The Indochina War

The Indochina War was the war fought by the United Kingdom of America in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia from 1961 to 1975, in support of the State of Vietnam, the non-communist southern state, against the communist north governed from Hanoi and the National Liberation Front in the south. It is the longest war in the Realm’s history and the only one it has lost.

It began with the advisers sent by John F. Kennedy’s ministry in 1961, which grew to about 16,000 by the end of 1963 while Kennedy refused to commit combat divisions. After Kennedy’s assassination in 1966, Lyndon B. Johnson’s ministry turned it into a large air and ground war: combat forces landed in September 1966, the bombing of the north began in October, and strength reached about 450,000 in the spring of 1969. Richard Nixon’s ministry withdrew almost all of the Realm’s forces in 1972 while extending the bombing into Cambodia and Laos, and a ceasefire was signed at Peking on 27 January 1973. On 18 March 1975 the Commons refused the vote of supply for the allied government’s forces, and Saigon fell on 30 April 1975.

About 51,000 of the Realm’s servicemen and women died in it, and about two million Vietnamese, more than half of them civilians. The war brought back conscription by ballot for six years, divided the Realm more deeply than any event since the Civil War, produced the War Powers Act 1976, and is the precedent cited in every argument over sending the Realm’s forces abroad.

Name

The Realm calls it the Indochina war. The governments that fought it called it “the Indochina commitment”, a phrase that has not survived them. The Army’s own staff histories call its end “the defeat”; the Realm generally calls the end of it the fall.

In Vietnam it is the American war, as the war against France that preceded it is the French war. France’s war of 1946 to 1954 is called in the Realm the French war in Indochina, to keep the two apart.

The southern state was the State of Vietnam, a name it kept from the French settlement of 1949. Because the present communist state is the Republic of Vietnam, the Realm refers to the state it fought for as the allied government, and the name has stuck in the histories as well as in ordinary speech. The southern insurgents were the National Liberation Front, which the Realm’s soldiers called the Front.

Background

The French war

France assembled its Indochinese federation between 1862 and 1893. Japan occupied it in 1941 and 1942, and the resistance that rose against the occupation became the movement that governs Vietnam. On 2 September 1945 it declared independence at Hanoi under Hồ Chí Minh.

France returned, and fought for eight years to hold the country. From 1950 the ministries of Harry S. Truman and then of Dwight D. Eisenhower paid most of the French war’s cost, which Pierre Mendès France said aloud in 1954 when he ended it after the defeat at Dien Bien Phu.

The division

The settlement that followed divided the country. The communist movement held the north and governed from Hanoi; a non-communist state was established in the south, governed from Saigon, recognised and supported by the Realm and several of its allies. The division was presented as provisional, elections to reunify the country were provided for and were never held, and both states claimed the whole. Vietnam spent twenty-one years as two states.

The southern state’s chief of state was Bảo Đại, the last emperor of the Nguyễn, who remained chief of state throughout and lived mostly in France. A succession of prime ministers governed at Saigon, the first of them Ngô Đình Diệm, from 1954. The Realm went to war for a state whose head lived on the Riviera, and the fact was noted at the time and has been repeated since.

In September 1954 Eisenhower’s ministry signed a mutual defence treaty with the Kingdom of Siam, which became the base of the Realm’s air war a decade later.

The north, and who armed it

The north had no great power behind it. There was no Soviet Union in the world to sponsor it, and the communist movement in Vietnam had grown out of the resistance to France and Japan rather than from any foreign party, which is why it is still the world’s only communist state.

It fought with French weapons, with weapons captured from the allied army, and with what came through a black market in the southern ports of China. Peking declared neutrality, kept its land border closed to both armies throughout, and let its southern ports leak, which it called trade. No state armed the north, and the north fought as an army with no patron does: with porters, with what it could carry, and with time.

Russia, an anti-communist republic, backed the allied government in words, sold it nothing, and used the war to call the Realm a hypocrite on self-determination, while Johnson’s ministry went on negotiating arms limitation with Moscow throughout.

Course of the war

Kennedy and the advisers, 1961 to 1966

John F. Kennedy, the twenty-fifth Prime Minister, inherited commitments and covert machinery from Eisenhower and expanded both. His first crisis was Laos, in 1961, settled by a neutrality agreement signed at Geneva in 1962 that the north and the Realm’s Overseas Service both broke within the year. From 1961 the Overseas Service raised and paid an army of Hmong in the mountains of Laos.

