north vietnam soldiers called what was the result of the vietnam war

In another delta province there is a woman who has both arms burned off by napalm and her eyelids so badly burned that she cannot close them. A temple of the Cao Dai religious sect in the same area had been bombed twice this year. 'In Bien Hoa province south of Saigon on August 15 United States aircraft accidentally bombed a Buddhist pagoda and a Catholic church… it was the third time their pagoda had been bombed in 1965. On September 6, another press dispatch from Saigon: But three out of four patients seeking treatment in a Vietnamese hospital afterward for burns from napalm, or jellied gasoline, were village women. The American contention is that they were Vietcong soldiers. Many Vietnamese - one estimate as high as 500 - were killed by the strikes. On June 5, 1965, the New York Times carried a dispatch from Saigon:Īs the Communists withdrew from Quangngai last Monday, United States jet bombers pounded the hills into which they were headed. Tiny glimmerings of the massive human suffering under this bombardment came to the outside world.

By early 1968, there were more than 500,000 American troops there, and the US Air Force was dropping bombs at a rate unequalled in history. Historian Howard Zinn describes the conflict from that point on:ĭuring 1965, over 200,000 American soldiers were sent to South Vietnam, and in 1966, 200,000 more. The USSR and China were funding the Viet Cong while the US channelled funds to the South, and in 1965 the US sent combat troops to the region.

South Vietnam repeatedly blocked the elections to prevent the inevitable Communist victory.Ī Communist insurgency erupted in 1957, which was largely kept under control until 1963 when the pro-independence Viet Cong inflicted a large defeat on South Vietnamese forces at the Battle of Ap Bac and full-scale war began to break out. Following the partitioning of Vietnam into the pro-independence Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North, and the US puppet state the Republic of Vietnam in the South in 1954 (see our short history of Vietnam from 1945 to 1957) elections were due to be held on re-unification.

North vietnam soldiers called what was the result of the vietnam war