US didn’t pressure us into Vietnam, we urged them to escalate

This is a week for anniversaries. Not only the centenary of the Anzac landings at Gallipoli but also 50 years since the announcement of Australia’s entry into the Vietnam War. On April 29, 1965 prime minister Robert Menzies announced to the federal parliament that Australia would commit almost 1000 combat troops to the conflict in Vietnam. By October 1967 the total number of Australian military personnel in Vietnam had reached more than 8000.

There are several longstanding myths about Australia’s participation in the Vietnam War. One is that the Whitlam government withdrew their remaining Australian troops after its election in December 1972. In fact, all the troops had been withdrawn by the end of 1971 during the period of the McMahon government.

Another myth is that the war was deeply unpopular in the Australian community. The feeling in the electorate was demonstrated in the 1966 general election when the Liberal government, under prime minister Harold Holt, won in a landslide after Labor had come out against the decision to commit troops.

It is true that the community was more evenly divided on the question of conscription but it was not until later in the 1960s, when it was clear the war was going badly for the US and its allies, that public opinion in Australia became disenchanted with continued participation in the conflict.

Perhaps the most persistent myth, however, is that the Australian government was pressured by the Americans to make a commitment of ground troops. As it happens, there was a debate in Washington in late 1964 and early 1965, following Lyndon Johnson’s victory in the November presidential election, as to whether the US would significantly increase its role in Vietnam. The Australian government, particularly Menzies and foreign minister Paul Hasluck, pushed the Washington administration to escalate its war effort and to ask for the presence of Australian troops. The diplomatic cables between the government in Canberra and the Australian embassy in Washington over this period indicate a concern by Australia that the US might enter into negotiations with North Vietnam and that the war might end.

The Australian government’s objectives were certainly fulfilled. The first American combat troops landed in Vietnam in March 1965. There were 1500 of them. Two months later there were 50,000 and by the end of 1965 there were 200,000. By the middle of 1967 there were 525,000. The last Americans were evacuated from Saigon on April 30 1975, the day on which North Vietnamese troops entered the city. More than two million persons had been killed in the course of the war and twice that number wounded. Twice as many again had been made refugees.

Some commentators in the US and Australia now say the decision to intervene in Vietnam was right but that the war was fought in the wrong way. They suggest that it is only in hindsight that it looks obvious that the drastic military means necessary to win the war could not be undertaken once the political will of the US administration had been eroded by public loss of confidence in victory. But there were members of the Johnson administration who had put forcefully, if unsuccessfully, the view that the war was unwinnable in late 1964 and early 1965 in Washington.

In May 1961 French president Charles de Gaulle said to US president John Kennedy, whom he liked despite their somewhat different personalities, that intervention in Vietnam would be an “entanglement without end”. The French, of course, had been defeated by the North Vietnamese forces in 1954 and forced to withdraw from the region. De Gaulle added to Kennedy his prediction that “you will, step by step, become sucked into a bottomless military and political quagmire despite the losses and expenditure that you may squander”.

Menzies was one of the most talented persons to become an Australian prime minister but Vietnam is a significant stain on his record period of leadership. This was a particularly cynical exercise on the Australian side because it was an attempt to lock the Americans into the South-East Asian region without ultimately caring what the consequences of the war were for the US. Vietnam has cast a long shadow for the US. It still today affects its attitude to foreign interventions and it remains the source of some hostility and much suspicion among the people of European nations. Unlike the Anzac experience, Vietnam was one of the least glorious exercises in Australian military and political history.

Michael Sexton SC is the author of War for the Asking: How Australia invited itself to Vietnam.