![]() The 1968 Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese turned many Americans against the war. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson escalated the war, commencing air strikes on North Vietnam and committing ground forces-which numbered 536,000 in 1968. The military condition deteriorated, and by 1963, South Vietnam had lost the fertile Mekong Delta to the Viet Cong. To support the South's government, the United States sent in 2,000 military advisors-a number that grew to 16,300 in 1963. By 1958, Communist-led guerrillas, known as the Viet Cong, had begun to battle the South Vietnamese government. In 1956, South Vietnam, with American backing, refused to hold unification elections. As a result of the conference, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam received their independence, and Vietnam was temporarily divided between an anti-Communist South and a Communist North. The French defeat at the Dien Bien Phu was followed by a peace conference in Geneva. Even today, many Americans still ask whether the American effort in Vietnam was a sin, a blunder, a necessary war, or whether it was a noble cause, or an idealistic, if failed, effort to protect the South Vietnamese from totalitarian government.Ä«etween 19, the Vietnamese waged an anti-colonial war against France, which received $2.6 billion in financial support from the United States. It resulted in nearly 60,000 American deaths and in an estimated 2 million Vietnamese deaths. Vietnam was the longest war in American history and the most unpopular American war of the 20th century.
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