offensive, while South Korea, with only limited American backing, had far fewer options. That said, hundreds of forays by South Korean forces into the north may have convinced North Koreans that an all-out invasion was imminent. Documents show that both leaders were eager to escalate hostilities.

The People’s Republic of China was wary of a war in Korea. Mao Zedong (毛泽东) was concerned that it would encourage American intervention in Asia and would destabilize the region and interfere with plans to destroy the Kuomintang (國民黨) forces under Chiang Kai-Shek (蔣介石) which had retreated to Taiwan. In early 1949 Kim Il-sung pressed his case with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that the time had come for a conventional invasion of the South. Although he approved of the idea of a united Korea, Stalin refused, concerned about the relative unpreparedness of the North Korean armed forces and about possible U.S. involvement. In the course of the next year, the communist leadership built the North Korean army into a formidable offensive organization modeled after a Soviet mechanized force. By 1950 the North Koreans enjoyed substantial advantages over the South in every category of equipment. After another visit by Kim to Moscow in March–April 1950, Stalin approved an invasion.

War begins

In the predawn hours of June 25, 1950 North Korea struck across the 38th parallel behind a thunderous artillery barrage. Advised and equipped by the Soviets and with huge reserves of manpower, their surprise attack was a devastating success. Within days South Korean forces were in full retreat. Seoul was captured by the North Koreans on the afternoon of June 28. Nevertheless, the North Koreans had not accomplished their goal of a quick surrender by the Rhee government and the disintegration of the South Korean army. The US’s response to these events was to order MacArthur to transfer munitions to the ROKA and to use air cover to protect the evacuation of U.S. citizens.

By August the South Korean forces, and the small number of Americans in Korea, were driven into a small area in the far South around the city of Pusan. With the aid of American supplies and air support the ROK (Republic of Korea) forces managed to stabilize this frontier. This became a desperate holding action called the Pusan Perimeter. Although more UN support arrived, the situation was dire, and looked as though the North could gain control of the entire peninsula.

Western reaction

The invasion of South Korea (Republic of Korea, ROK) came as a complete surprise to the United States and the other western powers; Dean Acheson of the State Department had told Congress on June 20 that no war was likely. However, a CIA report in early March had predicted a June invasion.

On hearing of the invasion, Truman did not agree with his advisors to use U.S. airstrikes, unilaterally, against the North Korean forces. He also ordered Seventh Fleet to protect Taiwan, thereby ending the policy of the United States of acquiescing to the defeat of the forces of Chiang Kai-Shek. The United States still had substantial forces in Japan that allowed for a quick intervention. The actions were put under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, who was in charge of American forces in the Pacific. The other western powers quickly agreed with the American actions and volunteered their support for the effort.

The Americans organized Task Force Smith, and on July 5 engaged in the first North Korean-U.S. clash of the war.

American action was taken for a number of reasons. Truman was under severe domestic pressure for being too soft on communism. Especially vocal were those who accused the Democrats of having “lost China.” The intervention was also an important implementation of the new Truman Doctrine, which advocated the opposition of communism everywhere it tried to expand.

Instead of pressing for a congressional declaration of war, which he regarded as too alarmist and time-consuming when time was of the essence, Truman went to the United Nations for approval. The western powers did gain a United Nations mandate for action because the Soviets were boycotting the Security Council over the admission of Mongolia to the UN while the (Nationalist controlled) Republic of China held the Chinese seat — the Republic of China refused to acknowledge the independence of Mongolia, and thus blocked its entry into the UN. Without the Soviet veto and with only Yugoslavia abstaining, the UN voted to aid South Korea on June 27. U.S. forces were eventually joined during the conflict by troops from fifteen other UN members: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, France, South Africa, Turkey, Thailand, Greece, the Netherlands, Ethiopia, Colombia, the Philippines, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Although American opinion was solidly behind the venture, Truman would later take harsh criticism for not obtaining a declaration of war from Congress before sending troops to Korea. Thus, “Truman’s War” was said by some to have violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the United States Constitution.

U.S. forces were suffering from problems caused by demobilization which had been going on since 1945. Excluding the Marines, the infantry divisions sent to Korea were at 40% of paper strength, and the majority of their equipment was found to be useless. Other powers were even further demobilized, and apart from British Commonwealth units, it was many months before sizeable forces arrived from other coalition partners.

The Chinese Nationalists, now confined to Taiwan, asked to participate in the war, but their request was denied by the Americans who felt they would only encourage Communist Chinese intervention.

Incheon landing

In order to alleviate pressure on the Pusan Perimeter, MacArthur, as UN commander-in-chief for Korea, ordered an amphibious invasion far behind the North Korean troops at Incheon (Inchon 인천 仁川). This was an extremely risky operation, but once the American and other UN troops gained a foothold on the beach, it was extremely successful. United Nations troops landed at Incheon, faced only mild resistance and quickly moved to recapture Seoul. The North Koreans, finding their supply lines cut, began a rapid retreat northwards and the ROK and UN forces that had been confined in the south moved north and joined those that had landed at Inchon.

The United Nations troops drove the North Koreans back past the 38th parallel. The goal of saving South Korea had been achieved, but because of the success and the prospect of uniting all of Korea under the rule of Syngman Rhee the Americans were convinced to continue into North Korea. This greatly concerned the Chinese, who worried that the UN forces might not stop at the end of North Korea. Many in the west, including General MacArthur, thought that spreading the war to China would be necessary. However, Truman and the other leaders disagreed, while MacArthur was ordered to be very cautious when approaching the Chinese border. Eventually, MacArthur disregarded these concerns, arguing that since the North Korean troops were being supplied by bases in China, those supply depots should be bombed.

Entrance of the Chinese

The Communist Chinese had issued warnings that they would react if the UN forces encroached on the frontier at the Yalu River (Chinese 鸭绿江). Mao sought Soviet aid and saw intervention as essentially defensive: “If we allow the U.S. to occupy all of Korea… we must be prepared for the US to declare… war with China”, he told Stalin. Zhou Enlai was sent to Moscow to add force to Mao’s cabled arguments. Mao delayed his forces while waiting for Russian help, and the planned attack was thus postponed from 13 October to 19 October. Soviet assistance was limited to providing air support no nearer than sixty miles (96 km) to the battlefront. The MiG-15s in PRC colours were an unpleasant surprise to the UN pilots; they held local air superiority against the F-80 Shooting Stars until the newer F-86 Sabres were deployed. The Soviet role was known to the U.S. but they kept quiet to avoid any international and potential nuclear incidents.

A Chinese assault beginning on October 19, 1950, under the command of General Peng Dehuai with 380,000 CPV troops — officially named Chinese People’s Volunteers,(indeed they were People’s Liberation Army regulars —?) their equipments were poor and were described as “Millets plus bolt action rifle”(小米加步枪),there were no mechanised units such as tanks and only a few artillery &mdash, but their large numbers usually made up the difference; repelled the United Nation troops back to the 38th parallel, the pre-conflict border. The Chinese assault caught U.S. troops by surprise, as war between PRC and the United States had not been declared. The Battle of Chosin Reservoir in winter forced the UN troops to withdraw from North Korea. The United States X Corp retreat was the longest retreat of a U.S. unit in history. The Marines, on the eastern side of the peninsula, fared better, mainly due to better training and discipline.

On January 4, 1951, Communist Chinese and North Korean forces captured Seoul. The situation was such that MacArthur mentioned that atomic weapons might be used, much to the alarm of America’s allies. In March 1951, Operation Ripper repelled the North Korean and Chinese troops from Seoul.

MacArthur was removed from command by President Truman on April 11, 1951. The reasons for this are many and well documented. They include MacArthur’s meeting with ROC President Chiang Kai-shek in the role of a U.S. diplomat; he was also wrong at Wake when President Truman asked him specifically about Chinese troop buildup near the Korean border. Furthermore, MacArthur openly demanded nuclear attack on China, while being rude and flippant when speaking to Truman. MacArthur was succeeded by General Matthew Ridgway who managed to regroup the UN forces for an effective counter offense that managed to slowly drive back the opposing forces.

