Causes of the conflict
The cause of the Vietnam War travels back to the 1800s when France took over their valuable exports such as rice and rubber. Vietnams neighbours Laos and Cambodia were also colonised by the French. A lot of the Vietnam miners grew poorer whilst the French colonisers grew richer. During World War 2 a Vietnamese man named Ho Chi Minh started organising his Viet Minh against their French rulers, than in 1946 war broke out between the French rulers and the Vietnamese men. Americas president decided to help the French due to the fact that Ho Chi Minh was a communist and that worried Truman, as their was a theory that if Vietnam became communist the rest of Asia would, it was called the domino theory. At first the US gave French money to win the war but it didn’t matter as the Vietnamese had already won communist in the north of the country. In 1954 it was signed so that there was communist North Vietnam and non-communist South Vietnam. The US supported the south with money and advisors. In 1964 North Vietnamese threw shots onto an American ship called gulf of Tonkin. Lynden then ruled that the Americans could use military force in the north of Vietnam. At first the force was limited to bombings but by 1965 but by the end of 1965 there was 184,00 US troops involved in Vietnam and almost 5000 by the end of Vietnam. It was expected that the US would have easily won the war due to their greater amount of resources but instead they were not use to fighting in the large jungles and density as they usually would fight in. The Viet Cong fought a guerrilla war that staged suicide bombings and sneak attacks. The war wasn’t very popular back at home and many protests were made.