extension of the cold war case study vietnam essay

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HISTORY T1 W3 Gr. 12: THE EXTENSION OF THE COLD WAR: CASE STUDY: VIETNAM

ESSAY: THE EXTENSION OF THE COLD WAR: CASE STUDY: VIETNAM

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Extension of the Cold War Case Study Vietnam Essay – Grade 12 History

Extension of the Cold War Case Study Vietnam Essay – Grade 12 History Answer Guide based on the memo.

All the military might of the United States of America’s army could not defeat a small nation of Vietnamese peasants.

Critically discuss this statement in the context of the military strategies that both the United States of America and the Vietcong used in Vietnam between 1963 and 1973.

Answer Guide:

Plan and construct an original argument based on relevant evidence using analytical and interpretative skills.

Candidates must critically discuss why the USA was unable to defeat a small nation of Vietnamese peasants during the Vietnam War between 1963 and 1973.

An outline of the tactics and strategies employed by the USA’s army and the Vietmihn/Vietcong (National Liberation Front) during the war should be highlighted.

MAIN ASPECTS

Candidates may include the following aspects in their response:

Introduction: Candidates should critically discuss the statement and develop a relevant line of argument.

ELABORATION

USA strategies:

• Reasons for the USA’s deployment of troops to Vietnam
• Villagisation/strategic hamlet programme (USA and South Vietnam government created new villages and attempted to separate villagers (farmers) from guerrillas) of which it was a failure
• Gulf of Tonkin resolution (1964) gave President Johnson wide military powers resulting in the escalation of warfare in Vietnam
• The USA’s mass aerial bombing – “Operation Rolling Thunder”
• Operation Ranch Hand (used chemicals to destroy forests (Agent Orange) and crops (Agent Blue)
• US sent young and inexperienced soldiers to Vietnam
• US used search and destroy missions (My Lai massacre) to destroy villages supported by Viet Cong (this resulted in a number of civilian deaths)
• The role of the media, students and disarmament movements in bringing pressure on the US government to withdraw from Vietnam
• President Nixon’s Vietnamisation policy/including WHAM (Winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese) was an attempt by the USA to withdraw from war and save face
• The USA withdraw all troops by 1973 and North Vietnam took control of Saigon in 1975
• Any other relevant response

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Vietcong strategies:

• North Vietnam received military support from the USSR and China so the Vietminh and Vietcong had access to some modern weapons
• Guerrilla warfare was effectively used by the Vietcong, supported by Vietminh from the north and used tactics such as booby traps, underground tunnels, hit and run and sabotage
• Tet offensive (1968) was launched by Vietminh and Vietcong against urban centres and USA bases throughout Vietnam
• The local Vietnamese population supported the Vietcong to liberate their country
• Ho Chi Minh Trail used by Vietminh (North) to support Vietcong in the south
• The Vietcong increased its support base because of the tactics used against the USA soldiers
• Vietnamese were united in the defence of their country
• Conclusion: Candidates should tie-up their arguments with relevant conclusions.

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Extension of the Cold War Case Study Vietnam Essay – Grade 12 History

Extension of the Cold War Case Study Vietnam Essay – Grade 12 History Answer Guide based on the memo.

All the military might of the United States of America’s army could not defeat a small nation of Vietnamese peasants.

Critically discuss this statement in the context of the military strategies that both the United States of America and the Vietcong used in Vietnam between 1963 and 1973.

Answer Guide:

Plan and construct an original argument based on relevant evidence using analytical and interpretative skills.

Candidates must critically discuss why the USA was unable to defeat a small nation of Vietnamese peasants during the Vietnam War between 1963 and 1973.

An outline of the tactics and strategies employed by the USA’s army and the Vietmihn/Vietcong (National Liberation Front) during the war should be highlighted.

MAIN ASPECTS

Candidates may include the following aspects in their response:

Introduction: Candidates should critically discuss the statement and develop a relevant line of argument.

ELABORATION

USA strategies:

• Reasons for the USA’s deployment of troops to Vietnam
• Villagisation/strategic hamlet programme (USA and South Vietnam government created new villages and attempted to separate villagers (farmers) from guerrillas) of which it was a failure
• Gulf of Tonkin resolution (1964) gave President Johnson wide military powers resulting in the escalation of warfare in Vietnam
• The USA’s mass aerial bombing – “Operation Rolling Thunder”
• Operation Ranch Hand (used chemicals to destroy forests (Agent Orange) and crops (Agent Blue)
• US sent young and inexperienced soldiers to Vietnam
• US used search and destroy missions (My Lai massacre) to destroy villages supported by Viet Cong (this resulted in a number of civilian deaths)
• The role of the media, students and disarmament movements in bringing pressure on the US government to withdraw from Vietnam
• President Nixon’s Vietnamisation policy/including WHAM (Winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese) was an attempt by the USA to withdraw from war and save face
• The USA withdraw all troops by 1973 and North Vietnam took control of Saigon in 1975
• Any other relevant response

Vietcong strategies:

• North Vietnam received military support from the USSR and China so the Vietminh and Vietcong had access to some modern weapons
• Guerrilla warfare was effectively used by the Vietcong, supported by Vietminh from the north and used tactics such as booby traps, underground tunnels, hit and run and sabotage
• Tet offensive (1968) was launched by Vietminh and Vietcong against urban centres and USA bases throughout Vietnam
• The local Vietnamese population supported the Vietcong to liberate their country
• Ho Chi Minh Trail used by Vietminh (North) to support Vietcong in the south
• The Vietcong increased its support base because of the tactics used against the USA soldiers
• Vietnamese were united in the defence of their country
• Conclusion: Candidates should tie-up their arguments with relevant conclusions.

