Introduction

Hi. I'm Andrew Preston.

I'm a history professor at Cambridge University,

and I'm here to give a lecture about the stalemate of the

American war in Vietnam from nineteen sixty five to the very

end of nineteen sixty seven.

In my previous lecture,

on the process of escalation from nineteen sixty three to

nineteen sixty five,

I examined why the United States decided to escalate the

war. And I I I couched that process of escalation as a

series of questions and a series of puzzles to try and

explain something that's actually very difficult to

explain why did the United States decide that the fate of

South Vietnam was so important to the security and interests

of the United States.

When there were so many reasons not to think that way,

and there were so many reasons that other people offered,

why the United States shouldn't go to war in Vietnam.

And I want to return to that idea of looking at the process

of stalemate also as a through a series of puzzling questions.

In July nineteen sixty five,

Linda Johnson Americanized the war in Vietnam.

That is He took the fighting of the Vietnam war over or took it

away from the Vietnamese.

The South Vietnamese, of course,

were still major partners in waging the war and they waged

the war with the United States.

They weren't incidental and they weren't completely sidelined.

They were major players in the war but in July nineteen sixty

five, the war became an American show. And so how was

it that the most powerful country the world had ever seen

by almost any measurement that you could bring to bear.

How was it that this extremely powerful country couldn't

defeat such a poor underdeveloped country that had

just come out of colonialism and a brutal process of colonialism,

as well. Was divided in half in nineteen fifty four, and then

had trouble modernizing in the nineteen fifties and through

the nineteen sixties.

So by the time we get to the process of Americanization in

July nineteen sixty five, North Vietnam, the United States'

main adversary was poor. It was backwards economically.

It didn't have an industrial infrastructure.

It didn't really have,

a lot of wherewithal you would think.

To fight a major war against the United States. So how is this possible?

How could the US?

How could the US so powerful and that built South Vietnam

into such a powerful state?

Lose to the North Vietnamese and the Vietnam.

That puzzle becomes more complex when you think about

just how much firepower the US brought to bear in the war.

Consider that the United States dropped more than four times

the amount of bomb tonnage on Indochina in between nineteen

sixty five and nineteen seventy three,

then all parties in all of World War II dropped. Around

the entire planet from nineteen thirty nine to nineteen forty five.

It's just absolutely mind boggling when you think about

it like that.

The United States also committed over a half million

troops, battle hardened, tested troops,

supplied by the most technologically advanced

military in the entire world, all to a very,

very small country, not just Vietnam, but half of Vietnam,

to South Vietnam, where they were fighting.

Consider that the United States built up the Arvin, the ARVM,

the army of the Republic of Vietnam,

into one of the world's largest fighting forces and built the

South Vietnamese air force into one of the world's largest so

much so that this tiny country, South Vietnam,

had ended up having the world's fourth largest air force,

by the time the war came to a close.

So when you compare the amount of firepower,

that the US had on its side and with South Vietnam.

And you compare that to what the North Vietnamese and the

National Liberation front or Vietnam as it was nicknamed.

Had in the mid nineteen sixties.

It just wasn't by any empirical measurement.

It shouldn't have been a fair fight.

And yet, at the end of this process, in nineteen seventy

three, when the US pulled out, and then nineteen seventy five,

when South Vietnam fell and North Vietnam reunified the

country under socialist rule to reunify the country into the

socialist Republic of Vietnam.

By the time we get to that point, the US is completely lost.

And all of its objectives that it was pursuing in the war went

up and smoked. So how do we get there?

And the basic answer is in the specific context and specific

conditions of the war in Vietnam,

American strengths weren't strengths,

and North Vietnam's weaknesses, its economic backwardness,

North Vietnam's weaknesses

weren't weaknesses.

In fact, the opposite was true. In the context of Vietnam,

American strengths

were actually weaknesses

and communist weaknesses

were actually strengths.

And it's that mismatch

a mismatch that we don't normally think of as a

mismatch, that actually communist weakness was a

strength, and American strength was actually a weakness.

It was that mismatch.

And also America's inability to identify that mismatch and the

communist stability to identify that mismatch and then base

their strategy on it.

That's what ended up turning the tide of the war and

enabling the Vietnamese communists to pull off an

incredible feat of defeating the most powerful country the

world had seen up until that point.