Why did America go to war in viet nam?

Answer 1

Americans went to Vietnam because of a popular political belief known as the domino effect. Many at the time thought that if one country was allowed to fall to the communists, country after country would fall, and eventually the United States.

Answer 2

To stop the spread of Communism

Vietnam War The Vietnam War was the longest war ever fought by the United States. It lasted more than 15 years, from 1959 to 1975. It was also the first war that the United States lost.

WHY THE WAR WAS FOUGHT The United States entered the war to stop the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia. American leaders feared that Communist forces would gain control of Vietnam. After that, nation after nation might fall to Communism. Communism is a political and economic system that the United States strongly opposed. Vietnam had been split in half in 1954, after fighting a war to gain independence from France. When French forces withdrew, Vietnamese Communists gained control of North Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh was the leader of the North Vietnamese Communists. South Vietnam had a non-Communist government. This government was weak. But the United States supported it in order to keep the Communists from taking control of all of Vietnam.

FROM ADVISERS TO TROOPS At first, the United States supported South Vietnam with only money and military advisers. The number of advisers in Vietnam jumped from 800 to nearly 17,000 during the early 1960s while John F. Kennedy was U.S. president. In 1964, U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson reported that North Vietnam had attacked U.S. Navy ships along Vietnam's coast. Nearly 80,000 U.S. troops were in South Vietnam by the end of 1965. . The United States conducted a brutal air war against North Vietnam. In one year, the air force flew 150,000 bombing missions. By 1967, the United States had dropped more bombs on North Vietnam than it dropped on its enemies during World War II (1939-1945). By 1969, at the height of the war, the United States had about 543,000 troops in Vietnam. Many of them were teenagers. The average age of Americans fighting in Vietnam was 19.

END OF THE WAR Although Nixon increased the bombing of North Vietnam, he began withdrawing U.S. troops. Without U.S. support, South Vietnam's government collapsed. North Vietnam won the war in 1975. Vietnam was reunited as a Communist nation. Millions of people died in the Vietnam War. Many of them were civilians, not soldiers. The war created about 10 million homeless Vietnamese refugees. It left hundreds of thousands of orphans.

Answer

They got involved in Vietnam because they wanted to stop the spread of communism (domino theory) and after France left Vietnam the US felt they needed to take matters into their own hands.

Answer

Complex answer that I will only scratch surface of: ;]

After WWII, President Truman (and the other western allies) viewed Communism (in the form of the Soviet Union) as the greatest post-war threat. The turning point for Asia came in Dec. 1949 when Chinese communist forces won the civil war in China. Now the U.S. feared all of Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand) might fall to communism.

When France pulled-out of Vietnam in 1955-56, the U.S. basically felt it had to fill the void in order to prevent Ho Chi Minh from unifying Vietnam under communist rule (the 1956 peace accords with France had divided Vietnam in half). So starting in 1955, the U.S. started sending military advisors to assist the South Vietnamese Army. The conflict continued to escalate as communist rebels in the South gained more control of the countryside, which required more & more U.S. military advisors & equipment to prop-up the South Vietnamese army. Finally, in 1965, we sent combat troops to prop-up South Vietnam.

Answer 3

They were worried about the spread of communism and didn't want Vietnam to be ruled by communists as this would spread communism which is what they didn't want.