Questions and Answers

My Courses has a large Questions and Answers repository for the most popular High School and Tertiary Schools subjects. This comes in handy when doing your revision or preparing for exams, tests, research tasks, and assignments.

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Viet nam and the cold war: a short bibliographical essay.

The Cold War in Asia blew the wars for post-colonial Việt Nam out of all proportion, magnified the centuries-old web of Vietnamese diaspora into a train wreck, and laid the ground for post-socialist transition to an especially lively civil society under abiding authoritarian rule. These fascinating stories are well served by world scholarship, but best told by Vietnamese witnesses, who testify through daily life experiences to the abstractions of policy and research.

Duong Van Mai Elliott’s The Sacred Willow , the history of her family from the eighteenth through the end of the twentieth century, introduces both the Vietnamese sense of the national past and accurately reflects mainstream scholarship. Her narrative is too substantial for most classrooms, but as preparation, it will situate the non-specialist instructor in a local view of the Vietnamese nation.

Elliott, a former RAND researcher in the war between Sài Ģòn and Hà Nội, researched and interviewed her extensive family to flesh out the story of Việt Nam since the dawn of the Nguyen dynasty (1802–1945). Her procedure is Tolstoyan, proceeding from set pieces on the stage of domestic life to social science overview, providing many dramatic passages that can be taught, as well as citations to the scholarly literature for research projects.

Most teachers in survey courses can bring only one or two Vietnamese texts into the classroom. There is a rich opportunity to select those exact texts that direct attention to Vietnamese views of the topic of the course. Despite ritual laments of scarcity, in fact a great many texts have been published in English over the last forty years. Improved access through interlibrary loan, Google, and dealer networks have made them all available with planning.

Two tools are at hand on the Web to guide the search for the right few texts. John C. Schafer’s Vietnamese Perspectives on the War in Vietnam provides a classified, annotated view of the translated literature available as of 1996. Schafer taught in Huế during the war and researched Vietnamese literature on his own during a career teaching college English despite a heavy class load. His two-handed grasp of both the subject matter and its possibilities in the US classroom is unmatched. The Yale University Council on Southeast Asian Studies, who published the book, now makes it available on their Web site. 1

Once oriented by Elliott and Schafer, an instructor can search further in Wikivietlit , the online encyclopedia of the Viet Nam Literature Project. 2 It is intended for those literate in Vietnamese and French as well as English, but automated categories provide lists of authors translated into English by genre and topic. Author entries provide both backgrounds for instructors and avenues for student research.

I made my own suggestions in “Not a War” in the fall 1997 issue of Education About Asia . 3 In the two stories by Le Minh Khue, I discussed teaching “Distant Stars” and “Last Rain of the Monsoon,” which depict two of the three most important Vietnamese aspects of the Cold War in Asia, the hot war in Việt Nam and the new society it created. Le Minh Khue, one of the most prestigious book editors in her country, has since worked with novelist Wayne Karlin and Curbstone Press to bring out a lengthy series of such work by her colleagues.

Where course content includes the memory of the war, an instructor might also consider works by foreigners who scrupulously attend to the testimony and interpretation of non-writers.

Where course content includes the memory of the war, an instructor might also consider works by foreigners who scrupulously attend to the testimony and interpretation of non-writers. Martha Hess’s Then the Americans Came , from a variety of Southerners; Lady Borton’s After Sorrow , from communist women in the North and Central regions; and, Heonik Kwon’s astonishing report of the afterlife of deceased Vietnamese, Ghosts of War in Viet Nam , are rich candidates.

Other texts, mostly memoir, address the third great consequence of the Cold War in Asia for the Vietnamese—their intensified diaspora after 1975. These texts range from those by adult emigrants with a firm grasp on the home country, such as Le Ly Haslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places , Lucy Nguyen’s Dragon Child , Quang Van Nguyen and Marjorie Pivar’s Fourth Uncle in the Mountain —to writers from the next generation, such as Andrew X. Pham and le thi diem thuy [ sic ], for whom the war is fantasy and family secrets. Nguyen Qui Duc’s Where the Ashes Are and Quang X. Pham’s A Sense of Duty combine the two impulses, acting on their memories to investigate the family past and its public context.

In this brief introduction to teachable resources in English on the Cold War in Việt Nam, my largest point is that no longer are there just a handful of accessible texts to consider for teaching, whose limitations themselves determined the content of many past courses. There are now dozens of teachable texts in print or online from which the instructor may choose. Working through Elliott for a panoramic Vietnamese view of the Cold War, with Schafer’s bibliography, and the Wikivietlit encyclopedia, a motivated instructor can find exactly the right works for his or her students.

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1. John C. Schafer, Yale University Council on Southeast Asian Studies , “Vietnamese Studies on the War in Vietnam,” online at http://www.yale.edu/seas/bibliography/.

2. Wikivietlit, Viet Nam Literature Project, at http://vietnamlit.org/wiki/index.php?title=Wikivietlit .

3. Dan Duffy, “Not a War. Suggestions from a College Reading Course in Fiction and Poetry from Vietnam and Vietnamese Americans,” EAA , 2:2 (Fall 1997), 9.

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