The use and evolution of guerilla warfare in the Vietnamese war

The use and evolution of guerilla warfare in the Vietnamese war

Introduction

The guerilla warfare in the Vietnam War was one of the deadliest strategies used by the North Vietnamese forces. The guerilla warfare was a very unconventional style of combat, where the groups of stealthy combatants used the element of surprise to eliminate their opponents. This tactic was widely used by the North Vietnamese Communists, known as the Vietcong. Several critics of the war state that the war was fought without any plan, goal, or any strategy. The guerilla warfare was heavily used by the North Vietnamese and was misunderstood by the United States military. The causes of the Vietnamese war were derived from the symptoms, components, and the consequences of the Cold War. This paper will further define the warfare of its use and evolution and the tactics of the warfare used (Huynh et al., 2015, p11).

The evolution of the guerilla war

In its development, in the ancient world, this kind of warfare was mentioned indirectly by the Greeks but usually as hit and run acts of beating the enemy. However, there were no many examples of guerilla warfare in ancient Greek warfare. In the Vietnamese war the struggle began between Vietnam and France; the French did not want to relinquish their control of the country. Then the United States got involved in Vietnam in the year 1959 and remained until 1973. When the US got involved, their main aim was to support the French and the South Vietnamese. The French later pulled out, but the US continued the fight with the grand attempt to stop the domino effect. The domino effect was based on the idea that communism should continue spreading to the neighboring countries (Burns et al., 2017, p39)

How the war was fought

After the non-election of 1956, the Viet Minh had become much active military; their guerillas called the Viet Cong attacked their targets in the South. They used a 1000 mile Ho ChiMinh Trail along the border with Laos with a considerable forest coverage that made it hard for them to be detected from the air. The Viet Cong got a thorough training from their commander Gap, who had learned several tactics from the Chinese communists in their fight against the National Chinese Forces(Burns et al., 2017, p 63).

Guerilla warfare is very unconventional, and it, however, refers to small conflicts where groups of stealthy combatants use the aspects of surprise in eliminated the opponent and their threats. This tactic was widely applied by the North Vietnamese communist’s, also referred to as the Vietcong. During some of the ambushes, the Vietcong guerilla fighters would keenly sneak on unaware US troops, attack them and quickly leave before they could get captured. They would also pose as farmers or citizens; then, they would give a surprise attack on the US troops when least expected. Ho Chi Minh, a Vietnamese Marxist revolutionary leader and also the president of Vietnam, would supply the Vietcong with weaponry. He ordered the construction of a 200mile long tunnel to be dug to help the guerilla fighters in their ability to move from place to place without getting detected by the American Army (Giap, 2015, p 8).

By the year 1965, the Vietcong soldiers had access to the Chinese versions of the AK-47; they were also equipped by the heavy and light machine guns. They were using the heavy machine guns as anti-aircraft weapons because they were most effective on the US helicopters. The booby traps and land mines weapons were used in the North Vietnamese villages. The Vietcong also got assistance from other outside sources; whey would walk around scavenging for the unexploded American land mines and bombs and later use them on the American troops (Giap, 2015, p 26).

When the Americans did enter the war they planned on means of winning using the traditional methods, meanings that the war would only be women through conquering a land. However, the US troops were used in juggling the terrain and the general Westmoreland that the only means that the war would be won was only through the methods of attritions. This had the meaning that war was not to be women by those who has the more land but rather those who were able to eliminate the opponent during the process of the war (Huynh et al., 2015, p 14). The American soldiers were t this time very successful in using this method; they had to kill twice as many soldiers from Vietnam as they had lost in the war. However, the style of fighting did catch the attention of many peace groups in the US because it targeted mostly civilians on an equal measure. Various riots and protests did occur throughout America.

Traps, tunnels, and support from peasants

The Vietcong had an experience of the guerilla while fighting the Japanese and the French after World War II; they were therefore very familiar with the climate and the terrain of the regions. Using the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which stretched from North Vietnam to the South, they kept their forces supplied (Huynh et al., 2015, p 19). The Vietcong made sure that they picked battles they would win. Weapons included the swords and draggers and the explosives they obtained from the Americans to ambush patrols. The bobby traps used were made from the pointed bamboo sticks, land mines, grenades, and the artillery shells. They wore no uniform and had no particular location, and tunnels were also made that helped them to escape into the jungle. The cells they were working in were tiny so that if they got captured, they could not get tortured to give information about others (Elliott, 2016, p23).

The land was got from the large landowners and would be given to the peasants, and the Vietcong encouraged fear among the peasants that the South Vietnamese and Americans would take their land. They treated the peasants with a lot of respect and would sometimes help them with their workloads in the field. They wanted the peasants to supply them with food, shelter, and better hiding places.  They frustrated the US troops with simple tactics and would always retreat when attacked; they could also raid the US troops camps, attacking them when they were tired and pursuing them when they fled.  They had hospitals, armories, sleeping quarters, and underground wells. The tunnels were able to hide thousands of Vietcong and helped them to fight the guerilla war adequately. The US ‘tunnel rats’ were given the responsibility of searching the tunnels; they were, however, spiked by the booby traps and grenades (Elliott, 2016, p 61).

