Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

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Essay The Vietnam War, or the Second Indo-China war, which took place from the 1 st of November 1955 to the 30 th of April 1975, with the end coming in the Fall of Saigon, where the communist North Vietnam and Viet-Cong took over the capital of South Vietnam, Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh city, after the leader of North Vietnam. The USA feared the ‘domino effect’ where communism would go from one country to the next, flowing through South East Asia. President Eisenhower believed that it could even spread further into India and even Australia and New Zealand and was quoted saying “ The possible consequences of the loss [of Indochina],” Eisenhower said, “are just incalculable to the free world.” Given the US’s fear of this, they called upon their allies, one of which being Australia. This essay will focus primarily on the positives and negatives of the war on Australia socially, and politically and their impacts on these aspects of Australia and the reactions of both of these parties to the war. In Australia, the Prime Minister, Harold Holt told the public that troops were going to be placed in Vietnam in support of our allies, there was an immediate divide between the population. At the start of the war, support for the government’s decision to send troops into Vietnam was supported heavily by the public, with newspapers giving support and were behind the government’s decision to go to war, with only one newspaper, ‘The Australian’ voicing a negative opinion on the war, disagreeing with the governments decision. However, there was not the same type of support from the news compared to the previous wars which Australia had been involved in. Rather than the troops being called ‘heroic’ there was heavy use of words like ‘grave decision’ (Skwirk, 2018). Instead of the nationalistic flag waving way Australia entered the previous world wars, there was a more forced entering of the war, with many newspapers saying that Australia had ‘no alternative’ given its geographical