Vietnam-+Path

=Vietnam War Causes=

From the late 1800s, France ruled Vietnam.The Vietnamese never liked it though. In 1930, there was a revolutionary leader named Ho Chi Minh, who called for Vietnamese independence. He united three Communist groups to form the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP). The ICP organized protests but the French government arrested Communists and executed some leaders. In 1940, Japan took over Indochina. The next year Ho Chi Minh, who was living in China, returned secretly to Vietnam and hid in a jungle camp. The ICP, under his command, joined with other nationalists to form an organization called Viet Minh. They fought to make Vietnam independent. The U.S. was Japan's enemy in WWII, so it helped the Viet Minh with their fight for independence. In 1945, Vietnam was independent, but France tried to get Vietnam back so a war broke out in 1946.

Meanwhile France and Vietnam were fighting, the U.S. was having problems with the Soviets and the Cold War. President Truman followed the policy of containment to stop Communism from spreading. In 1949, Communists took control of China. The Americans were worried about Communism spreading, so when France asked the U.S. for support in their war against Vietnam, the U.S. agreed.

France was not succesful in defeating the Viet Minh, so both reached and agreement called the Geneva Accords which stated that Vietnam would be temporarily divided in two along the 17th parallel. Ho Chi Minh controlled the North side, but Ngo Dinh Diem, an anti-communist, became prime-minister and then president of South Vietnam. Thousands of anti-communists in Vietnam fled to the South. Diem's government was corrupt; he had opponents, the South Vietnamese Communists, who joined another South Vietnamese group to form the National Liberation Front, or the Viet Cong. They fought to overthrow Diem, and North Vietnam supported them.

President Kennedy continued to send military advisers and equipment to South Vietnam, Kennedy faced some Cold War crises that made him continue his fight against communism in Vietnam. South opposition to Diem increased, and Diem was overthrown, he was killed. THen, Kennedy was assassinated too, and Johnson became president. He did not want communism to win in Vietnam, so he incresed U.S. efforts. Johnson's military advisers made a plan to bomb North Vietnam, but didn't, until a shooting incident in the Gulf of Tonkin gave Congress approval to the plan. Johnson asked the Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave permission to the U.S. to use military forces in Vietnam. It was passed. In 1965, due to the threat of the Domino Theory, which said that if a country became communist, all of the other countries around it would (Vietnam and all of Southeast Asia), and other threats, the U.S. sent its first Marine shipments in 1965.