Stalemate

The rest of the war involved little territory change and lengthy peace negotiations (which started in Kaesong on July 10 of the same year). Even during the peace negotiations combat continued, for the South Korean and allied forces the goal was to recapture all of what had been South Korea before an agreement was reached in order to avoid losing any territory. The Chinese did a similar operation at the battle of “The Hook” where they were repelled by British forces.

Eventually a cease-fire was established on July 27th, 1953, by which time the front line was back in the proximity of the 38th parallel, and so a demilitarized zone (DMZ) was established around it, which is still defended today by North Korean troops on one side and South Korean and American troops on the other. The DMZ passes to the north of the parallel towards the east, and to the south as it travels west. The site of the peace talks, Kaesong, the old capital of Korea, was part of the South before hostilities broke out but is currently a special city of the North. No peace treaty has yet been signed to date. U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower on November 29, 1952 fulfilled a campaign promise by travelling to Korea to find out what could be done to end the conflict.

Air War

The Korean War was the last major war where propeller fighters such as the United Nations air forces’ P-51 Mustang, F4U Corsair, A-1 Skyraider, and F4U-5N were used, and it was the war in which jet fighters came to dominate the skies. These, initially, were US Air Force F-80s, and US Navy or US Marine Corps Grumman F9F Panthers, and McDonnell F2H Banshees, which overwhelmed North Korea’s propeller-driven Yakovlev Yak-9s and Lavochkin La-9s. Other UN air combat capability came from propeller planes like the Supermarine Seafire, Fairey Firefly, and Hawker Sea Fury, based on aircraft carriers deployed by the British Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy.

From 1950, North Korea introduced MiG-15 jet fighters, piloted by Soviet Air Force pilots, which was — on the face of it — a casus belli, if it were not for the reluctance of the UN to become involved in open war with the Soviet Union and China. At first UN jet fighters, which now included Royal Australian Air Force Gloster Meteor Mk.8s, had some success against inexperienced Soviet pilots, but the superior quality of the MiGs soon held sway over the first generation jets used by the UN.

Even after the USAF introduced the more advanced F-86, its pilots often struggled against the Soviet jets. The MiG-15 still had better high altitude capability, rate of climb, longer range and more powerful armament (3 cannons vs. 6 machine-guns) although dive speed and roll rate were inferior. However, the U.N. gradually gained a numerical advantage, which gave them an air superiority that lasted until the end of the war. The Chinese had jet power, but the American forces had superior training for their pilots. This was decisive in helping the U.N. first advance into the north, and then resist the Chinese invasion of South Korea.

Among other factors which helped tip the balance toward the U.N. Jets include the F-86s’ better radar gunsight, better stability and control at high speed and high altitudes, the introduction of some of the first radar warning receivers, which allowed F-86 pilots to be warned if a MiG was on their tail, and the introduction of the first G-suits. The U.N. pilots achieved impressive success with the F-86, claiming to shoot down 792 MiG-15s and 108 additional aircraft for the loss of 78 Sabres, a ratio in excess of 10:1. Post-war research was only able to confirm 379 victories and recently exposed Soviet documentation admits only 345, but even with the lower figures the advantage was still clearly with the U.N. fighter pilots with a kill ratio of at least 4.4:1.

Throughout the conflict, the United States maintained a policy of heavy bombing, especially using incendiary weapons, against any and all North Korean settlements. Although images of the civilian victims of the weapon were to be ingrained upon the memory of the world in Vietnam, significantly more napalm was dropped on North Korea, despite the relative short length of the conflict. During the second half of 1950 alone, close to a million gallons of the weapon was used to destroy dozens of settlements in North Korea.

In May and June of 1953, the United States Air Force undertook a mission to destroy several key irrigation and hydroelectric dams, in order to critically hamper agriculture and industry in the North. The Kusǒng (구성), Tǒksan (덕산) and Pujǒn (부전) River dams were all destroyed, severely flooding vast areas of land, drowning thousands and ultimately starving many more.

Legacy

The Korean War was the first armed confrontation of the Cold War, and it set a model for many later conflicts. It created the idea of a limited war, where the two superpowers would fight without descending to an all out war that could involve nuclear weapons. It also expanded the Cold War, which to that point had mostly been concerned with Europe.

Korea

600,000 Koreans died in the conflict according to US estimates. The whole number, including all civilians and military soldiers from UN Nations and China, amount to the order of 2,000,000 deaths. More than a million South Koreans were killed, 85% of them civilians. According to figures published in the Soviet Union, 11.1% of the total population of North Korea perished, which indicates that 1,130,000 people were killed. In sum, about 2,500,000 people were killed, including north and south together. More than 80% of the industrial and public facilities and transportation works, three-quarters of the government offices, and one-half of the houses were destroyed. Pyongyang (the capital of North Korea) was bombarded with more than one thousand bombs per square kilometre. When the armistice was settled, there were only two buildings left in the city where 400,000 people had lived. The air photograph that was taken in 1953 shows that the condition of Pyongyang was like that of Hiroshima in Japan, bombed with a nuclear bomb (see Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The misery and the damage meted out to it were palpable.

The war left the peninsula permanently divided with a garrisoned pro-Soviet, Communist party led state in North Korea and a pro-American capitalist one in the South. American troops remain on the border today, as do a large number of Koreans. It is the most heavily defended border in the world.

United States

U.S. troops suffered about 36,000 fatalities, less than in the Vietnam War, but in a much shorter time. However, advances in medical services such as the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital and the use of rapid transport of the wounded to them such as with helicopters enabled the death rate for UN forces to be much lower than in previous wars. For service during the Korean War, the United States military was issued the Korean Service Medal.

Later neglect of remembrance of this war, in favor of the Vietnam War, World War I and II, has caused the Korean War to be called the Forgotten War or the Unknown War. On July 27, 1995 in Washington, DC, a museum called the Korean War Veterans Memorial was built and dedicated to veterans of the war.

The war was instrumental in re-energizing the U.S. military-industrial complex from its post-war slump. The defense budget was boosted to $50 billion, the Army was doubled in size, as was the number of Air Groups, and they were deployed beyond American soil in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere in Asia, including Vietnam, where covert aid to the French was made overt. The Cold War became a much stronger state of mind for American policy makers.

The war also changed America’s view of the Third World, most notably in Indochina. Before 1950 the Americans had been very critical of French endeavours to reestablish its presence there against local resistance; after Korea they began to heavily support the French against the Viet Minh and other nationalist-communist local parties, paying for up to 80% of the French military budget in Vietnam.

The Korean War also saw the beginning of racial integration efforts in the US military service, where African Americans fought in integrated units. President Truman signed Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, calling on the armed forces to provide equal treatment and opportunity for black servicemen. The extent by which Truman’s 1948 orders were carried out varied among the branches of the military, with segregated units still in deployment at the start of the conflict, and eventually integrating towards the end of the war.

The United States still maintains a heavy military presence in Korea, as part of the effort to uphold the armistice between South and North Korea. A special service decoration, known as the Korea Defense Service Medal is authorized for U.S. service members who serve a tour of duty in Korea.

China

Various credible Western and Eastern sources agree that about 500,000 Chinese soldiers were either killed in action or died of disease, starvation, exposure, and accidents. The overall total of Chinese killed, wounded and missing equal to about 1 million. The Korean War also led to other long lasting effects. Until the conflict in Korea, the United States had largely abandoned the government of Chiang Kai-Shek, which had retreated to Taiwan, and had no plans to intervene against the expected invasion of Taiwan by the Communist Party of China. The start of the Korean War rendered untenable any policy that would have caused Taiwan to fall under Communist control and Truman’s decision to send American forces into the Taiwan straits saved the Republic of China from defeat and ended any immediate hopes for the PRC of conquering that island. The anti-communist atmosphere in the West in response to the Korean War contributed to the unwillingness to diplomatically recognize the PRC by the West and by the United Nations until the 1970s.

