9781422279014

Stalemate: U.S. Public Opinion of the War in Vietnam

piston engine, to the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress with its eight jet engines. The forces of the NLF , therefore, switched back to the type of small- unit irregular operations in which they had been so successful up to the middle of 1965. From a time late in 1964 the North Vietnamese had been dispatching units of their regular army into South Vietnam. At this time some of the politico-military leadership in Hanoi had felt that the time was ripe for an immediate invasion of the south, and this was the reason for the Communist military attempt to split South Vietnam in two with an advance from the Central Highlands east to the sea. This had led to the first major combat operation between North Vietnamese forces in the Ia Drang valley, and to the subsequent revision of the Communist tactics to reflect the losses suffered by the North Vietnamese. The lesson the U.S. forces drew from the fighting was that the North Vietnamese were not, as they had so wrongly believed, a force of indifferent troops of the light infantry type, little more than irregulars with little discipline and only light weapons, but a force of well disciplined and highly motivated soldiers with good training and excellent weapons. On November 27, 1965 the U.S. Department of Defense revealed that it was now thinking that a successful campaign to defeat the North Vietnamese and NLF forces in South Vietnam would require substantially greater strength than had been thought necessary up to this time: major operations were now accepted as necessary, and this would need an increase in the U.S. troop levels in South Vietnam from the current figure OPPOSITE: Marines conduct a search- and-destroy mission along a Vietnamese hillside in 1966. RIGHT: A sentry on duty with his dog at Da Nang airbase.

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