Grand total of war deaths: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (1954-75) 1,450,000: 2,450,000: 3,595,000: Civilian deaths in the Vietnam War . United States, National Archives, Korean War and Vietnam War Records; United States Vietnam War 1964 to 1972; Related Websites: NARA Series Description; NARA Reference Information Paper 90 Prisoners of War and Missing in Action from the Vietnam War Era; NARA State-Level Fatal Casualty Lists for the Vietnam War According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, between 200,000 and 400,000 boat people died at sea. [19] Rummel's mid-level estimate includes 17,000 South Vietnamese civil servants killed by PAVN/VC. The human costs of the long conflict were harsh for all involved. The Virtual Wall uses the Coffelt Database (CDB) for unit assignment information. Numbers certainly do not tell the whole story - or all of them - but they certainly paint a picture of lives lost and families devastated. Others are still yet to be discovered and over 1,200 Americans are still unaccounted for. . However, side effects occurred because of Agent Orange. Vietnam War Casualties 1956-1998. The war was fought on Vietnamese land, in addition to the territories of Cambodia and Laos. The first American soldier died in the Vietnam War was Richard B. Fitzgibbon, Jr., a U.S. Air Force Technical Sergeant. These alphabetical indexes are for your convenience but do not represent the order of names on the Wall. These are the most accurate estimates of the death tolls for each group of fighters: Civilians made up a large portion of the casualties in the Vietnam War. In just 30 minutes, they had 30 casualties. Colonial France inhabited Vietnam through the end of World War II. Around 2 million civilians were killed in the territories of North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. These Vietnam War photos taken by U.S. Army photographers reveal a side of the conflict that few people have ever seen. Few Marines units were involved in the U.S. military actions in Cambodia or Laos, and while 1. st. . The United States withdrew its forces in 1973, placing the onus on South Vietnam to fight its own battle. Civil War Deaths | How Many People Died in the Civil War? North Vietnamese troops launched the Tet Offensive in January 1968, which was successful against South Vietnam and the U.S. [19], Other casualties for the ARVN included up to 1,170,000 military wounded,[59] and 1,000,000 surrendered or captured. The film follows the experiences of both Moore, portrayed by Mel Gibson, and his wife, Julia, played by Madeleine Stowe. She has an M.S.Ed. The important statistics and information to remember from this lesson are: To unlock this lesson you must be a Study.com Member. ; 1972 Easter Offensive - This saw 50,000 to 75,000 North Vietnamese combatants . [93][97], Civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, John Lewis, Muhammad Ali and others, criticized the racial disparity in both casualties and representation in the entire military, prompting the Pentagon to order cutbacks in the number of African Americans in combat positions. Revolutionary War. For this figure, Guenter Lewy assumes that one-third of the reported enemy killed may have been civilians, concluding that the actual number of deaths of the VC and PAVN military forces was probably closer to 444,000. [25], Operating under the direction of the CIA and other US and South Vietnamese Intel organizations and carried out by ARVN units alongside US advisers was the Phoenix Program, intended to neutralise the VC political infrastructure, whom were the civilian administration of the Viet Cong/Provisional Revolutionary Government via infiltration, capture, counter-terrorism, interrogation, and assassination. All three men died in spring of 2020 of COVID-19 after . The Geneva conference established a treaty that split the nation of Vietnam in half for the time being, with reunification elections set to be held in 1956. More than 8.7 million Americans served on active duty during the Vietnam period (Nov 1, 1955 to May 15, 1975). Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and China poured weapons, supplies, and advisers into the North, which in turn provided support, political direction, and regular combat troops for the campaign in the South. Specialized units such as the SeaBees, Scout Dog and Combat Tracker units, Navy SEAL/UDT, etc., usually are indexed under the next higher command. My Lai (4) and My Khe (4) (collectively the My Lai Massacre) claimed the largest number of victims with 420 and 90 respectively, and in five other places a total of about 100 civilians were executed. Deaths caused by the South Korean military, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong military casualties, Disproportion of African American casualties. Civilian deaths were also caused by mortar and artillery, extensive aerial bombing and the use of firepower in military operations conducted in heavily populated areas. This stemmed from the United States' involvement in the Cold War, which the United States fought to preserve democracy against the forces of Communism springing up in countries such as the Soviet Union and China. On February 26, 2007, President George W. Bush presented Crandall with the Medal of Honor for . The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., lists more than 58,300 names of members of the U.S. armed forces who were killed or went missing in action. [27] Estimates for the number of North Vietnamese civilian deaths resulting from US bombing range from 30,00065,000. One study estimated that American commanders exaggerated body counts by 100 percent. 8. During the final years of World War II, political leader Ho Chi Minh organized a group, the Viet Cong, to fight the powers in occupancy of the territory and take control. [citation needed] Black people often made up a disproportionate 25% or more of combat units, while constituting only 12% of the military. Ordering Information for Electronic Records. The Vietnam War is one of the most unpopular wars in American history. When he later read the official tally of dead, he found that it listed them as 130 VC killed. He estimates that between 30 and 46% of the total war deaths were civilians. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). War on Terrorism, 2000-2014. The earliest casualty record contains a date of death of . Panama . Although demographers have developed a reper- It is unknown how much aid was lost from North Vietnamese allies. It is estimated that South Vietnam lost between 200,000 and 250,000 fighters. Vietnam emerged from the war as a potent military power within Southeast Asia, but its agriculture, business, and industry were disrupted, large parts of its countryside were scarred by bombs and defoliation and laced with land mines, and its cities and towns were heavily damaged. The South Vietnamese government, on the other hand, fought to preserve a Vietnam more closely aligned with the West. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Not until 1995 did Vietnam release its official estimate of war dead: as many as 2 million civilians on both sides and some 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. [55] Widespread reports of deliberate mass killings by Korean forces alleged that they were the result of systemic, deliberate policies to massacre civilians, with murders running into the hundreds. [62] According to the Vice Minister Nguyn B Hoan, in 2022, nearly 200,000 PAVN/VC were still MIA (whose bodies were have not been found), and 300,000 whose bodies have been found, but buried anonymously and never identified. Search and destroy was a term to describe operations aimed at flushing the Viet Cong out of hiding, while body count was the measuring stick for operation success and this resulted in exaggeration and listing civilian deaths as enemy KIA. The exact breakdown still remains unclear, although an estimated 273,000 Cambodians and 62,000 Lao lost their lives. Many black men who had previously been ineligible could now be drafted, along with many poor and racially intolerant white men from the southern states. In 1965 alone they comprised 14.1% of total combat deaths, when they only comprised approximately 11% of the total U.S. population in the same year. (At least 100 names on the memorial are those of servicemen who were actually Canadian citizens.) Joseph L. Rhodes, 22, Marines, L. [21] During the peak war years, another scholar Guenter Lewy attributed almost a third of civilian deaths to the VC. Put in their place to rule was Emperor Bao Dai, a French implant who had ties to creating a democracy. Causes of ongoing deaths and side effects include. . Their estimates for conflict deaths in Vietnam are 164,923 from 195564 and 1,458,050 from 196575 for a total of 1,622,973. Its like a teacher waved a magic wand and did the work for me. [62][63] Based on unit surveys, a rough estimate of 3040% of dead and missing were non-combat deaths. At the heart of the conflict was the desire of North Vietnam, which had defeated the French colonial administration of Vietnam in 1954, to unify the entire country under a single communist regime modeled after those of the Soviet Union and China. As a member, you'll also get unlimited access to over 84,000 Relations between the United States and Vietnam were stable in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and peace was maintained. from Johns Hopkins and his MA and Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. He further suggests that 222,000 civilians may have been counted as enemy military deaths by the U.S. in compiling its "body count" raising the total to 627,000 killed. As of 2014, 221 Virginian deaths have been identified. * The 143 men subsequently declared dead between 1973 and 2002 are not included in these totals. Regarding killed in action the 1st Marine Division was the unit with the highest . Vietnam War, Awards and Decorations of Honor, 1965-1972. More than 58,000 American casualties of the Vietnam War are commemorated on the Vietnam Wall in Washington, DC. Try refreshing the page, or contact customer support. This resulted in a dramatic decrease in the proportion of black casualties, and by late 1967, black casualties had fallen to 13%, and were below 10% in 1970 to 1972. Records with Unit Information on Military Personnel Who Died During the Vietnam War . On October 22, 1957, the U.S. forces suffered their first hostile casualties. He succeeded in 1954 and established a Communist government. It granted him broad latitude in handling the struggle against communism in Southeast Asia. Enrolling in a course lets you earn progress by passing quizzes and exams. In the midst of an intense 3-week fight against the North Vietnamese Army in the province of Kontum, South Vietnam, elements of the U.S. Army 173d Airborne Brigade and the 503d Infantry Regiment assaulted a battalion of North Vietnamese soldiers entrenched on a hill outside the village . Among other countries that fought for South Vietnam on a smaller scale, South Korea suffered more than 4,000 dead, Thailand about 350, Australia more than 500, and New Zealand some three dozen. That can include disabled by injuries, disabled by psychological trauma, captured, deserted, or missing. [7], R. J. Rummel's mid-range estimate in 1997 was that the total deaths due to the Vietnam War totaled 2,450,000 from 195475. Memorial pages honoring Vietnam War casualties, listed by their last names. Veterans were viewed negatively for their participation in the war, even if it was not by their choice to do so. The war was fought largely in North Vietnam and South Vietnam, though some fighting did occur in the neighboring territories of Cambodia and Laos. Two major war memorials commemorating the dead soldiers in the Second Indochina War (a.k.a. U.S. military advisers, present in small numbers throughout the 1950s, were introduced on a large scale beginning in 1961, and active combat units were introduced in 1965. Australian special operations units would go out into the jungles of Vietnam for weeks at a time, often without saying a word to one another in order to maintain complete silence as they stalked the Northern troops through the jungles. Over 58,000 American troops were killed in Vietnam, with more still not identified. 69th Armor Page: Ray's Home Page: E-Mail Me: Note: NVA casualty data was provided by North Vietnam in a press release to Agence France Presse (AFP) on April 3, 1995, on the 20th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died in the war. Encounter Books, December 2022. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, but his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, continued the work that Kennedy had started. lessons in math, English, science, history, and more. Against the background of the Cold War, the Vietnam War embroiled the United States, South Vietnam, and regional allies in a long and costly conflict against the regular forces of North Vietnam and the Communist Viet Cong guerillas. These photographs have become a part of the Coffelt Database. The number of casualties is simply the number of members of a unit who are not available for duty. 88,594. From 1965 to 1975, nearly 500,000 Marines served in Southeast Asia. [57], The ARVN suffered 254,256 recorded combat deaths between 1960 and 1974, with the highest number of recorded deaths being in 1972, with 39,587 combat deaths. [60] Prior to the 1975 spring offensive, at least 5,336 ARVN were captured, being released in the aftermath of the Paris Peace Accords. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners. 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