Saturday, May 31, 1975. Laying down arms.

Neutralist Laotian Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma ordered the Royal Lao Army to lay down their arms and cease further resistance as the Pathet Lao took Savannakhet.

Last edition:

Wednesday, May 28, 1975. "NATO is the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and has the unwavering support of the American public and of our Congress. Our commitment to this alliance will not falter."

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Gerald Ford, It was because of the Vietnam War, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, United States, Vietnam, Vietnam War

Tuesday, May 27, 1975. Americans out of Laos.

The US and Laos reached an agreement which included that all Americans were to leave Laos,by June 30, 1975.

The nation was not yet fully controlled by the Pathet Lao.

Falling like dominoes.  

Last edition:

Monday, May 26, 1975. Memorial Day.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Daily Living, Gerald Ford, Growing up in the 1970s, Memorial Day

Friday, May 23, 1975. Leaving Laos.

Most American employees of the U.S Embassy in Laos were ordered to evacuate.

The U.S. has an embassy in Laos presently.  In fact, the countries never severed diplomatic relations and normalized them in 1992.

The Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975 was signed into law by President Ford. The act provided for resettlement of South Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees into the United States. In 1975 it would be amended to include include refugees from Laos.

A military government was appointed to govern Lebanon.

Former President of the Teamsters Union Dave Beck was pardoned by President Ford.

Last edition:

Thursday, May 15, 1975. The Raid on Koh Tang.

Labels: 1960s, 1964, 1970s, 1975, Cambodia, Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Khmer Rouge, Mayaguez Incident, The Mayaguez Incident, U.S. Air Force, United States Marine Corps, Vietnam War

Wednesday, May 14, 1975. Hmong evacuation.

Thousands of Hmong soldiers and officers and their families who had assisted the CIA during the Laotian Civil War, reported to the Long Chieng airbase in Laos for air evacuation.  Only two cargo planes were assigned the duty, but they managed to take out 2,500 Hmong.

This brings back up the discussion here earlier of Ma Yang, a Hmong was deported by the U.S. to Laos even though she only speaks English and has lived in the US since she was eight months old.  As far as I know, nothing has yet been done to address her plight.

Today is Hmong American Day in the United States, which is set on this day in recognition of the evacuation and ultimately that a population of the Hmong Diaspora relocated to the U.S.  The largest population of Hmong live in China, which is actually where the ethnic group originates, with Vietnam having the second largest population.

Dalton Trumbo was presented an Academy Award for his 1956 script for The Brave Ones, which had been earlier awarded under a pseudonym due to Trumbo then being blacklisted.

Dalton and Cleo Trumbo at a 1947 House Committee on UnAmerican Affairs hearing.

Trumbo actually was a Communist and pretty up front about it.  1973's Papillon was his last screenplay to be produced prior to his death in 1976.

Last edition:

Tuesday, May 13, 1975. Breakthrough at Long Tieng.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Central Intelligence Agency, Hmong People, Laotian Civil War, North Vietnamese Army, Pathet Lao, Personalities, U.S. Air Force, Vietnam War

Related Threads:

Ma Yang

Labels: Crime, Hmong People, Immigration, It was because of the Vietnam War, Laos, law, Marijuana, Monday at the bar

Sunday, May 11, 1975. Celebrating a peace that wasn't.

A photograph of doves and an Asian woman for the celebration.  In reality, the PAVN and Cambodians were already fighting.  The Khmer Rouge was murdering people and sending the entire population into the countryside, and the Pathet Lao were getting ready to murder the Hmong.

A celebration organized by anti war figure and songwriter Phil Ochs marked the end of the Vietnam War, which of course by necessary implication marked the South Vietnamese defeat.  The event in Central park included performances by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Paul Simon.

The ironies are thick, as the poster above portrays. Rather than smiling Vietnamese women, there were thousands of South Vietnamese going into an uncertain future that included "reeducation", although this time the Communists in Vietnam did not commit mass murders.  The Khmer Rouge and Pathet Lao, however, were about to.

