Gulf of Tonkin incident
The Gulf of Tonkin incident refers to a naval confrontation in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam, which led to the United States engaging more directly in the Vietnam War. On 2 August 1964 there was a clash between a destroyer of the United States Navy that was collecting signals intelligence close to North Vietnamese waters, and three North Vietnamese naval vessels. On the night of 4 August, two US destroyers reported they were attacked by North Vietnamese vessels and that they were returning fire. Later investigation revealed that the 4 August attack did not happen; no North Vietnamese vessels had been present. Shortly after the events, the National Security Agency, an agency of the US Defense Department, deliberately skewed intelligence to create the impression that an attack had been carried out.
On the night of 30 July, South Vietnamese commandos raided a North Vietnamese radar station on the island of Hòn Mê in the Gulf of Tonkin. The next day the destroyer commanded by Commander Herbert L. Ogier began patrolling near the North Vietnamese coast. On 2 August, the Maddox, while performing a signals intelligence patrol as part of DESOTO operations, near one of the islands that had been shelled two nights before, was approached by three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats of the 135th Torpedo Squadron. Maddox fired warning shots and the North Vietnamese boats attacked with torpedoes and machine gun fire. In the ensuing engagement, one US aircraft was damaged, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats were damaged, and four North Vietnamese sailors were killed, with six more wounded. There were no US casualties. Maddox was "unscathed except for a single bullet hole from a Vietnamese machine gun round".
On 3 August, destroyer joined Maddox and the two destroyers continued the DESOTO mission. On the evening of 4 August, the ships opened fire on radar returns that had been preceded by communications intercepts, which US forces claimed meant an attack was imminent. The commodore of the Maddox task force, Captain John Herrick, reported that the ships were being attacked by North Vietnamese boats when, in fact, there were no North Vietnamese boats in the area. While Herrick soon reported doubts regarding the task force's initial perceptions of the attack, the Johnson administration relied on the wrongly interpreted National Security Agency communications intercepts to conclude that the attack was real.
While doubts regarding the perceived second attack have been expressed since 1964, it was not until years later that it was shown conclusively never to have happened. In the 2003 documentary The Fog of War, the former United States secretary of defense, Robert S. McNamara, admitted that there was no attack on 4 August. In 1995, McNamara met with former North Vietnamese Army General Võ Nguyên Giáp to ask what happened on 4 August 1964. "Absolutely nothing", Giáp replied. Giáp confirmed that the attack had been imaginary. In 2005, an internal National Security Agency historical study was declassified; it concluded that Maddox had engaged the North Vietnamese Navy on 2 August, but that the incident of 4 August was based on bad naval intelligence and misrepresentations of North Vietnamese communications. The official US government claim is that it was based mostly on erroneously interpreted communications intercepts.
The outcome of the incident was the passage by US Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted US president Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by communist aggression. The resolution served as Johnson's legal justification for deploying US conventional forces to South Vietnam and the commencement of open warfare against North Vietnam in early 1965.
