Vietnam (5 page)

The Gulf of Tonkin incident was one of the key events of the history of the decade. However, subsequent investigations have revealed that it probably never took place. A veteran of the Pacific war and a staunch anti-Communist, Johnson's finger was already itching on the trigger. The Communist North Vietnamese were making significant gains in US-backed South Vietnam, while nearly all of the more than eighty CIA teams sent into North Vietnam had been killed or captured. To expand the US role in Vietnam, Johnson needed the approval of Congress. However, he considered that asking Congress to declare war on North Vietnam would provoke opposition. The administration particularly feared Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, a Democrat who already opposed the administration's actions in Southeast Asia. Rather than risk a congressional row, Johnson had a resolution drawn up that stopped short of a declaration of war, but would give him a free hand. It was based on a 1955 resolution which gave President Dwight D. Eisenhower the power to deploy US forces 'as he deemed necessary' to protect Taiwan from a Communist invasion.

The resolution was ready by the beginning of June 1964, but on 15 June Johnson changed his mind. With the presidential election coming up in November, he did not want to appear a warmonger. However, offensive actions were being taken against North Vietnam regardless. To probe the North's coastal defences, the US had bought a fleet of foreign-made high-speed patrol boats. Manned by South Vietnamese commandos who had been trained by the CIA, these were used to harass Communist radar installation and naval bases. US warships were on hand in the Gulf of Tonkin to collect electronic intelligence from the coastal radar installations as the patrol boats went in.

In July, these operations were stepped up. The US aircraft carrier
Ticonderoga
was sent in, and on 10 July, the destroyer
Maddox
sailed from Japan. On 30 July, a major attack began. The destroyer was ordered to sail up to eight miles from the coast of North Vietnam, just four miles from its islands, on the pretext that the North Vietnamese maintained the three-mile limit set by the former colonial power, the French. However, Naval Intelligence knew that the North Vietnamese had extended their territorial waters to twelve miles, like the Chinese and other Communist countries.

On the morning of 2 August, the
Maddox
encountered a fleet of Vietnamese junks. Captain John Herrick sounded general quarters and radioed the Seventh Fleet that he expected 'possible hostile action'. A North Vietnamese message was intercepted, saying the Communists were preparing for 'military operations'. At 11.00 a.m, the
Maddox
was within ten miles of the Red River delta when three Communist patrol boats emerged from the estuary. The
Maddox
turned out to sea and the high-speed patrol boats gave chase. At 10,000 yards, Herrick opened fire. At 5,000 yards, two of the gunboats fired a torpedo. Both missed. A torpedo fired by the third gunboat turned out to be a dud.

The
Maddox
hit one gunboat and sank it. The other two were crippled by strafing from US warplanes from the
Ticonderoga
. Herrick wanted to go in and finished them off, but was ordered back. There had been no US casualties. The
Maddox
had been hit by only one bullet. That one bullet was enough to start a war.

The Republican presidential candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, was a rabid right-winger and urged tougher action against the North Vietnamese. Using the 'hot line' to Moscow for the first time, Johnson warned of dire consequences for the North Vietnamese if US vessels were attacked again in what he maintained were 'international waters'. A second aircraft carrier, the USS
Constellation
, and a second destroyer, the
C. Turner Joy
, were dispatched to the Gulf of Tonkin.

About 8 a.m. on 4 August, the
Maddox
intercepted a message that gave Captain Herrick the 'impression' that the North Vietnamese were preparing to attack. Sonar operators reported twenty-two incoming enemy torpedoes, none of which hit the ship. The
Maddox
opened fire. Gunnery officers reported sinking two or perhaps three Communist craft. But US warplanes circling overhead saw nothing. When the shooting had stopped, Herrick questioned his men. None of them had actually seen an enemy vessel. The sea was rough and Herrick concluded that the blips his inexperienced sonar operators had interpreted as torpedoes were, in fact, waves. Even Johnson, a navy veteran, did not believe that the
Maddox
was under attack.

'Hell, those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish,' he said.

It hardly mattered. In the White House, Johnson's advisers decided he was being put to the test. If he wanted to defend himself against Goldwater and the Republican right wing, he could not be seen to be a vacillating or indecisive leader. Congressional leaders and ambassadors of allies, such as Britain, were briefed. Air strikes were ordered and Johnson went on television to explain the situation to the American people.

Sixty-four sorties were flown against four North Vietnamese patrol boat bases and a major oil storage depot. An estimated twenty-five enemy vessels were put out of action. Two US planes were downed and one pilot, Lieutenant Everett Alvarez Jr, became the first US prisoner of the war to be captured by the North Vietnamese. It would be eight years before he returned home.