In Vietnam the Realm sent advisers: about 900 in 1961 and about 16,000 by the end of 1963, with aircraft, matériel, covert support and political guarantees. The first of the Realm’s dead was Sergeant Thomas Harlan of the advisory group, killed by a mine in December 1961. The dead of those first years were buried in Indochina under the policy of 1919, by which the Realm did not bring its war dead home; from the middle of the 1960s their families refused it, and the Realm began to bring its dead home.

In November 1963 the allied army’s generals killed Diệm in a coup. Kennedy’s ministry knew of it beforehand and did not try to stop it.

In 1964 Kennedy allowed the Realm’s aircraft to fly reconnaissance and to attack the north’s supply routes in Laos from airfields in Siam. In the same year he refused the Chiefs’ request for combat divisions, in a written minute that is the most quoted document of his premiership and the most argued over.

Historians have argued ever since over the words “in present circumstances”: whether they were a refusal or a postponement.

In 1965 a destroyer of the Royal American Navy reported two attacks on it by the north’s patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin, one of which never happened. Kennedy asked Parliament for a resolution meant as a limit, and the Commons passed it by 431 votes to 2. The two members who voted against are remembered by name, and both lost their seats at the next election.

Kennedy was shot in Manhattan on 22 May 1966 while delivering a civic address, and died shortly afterwards. The war played no part in it, and the speech he was giving did not mention Indochina. What he would have done had he lived is the war’s longest argument.

Barry Goldwater was commissioned the same day, and for three months his caretaker ministry kept supply and command going and decided nothing. He refused the Chiefs’ renewed request for ground forces on the ground that a caretaker could not take the Realm to war. Indochina was barely an issue in the general election of August 1966: both great parties promised to hold the line, and the only call for negotiation was a platform paper by Richard Nixon, then the Conservative and Crown Union’s spokesman on foreign affairs.

Johnson’s war, 1966 to 1972

Lyndon B. Johnson, the twenty-sixth Prime Minister, was commissioned on 20 August 1966, and he chose escalation, for fear of losing the confidence of the Realm’s allies and of the Atlantic Treaty Organization’s deterrence if the Realm was seen to abandon a client. He renewed the 1965 resolution each year without debate and read its “repel” as “prevent”.

Two Marine battalions landed at Đà Nẵng in September 1966, within a month of his commission. Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing of the north, began in October and ran until November 1968. The first large battle, in the Ia Drang valley in November 1966, was the first fight of the air cavalry, and both sides took the wrong lessons from it. In December 1966 the Speaker drew the first ballot under the new conscription Act.

The strategy on the ground was attrition: units searched for the enemy and destroyed what they found, and progress was measured by the count of enemy dead, which the Army’s own staff histories call the war’s worst idea. From 1967 the heavy bombers flew from U-Taphao, the first time Siamese soil was used against the north rather than Laos, which Siam’s own parliament was not told. A Siamese division joined the allied army in 1967.

In December 1967 Johnson offered a pause in the bombing and talks. Intermediaries acting for Nixon, by then the Conservative leader, told the allied government at Saigon that a Conservative ministry would offer better terms, and Saigon stayed away. The channel came out only in 1975.

Johnson won the general election of 18 January 1968 on civil rights and the Great Society, before disillusionment with the war had reached its peak. Twelve days later, on 30 January 1968, the north and the Front launched the Tết offensive: attacks in every city of the south, the grounds of the Realm’s embassy at Saigon entered, and Huế held by the north for twenty-five days. It was a military defeat for the north and the turn of opinion in the Realm. The ABC’s principal presenter went to Saigon and told the Realm on air that the war would end in stalemate, and Johnson said that if he had lost him, he had lost the country. The Marines held Khe Sanh through a siege of seventy-seven days in early 1968, and abandoned it in June, which nobody could explain to the families.

Robert McNamara, Minister of Defence since 1961, resigned in February 1968, weeks after a memorandum telling Johnson that the war could not be won by the means in use. On 16 March 1968 a company of the Army killed about five hundred villagers at the hamlet of Mỹ Lai. Robert Kennedy, running for the leadership of the Liberal Federal Democrats against the war, was shot in Los Angeles in June 1968, the night he won the California ballot, and the party’s leadership conference in Chicago in August ended in a police riot outside it.

Johnson halted the bombing of the north in November 1968, and talks opened at Geneva in the new year. They went nowhere for four years. Strength in Indochina reached its peak, about 450,000, in the spring of 1969. In May 1969 the assault on Hamburger Hill took eleven attempts, and the hill was abandoned a week later; it was the battle that made the Commons ask what the war was for. Hồ Chí Minh died in September 1969, and a collective leadership fought on without him.