It also contributed to the decline of Sino-Soviet relations. Although the Chinese had their own reasons to enter the war (i.e. security of Manchuria), the view that the Soviets had used them as proxies was widely shared in the Western bloc. The Soviets had given them out-of-date and often shoddy equipment and had forced the Chinese to pay for it. However, the fact that Chinese forces held their own against American forces in this war heralded that China was once again becoming a major world power. The war is also generally seen as an honour in the PLA’s history by many Chinese as it was the first time in a century a Chinese army was able to withstand a Western army in a major conflict, in spite of China’s heavy losses.

Japan

Japan was a key beneficiary of the war. The U.S. material requirements were organized through a Special Procurements system, which allowed for local purchasing without the complex Pentagon procurement system. Over $3.5 billion was spent with Japanese companies, peaking at $809 million in 1953, and still significant amounts in 1955. Other foreign non-military investment was less than 5% of this. U.S. Aid Counterpart Funds gave Japan, by 1956, the most modern shipyards in the world and a 26% share in launched tonnage. On the other hand, left-wing organizations were closed down for fear of destabilising actions in support of North Korea or even of an internal revolution, and the zaibatsu went from being distrusted to being encouraged — Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Sumitomo were amongst the zaibatsu that thrived, not only on orders from the military but through American industrial experts, including W. Edwards Deming. Japanese manufacturing grew by 50% between March 1950 and 1951. By 1952, pre-war standards of living were regained and output was twice the level of 1949. The 1951 peace treaty returned Japanese sovereignty (excluding Okinawa and the Ryukyu islands) and in the eyes of some American policy makers, the non-belligerency clause in the constitution was already being considered a “mistake” by 1953.

Atrocities and war crimes

North Korean troops, South Koreans, Chinese and United States personnel targetted civilians and/or mistreated POWs in some cases . Specifically, there is extremely strong evidence to suggest:

• North Korean and Chinese troops tortured and executed prisoners on a number of occasions, including shooting wounded soldiers lying at their feet.
• American troops were under orders to consider any unidentified people on the battlefield approaching their position as hostile and eliminate them. The reason for these orders was that communist infiltrators frequently hid among Korean refugees. On some occasions (No Gun Ri) hundreds of refugees caught in the fighting were shot and strafed. Whether this qualifies an “atrocity” is in dispute as the U.S. claims it did it for defensive measures.
• Communist forces rounded up and executed thousands of civilians in captured villages. It is claimed that more than 100,000 were killed in 1950 during the capture of Seoul alone.
• South Korean forces executed without trial tens of thousands of “Communist Sympathizers”.

Many consider these events to be atrocities and some refer to them as “war crimes”. It is of little doubt that the killing of prisoners of war or wounded soldiers by signatories of the Geneva conventions (especially GCIV) are war crimes, as these conventions specifically disallow it. However, no conventions of the time forbade the killing, purposefully or accidentally, of enemy civilians. Whilst it is extremely distasteful and unpopular to do so there does not seem to be any legal basis in calling these actions “war crimes”. It is more reasonable to label them as crimes against humanity. There are Additional Protocols to the Geneva Convention formed in 1977 which call for the protection of civilians, as do several UN Security Council Resolutions, but these all appear to post-date the war in Korea.

There are many more cases than those listed above but evidence, rather than accusations, is hard to come by. At the time, many of the killings were felt justified because of the fear of infiltration by irregular forces by the South Koreans and as a terror tactic by the North Koreans. It is also worth keeping in mind that the Korean war began only five years after the Second World War ended, a war during which targeting of civilians was severe and routine by all major parties involved.

All parties have denied these actions during the war and afterward, but the U.S. has admitted their policy on strafing certain refugee groups.

Artistic depiction

Artist Pablo Picasso’s painting Massacre in Korea (1951) depicted violence against civilians during the Korean War. By some account, civilian killings committed by U.S. forces in Shinchun, Hwanghae Province was the motive of the painting. In South Korea, the painting was deemed anti-American, a longtime taboo in the South, and thus was prohibited for public display until the 1990s.

In the United States far and away the most famous artistic depiction of the war is M*A*S*H, originally a novel by Richard Hooker (pseudonym for H. Richard Hornberger) that was later turned into a successful movie and television series. All three versions depict the misadventures of the staff of a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital as they struggle to keep their sanity through the war’s absurdities through ribald humour and hijinks when not treating wounded.

Although M*A*S*H gave a fairly accurate depiction of a US Army field hospital in the Korean War, there were a few flaws in the TV series. For instance, there were far more Korean doctors in the M*A*S*H units than shown in the series. In the series, nearly all the doctors were American. The first few episodes featured an African-American doctor, Spearchucker Jones. This character was removed upon the revelation that there were no African American doctors serving in Korea. Furthermore, the television series lasted for eleven years, while the actual war lasted only three (of course, one cannot blame the screenwriters and the producers for creating a popular show); among other things, the characters aged far more visibly over the course of the series than they might have done during the actual three-year conflict. Additionally, the series was filmed in California, which has a very different physical environment than the Korean peninsula.

The Korean War was also the backdrop of the 1962 movie The Manchurian Candidate. The backdrop for the 2004 remake of the movie was the Persian Gulf War (1991).

Names

The name ‘Korean War’ is the English language name for the war. In South Korea, the war is called the “June 25th Incident (육이오 사변; 六二五 事變)”, although some use the term “한국전쟁” (韓國戰爭), which means Korean War. In North Korea, the war is called the “Fatherland Liberation War (조국해방전쟁; 祖國解放戰爭)”. In China the war is called 抗美援朝 (kàng měi yuán cháo), which can be translated to “The Resisting American War to Aid Korea”.

Source Wikipedia

Fighting occurred across the Atlantic Ocean, in Western and Eastern Europe, in the Mediterranean Sea, Africa, the Middle East, in the Pacific and South East Asia, and it continued in China. In Europe, the war ended with the surrender of Germany on 8 May 1945 (V-E and Victory Days), but continued in Asia until Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945 (V-J Day).

Approximately 55-57 million people died as a result of the war, including acts of genocide such as the Holocaust and General Ishii Shiro’s Unit 731 experiments in Pingfan. As a case of total war, it involved the “home front” and bombing of civilians to a new degree. Atomic weapons, jet aircraft, and radar are only a few of many wartime inventions.

Post-World War II Europe was partitioned into Western and Soviet spheres of influence, the former undergoing economic reconstruction under the Marshall Plan and the latter becoming satellite states of the Soviet Union. Western Europe largely aligned as NATO, and Eastern Europe largely as the Warsaw pact, alliances which were fundamental to the ensuing Cold War. In Asia, the United States’ military occupation of Japan led to its democratization. China’s civil war continued through and after the war, resulting eventually in the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. The war sparked a wave of independence for colonies of European powers. There was a fundamental shift in power from Western Europe to the new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.

