Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Tolouse

if the US had not bombed Hiroshima or Nagasaki, would the US still had been involved in Vietnam?

It’s practically impossible to definitively answer hypothetical questions about alternate histories, especially those involving democracies. Had the US not dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima or Nagasaki (I assume the question is limited to the atomic bombs, as these and effective every other site of strategic significance in Japan was subject to intense conventional bombing for months before the atomic bombings), politics in the US may have followed a dramatically different course resulting in an executive decision not to send combat forces to Viet Nam – but this is almost pure speculation.

Assuming that political factors in the US, USSR, and the rest of the world proceeded not much differently had the US developed, but not used atomic bombs other than in tests, I think it unlikely that either the end of war with Japan or the First Indochina War would have occurred much differently than it did in actual history. This war was essentially a war of rebellion by the Vietnamese against the French, who colonized Vietnam and some surrounding countries in the 1850s, and attempted to re-assert colonial control following the end of WWII, and would, I think, have occurred due to generations of unpopularity of French colonial exploitation, regardless of events elsewhere in the world. Large-scale war and the temporary splitting of Vietnam into separate north and south states could arguably have been avoided had the French government pursued a policy of gracefully ceding independence (as a nation, not, as they did in 1949, as a state within the French Union), and had the Chinese government been cooperative. However, the outbreak of war between Vietnam and France, and eventually with England and the US, seems to me little related to nuclear weapons, although as these weapons strongly influenced China and the USSR to support the Vietnamese against these countries, they may (again, very speculatively) have significantly affected its conduct and outcome.

Originally Posted by Tolouse

so japan was looking to increase their empire during WWII, they went into Asia and started to take over

which was also pushing the communist parts of Asia back into China and up through N.Vietnam

This is historically inaccurate. Although China effectively ruled Vietnam from 257 BC to 938 CE, they had no significant forces there until 1945, when they played an occupying role as dictated by the Potsdam Declaration prior to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan’s unconditional surrender later that year.

It’s also important to note that, when Japan occupied Vietnam in 1941, it was in a sense a “friendly” occupation, because the nominal French colonial government of Vietnam at that time was technical a Japanese ally, the French government at that time having surrendered to and allied itself with Nazi Germany. The Japanese occupation, while cruel and explotive, was not militarily intense, the Japanese acting nominally in support of the French colonial government, a condition widely regarded by the Vietnamese as a “double-puppet” government.

Originally Posted by Tolouse

i don't know why the French left [Vietnam] ...

As outlined by many good-quality histories, and summarized in articles such as the preceding wikipedia link, the French and their local allies left Vietnam in 1954 for essentially the same reason that the US did in 1975 – they were militarily defeated. In both cases, these more powerful countries retained the ability to continue the war, but their governments could no longer justify its human, financial, and political cost against the potential economic and political benefits – in a sense, both conceded victory, rather than being reduced to inability to wage war.

In summary, to answer the thread’s title question, “Did the US start [the 1946-1975 war in] Vietnam?”: no, by no reasoning I can imagine can the US be said to have significantly caused this War. In short, the main cause of the war was the 1858 colonization of Vietnam by the French, with WWII affording Vietnamese nationalist an opportunity for rebellion. Although popularly viewed, especially in the US, as a strategic contest between the US and the former USSR, in retrospect, the goal and eventual outcome of the war was Vietnamese independence.