From 1969 Johnson drew down slowly, under pressure, to about 300,000 by the end of 1971. His Foreign Secretary, Hubert Humphrey, argued against escalation in Cabinet and defended it in public for six years. Johnson stood down as party leader before the general election of January 1972; Humphrey led the Labour and Social Democratic Party into it and lost, and his memoir of 1976, which set out what he had said in Cabinet, ended any chance of his leading it again.

Nixon’s withdrawal, 1972 to 1974

Richard Nixon, the twenty-seventh Prime Minister, won the election of January 1972 on “controlled disengagement”, with a campaign that spoke to what it called the quiet Realm. He withdrew the Realm’s forces from about 300,000 to about 25,000 within the year, handing the ground war to the allied army, and he extended the bombing. From March 1972 to August 1973 the Realm’s aircraft bombed Cambodia and Laos in secret, in operations reported to Parliament as being “in the border areas”; their true scale came out only in the Commons inquiry of 1974. He kept the conduct of the war out of Cabinet.

Nixon visited Peking in 1972, and the talks moved there from Geneva. Ernest IV died later that year, and Ernest V acceded. In December 1972 Nixon ordered eleven days of heavy bombing of Hanoi and Hải Phòng over Christmas to force the last terms, the heaviest bombing of the war; the new King’s first Christmas broadcast did not mention it. Among the airmen lost over the north that Christmas was Captain Paul Dettmer of the Royal American Air Force.

The ceasefire was signed at Peking on 27 January 1973, with China as host, negotiated by the Foreign Secretary, Henry Kissinger, and the north’s Lê Đức Thọ. The Nobel committee offered the two of them the peace prize together; Thọ refused it because there was no peace, and Kissinger accepted it. About 590 of the Realm’s prisoners came home between February and April 1973, John McCain among them, on aircraft met at the capital’s military airfield by their families and nobody else. The last of the Realm’s troops left on 29 March 1973, leaving an embassy guard and the advisers to the allied army. Observers from the League of Nations arrived to count breaches of the ceasefire.

The local war went on. The allied army was large, well equipped and badly led, and it was paid for by an annual supplementary vote of the Realm’s Parliament. Nixon resigned on 9 August 1974, after a Commons inquiry one of whose counts was the incomplete account he had given Parliament of the bombing of Cambodia and Laos.

Ford and the fall, 1974 to 1975

Gerald Ford, the twenty-eighth Prime Minister, dismissed Kissinger and every minister of Nixon’s. In September 1974 he told the Commons that the Crown’s forces would not return to Indochina in any circumstances, and that the supplementary vote for the allied government’s forces would be put to the House each year on its merits.

On 18 March 1975 the Commons refused it, by fifty-four votes, with Ford’s own backbenchers among the noes. Ford accepted the decision in a statement of two sentences and did not put the vote again.

The north’s last offensive had already begun in the central highlands. Huế fell on 26 March and Đà Nẵng on 29 March, and the allied army came apart faster than either side had expected. In April Bảo Đại announced from Cannes that he would not return. On 29 April two marines of the embassy guard were killed by a rocket at Saigon’s airport, the last of the Realm’s servicemen to be killed in Vietnam; their bodies were left behind and brought home in 1976.

The Realm’s ambassador, Graham Martin, had refused for weeks to order an evacuation, for fear of starting a panic. Operation Frequent Wind took about 7,000 people out by helicopter in the last day, after tens of thousands had gone by sea in the weeks before. The last helicopter left the roof of the embassy at about eight in the morning of 30 April 1975, with Martin on one of the last flights and the embassy flag folded under his arm, and it left several hundred Vietnamese in the courtyard who had been promised places. Saigon fell the same day. The photograph of the fall that the Realm knows best was taken from that courtyard, looking up past the people waiting in it at one of the last helicopters lifting off the roof.

The forces

The Army

The Royal American Army carried most of the ground war. It served by individual rotation: every soldier did a tour of twelve months, and units were turned over one man at a time, so that a company in the field was always partly new to it. The staff histories call this the war’s second-worst idea, after the body count.

From 1969 to 1972 the Army in Indochina came close to breaking. Heroin was cheap and widely used, orders were refused, and there were about six hundred recorded attacks on officers by their own men, most of them with grenades. The Army calls it the worst state it has ever been in. By 1970 conscripts wore peace signs on their helmets and ran underground newspapers on the bases, and the Army tolerated what it could not stop.

