There is a myth the UK did not support Washington’s war against Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, Labour and Conservative governments backed every phase of US military escalation and played secret roles in the conflict, declassified files show.

MARK CURTIS
 

Harold Wilson and Lyndon Johnson in the White House, February 1968 (Bettmann / Contributor/Getty)

• UK sent SAS team to Vietnam in 1962, flew secret RAF missions to deliver arms, and provided intelligence to US 
• UK governments lied to parliament they were not providing military advice to South Vietnam’s brutal regime
• Labour government secretly gave arms to US for use in Vietnam, stressing need for “no publicity”
• It also connived with Washington to deceive UK public over its support for US
• UK governments knew of atrocities against civilians but backed US war aims
• Whitehall only started to advocate a peaceful solution, on US terms, once the war became unwinnable

During its war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s the US dropped more bombs than in the whole of World War Two, in a conflict that killed over two million people. The wholesale destruction of villages and killing of innocent people was a permanent feature of the US war from the beginning, along with widespread indiscriminate bombing.

Britain’s role in the war has been largely buried and must be almost completely unknown to the public. When the UK media mentions the war now, reports often simply reference the refusal by Harold Wilson’s government to agree to US requests to openly deploy British troops. 

Although this was certainly a public rebuff to Washington, Britain did virtually everything else to back the US war over more than a decade, the declassified documents show.

Popular revolution

After France was defeated in 1954 in its eight-year attempt to reconquer Vietnam, the Geneva Accords divided Vietnam between North and South, with the northern half of the country under the control of the Communist Party.

What the US subsequently confronted in South Vietnam was a liberation movement – the Viet Minh, designated ‘Viet Cong’ by the US – calling for reunification with the North, land reform to benefit the rural poor, the overthrow of the US-backed regime of Ngo Dinh Diem and abolition of the US bases in the South.

Land reform lay at the root of the war. The Viet Minh movement redistributed huge areas of land under its control to previously landless peasants but by 1961 hundreds of thousands of hectares had been taken back by the Diem regime.