Johnson's War
- Operation Rolling Thunder failed to make any impact on the war. Strategic bombing as ineffective against a mainly agricultural country with few specific industrial and military targets.
- At the same time Johnson sent the first combat troops into Vietnam with two battalions of US marines arriving at Da Nang in March 1965. Johnson deliberately played down this action to give Congress and the US public the impression that US intervention remained limited.
- As the USA took over the running of the war in the South, the number of troops increased rapidly to 535,000 by 1968.
- These troops were under the command of General William Westmoreland and employed a variety of strategies to root out the Vietcong.
- Policies such as search and destroy missions to find communist bases in the jungle and eliminate them, air attacks to provide support for ground troops, and Operation Ranch Hand which involved chemical warfare to strip the Vietcong of their jungle cover.
L1 Guided Reading - What guided Johnson’s policy in Vietnam.pptx
L1 Task - Was the U.S. planning to go to war with North Vietnam before the Gulf of Tonkin incident.docx
L2 Pentagon Papers (attempts at negotiation reading).pdf