Contents

1 Participants
2 Europe, 1939–45
2.1 1939: Poland, Tripartite Pact, Winter War
2.2 1940: Denmark and Norway, France and Low Countries, Baltic Republics, Britain and Atlantic, Greece
2.3 1941: Yugoslavia, Greece, Soviet Union, Continuation War, United States enters
2.4 1942: Turning of the war in Russia
2.4.1 1942: Caucasus offensive, Stalingrad
2.5 1943: Kursk
2.6 1944: France invaded, Soviet-Finland armistice, surrender of minor Axis, Ardennes offensive
2.7 1945: Yalta Conference, push into Germany, Berlin falls, occupation
3 Pacific and East Asia, 1937–45
3.1 1937: Sino-Japanese War
3.2 1940: Vichy France colonies
3.3 1941: Pearl Harbor, the United States enters the war, Japanese invasions in SE Asia
3.4 1942: Coral Sea, Port Moresby, Midway, Guadalcanal
3.5 1943–45: Allied offensives in Asia and the Pacific
3.6 1945: Iwo Jima, Okinawa, atomic bombings, Japan surrenders
4 Mediterranean, 1940–45
4.1 1940: Egypt and Libya
4.2 1941: Syria, Lebanon, Afrika Korps to Tobruk
4.3 1942: First and Second Battles of El Alamein
4.4 1942: Operation Torch, French North Africa
4.5 1943: Yugoslavia and Italy
5 Home front
6 Genocide, atrocities, war crimes, and internment
6.1 Internment and genocide
6.2 Atrocity and war crimes
7 Technology in World War II
8 Consequences
8.1 United Nations and the Cold War
8.2 Casualties

Participants

The belligerents of the Second World War are usually considered to belong to either of the two blocs: the Axis and the Allies. A number of smaller countries participated in the war, more or less voluntarily, on the side of the power that in their neighbourhood was the most influential.

The Axis Powers consisted primarily of Germany, Italy, and Japan, which split the Earth into three spheres of influence under the Tripartite Pact of 1940, and vowed to defend one another against aggression. This replaced the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936 that Italy had joined in 1937. Spain’s fascist government lead by Francisco Franco was a great asset in trade to the Axis powers during the war. A number of smaller countries were counted among the Axis powers, but these countries did not have a profound impact on the war, nor did they supply the Axis powers with any great abundance of troops or supplies.

Until attacked by it in June 1941, the Soviet Union was effectively allied with Nazi Germany through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, invading and occupying parts or the whole of Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania.

Among the Allied powers, the “Big Three” were the United Kingdom, from 3 September 1939, the Soviet Union, from June 1941, and the United States, from December 1941. China had been fighting Japan since 1937. The independent dominions and colonies of the British Empire, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Greece, and Denmark were also counted among the Allies, though many would ultimately be conquered and occupied by Axis forces. For the details of each ally, like the dates of joining, click participants in World War II.

Countries that attempted to remain neutral in the conflict were often viewed with suspicion by the participants, and often pressured to make contributions to the most influential power in their neighborhood. Sovereignty was often difficult to maintain as many countries that did not directly participate in the conflict nevertheless held vested interests in seeing a particular side prevail. For example, neutral Switzerland was generally considered to be “Allied-friendly” while neutral Spain was considered “Axis-friendly,” despite the fact that neither country openly proclaimed any alliances. Such situations allowed neutral countries to become hotbeds of espionage.

Europe, 1939–45

1939: Poland, Tripartite Pact, Winter War

War began in Europe on 1 September 1939, with the German invasion of Poland. France and the United Kingdom honored their defensive alliance of March 1939 by declaring war two days later on 3 September.1 Only partly mobilized, Poland fared poorly against the Wehrmacht’s superior numbers and strategy of “blitzkrieg”. In accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Red Army invaded Poland from the east on 17 September. Hours later, the Polish government escaped to Romania. The last Polish Army unit was defeated on 6 October.

As Poland fell, the British and French remained largely inactive in what would be termed “the Phony War,” lasting until May 1940. There were isolated engagements during this period, including the sinking of the HMS Royal Oak in the British port of Scapa Flow and Luftwaffe bombings of the naval bases at Rosyth and Scapa Flow. The Kriegsmarine pocket battleship “Admiral Graf Spee” was sunk in South America after the battle of the River Plate.

The Tripartite Pact was signed between Germany, Italy, and Japan on 27 September 1940, formalizing their alignment as the “Axis Powers.”

The Soviet Union invaded Finland on 30 November 1939, beginning the Winter War, which lasted until March of 1940 with Finland ceding territory to the Soviet Union.

1940: Denmark and Norway, France and Low Countries, Baltic Republics, Britain and Atlantic, Greece

Suddenly, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway on 9 April 1940, in Operation Weserübung, ostensibly to counter the threat of an Allied invasion from the region. Heavy fighting ensued on land and at sea in Norway. British, French and Polish forces landed to support the Norwegians at Namsos, Åndalsnes and Narvik, with most success at the last. By early June, all Allied forces were evacuated and the Norwegian Army surrendered.

France and the Low Countries were invaded on 10 May, ending the Phony War and beginning the Battle of France. The Allies had expected a WWI style of conflict, with the French and German soldiers firing at each other from the entrenchments, and were not prepared for this sudden invasion. In the first phase of the invasion, Operation Yellow, the Wehrmacht’s Panzergruppe von Kleist bypassed the Maginot Line and split the Allies in two by driving to the English Channel. Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands fell quickly against the attack of Army Group B, and the British Expeditionary Force, trapped in the north, was evacuated at Dunkirk in Operation Dynamo. German forces then invaded France itself, in Operation Red, advancing behind the Maginot Line and near the coast. Defeated, an armistice was declared on 22 June and the Vichy France puppet government created.

In June of 1940 the Soviet Union occupied Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, and annexed Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina from Romania.

Not having secured a rapid peace with the United Kingdom, Germany began preparations to invade with the Battle of Britain. Fighter aircraft fought overhead for months as the Luftwaffe and Royal Air Force fought for control of Britain’s skies. The Luftwaffe initially targeted RAF Fighter Command, but turned to terror bombing London. Germany was defeated and Operation Sealion, the proposed invasion of the British Isles, was abandoned. Similar efforts were made, though at sea, in the Battle of the Atlantic. In a long-running campaign, German U-Boats attempted to deprive the British Isles of necessary Lend Lease cargo from the United States. Shipments were reduced considerably by the U-Boats; however, the United Kingdom refused to seek peace, with Prime Minister Winston Churchill stating that “We shall never surrender.”

Italy invaded Greece on 28 October 1940, from bases in Albania. Although outnumbered, Greek forces successfully repelled the Italian attacks and launched a full-scale counterattack deep into Albania. By mid-December they had liberated one-fourth of Albania. Claimed to be the first Allied victory of the war, that battle was actually The Battle of Narvik, in which Norwegian, British and French forces reconquered Narvik from the Germans. Winston Churchill declared “We are used to saying that the Greeks fight like heroes, from now on we shall say that the heroes fight like Greeks.”

President Roosevelt announced a shift in the American stance from neutrality to “non-belligerency”.

1941: Yugoslavia, Greece, Soviet Union, Continuation War, United States enters

Yugoslavia’s government succumbed to the pressure of Italy and Germany and signed the Tripartite Treaty on March 25, 1941. This was followed by anti-axis demonstrations in the country and a coup which overthrew the government and replaced it with a pro-allied one on March 27, 1941. Hitler’s forces then invaded Greece and Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941. Hitler reluctantly sent forces to assist Mussolini’s bogged-down forces in Greece, principally to prevent a British buildup on Germany’s strategic southern flank. A month later on May 20, 1941, the Battle of Crete began when tens of thousands of elite German paratroopers and some 1,300 aeroplanes launched a massive airborne invasion of the Greek island of Crete. Crete was defended by an ill-equipped group of about 43,000 Greek, New Zealand, Australian and British troops. The Germans attacked the island simultaneously on the three airfields. Their invasion on two of the airfields failed miserably, but they successfully captured one, which allowed them to reinforce their position by landing reinforcements (about three transport planes every five minutes). After a week it was decided that so many German troops had been flown in that there was no way to defeat them. The Allied soldiers had grown exhausted and were by now numerically inferior. An evacuation took place and about 17,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers were evacuated. About 12,000 Commonwealth and 5,500 Greek troops were made prisoners; however, over 10,000 Greek and 500 Commonwealth troops remained at large and caused serious problems for the German occupiers over the next four years. The Germans suffered over 17,000 casualties in Crete. So heavy were the losses that Hitler never launched another airborne assault. General Kurt Student, who commanded the invasion of Crete, would later say “Crete was the grave of the German parachutists.” As a result, planned airborne operations against Malta, Cyprus, and the Suez Canal never took place.

Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, commenced on 22 June 1941. The “Great Patriotic War” (Russian: Великая Отечественная Война, Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna) had begun with surprise attacks by German panzer armies, which encircled and destroyed much of the Soviet’s western military, capturing or killing hundreds of thousands of men. Soviet forces came to fight a war of scorched earth, withdrawing into the steppe of Russia to acquire time and stretch the German army. Industries were dismantled and withdrawn to the Ural mountains for reassembly. German armies pursued a three-pronged advance against Leningrad (modern-day St. Petersburg), Moscow, and the Caucasus. Having pushed to occupy Moscow before winter, German forces were delayed into the Soviet Winter. Soviet counterattacks defeated them within sight of Moscow’s spires, and a rout was only narrowly avoided. Some historians identify this as the “turning point” in the Allies’ war against Germany; others identify the capitulation of the German Sixth Army outside Stalingrad (modern-day Volgograd) in 1943.

The Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union began with Soviet air attacks shortly after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, on 25 June, and ended with an armistice in 1944. The Soviet Union was joined in the war by the United Kingdom but not by the United States.

Germany declared war on the United States on 11 December 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was not obligated to do so under the Tripartite Pact of 1940. Hitler made the declaration in the hopes that Japan would support him by attacking the Soviet Union. Japan did not oblige him, and this diplomatic move proved a catastrophic blunder which gave President Franklin D. Roosevelt the pretext needed for the United States joining the fight in Europe with full commitment and with no meaningful opposition from Congress. Some historians mark this moment as another major turning point of the war with Hitler provoking a grand alliance of powerful nations who could wage powerful attacks on both East and West simultaneously.

1942: Turning of the war in Russia

1942: Caucasus offensive, Stalingrad

In 1942, an aborted German offensive was launched towards the Caucasus to secure oil fields and German armies reached Stalingrad. The siege of Stalingrad continued for many months, with vicious urban warfare leading to high casualties on both sides. At night, the Soviet forces were resupplied from the east bank of the Volga, and the Wehrmacht forces were eventually ground down; especially after Hitler diverted the armor of the Sixth Army to the Caucasus. By early February 1943, it was clear that the Sixth Army would have to surrender. The Fuhrer made General Friedrich Paulus, who was in charge of the German forces, a Field Marshal in the vain hope it would deter him from surrendering. It didn’t, and he surrendered completely on February 2. The results were the destruction of the city, millions of casualties, and the collapse of Germany’s Sixth Army as a viable fighting force. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels responded with his Sportpalast speech to the German people. Some historians cite this as the European war’s “turning point.”

1943: Kursk

German forces repulsed Red Army offensives along the Don basin near Stalingrad in January 1943. In July, the Wehrmacht launched a much-delayed offensive against the Soviet Union at Kursk. Their intentions were known by the Soviets, and the Battle of Kursk ended in a Soviet counteroffensive that threw the German Army back.

1944: France invaded, Soviet-Finland armistice, surrender of minor Axis, Ardennes offensive

On “D-Day”, 6 June 1944, the western Allies invaded German-held Normandy in a pre-dawn amphibious assault spearheaded by American (82nd and 101st), British (6th) and Canadian paratroops, opening the “second front” against Germany.2 Hedgerows aided the defending German units, and for months the Allies measured progress in hundreds of yards and bloody rifle fights. An Allied breakout was effected at St.-Lô, and the most powerful German force in France, the Seventh Army, was destroyed in the Falaise pocket while counterattacking. Allied forces stationed in Italy invaded the French Riviera on 15 August and linked up with forces from Normandy. The Allies captured Paris on 25 August.

By early 1944, the Red Army had reached the border of Poland and lifted the Siege of Leningrad. Shortly after Allied landings at Normandy, on 9 June, the Soviet Union began an offensive on the Karelian Isthmus that after three months would force Nazi Germany’s co-belligerent Finland to an armistice. Operation Bagration, a Soviet offensive involving 2.5 million men and 6,000 tanks, was launched on 22 June, destroying the German Army Group Center and taking 350,000 prisoners. Finland’s defense had been dependent on active, or in periods passive, support from the German Wehrmacht that also provided defense for the chiefly uninhabited northern half of Finland. After the Wehrmacht retreated from the southern shores of the Gulf of Finland, Finland’s defense was untenable. The Allies’ armistice conditions included further territorial losses and the internment or expulsion of German troops on Finnish soil executed in the Lapland War, now as co-belligerents of the Allies, who also demanded the political leadership to be prosecuted in “war-responsibility trials” that by the Finnish public were perceived as a mockery of the rule of law.

British forces attempted a fast advance into Germany with Operation Market Garden in September, but were repulsed. Logistical problems were starting to plague the Allies advance west as the supply lines still ran back to the beaches of Normandy. A decisive victory by the Cdn. 1st Army in the Battle of the Scheldt secured the entrance to the port of Antwerp, freeing it to receive supplies by late November 1944. Romania surrendered in August of 1944 and Bulgaria in September. The Warsaw Uprising was fought between 1 August and 2 October. Germany withdrew from the Balkans and held Hungary until February 1945.

In December of 1944, the German Army made its last major offensive in the West, attempting to capture the vital port of Antwerp and cripple the Allies in the Battle of the Bulge. At first, Germans scored successes against the Americans stationed in the Ardennes. However, with the German failure to capture Bastogne and the arrival of Gen. Patton’s Third Army, the Germans were forced to retreat back into Germany. The offensive was defeated. By now, the Soviets had reached the eastern borders of pre-war Germany.

1945: Yalta Conference, push into Germany, Berlin falls, occupation

Churchill, Stalin, and Franklin D. Roosevelt made arrangements for post-war Europe at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. It resulted in an April meeting to form the United Nations: nation-states were created in Eastern Europe; it was agreed Poland would have free elections (in fact elections were heavily rigged by Soviets); Soviet nationals were to be repatriated, and the Soviet Union was to attack Japan within three months of Germany’s surrender.

The Red Army (including 78,556 soldiers of the 1st Polish Army) began its final assault on Berlin on 16 April. Hitler and his staff moved into the Führerbunker, a concrete bunker beneath the Chancellery, where on 30 April 1945, he committed suicide. The Soviets took a massive toll of 100,000 men killed. Karl Dönitz became leader of the German government and quickly dispatched the German High Command to travel to Reims, France, to sign an unconditional surrender with the Allies. Field Marschal Jodl surrended unconditionally on 7 May. The Western Allies celebrated “V-E Day” on 8 May and the Soviet Union “Victory Day” on 9 May. The Soviet Union forcefully occupied the Baltic states as part of Stalin’s campaign to subjugate the nations of Eastern Europe.

Pacific and East Asia, 1937–45

1937: Sino-Japanese War

War conflict began in Asia years before fighting started in Europe. Japan had already invaded China in 1931, long before World War II started in Europe. On March 1st, the Japanese appointed Henry Pu Yi king in Manchukuo, the puppet state in Manchuria. By 1937, war had broken out as the Japanese sought control of China.