Background
The Geneva Conference in 1954 was intended to settle outstanding issues following the end of hostilities between France and the Viet Minh at the end of the First Indochina War. Neither the United States nor the State of Vietnam signed anything at the 1954 Geneva Conference. The accords, which were signed by other participants including the Viet Minh, mandated a temporary ceasefire line, which separated southern and northern Vietnam to be governed by the State of Vietnam and the Viet Minh respectively. The accords called for a general election by July 1956 to create a unified Vietnamese state. The accords allowed free movement of the population between the north and south for three hundred days. They also forbade the political interference of other countries in the area, the creation of new governments without the stipulated elections, and foreign military presence. By 1961, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem faced significant discontent among some quarters of the southern population, including some Buddhists who were opposed to the rule of Diem's Catholic supporters. Viet Minh political cadres, who were legally campaigning for the promised elections between 1955 and 1957, were suppressed by the government. In March 1956, the North Vietnamese leadership approved tentative measures to revive the southern insurgency in December 1956. A communist-led uprising began against Diem's government in April 1957. The North Vietnamese Communist Party approved a "people's war" on the South at a session in January 1959, and on 28 July, North Vietnamese forces invaded Laos to maintain and upgrade the Ho Chi Minh trail, in support of insurgents in the south. The rebellion, headed by the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam under the direction of North Vietnam, had intensified by 1961. About 40,000 communist soldiers infiltrated the south from 1961 to 1963.The Gulf of Tonkin Incident occurred during the first year of the Johnson administration. While U.S. President John F. Kennedy had originally supported the policy of sending military advisers to Diem, he had begun to alter his thinking by September 1963, because of what he perceived to be the ineptitude of the Saigon government and its inability and unwillingness to make needed reforms. Shortly before Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, he had begun a limited withdrawal of 1,000 U.S. forces before the end of 1963. Johnson's views were likewise complex, but he had supported military escalation as a means of challenging what was perceived to be the Soviet Union's expansionist policies. The Cold War policy of containment was to be applied to prevent the fall of Southeast Asia to communism under the precepts of the domino theory. After Kennedy's assassination, Johnson ordered in more U.S. forces to support the Saigon government, beginning a protracted United States presence in Southeast Asia.
A highly classified program of covert actions against North Vietnam, known as Operation Plan 34-Alpha, in conjunction with the DESOTO operations, had begun under the Central Intelligence Agency in 1961. In 1964, the program was transferred to the Defense Department and conducted by the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations Group. For the maritime portion of the covert operation, a set of fast patrol boats had been purchased quietly from Norway and sent to South Vietnam. In 1963, three young Norwegian skippers traveled on a mission in South Vietnam. They were recruited for the job by the Norwegian intelligence officer Alf Martens Meyer. Martens Meyer, who was head of department at the military intelligence staff, operated on behalf of U.S. intelligence. The three skippers did not know who Meyer really was when they agreed to a job that involved them in sabotage missions against North Vietnam.
Although the boats were crewed by South Vietnamese naval personnel, approval for each mission conducted under the plan came directly from Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp Jr., CINCPAC in Honolulu, who received his orders from the White House. After the coastal attacks began, Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, lodged a complaint with the International Control Commission, which had been established in 1954 to oversee the terms of the Geneva Accords, but the U.S. denied any involvement. Four years later, Secretary McNamara admitted to Congress that the U.S. ships had in fact been cooperating in the South Vietnamese attacks against North Vietnam.
In 1962, the U.S. Navy began an electronic warfare support measures program, conducted by destroyer patrols in the western Pacific, with the cover name DESOTO. The first missions in the Tonkin Gulf began in February 1964. While intelligence collected by DESOTO missions could be used by OPLAN-34A planners and commanders, they were separate programs not known to coordinate mission planning except to warn DESOTO patrols to stay clear of 34A operational areas.
On July 29, 1964, the night before it launched actions against North Vietnamese facilities on Hòn Mê and Hòn Ngư islands, the MACV-SOG had launched a covert long-term agent team into North Vietnam, which was promptly captured. On 1 and 2 August, flights of CIA-sponsored Laotian fighter-bombers attacked border outposts well within southwestern North Vietnam. According to Edwin Moïse, the Hanoi government probably assumed that they were all a coordinated effort to escalate military actions against North Vietnam.
