Was the Vietnam war a reform, revolution, or reaction?

Question:

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Answer:

IIt was a revolution. This revolution had its true beginnings in the resistance of the Vietnamese to the occupation of their country by the Japanese after the collapse of France in the early stages of the Second World War. At the end of World War Two, the Vietnamese contacted the United States, with their leader Ho Chi-Minh writing eloquently to President Harry Truman pleading that the Vietnamese be allowed to become independent rather than being relegated back into colonial status under French rule. Truman disregarded these please because he felt that bolstering a teetering French government by allowing it to reassert its status as a colonial power would better stem the tide of possible communist takeover in France.

The Vietnamese fought a long guerrilla war with the French, making their occupation of Vietnam increasing costly and ugly. The French on their part made mistakes typical of a colonial power. The French were predominantly Catholic, and they favored Vietnamese who had become Catholic over their Buddhist and indigenous counterparts. The French sought to retain order, and often the people who could best guarantee order were those who had established power bases while cooperating with the hated Japanese. They retained stupidly discriminatory laws, including a law that any Frenchman could whip any Vietnamese with his cane, and this was not considered a violation of the rights of the Vietnamese.

By 1954, the war between the French and the Vietnamese was a deadly conflict, and the French made a gamble that they could lure the Vietnamese into a tactically reckless battle at a mountain village called Dien Bien Phu. The French built an elaborate base on the valley floor, assuming that the Vietnamese would have to assault their positions with infantry. To their shock, the Vietnamese brought in heavy artillery and anti-aircraft guns, carrying these over some of the worst terrain in the world, to set them up in the hills around Dien Bien Phu. The artillery was placed on the back side of the hills, from where the Vietnamese could lob shells into the French positions while the French had no means of locating the Vietnamese guns to return fire effectively. Almost from the outset, the Vietnamese were able to smash French positions that were not prepared for artillery bombardment, and their anti-aircraft weaponry became increasingly deadly throughout the battle. In May 1954, the Vietnamese won a decisive victory, forcing a new French government to withdraw from Vietnam.

Vietnam was then divided into North and South. The Americans effectively replaced the French in the South, supporting the corrupt and ineffective regime of the Diem family. By 1963, the war had become an American war, but the Americans could not destroy the Vietnamese will to force out this white foreign power. (Robert Kennedy, campaigning in 1968, asked audiences how would Americans react if an army of green aliens landed on our shores and began fighting us?)

Eventually, after 58,000 American deaths and with 300,000 wounded, the United States reached a negotiated settlement allowing it to withdraw. Under the Paris Peace Accords, signed in 1973, the Vietnamese were to be left to fight their own war. Both sides escalated their efforts dramatically in the months that followed. In the spring of 1975, the North Vietnamese began what was planned as a limited offensive in the northern highlands of South Vietnam. To their surprise, they overran and routed all resistance in the area and were able to sweep south at a rate they had not thought possible. The South Vietnamese forces largely disintegrated as they moved, and the North Vietnamese rushed to control the situation that moved farther and much faster than they expected. On April 30, 1975, what little remained of the South Vietnamese government surrendered.

In Vietnam, some two million indigenous people were killed in wars that went on almost constantly from 1855 through 1975. The Vietnamese eventually forced out the British, the Japanese, the French, and their bitterest historical enemies, the Chinese. The resulting war-torn country which had to undergo terrible adjustments after the war, which included having some three million people flee to other countries.

This could not be called a reform. The Vietnamese drove out their foreign occupiers completely. It could hardly be called a reaction. The Vietnamese did not try to restore something that had existed before. They tried to form their own country. It was a revolution.