number us navy personnel in vietnam war by year

In August 1964, shots were allegedly fired at the American destroyer USS Maddox off the coast of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin, where it was conducting intelligence-gathering on behalf of the Republic of Vietnam. In the late 1950s, the government of North Vietnam, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, ratcheted up its efforts to take over South Vietnam and merge the two countries in 1960, it established the National Liberation Front (the NLF, commonly known to Americans as the Viet Cong) to fight against the South Vietnam government (Appy, 1993 Marolda, 1994). The US government publicly supported that plan but privately provided funding and other support for the development of an independent, anticommunist, pro-American state in the south, the Republic of Vietnam. In 1954, the Vietnamese defeated the French forces, and the two sides agreed to a temporary, 2-year partition of Vietnam at the 17th parallel, with the French military forces retreating to the south before elections were held and a unified government could be established. In 1950, the US Military Assistance Advisory Group-Indochina (MAAG-Indochina) was established, and small numbers of American military personnel went to Saigon to supervise the material support that the United States was providing to the French (Marolda, 1994). After the Communist victory in China in 1949 and the beginning of the Korean War in 1950, the US government expanded its financial and advisory support of the French in the French-Vietnamese conflict (also known as the First Indochina War). Its support grew primarily out of an American interest in building alliances with Western European nations that would fight against the Soviet Union’s expansion efforts of the early Cold War. After World War II, when Vietnam became an independent nation, the US government supported France’s interest in repossessing Vietnam, its former colony. American involvement in Southeast Asia did not begin with the Vietnam War.

Number us navy personnel in vietnam war by year