Incident
, who was on duty in the Pentagon the night of 4 August, receiving messages from, reported that she was on a DESOTO mission near Northern Vietnamese territorial waters. On 31 July 1964, Maddox had begun her mission in the Gulf of Tonkin. Maddox was under orders not to approach closer than eight miles from North Vietnam's coast and four miles from Hon Nieu island. When a MACV-SOG commando raid was being carried out against Hon Nieu, the ship was away from the attacked area.First attack
In July 1964, "the situation along North Vietnam's territorial waters had reached a near boil", because of South Vietnamese commando raids and airborne operations that inserted intelligence teams into North Vietnam, as well as North Vietnam's military response to these operations. On the night of July 30, 1964, South Vietnamese commandos attacked a North Vietnamese radar station on Hòn Mê island. According to Hanyok, "it would be attacks on these islands, especially Hòn Mê, by South Vietnamese commandos, along with the proximity of the Maddox, that would set off the confrontation", although the Maddox did not participate in the commando attacks. In this context, on July 31, Maddox began patrols of the North Vietnamese coast to collect intelligence, coming within a few miles of Hòn Mê island. A U.S. aircraft carrier, the USS Ticonderoga, was also stationed nearby.By 1 August, North Vietnamese patrol boats were tracking Maddox, and several intercepted communications indicated that they were preparing to attack. Maddox retreated, but the next day, Maddox, which had a top speed of 28 knots, resumed her routine patrol, and three North Vietnamese P-4 torpedo boats with a top speed of 50 knots began to follow Maddox. The boats were from Squadron 135, commanded by Le Duy Khoai, with the boats commanded by brothers Van Bot, Van Tu, and Van Gian. Intercepted communications indicated that the vessels intended to attack Maddox. As the ships approached from the southwest, Maddox changed course from northeasterly to southeasterly and increased speed to 25 knots.
As the torpedo boats neared, Maddox fired three warning shots. The North Vietnamese boats then attacked, and Maddox radioed she was under attack from the three boats, closing to within, while located away from the North Vietnamese coast. Maddox stated she had evaded a torpedo attack and opened fire with its five-inch guns, forcing the torpedo boats away. Two of the torpedo boats had come as close as and released one torpedo each, but neither one was effective, coming no closer than about after Maddox evaded them. Another P-4 received a direct hit from a five-inch shell from Maddox; its torpedo malfunctioned at launch. Four USN F-8 Crusader jets launched from Ticonderoga and 15 minutes after Maddox had fired her initial warning shots, attacked the retiring P-4s, claiming one was sunk and one heavily damaged. Maddox suffered only minor damage from a single 14.5 mm bullet from a P-4's KPV heavy machine gun into her superstructure. Retiring to South Vietnamese waters, Maddox was joined by the destroyer.
The original account from the Pentagon Papers has been revised in light of a 2001 internal NSA historical study, which states:
Maddox, when confronted, was approaching Hòn Mê Island, three to four nautical miles inside the limit claimed by North Vietnam. This territorial limit was unrecognized by the United States. After the skirmish, Johnson ordered Maddox and Turner Joy to stage daylight runs into North Vietnamese waters, testing the limit and North Vietnamese resolve. These runs into North Vietnamese territorial waters coincided with South Vietnamese coastal raids and were interpreted as coordinated operations by the North, which officially acknowledged the engagements of August.
Others, such as Admiral Sharp, maintained that U.S. actions did not provoke the incident. He claimed that the North Vietnamese had tracked Maddox along the coast by radar and were thus aware that the destroyer had not actually attacked North Vietnam and that Hanoi had ordered its craft to engage Maddox anyway. North Vietnamese general Phùng Thế Tài later claimed that Maddox had been tracked since 31 July and that she had attacked fishing boats on August 2 forcing the North Vietnamese Navy to "fight back".
Sharp also noted that orders given to Maddox to stay off the North Vietnamese coast put the ship in international waters, as North Vietnam claimed only a limit as its territory. In addition, many nations had previously carried out similar missions all over the world, and the destroyer had earlier conducted an intelligence-gathering mission in similar circumstances without incident.
Sharp's claims, however, included some factually incorrect statements. North Vietnam did not adhere to an 8-kilometer limit for its territorial waters; instead it adhered to a limit claimed by French Indochina in 1936. Moreover it officially claimed a 12 nmi limit, which is practically identical to the old 20 km French claim, after the incidents of August, in September 1964. The North Vietnamese stance is that they always considered a 12 nautical mile limit, consistent with the positions regarding the law of the sea of both the Soviet Union and China, their main allies.