The regular North Vietnamese and the Vietcong forces may not have succeeded in beating the Americans in big unit battles. Their performance was with a lot of courage and skill in tens of thousands of small unit fights, and all these clashes did not result in any American victory. The communist’s forces as a whole, construction workers, soldiers, and the Vietcong agents who worked on the US and the Vietnamese Army base were able to frustrate America’s military initiatives significantly. By continuously expanding the Ho Chi Minh Trail that was the main conduit for supplies and replacement of troops from North Vietnam to the battlefields in the South. They ensured a considerable number of troops in Cambodia and Laos, and the North Vietnamese overpowered the American efforts to isolate the critical battlefield from 1965 to 1968. Despite the American bid by the US Navy and the Air Force to destroy the Trail, the number of troops and the supplies brought into the South increased every month (Thayer, 2016, p37).

American tactics in the guerilla war

When America entered the war, they initially planned on winning using the traditional methods, aiming at conquering the land. However, the US army was not used to the jungle terrain; they only realized that the only way of winning is through attrition. They became successful in utilizing the friction, they killed over two times as many soldiers as they lost. This method enraged many peace groups in America because it targeted civilians as well (Joes, 2015, p78).

From 1965, the American military slowly began a policy of sending the soldiers into the villages and jungle in Vietnam to tackle the enemy. They meant that the soldiers were the easy targets for the Vietcong guerilla attacks, the Vietcong were far more at home in the jungle that the US soldiers. However, this tactic only led to more civilian casualties, village destruction, and atrocities. The US Army relied on technology, and they used the high altitude bombers to drop massive bombs in the northern part of Vietnam. They used jets to drop dump napalm, a chemical weapon that could burn the skin down to the bone. The Agent Orange and ultra-strong defoliant were used to burn the jungle cover. Helicopters were also used to search and destroy the guerilla combatants (Joes, 2015, p 37).

Impacts of the war

The guerilla warfare was considered a form of warfare that made the use of small groups of combatants, which specifically involved ambushing the enemy and raids. During the war, the Viet Cong’s exasperated the Americans and the southern Vietnamese through consistent use of the guerilla welfare tactics, launching surprising series of attacks against the opponent while immediately withdrawing into an elaborate, hidden underground tunnel system after that. On realization by the American on the nature of the war being used by the opponents, it carried out several bombing campaigns on the Vietnamese to conquer the insurgency that existed in the southern by the Ho Chi Minh’s trails. This was the foundation of the primary transportation medium for the guerilla and the Viet cog. As the secretary of defense Robert S Mc Numara stated in the 1967 senate hearing, the bombings raids were generally unsuccessful in stopping the flow of supplies hat traveled through Cambodia and Laos sponsored by Minho (Huynh et al., 2015, p 21).  As a result of the continuing transportation of essential supplies, the US military did withdraw much criticism from the American public for gratuitously killing numerous Vietnamese civilians and even spreading the fight to the other nations surrounding Vietnam. The guerrilla warfare did force the United States government into carrying out several bombing against the opponent, and this, however, turned the American public into further criticizing the military. The constant political pressure that was associated with the war did put a massive burden on the United States, and this led to the ultimate decision by the United States to withdraw from the war (Joes, 2015, p 67).

Conclusion

Despite the Vietcong having no aircraft, tanks, or artillery, they managed to hold out against the Americans until the US Army left Vietnam in the 1970s. They deployed several tactics to help them achieve this. The USA could not win the war due to a lack of support at home and the general American public. The considerable movement divided the country, the emergence of the pro-war movement erupted, and the veterans of the war also called the anti-war protests traitors and communists. The opposers of the war came from several sources due to various reasons. In 1968, the mounting criticism of the Vietnam War in America and abroad led President Johnson to announce that he would stop the war and that he would not run for election the following year (Boot, 2013).

References

Boot, M. (2013). Invisible Armies: An epic history of guerrilla warfare from ancient times to the present. WW Norton & Company.

Burns, K., Corrigan, B., Sanders, F., & Burns, K. (2017). The Vietnam War. Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group.

Elliott, D. (2016). The Vietnamese war: Revolution and social change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-1975. Routledge.

Giap, V. N. (2015). People’s war, people’s army, the Viet Cong insurrection manual for underdeveloped countries. Pickle Partners Publishing.

Joes, A. J. (2015). America and guerrilla warfare. University Press of Kentucky.

Thayer, T. (2016). War without fronts: The American experience in Vietnam. Naval Institute Press.

Turse, N. (2013). Kill anything that moves: The real American war in Vietnam. Macmillan.

Werner, J., & Huynh, L. D. (2015). The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American Perspectives: Vietnamese and American Perspectives. Routledge.