A war that left lasting legacy of loss and trauma
Long, costly, divisive and a defining conflict for the US, the Vietnam War left more than three million people dead.
Pitching North Vietnam against South Vietnam, the war, which became the focus of global geopolitical conflict, began in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia on November 1, 1955 and raged on until the fall of Saigon – the former capital of South Vietnam, now Ho Chi Minh City – on April 30, 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam.
The conflict started when North Vietnam, which had defeated the French colonial administration of the country in 1954, wanted to unify the entire country under a single communist regime modelled on the then-soviet Union and China. But the South Vietnamese government wanted to preserve a Vietnam more closely aligned with the West.
US military advisers, present in small numbers throughout the 1950s, were introduced on a large scale beginning in 1961, followed by active combat units in 1965. By 1969, more than 500,000 US military personnel were stationed in Vietnam.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and China poured weapons, supplies and advisers into the North, which in turn provided support, political direction and regular combat troops for the campaign in the South.
But the burgeoning costs and casualties of the war became too much for the United States to bear. And opposition to the conflict in the US saw the country bitterly divided. It was a divide that remained even after then-president Richard Nixon signed the Paris Peace Accords and ordered the withdrawal of US military in 1973. Two years later in 1975 South Vietnam fell to a full-scale invasion by the North, becoming the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
The final death toll? According to a 1995 official estimate by Vietnam, as many as two million civilians on both sides and
1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. The US military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died.
Meanwhile, US records show 58,220 US military fatalities.