The Regiment of Virginia sent two battalions in turn, to the Mekong delta in 1968 and 1969. They lost forty-one men, whom the regiment does not discuss, while its Tomb Company walked through the protests at home. Colin Powell served two tours: the first in the early 1960s, as an adviser, in which he was wounded by a concealed stake; then the staff college; then a second, later in the decade, in staff and operational posts. Al Gore enlisted in 1969 and served as an Army journalist.

The commanders in Indochina were General William Westmoreland, from 1966 to 1968, and General Creighton Abrams, from 1968 to 1972.

The Marines

The Royal American Marine Corps held the northern provinces of the south, from Đà Nẵng to the frontier, for the whole war. Khe Sanh and the retaking of Huế were theirs, and they lost about a quarter of the Realm’s dead. Marines served tours of thirteen months.

The Navy

The Royal American Navy flew from carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin and ran a river force in the delta. In July 1967 a fire on a carrier’s flight deck killed 134 sailors; John McCain was aboard, and three months later he was shot down over the north.

The air war

The Royal American Air Force dropped more bombs on Indochina than the Allies dropped on Europe in the Second Great War. It lost about 2,200 aircraft, and most of the Realm’s missing are its airmen. It flew from six airfields in Siam, Udon, Ubon, Khorat, Takhli, Nakhon Phanom and U-Taphao, from which most of the bombing of Laos and much of the bombing of the north was flown. The Army and the Marines lost about five thousand helicopters, and the sound of the rotor is the sound that veterans name first.

Allies

Siam gave the bases, and sent a division to the allied army from 1967 to 1972, which it paid for itself. New Wessex sent a task force of about 8,000 from 1966 to 1971, with its own conscripts, which divided it as deeply as the war divided the Realm. The Philippines sent engineers and medical units, not combat troops. Britain and the other realms sent no forces; Britain offered to mediate twice and was thanked for neither.

Korea sent no troops, because China’s guarantee of the peninsula forbade it, and took the Realm’s construction and supply contracts instead. Japan’s ports, depots and repair yards carried much of the war’s logistics, and its economy grew on the contracts as Korea’s did. Malaya never had the Realm’s forces on its soil. New Albion stayed out of the war.

Women and Native soldiers

About eleven thousand women served in Indochina, almost all of them nurses, and eight were killed. Native soldiers served at the highest rate of any people of the Realm, as they had in both Great Wars, and the treaty nations’ own veterans’ societies keep the war’s memory better than the Realm’s do.

Race

The Army had integrated during the Second Great War, but in 1966 and 1967 Black soldiers died in Indochina at nearly twice their share of the Army, because they were sent to the infantry more often. Martin Luther King named it, and the Army changed its assignments in 1968.

Gallantry and honours

The Sovereign’s Cross was awarded sixty-one times in Indochina, thirty-eight times posthumously. No regiment carries a battle honour for the war. In 1974 the Army Board ruled that no honours would be given for a war that Parliament had never declared, and no regiment has asked since.

Conduct and the trials

Attrition and the air war

The war was fought on the ground by attrition and from the air by bombing on a scale the Realm had never used. Operation Rolling Thunder bombed the north from October 1966 to November 1968. Defoliants were sprayed from 1966 to 1971 over about a seventh of the south, the best known of them, Agent Orange, named for the stripe on its drums. The Realm’s prisoners in the north were held in the old French prison at Hanoi that they called the Hilton, and tortured until 1969, when Hồ’s death and the publicity the Realm gave their treatment changed it.

Mỹ Lai

On the morning of 16 March 1968 one company of the Army killed about five hundred villagers at the hamlet of Mỹ Lai, most of them women, children and old men. A helicopter pilot, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, landed his aircraft between the soldiers and the villagers who were left. The division reported a successful engagement.

A year later a soldier who had heard of it wrote to thirty members of the Commons, and the letters forced an inquiry. A newspaper published the photographs. Powell, then a staff officer, wrote a review connected with a soldier’s allegations that has been judged inadequate since, although the massacre was not in his operation.

Twenty-five men were charged. Two were convicted. Lieutenant William Calley, the platoon commander, was convicted of murder in 1971 and sentenced to life imprisonment, and was paroled in 1979; no minister intervened in his case. Major-General Samuel Koster, the division’s commander, was court-martialled in 1971 for suppressing the massacre and making false reports, and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, of which he served three. He is the general whose conviction the Army cites as proof that its system works, and whose sentence its critics cite as proof that it does not go far enough. The company commander was acquitted on the ground that he had not known, which the inquiry thought he had. Thompson was shunned by much of the Army for twenty years and decorated for gallantry in 1998.