Roosevelt signed an unpublished (secret) executive order in May of 1940 allowing U.S. military personnel to resign from the service so that they could participate in a covert operation in China: the American Volunteer Group, also known as Chennault’s Flying Tigers. Over a seven-month period, Chennault’s Flying Tigers destroyed an estimated 600 Japanese aircraft, sunk numerous Japanese ships, and stalled the Japanese invasion of Burma. With the United States and other countries cutting exports, particularly fuel oil, to Japan, Japan planned a strike on Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, 1941 to cripple the U.S. Pacific Fleet while consolidating oil fields in Southeast Asia. It is hard to determine whether the Japanese intended to release an advance declaration of war, however, as means of coordinating secret directives with public communication, particularly during a weekend in the U.S., were limited. Despite what warning signs remained, the attack on Pearl Harbor achieved military surprise and dealt severe damage to the American Fleet’s Battleships, though the primary targets–Fleet Carriers–remained safely at sea. The next day, Japanese forces arrived at Hong Kong, which later led to the surrender of the British colony on Christmas Day, as well as launching numerous attacks on British and American outposts across the Pacific.

1940: Vichy France colonies

In 1940, Japan occupied French Indochina (Vietnam) upon agreement with the Vichy Government despite local Free French, and joined Axis powers Germany and Italy. These actions intensified Japan’s conflict with the United States and the United Kingdom, which reacted with an oil boycott.

1941: Pearl Harbor, the United States enters the war, Japanese invasions in SE Asia

On December 7, 1941, Japanese warplanes commanded by Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo carried out a surprise air raid on Pearl Harbor, the largest U.S. naval base in the Pacific. The Japanese forces met little resistance and devastated the harbor. This attack resulted in eight battleships either sunk or damaged, damage to three light cruisers and damage to four destroyers in addition to damage to some auxilaries and approximately 300 aircraft either damaged or destroyed. No U.S. Pacific Fleet aircraft carriers were at the harbor at the time of Japanese attack. The following day, the United States declared war on Japan.

Simultaneously to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan also attacked U.S air bases in the Philippines. Immediately following these attacks, Japan invaded the Philippines and also the British Colonies of Hong Kong, Malaya, Borneo and Burma with the intention of seizing the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies. In a matter of months, all these territories, and more, fell to the Japanese onslaught. The British island fortress of Singapore was captured in what Churchill considered one of the most humiliating British defeats of all time.

1942: Coral Sea, Port Moresby, Midway, Guadalcanal

In May 1942, a naval attack on Port Moresby, New Guinea, was thwarted by Allied navies in the Battle of the Coral Sea. Had the capture of Port Moresby succeeded, the Japanese Navy would have been within striking range of Australia. This was both the first successful opposition to Japanese plans and the first naval battle fought only between aircraft carriers. The two sides suffered roughly equal losses. A month later the invasion of Midway Island was prevented by decoding secret Japanese messages, and hence alerted U.S. naval leaders that the target of the Japanese was Midway. American pilots sunk four Japanese carriers which the Japanese industry could not replace swiftly. The loss of many planes and skilled pilots (many of them took part in Pearl Harbor) was also difficult to redress. The Americans lost one carrier and fewer planes. It was a complete victory for the Americans and the Japanese Navy was now on the defensive.

However, in July an overland attack on Port Moresby was led along the rugged Kokoda Track. This was met with Australian reservists, many of them very young and untrained, fighting a stubborn rearguard action until the arrival of Australian regulars returning from action in North Africa, Greece and the Middle East. But amazingly, the outnumbered and untrained Australian 39th battalion, defeated the 5,000-strong Japanese army. This was one of the most significant victories in Australian military history.

Even prior to the American entry to the war, the Allied leaders had agreed that priority should be given to the defeat of Nazi Germany. Nonetheless, U.S. forces began to attack captured territories, beginning with Guadalcanal Island, against a bitter and determined Japanese defense. On 7 August 1942, the United States assaulted the island. In late August and early September, while battle raged on Guadalcanal, an amphibious Japanese attack on the eastern tip of New Guinea was met by Australian forces at Milne Bay, and the Japanese land forces suffered their first conclusive defeat. On Guadalcanal, the Japanese resistance failed in February 1943.

1943–45: Allied offensives in Asia and the Pacific

Australian and U.S. forces then undertook the prolonged campaign to retake the occupied parts of the Solomon Islands, New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, experiencing some of the toughest resistance of the war. The rest of the Solomon Islands were retaken in 1943, New Britain and New Ireland in 1944. As the Philippines were being re-taken in late 1944, the Battle of Leyte Gulf raged, arguably the largest naval battle in history. The last major offensive in the South West Pacific Area was the Borneo campaign of mid-1945, which was aimed at further isolating the remaining Japanese forces in South East Asia, and securing the release of Allied POWs.

Allied submarines and aircraft also attacked Japanese merchant shipping, depriving Japan’s industry of the raw materials it had gone to war to obtain. The effectiveness of this stranglehold increased as U.S. Marines captured islands closer to the Japanese mainland.

The Nationalist Kuomintang Army, under Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communist Chinese Army, under Mao Zedong, both opposed the Japanese occupation of China, but never truly allied against the Japanese. Conflict between Nationalist and Communist forces emerged long before the war; it continued after and, to an extent, even during the war, though more implicitly.

The Japanese had captured most of Burma, severing the Burma Road by which the Western Allies had been supplying the Chinese Nationalists. This forced the Allies to create a large sustained airlift, known as “flying the Hump”. U.S. led and trained Chinese divisions, a British division and a few thousand U.S. ground troops, cleared the Japanese forces from northern Burma so that the Ledo Road could be built to replace the Burma Road. Further south the main Japanese army in the theatre were fought to a standstill on the Burma-India frontier by the British Fourteenth Army (the “Forgotten Army”), which then counter-attacked, and having recaptured all of Burma was planning attacks towards Malaya when the war ended.

1945: Iwo Jima, Okinawa, atomic bombings, Japan surrenders

U.S. capture of islands such as Iwo Jima and Okinawa brought the Japanese homeland within range of naval and air attack. Amongst dozens of other cities, Tokyo was firebombed and on the inital attack alone upwards of 90,000 people died as the fire raced unchecked through the city. The high loss of life was attributed to the dense living conditions around production centers and the wood and paper residential construction common to that period. Later on 6 August 1945, the B-29 “Enola Gay”, piloted by Col. Paul Tibbets, dropped an atomic bomb (Little Boy) on Hiroshima, effectively destroying it. On 8 August 1945 the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, as had been agreed to at Yalta, and launched a large scale invasion of Japanese occupied Manchuria (Operation August Storm). On August 9, the B-29 “Bock’s Car”, piloted by Maj. Charles Sweeney, dropped an atomic bomb (Fat Man) on Nagasaki.

The combination of the use of atomic weapons and the new inclusion of the Soviet Union in the war were both highly responsible for the surrender of Japan, although the USSR did not declare war until August 8, 1945, after first atomic bombing had taken place.

The Japanese surrendered on August 14, 1945, signing official surrender papers on September 2, 1945, aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Japan’s surrender to the United States did not fully end the war, however, because Japan and the Soviet Union never signed a peace agreement. In the last days of the armed conflict, the Soviet Union occupied the Southern Kurile Islands, an area previously held by Japan and claimed by the Soviets. Multiple efforts [1] to bring to a peace agreement, and officially end the war, have as yet not succeeded.

Mediterranean, 1940–45

1940: Egypt and Libya

The North African Campaign began in 1940, Italian forces in Libya attacked British forces in Egypt. The aim was to make Egypt an Italian possession, especially the vital Suez Canal. British, Indian and Australian forces counterattacked (see Operation Compass), but this offensive stopped in 1941 when much of the Commonwealth forces were transferred to Greece to defend it from German attack. However, German forces (known later as the Afrika Korps) under General Erwin Rommel landed in Libya, and renewed the assault on Egypt.

1941: Syria, Lebanon, Afrika Korps to Tobruk

In June 1941, Allied forces invaded Syria and Lebanon, capturing Damascus on 17 June (see Syria-Lebanon campaign). Meanwhile Rommel’s forces advanced rapidly eastward, laying siege to the vital seaport of Tobruk. Australian and other Alllied troops in the city resisted all until relieved, but a renewed Axis offensive captured the city and drove the Eighth Army back to a line at El Alamein.