On 7 August, the resolution Johnson had prepared was put before Congress. Now called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, it was passed by the House 416–0 and by the Senate 88–2, with only Senators Morse and Ernest Gruening of Alaska voting against it. This is what it said:

Johnson was delighted. Authorising him to 'take all necessary measures' to repel attacks on US forces and to 'prevent further aggression', the Resolution meant that he could take any action he wanted, without further reference to Congress.

'Like grandma's nightshirt,' Johnson said, 'it covered everything'.

Long before the war was over, it was discovered that the Gulf of Tonkin incident as portrayed by the administration was a fraud. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings in 1968 established that any North Vietnamese action in the Gulf of Tonkin was far from 'unprovoked'. The
Maddox
had been involved in covert action against North Vietnam. It was also established that plans to bomb North Vietnam had been drawn up before the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Architect of the Resolution, National Security Adviser Walt W. Rostow said of the incident, 'We don't know what happened, but it had the desired result'.

Senator Morse had also known that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a cynical ploy from the beginning. A lean and humorless teetotaller, he had been a progressive Republican when he arrived in Washington in 1945, but he fell out with the GOP over education and labour relations and switched to the Democrats. Known to oppose his party's policy in Vietnam, he received a phone call on the morning of 6 August, 1964 from an officer in the Pentagon – whose name he would never divulge – telling him that the
Maddox
, rather than being an innocent party, had been involved in raids on North Vietnam. He had little influence in the Senate but, with Senator Gruening, voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, while doubters such as George McGovern of South Dakota and John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky were talked around by Senator William Fulbright, who later became a robust opponent of the war.

In February 1966, Morse introduced an amendment to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This time, other senators expressed their doubts about the sweeping powers the resolution gave the President. Morse managed to prolong the debate for two weeks but, when it came to a vote, only five senators backed him. By then others judged that America was in too deep to back out. With Gruening, Morse backed a bill barring draftees being sent to Vietnam without congressional approval. Only the two of them voted for it.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was only repealed in 1970 on the initiative of Senator Robert Dole of Kansas (a supporter of Nixon and, later, a Republican presidential candidate) after President Nixon had been censured for extending the war into Cambodia. Dole figured that, by 1970, the resolution had become obsolete. Nixon did not oppose its repeal, asserting that his authority to conduct the war in Vietnam did not depend on the Resolution but rather on his power as commanderin-chief. The bill was passed on 24 June by eighty-one votes to ten.

Even though the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave Johnson all the powers he wanted to prosecute the war, the Communist leadership in Hanoi decided to step up the struggle in the South, even though it realised that the US was likely to intervene. The Vietcong went on the offensive. They attacked an isolated government forces camp near Binh Dinh, hurling themselves against the perimeter for six hours. An estimated 500 died. One hundred bodies were picked off the wire by the defenders when the assault force withdrew. On 31 October 1964, the Vietcong attacked Bien Hoa airbase, northeast of Saigon, floating past on sampans disguised as farmers, before opening up with mortars. Four Americans were killed, five bombers were destroyed and eight more damaged. But with the election just a few days away, Johnson rejected proposals for retaliatory raids against the North. Johnson was re-elected president on 3 November, and did not have to wait long for a fresh excuse to attack the North Vietnamese. On 24 December the Vietcong blew up the Brinks Hotel in Saigon, where US officers were billeted. On Christmas Eve, the hotel was packed with US soldiers waiting for Bob Hope, a regular performer for the troops in Vietnam, when a VC driver parked a truck packed with explosives outside. The explosion ripped through the hotel, killing two Americans and injuring fifty-eight others. Again Johnson stayed his hand.

The event more than any other that brought the Marines to the beaches of Da Nang occurred on the night of 7 February 1965. At Camp Holloway, an airbase near the provincial capital of Pleiku, some 400 Americans of the 52nd Combat Aviation Battalion were asleep when 300 Vietcong crept up on them. For the previous week, there had been a ceasefire for the Vietnamese festival for the lunar new year, Tet. The Vietcong had used that time to stockpile captured American mortars and ammunition. At 0200hrs, they began bombarding the airbase, turning it into a conflagration of exploding ammunition and burning aircraft which left seven American dead and 100 wounded.

'They are killing our men while they are asleep at night,' said President Johnson. 'I can't ask American soldiers to continue to fight with one hand behind their back'.

On 2 March 1965, 100 US jet bombers took off from Da Nang airbase to strike at targets in the North. As it was Vietcong who had attacked Camp Holloway, this was the first air strike against North Vietnam that could not be justified as retaliation and it began a sustained campaign of graduated bombing known as Operation Rolling Thunder that continued, on and off, for the next three years. Its aim was to slow the infiltration of men and supplies from the North and bomb the Communists to the negotiating table. It succeeded in neither, but America was now committed to a course of action and President Johnson had raised the political price of failure. That same day, the four ships of Amphibious Task Force 76 set sail from Japan. The Second Indochina War – the American war in Vietnam – was now underway.