Why did the Vietnam War happen?Does its legacy last till today?
You can probably trace the beginning of the Vietnam War to 1945. Prior to 1945 Vietnam was controlled by the French. During WWII it was controlled by the Japanese. The U.S. supported resistance efforts in Vietnam against the Japanese. The resistance leader was Ho Chi Minh. It was the hope of Ho that after the war the U.S. would support returning the country to the Vietnamese. However, the U.S. supported French interests. Ho then turned his attention to the French defeating them at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. President Eisenhower supported a popular vote scheduled for 1956 that would determine the leader of Vietnam. However, it became evident that Ho Chi Minh would win any election over the corrupt government of South Vietnam. Eisenhower withdrew his support for the elections as Ho was a well known communist. In my opinion while he was a communist he was first and last a nationalist. The U.S. then began to support South Vietnam with money and military equipment. The U.S.
The Vietnam war was developed by John F. Kennedy and his vice president Lyndon B. Johnson after Kennedy’s death enacted the war. They thought that it was the only way to stop the spread of communism in South Eastern Asia. The Democrats thought it would have been an easy war, but later found that the Soviets were helping the North Vietnamese Army greatly, and their carefully implemented Guerrilla warfare strategy was slowly killing off American soldiers in large numbers. After a while, the US began to implement stronger attacks against Vietnam, carpet bombing the country side, and using harsher tactics to stop the vietcong. After protests of anti-war demonstrations and public support for the war fading away, the government was forced to withdraw, even though it had begun to win the war. The Tet offensive by the NVA was unsuccessful and the marines had fought them back hard.