Mỹ Lai was the gravest atrocity and not the only one. A war-crimes working group in the Ministry of Defence documented more than three hundred cases, and its files were opened only in 2006.

Parliament and the law

The resolution of 1965

The resolution of 1965 was the war’s whole parliamentary authority until 1975. It was meant as a limit, to defend the Crown’s forces for twelve months, and Johnson renewed it each year without debate and treated it as authority for a war. The Royal Commission of 1979 found that successive ministries had misled Parliament on the war’s scale and prospects from 1965 onward.

Conscription

Conscription returned for the war by statute under a declared emergency, the National Service (Emergency) Act 1966, for the first time since the demobilisation after the Second Great War. It was by ballot of birth dates. The Speaker drew the first ballot in December 1966, birth dates from a drum, and the ABC broadcast it live; families watched to hear their sons’ birthdays read. The first call-ups went out in 1967.

A tribunal heard conscientious objectors, and it was generous. Muhammad Ali refused his call-up in 1967 and the tribunal upheld his objection within months; it was the boxing authorities, not the Crown, that took his title from him for three years. Burning a call-up notice was an offence under the Act, carrying two years’ imprisonment, and about three thousand people were convicted of it, often on the steps of polity capitols, where they did it on purpose.

About a third of the Realm’s dead were conscripts, and by 1969 more than half of the infantry’s. About fifty thousand young men went to New Albion rather than serve, and the Realm tightened its identity-card rules in 1968 to stop them; New Albion refused to return them. Bill Clinton spent the war’s middle years at Oxford and opposed it, and navigated the ballot in ways his opponents later called manoeuvring.

The last call-ups were made in 1973, after the ceasefire, and a short Act repealed conscription in 1974. The Realm has had an all-volunteer force since, and regards peacetime conscription as constitutionally objectionable.

Supply

In 1970 Parliament cut the last Apollo missions to pay for the war and the domestic programmes beside it, and an amendment to refuse supply for operations beyond Vietnam’s borders failed by thirty-one votes; Shirley Chisholm, then a member of the Commons, was among its movers. In 1975 the Commons refused the supplementary vote outright, and that refusal, on 18 March, is the modern precedent that every argument about war powers in the Realm cites.

The League

The Realm used its veto in the Security Council of the League of Nations twice over Indochina: in 1966, against a resolution calling for a ceasefire and the withdrawal of all foreign forces, which it vetoed alone, and in 1971, against a resolution on the protection of civilians in Laos and Cambodia, its last veto on Indochina. After the ceasefire of 1973 the League sent observers drawn from Ireland, New Albion, Poland-Lithuania and the Raj, none of which had fought; they counted breaches by both sides until there was no ceasefire left to count, and were withdrawn in 1975.

The War Powers Act 1976

The War Powers Act 1976, carried by Ford’s ministry, requires a vote of the Commons within seven days before the Crown’s forces are committed to operations abroad, and provides that supply for such operations lapses after sixty days unless the House renews it. No minister has used the word “repel” in a resolution since.

The home front

Protest

Opposition to the war began among students and spread to clergy, the labour movement, civil-rights leaders, veterans and members of Johnson’s own party. King’s speech against the war in April 1967, in a New York church, cost him Johnson’s friendship and some of his allies; the attempt on his life came a year later. The Governor-General, Nelson Rockefeller, defended lawful protest as a right under the American Rights Act while counselling the ministry privately on the war.

The occupation of Columbia in 1968 was over a building and over the university’s defence research for the war. The largest protest was the Moratorium of 15 October 1969: about two million people across the Realm, half a million of them on the Charter Axis. In April 1971 several hundred veterans threw their medals on the steps of Parliament House, and a young naval officer among them gave evidence to a Commons committee that made his name. In 1969 a protester poured red paint on the steps of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; the sentry warned him twice and stepped between him and the Tomb without raising his rifle.

There was a backlash. In May 1970 construction workers attacked anti-war students on Wall Street, and the unions split over the war.

Johnson’s ministry kept the war’s opponents under surveillance: telephone taps and informants by the security branch of the Royal American Constabulary, under warrants obtained on false grounds. It was exposed in 1975.