1942: First and Second Battles of El Alamein

The First Battle of El Alamein took place between July 1 and July 27, 1942. German forces had advanced to the last defensible point before Alexandria and the Suez Canal. However, they had outrun their supplies, and a Commonwealth defense stopped their thrusts. The Second Battle of El Alamein occurred between October 23 and November 3, 1942, after Bernard Montgomery had replaced Claude Auchinleck as commander of the Commonwealth forces, now known as the Eighth Army. Rommel, the brilliant German commander of the Afrika Corps, known as the “Desert Fox”, was absent for this epic battle, because he was recovering from jaundice back in Europe. Commonwealth forces took the offensive, and although they lost more tanks than the Germans began the battle with, Montgomery was ultimately triumphant.

The western Allies had the advantage of being close to their supplies during the battle. In addition, Rommel was getting little or no help by this time from the struggling Luftwaffe, which was now more tasked with defending Western European air space, and fighting the Soviet Union, than providing Rommel with support in North Africa. After the German defeat at El Alamein, Rommel made a brilliant strategic withdrawal to Tunisia. Many historians feel Rommel’s successful strategic withdrawal of the Afrika Corps from Egypt was more impressive than his earlier victories, including Tobruk, because he managed to get his whole force back intact against the overwhelming air superiority and numbers of the Commonwealth now reinforced by the Americans.

1942: Operation Torch, French North Africa

During the Arcadia Conference from December 1941 to January 1942, the Allied leaders concluded that it was essential to keep Russia in the war. This consideration led to the overall strategy “Germany First”; i.e. giving priority of knocking out Germany before Japan. This decision resulted in a long debate as to where and when to open a Second Front against Germany. The American Chiefs of Staff favoured a cross-channel (France) amphibious operation in the summer. The British opposed this because of insufficient landing craft and logistical problems. It was also thought that American forces were in a process of expansion, organisation and exercise, not capable yet of fighting an experienced German army. Only if Russia collapsed would they approve a main landing in France. Churchill put forward the idea of a small invasion in Norway or landings in French North Africa. The plan for landings in Africa were approved in July 1942.

Operation Torch was headed by General Dwight Eisenhower. The aim of Torch was to gain control of Morocco and Algiers through simultaneous landings at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers, followed a few days later with a landing at Bône, the gateway to Tunisia.

The operation was launched on 8 November 1942. The first wave was almost entirely American troops, because it was thought that the French would react more favourably to Americans than British. It was hoped that the local forces of Vichy France would put up no resistance, and submit to the authority of Free French General Henri Giraud. In fact resistance was stronger than expected, but still sporadic. In Algiers, 400 French resistance captured much of the city, though it was retaken before Allied forces could arrive. The Vichy commander, Admiral Darlan, negotiated an end to hostilities, against orders from the Vichy government. He was allowed to retain local control by the Allies, to the annoyance of Free French leaders. Hitler invaded and occupied Vichy France in response.

Rommel’s Afrika Corps was not being supplied adequately because of the loss of transport shipments caused by Allied—mostly British—navies and air forces in the Mediterranean. This lack of supplies and air support destroyed any chance of a large offensive for the Germans in Africa. Ultimately, German and Italian forces were caught in the pincers of a twin advance from Algeria and Libya. The withdrawing Germans continued to put up stiff defense, and Rommel defeated the American forces decisively at the Battle of Kasserine Pass before finishing his strategic withdrawal back to the meager German supply chain. Inevitably, advancing from both the east and west, the Allies finally defeated the German Afrika Corps on May 13, 1943. 250,000 Axis soldiers were taken prisoner.

1943: Yugoslavia and Italy

Mid-1943 brought the fifth and final German Sutjeska offensive against the Yugoslav Partisans before the invasion and subsequent capitulation of Italy, the other major occupying force in Yugoslavia.

Newly captured North Africa was used as a springboard for the invasion of Sicily on 10 July 1943. On July 25 Mussolini was fired from office by the King of Italy, allowing a new government to take power. Having captured Sicily, the Allies invaded mainland Italy on 3 September 1943. Italy surrendered on 8 September, but German forces continued to fight. Allied forces advanced north, but were stalled for the winter at the Gustav Line, until they broke through in the Battle of Monte Cassino. Rome was captured on 5 June 1944.

Home front

Home front is the name given to the activities of the civilians in a state of total war (sometimes referred to by the United States as the American Theater of Operations).

In Britain women joined the work force in jobs that the men overseas used to occupy. Food, clothing, petrol and other items were rationed. Access to luxuries was severely restricted, though there was also a significant black market. Families also grew victory gardens, small home vegetable gardens, to supply themselves with food. Civilians also served as Air Raid Wardens, volunteer emergency services and other critical functions. Schools and organizations held scrap drives and money collections to help the war effort. Many things were conserved to turn into weapons later, such as fat to turn into nitroglycerin. A notable case was the collection of street railings as scrap iron, which changed the ‘feel’ of many older urban streets. This metal, however, was unsuitable for re-use and subsequently dumped.

In the United States and Canada women also joined the workforce to replace men who had joined the forces, though in lesser numbers. Franklin D. Roosevelt stated that the efforts of civilians at home to support the war through personal sacrifice was as critical to winning the war as the efforts of the soldiers themselves.

In Germany, at least for the first part of the war, there were surprisingly few restrictions on civilian activities. Most goods were freely available. This was due in large part to the reduced access to certain luxuries already experienced by German civilians prior to the beginning of hostilities; the war made some less available but many were in short supply to begin with. For example, the famous Volkswagen “People’s Cars” that Hitler had promised the German people were not actually produced until after the war. The factories meant for the cars were instead used to manufacture war materials. It was not until comparatively late in the war that the civilian German population was effectively organised to support the war effort. For example, women’s labour was not mobilised as thoroughly as in Britain or the US. Foreign slave labour was more significant as a substitute for the males enlisted into the armed forces.

Civilian populations were heavily involved in war production and subject to propaganda from both sides.

Genocide, atrocities, war crimes, and internment

Acts of genocide against or mass internment of civilian populations occurred in the territories and/or occupied territories of most great powers of the war, including Germany, Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Some of these were so unimaginably immense and horrific that they changed the psyche of Western civilization; bringing to an end the optimistic beliefs in continual improvement in human nature which had supported western civilization in its education and imperialism up to that point.

Internment and genocide

The worst conditions were imposed in Nazi concentration camps. Most camps were specialized into variously forced labour camps, starvation camps (Buchenwald) or later extermination camps (Treblinka, Sobibor); though Auschwitz, the largest and most infamous, had a separate camp devoted to each purpose. In the Holocaust “Death-camps” large numbers of people were killed using gas, usually immediately after they disembarked from trains under the pretense of being given a shower to prevent disease. Grounds for this mass murder were variously racist (Jews, Roma [Gypsies]) “eugenic” (mental patients, homosexuals), and military/political opposition: initially anarchist and communist militant opponents, then ideological opponents (pacifists, Jehovah’s Witnesses), then citizens of occupied countries (like Poles), later Soviet POWs and then military and underground opposition. Jews were the largest group of people killed, approximately 6 million. Next in reducing order were Poles, other Slavs, Soviet POWs and then other groups.

Conditions as horrific as, or even worse than, Nazi concentration camps were in the USSR’s gulags. Japanese POW camps also had high death rates. Many citizens of occupied countries like Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia as well as German POW’s and even Soviet citizens themselves died in the Soviet Gulags or Labor camps, along with many opponents of Stalin’s regime and large proportions of some ethnic groups (particularly Chechens). Many Japanese POW camps were used as labour camps and starvation conditions among the mainly U.S. and Commonwealth prisoners were little better than many German concentration camps.

