— Ch. 1 · Escalation of Conflict —
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
~11 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
In March 1956, North Vietnamese leadership approved tentative measures to revive the southern insurgency. A communist-led uprising began against Ngo Dinh Diem's government in April 1957. The North Vietnamese Communist Party approved a people's war on the South at a session in January 1959. On July 28, North Vietnamese forces invaded Laos to maintain and upgrade the Ho Chi Minh trail. By September 1960, COSVN gave an order for a full-scale coordinated uprising by the Viet Cong. One-third of the population soon lived in areas under communist control. About 40,000 communist soldiers infiltrated from North Vietnam into the south from 1961 to 1963.
Throughout 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was concerned that the South Vietnamese regime was losing the war. Such concerns intensified after Diem was overthrown and killed in a CIA-supported coup on the 2nd of November 1963. On December 19, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara visited Saigon and reported to Lyndon B. Johnson that the situation was very disturbing. He stated current trends would lead to neutralization or a Communist-controlled state within two or three months. McNamara further reported that the Viet Cong were winning the war as they controlled larger percentages of the population and greater amounts of territory.
In response to McNamara's report, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended U.S. intervention. Air Force commander General Curtis LeMay called for a strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam. He said the United States was swatting flies when it should be going after the manure pile. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell D. Taylor, called South Vietnam pivotal to the worldwide confrontation with Communism. Taylor argued that allowing South Vietnam to fall would damage American durability, resolution, and trustworthiness. He claimed all of Asia might then be lost to Communism.
The journalist Stanley Karnow wrote that Taylor had offered an inflated version of the domino theory. Johnson feared losing South Vietnam would cause him to be branded soft on Communism. This fear could end the career of any American politician at the time. Johnson was more motivated by domestic policy concerns than foreign policy reasons. He worried a new McCarthy-type Republican politician would emerge and derail his domestic reforms. The instability of South Vietnamese politics made it impossible for the Army of Republic of Vietnam to focus on the war. Another coup took place in Saigon on the 30th of January 1964, when General Nguyen Khanh overthrew General Duong Van Minh.
Starting in 1961, the Central Intelligence Agency trained squads of South Vietnamese volunteers. They infiltrated them into North Vietnam with the aim of starting an anti-Communist guerrilla war. Of the 80 teams infiltrated into North Vietnam in 1963, all were captured. One CIA agent later said they were butchering their own allies. In January 1964, Johnson approved Operation 34A to step up the pace of covert war against North Vietnam. Starting the 1st of February 1964, South Vietnamese commandos began maritime raids on coastal North Vietnam under American naval operational command.