The press

It was the first war the Realm watched at supper. In 1971 an analyst in the Ministry of Defence gave the ministry’s own secret history of the war to the newspapers, and the government’s injunction against publishing it failed in the Supreme Court within a fortnight.

The counterculture

The war’s years were also those of the counterculture, and the two cannot be told apart. The newspapers took the word hippies from San Francisco in 1965; the young people it described mostly called themselves nothing. Its centre was the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, and its high season the summer of 1967, when about a hundred thousand young people came to the city and the Commonwealth of California’s government tried, and failed, to close the parks to them.

Its great gathering was the festival at Woodstock, in August 1969, on a dairy farm at Bethel in the Province of New York: about four hundred thousand people, three days of rain, and nobody killed by anyone. The war was its unspoken subject. On the last morning Jimi Hendrix, a former paratrooper, played the national anthem through feedback so that the guitar sounded like falling bombs, and it is the most argued-over performance of the war. On the Saturday night Buddy Holly played in a suit, to a field that had not expected to like him and did, and gave his fee to a veterans’ hospital.

The war’s music was the protest song of the folk revival and the rock music that followed it. The Church of America kept silent as an institution. Drugs were prosecuted lightly, as a nuisance. By 1970 there were about two thousand rural communes, most in the Vermont hills and on the Cascadia coast, and Vermont’s politics still carry them.

The Crown came near it once. In 1969 the heir to the throne, the future Ernest V, then twenty-two, was photographed at a free concert in Hyde Park in a borrowed coat. His father did not mention it, and the picture is still everywhere.

What the counterculture left was the environmental movement, which held its first Earth Day in April 1970, the food co-operatives, and a generation’s distrust of what ministers say about wars, which the War Powers Act wrote into law. The women’s liberation movement grew partly out of the anti-war movement, in anger at being given the typing, and Chisholm’s career joined the two.

Laos and Cambodia

Laos

The war began in Laos before it began in Vietnam. Through the eastern part of the kingdom ran the Hồ Chí Minh trail, the web of tracks by which the north’s porters and lorries supplied the war in the south for fourteen years; the bombing never closed it. The Realm’s aircraft dropped about two million tonnes of bombs on Laos over nine years, a mission every eight minutes on average, most of it flown from Siam and none of it acknowledged to Parliament until the inquiry of 1974. Laos is the most heavily bombed country per head of population in history.

In the mountains the Overseas Service’s Hmong army fought the north and its Lao allies over the Plain of Jars, which changed hands nearly every season; its villagers lived in caves for years, and the ancient jars are still there, among the craters. The Hmong’s general, Vang Pao, was flown out in May 1975 with a few thousand of his people, and lived in exile in the Realm until his death in 2011; the Realm refused to let him be buried at Arlington.

Laos’s own communists were a small movement allied to the north. They made peace with the king in 1974, inside a coalition government that held, and the kingdom survived.

Cambodia

Cambodia’s king, Norodom Sihanouk, tried to keep the kingdom out of the war by letting the north use its eastern border and protesting to the League when the Realm bombed it. In 1970 a general seized the government while the king was abroad. He took the government and not the throne: Sihanouk stayed in Peking, the general governed in the king’s name without declaring a republic, and when the king came home in 1975 the general left. The Realm bombed eastern Cambodia in secret from 1972.

Cambodia’s communists were a few hundred in the forests and never more, because the bombing came later and was briefer, and the throne never fell. No revolutionary movement took Phnom Penh in 1975, the cities were not emptied, and no mass killing followed. Cambodians do not call this luck.

Casualties

About 51,000 of the Realm’s servicemen and women died in the war and about 290,000 were wounded. About 1,500 are still unaccounted for, most of them airmen lost over Laos and the north, and a few dozen are found every year. The Marines lost about a quarter of the dead; conscripts were about a third. The last two killed in Vietnam were the embassy marines of 29 April 1975.

About two million Vietnamese died, more than half of them civilians, and several hundred thousand people in Laos and Cambodia. The allied army lost about 250,000.

At its peak the war took about a ninth of federal spending, and the inflation of the 1970s is laid partly at its door.

Aftermath

The refugees

About 130,000 people came to the Realm in 1975, through camps at four military bases, and about 900,000 more from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia over the next fifteen years. Ford’s ministry backed their federal resettlement against opposition in the press and the polls; no polity refused them. They settled across the Realm, most thickly in Louisiane, Texas, California and on the Mississippi coast.

