The Vietnam War: The Last War (Episode 5, Finale)

Key takeaways

• France ruled Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as French Indochina for nearly a century. At Dien Bien Phu in 1954, after a 56-day siege, the Viet Minh, who had hauled artillery up the surrounding hills by hand, captured more than 10,000 French and allied troops; historians estimate only about a third came home.
• At Geneva in July 1954, Laos and Cambodia were recognised as independent (Cambodia had declared independence on 9 November 1953) but Vietnam was split at the 17th parallel, a temporary line, like Korea's 38th. The promised 1956 elections to reunify the country never happened.
• After the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 (a second reported attack most likely never happened), American troop numbers rose from nearly 200,000 at the end of 1965 to more than 540,000 in 1969. Each request for more troops came with the same message: this time it will be enough.
• The Tet Offensive of January 1968 was a military defeat for Hanoi, but it shattered American trust. Walter Cronkite told the country the war looked stuck, Johnson chose not to run again, and the Pentagon Papers later showed that successive governments had told the public a different story from what they knew.
• The last US combat troops left in March 1973, and Saigon fell on 30 April 1975. More than 58,000 Americans died, and historians estimate Vietnamese deaths at about 1 to more than 3 million, not counting Lao and Khmer victims. Only three dominoes fell: Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.