Thousands of Japanese Americans were interned by the U.S. (under Executive Order 9066) as well as Canadian governments causing postwar outrage and compensation claims.

Atrocity and war crimes

Few forms of atrocity were excluded from the Eastern European theatre, including the killing of millions of Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians in the name of Lebensraum, of over a million Yugoslavs in disproportionate reprisal killings for Partisan activity, plus medical experimentation on concentration camp inmates. The population of Kiev dropped by 90% between the early 1930s and 1945, partly from starvation under Stalin, mostly under the Nazis.

Japan was not a signatory to the Geneva Convention until after the war, and millions of Asian civilians and Allied POWs were killed by its military and/or used as forced labour. The most notorious atrocities occurred in China, including the Nanjing Massacre and Unit 731′s experiments with biological warfare in Manchuria, with a view to killing a large part of the Chinese population. Japanese war crimes also included rape, pillage, murder, cannibalism and forcing female civilians to become sex slaves, known as “comfort women” .

In 1940, the Soviet Union murdered over 22,000 citizens of Poland, mainly Polish officers, but also scientists, politicians, doctors, lawyers, priests and others. This genocide is known as the Katyn Massacre. Soviet occupation of Poland between 1939 and 1941 resulted in the death or deportation of least 1.8 million former Polish citizens.

Though Article XXII of the draft Hague Rules of Air Warfare (1923) stated “aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population, of destroying or damaging private property not of a military character, or of injuring non-combatants” was to be prohibited, these rules were not ratified by the Powers. Germany has been bombing civilian targets from the first days of the war. In the first months of the war the British Government ordered the RAF to adhere strictly to the draft rules, but this restriction was progressively relaxed and abandoned altogether in 1942. By 1945 the strategic bombing of cities had been employed extensively by all sides. German bombing of Poland, Britain and the USSR initially caused shock but was soon exceeded by allied bombing. The deliberate firestorm bombing of Japanese and German cities, including Tokyo, Hamburg and Dresden by Anglo-American forces and the American atomic bombing of 2 Japanese civilian populations Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have been subject to criticism during the post-war era as possible war crimes; no action was taken against those responsible.

From 1945 to 1951, German and Japanese officials and personnel, but no Allied personnel, were prosecuted by Allied tribunals for war crimes. Accused of genocide and atrocities, many German officials were tried at the Nuremburg Trials, and many Japanese officials at the Tokyo War Crime Trial and other war crimes trials in the Asia-Pacific region. Such a trial for Allied war crimes, especially Soviet war crimes, has not taken place.

Technology in World War II

The massive research and development demands of the war, including the Manhattan Project’s efforts to quickly achieve a working nuclear weapon design, greatly impacted the scientific community, among other things creating a network of national laboratories in the United States. In addition, the pressing need for numerous time-critical calculations for various projects like code breaking and ballistics tables accentuated the need for the development of electronic computer technology. While the war stimulated many technologies, such as radio and radar development, it retarded related yet non-critical fields such as television in the major powers.

The Jet aircraft age began during the war with the development of the Heinkel He 178, the first true turbojet, the Messerschmitt 262—the first jet in combat, and the Gloster Meteor, the first Allied jet fighter. The Nazi terror weapon, the V-2 rocket, was the first step into the space age as its trajectory took it through the stratosphere, higher and faster than any aircraft. It led directly to the development of the ICBM. Wernher Von Braun led the V-2 development team and later immigrated to the United States where he contributed to the development of the Saturn V rocket, which took men to the moon in 1969.

All military technology progressed at a faster pace even than modern computers, and over six years there was a disorientating rate of change in combat in everything from aircraft to small arms. The best jet fighters at the end of the war easily outflew any of the leading aircraft on 1939, such as the Spitfire Mark I. However, despite their technological edge, German jets were overwhelmed by Allied air superiority, frequently being destroyed on or near the airstrip. Other nations’ jet aircraft, such as the British Gloster Meteor, did not significantly distinguish themselves from top-line piston-driven aircraft. The best late-war tanks, such as the Soviet JS-3 heavy tank or the German Panther medium tank, handily outclassed the best tanks of 1939 such as Panzer IVs. The early war bombers that caused such carnage would almost all have been shot down in 1945, many with one shot, by radar aimed, proximity fuse detonated anti-aircraft fire, just as the 1941 “invincible fighter”, the Zero, had by 1944 become the “turkey” of the “Marianas Turkey Shoot”. This future shock was capped by the atomic bomb.

The chaotic impotence of opposed amphibious landings typical of WWI disasters was overcome; the Higgins boat, primary troop landing craft, the DUKW, a six-wheel-drive amphibious truck, and amphibious tanks were developed by the Western Allies to enable beach landing attacks, and the organization and coordination of amphibious assaults coupled with the resources necessary to sustain them became a science.

Consequences

In contrast to World War I, the Western victors in the Second World War did not demand compensation from the defeated nations. On the contrary, a plan created by U. S. Secretary of State George Marshall, the “European Recovery Program”, better known as the Marshall Plan, called for the U.S. Congress to allocate billions of dollars for the reconstruction of Europe. Also as part of the effort to rebuild global capitalism and spur post-war reconstruction, the Bretton Woods system was put into effect after the war.

The end of the war is also seen by many as the end of Britain’s position as a global superpower and the emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union as the dominant powers in the world. Friction had been building up between the two before the end of the war, and with the collapse of Nazi Germany relations spiraled downward. The Cold War had begun.

At the end of the second world war, the European economy had collapsed, and 70% of the European industrial infrastructure was destroyed. There was also a moral crisis, because people could not understand how Western civilisation could produce death camps and atom bombs.

Millions of refugees were homeless. After the war, some German and Japanese leaders were tried for crimes against humanity. On the political side, the war increased the strength of independence movements in the European powers’ African, Asian, and American colonies, and most of them became independent in the following twenty years.

United Nations and the Cold War

Since the League of Nations had obviously failed to prevent the war, a new international order was constructed. In 1945 the United Nations was founded. Also, in order to prevent such devastating war from occurring again and to establish a lasting peace in Europe, the European Coal and Steel Community was born in 1951 (Treaty of Paris (1951)), the predecessor of the European Union.

In the Paris Peace Treaty, the Soviet Union’s enemies, Hungary, Finland and Romania, were required to pay war reparations of $300,000,000 each (in 1938 dollars) to the Soviet Union. Italy was required to pay $360,000,000, shared chiefly between Greece, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.

In the areas occupied by Western Allied troops, democratic governments were created; in the areas occupied by Soviet troops, including the territories of former Allies like Poland, communist puppet governments were created, giving rise to the western betrayal sentiment in many of those countries. Soviet pressure further delayed their economic development, forcing them to ignore the Marshall Plan. Germany was partitioned into four zones of occupation, with the American, British and French zones grouped as West Germany and the Soviet zone as East Germany. Austria was once again separated from Germany and it, too, was divided into four zones of occupation, which eventually re-united and became the state of Austria. The Cold War had begun, and soon NATO and the Warsaw Pact would form.

The repatriation, pursuant to the terms of the Yalta Conference, of two million Russian soldiers serving under Germany, who had surrendered to advancing American and British forces, resulted for the most part in their deaths.

Casualties

Estimates on the precise number vary widely, although most experts calculate the full civilian and combatant losses at 55 million, including the estimated 11 million lives lost due to the Holocaust, consisting of 5.6–5.9 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews made up of Poles, Roma, homosexuals, communists, dissidents, Afro-Germans, the disabled, Soviet prisoners as well as others.

Specifically, Allied forces suffered approximately 14.2 million deaths, and Axis forces suffered approximately 6.8 million deaths, Germany specifically had 5 million. The Soviet Union had the largest death toll, suffering an estimated 20 million civilian casualties along with 8 million Soviet soldiers killed.

In total, about 12 million soldiers lost their lives in the Second World War along with about 45 million civilians.

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