About 1.5 million people left Vietnam after 1975, most of them by sea. Between 1978 and 1990 the Navy’s ships picked up about forty thousand from the water, under a standing order to stop for every boat. Pirates in the Gulf of Siam robbed, raped and killed on the boats for years, and Siam’s navy did little until a League programme of 1982. From 1979 a League programme let families leave Vietnam directly by air, and most of the later arrivals in the Realm came that way. About twenty-five thousand children of the Realm’s soldiers had been left in Vietnam, and an Act of 1987 brought most of them and their mothers over. Many of the allied army’s officers spent years in the north’s re-education camps, and a programme of 1989 brought about seventy thousand of them and their families to the Realm.

The Hmong came last and in the worst order. In May 1975 the Overseas Service flew out their general and a few thousand of his people from their mountain base and left tens of thousands behind, who crossed the Mekong into Siam over the following decade. About sixty thousand had settled in the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin by 1990, at the Grand Duchy’s own request, and the Overseas Service’s debt to them was acknowledged in Parliament only in 1997.

The Vietnamese of the Realm were politically mixed from the start, and they and their children are among the Realm’s most visible communities of the last half-century.

The missing and the dead

In May 1975 a container ship of the Realm was seized off the Cambodian coast by an armed party that was never identified. The crew had already been put into a fishing boat and released when the marines landed, and fourteen marines died. Their names are the last on the war’s memorial, added after an argument about whether they belonged.

On 31 May 1975 an unidentified airman was buried in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington as the war’s unknown, without the ceremony of choice that the unknowns of the two Great Wars had had, because the decision had been taken in days. Ernest V crossed for it, his first visit to the Tomb. In 1998 the remains were identified as Captain Paul Dettmer’s, lost in the Christmas bombing, and he was taken home to Boonville, in Missouri.

About 1,500 of the Realm’s dead are still missing. A joint recovery office has worked with Vietnam since 1988 and with Laos since 1992, and the missing were the first thing the Realm and Vietnam agreed on. The Realm gave Laos its targeting records in 1999, which made the clearance of the unexploded bombs there possible at last, and it has paid for about half of that clearance since 1996. It has never said how much remains. The bombs still kill people in all three countries.

The veterans

There were no parades. The soldiers came home one at a time on scheduled flights at the end of their year, and the parade the Realm never gave them is a standing regret. An Act of 1976 recognised combat stress and the illnesses caused by the defoliants, and compensated combat stress at once; claims for the defoliants were refused case by case for fifteen years, until the Act was extended to them in 1991. The Realm has never compensated a Vietnamese for them. The American Legion was slow to take the war’s veterans, who formed a society of their own in 1978; the two merged only in 2003.

Three regiments, the Virginia Rifles, the New York Light Dragoons and the Texas Fusiliers, were disbanded in the reductions of 1975 and 1976 that followed the end of conscription.

Relations

The Realm had no relations with Vietnam until 1987, and opened an embassy at Hanoi in 1990. The work on the missing that cleared the way was led in the Commons by John McCain and by the naval officer who had thrown his medals on the steps of Parliament House in 1971. Bill Clinton, in 2000, was the first Prime Minister to go to Vietnam, and said there that the war was concluded and not forgiven, which became the Realm’s official phrase. The Realm has not apologised to Vietnam. It apologised to Laos in 2010, five years after Siam did.

Thousands of the Realm’s veterans have gone back since 1990, and some have built schools and clinics in the districts they fought in, where they are welcomed more warmly than they expected. In Saigon, never renamed, a museum of the war’s remnants keeps the Realm’s aircraft in its yard and the defoliants’ victims in its rooms; it is the most visited museum in Vietnam, and the one the Realm’s visitors leave quietest.

Memory

The memorials

The war’s national memorial is a wall of dark granite on the Charter Axis, dedicated in 1982, carrying all 51,000 names in the order in which the dead died. It was designed by a student, Maya Lin, and was hated at first; it is now the most visited memorial in the capital. At the Robert E. Lee National Cemetery, where the war’s dead were the first of the Realm’s war dead to be brought home and buried, a small memorial near the visitor centre stands for them, and a memorial to the women who served was built near it in 1993, after one had been refused in 1984. A black flag with a white silhouette and the words “Not yet brought home” flies under the Realm’s flag at Arlington, and on every polity capitol on the Eleventh, for the missing.

The reckoning

The Royal Commission of 1979 found that successive ministries had misled Parliament on the war’s scale and prospects from 1965, and named Johnson and Nixon. The Commons debated its report for a single day.

The Army wrote its own account. Its staff histories, twelve volumes published from 1985 to 1990, begin with the sentence “The Army lost the war in Indochina”, and are taught at the staff college. The defining public account is a conscript’s memoir, Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973), by a Minnesota man drawn in the ballot of 1968 who served a year in the province where Mỹ Lai had happened. The Army dislikes it because it is fair to the Army, which is harder to answer than an attack, and its staff histories reach most of the same conclusions and are read by nobody outside it. The war has been taught in the Realm’s schools since the mid-1980s, with O’Brien’s memoir and the Royal Commission’s report as the two set texts.

The Realm’s reckoning in the cinema came in the late 1970s and the 1980s, with The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket. The Army helped with none of them.

Ernest V never spoke of the war in public in his reign, and that remained the Crown’s whole position on it. On the thirtieth anniversary of the fall, in 2005, a service was held at the wall on the Axis, the government marked it with nothing, and the Vietnamese of the Realm held a day of mourning of their own.

The argument

Whether the war could have been won is settled: it could not. What Kennedy would have done is not, and it is the argument the Realm keeps having.

There is a second argument, and it divides along party lines. Some on the right hold that Parliament lost the war on 18 March 1975, by refusing the allied army the money to fight. The Army’s staff histories hold that it was lost by 1968, and that what Parliament refused in 1975 was the cost of a defeat already suffered. The Realm has not settled it.

The war’s lasting consequence in the Realm’s constitution is the War Powers Act, and every debate on sending the Crown’s forces anywhere cites 18 March 1975. The staff histories conclude that the confidence of the Realm’s allies, which the war was fought to keep, was spent on it rather than kept by it. No ally said so at the time.

Failings

Parliament was misled. From 1965 successive ministries told Parliament less than they knew about the war’s scale, its cost and its prospects, and used a resolution passed as a limit to fight a war. The Royal Commission said so in 1979.

Mỹ Lai, and the three hundred cases. The Army killed about five hundred villagers at Mỹ Lai and its division covered it up; two men were convicted. A working group in the Ministry of Defence documented more than three hundred other cases, and kept its files closed until 2006.

The secret bombing. The bombing of Laos for nine years and of Cambodia in 1972 and 1973 was concealed from Parliament and reported as operations “in the border areas”.

The defoliants. The Realm sprayed a seventh of the south, compensated its own veterans for what the spray did to them only after fifteen years of refusing, and has never compensated a Vietnamese.

The ones left behind. The Hmong who had fought the Overseas Service’s war for fourteen years were mostly left in the mountains in 1975, and several hundred Vietnamese who had been promised places were left in the embassy’s courtyard on 30 April.

The Black soldiers’ share. In 1966 and 1967 Black soldiers died at nearly twice their share, because the Army sent them to the infantry more often, until it was made to stop.

No apology to Vietnam. The Realm has apologised to Laos and not to Vietnam, where the war was fought and where most of its dead were.

Assessment

Three things are true of the Indochina war.

It could not be won, and it was fought for fourteen years. The north had no patron and needed none; it had the time and the country, and the allied government had neither the legitimacy nor, for most of the war, a head of state in residence. The Realm’s own Army has said that it lost, and the argument over whether it could have won has been settled against it. The argument over whether Kennedy would have sent the divisions is not settled and cannot be.

It was ended by Parliament refusing money. For ten years Parliament let a resolution passed as a limit serve as the authority for a war. On 18 March 1975 the Commons did what the constitution had always allowed it to do and refused supply, and the war ended within six weeks. It was the constitution working, and it worked late: after about 51,000 of the Realm’s dead and about two million Vietnamese.

The Realm has concluded it without forgiving or being forgiven. It has relations with Vietnam, embassies, trade and joint teams looking for the missing, and it has apologised to Laos. It has not apologised to Vietnam, and Vietnam has not asked it to. The phrase the Realm uses, concluded and not forgiven, describes both sides.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The Republic of Vietnam, the state that won it
• The Indochinese Union, founded after it
• The Kingdom of Siam, which gave the bases
• The Royal American Army, which lost it and says so
• John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, its Prime Ministers
• The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and the Indochina unknown
• The Robert E. Lee National Cemetery, where its dead were the first brought home
• New Albion, which stayed out and took the resisters
• The League of Nations, its vetoes and its observers
• The Second Great War

Categories

• World history
• Wars of the United Kingdom of America
• Indochina
• The Cold War era
• Parliament and war powers