A partial solar eclipse was visible in Greenland, Europe, north Africa and north Asia.

Last edition:

Saturday, May 10, 1975. Cambodian aggression.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Cambodia, Cambodian–Vietnamese War, North Vietnamese Army, Peoples Army of Vietnam, Vietnam War

Friday, May 9, 1975. The Hmong Genocide.

Kaho Xane Pathet Lao, the official newspaper of the Lao People's Party, (the Communist Party) announced: that the nation's Hmong people "must be exterminated down to the root of the tribe" because their soldiers had assisted the United States in fighting the Communists. 

Two days later the genocide would begin.

Last edition:

Thursday, May 8, 1975. The last to get out.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Cambodia, Cambodian Civil War, European Community, Islam, People's Republic of China, religion, Thailand

Monday, May 5, 1975. Dominos. And now Laos.

The Social Security Administration announced for the very first time that it's retirement and disability program was in debt; and that its $46 billion reserve would be drained by 1983.  Notably, President Nixon had extended Medicare, which originally did not apply to everyone, to everyone 62 years of age or older during his Administration.

Television broadcasting began in South Africa.

Royal Lao General Vang Pao, a Hmong highlander, was ordered by the Prime Minister of Laos to cease resistance to the Pathet Lao. 

He resigned instead.

It's almost like the Domino Theory was correct.

Before serving in in the Royal Lao Army, he has served with the French starting during World War Two.  He immigrated to the United States where he died in 2011.

101 former RVNAF aircraft at U-Tapao Royal Thai Navy Airfield were loaded aboard the USS Midway which evacuated 27 A-37s, 3 CH-47s, 25 F-5Es and 45 UH-1Hs.

A further 41 aircraft were flown to the U.S.  54 aircraft were transferred to the Thai Government, these comprised: 1 A-37, 17 C-47s, 1 F-5B, 12 O-1s, 14 U-17s and 9 UH-1Hs.

Last edition:

Sunday, May 4, 1975. 1,000,000 runs.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, baseball, Cambodia, Cambodian–Vietnamese War, Khemr Rouge, South Vietnam, Sports, Vietnam

Ma Yang

A conviction for Marijuana trafficking in 2020 has lead to one Ma Yang, a 37 year old mother of five, being deported to Laos.

It's hard not to note that while marijuana trafficking is illegal, hardly any state in the US cares about growing, selling, and using it now.

She came here from  Thailand in 1988 when she wasn't even a year old.  She's Hmong.  Raised in the US, she doesn't speak an Indochinese language.  Her arrest and conviction involved twenty-five other people (probably all Hmong, I'd guess) and she plead guilty and served thirty months in jail.

She shouldn't have done that, but then, the pressure to be involved, which doesn't excuse it, may have been pretty high.  Apparently everyone involved lived in the same building.

In jail her green card was revoked and she signed a deportation order, believing, naively that she wouldn't be deported as her folks were from Laos, which doesn't cooperate with the US on such matters.

Well, they did here.  She's been in Laos since March, where she doesn't speak the language, and can't get insulin or blood pressure medicine.  Getting a job isn't going to be easy.

What's the lesson here?

Well, some would say if you can't do the time, don't do the crime, although she did the time.  

Some might say she got bad legal advice.  Maybe.  

Some would say that this is really inhumane.  Given her condition, she's likely to suffer for her crime with death, in short order.

Monday, June 3, 1974. Leaving Laos.

The last U.S. military advisors in Laos, only three in number, left the country.

Last prior edition:

Sunday, June 2, 1974. The Forest Brothers.

Labels: 1970s, 1974, African National Congress, Algeria, Arab Oil Embargo, Bhutan, Estonia, Estonian Forest Brothers, Monarchy, OPEC, Rhodesia, Rhodesian Bush War, USSR

Friday, September 14, 1973. Winds of change.

It what was a sign of things to come, the Laotian government agreed to allow the Pathet Lao to become part of a coalition government.

Selassie in 1970.

Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was held at gunpoint by his grandson, Iskinder Desta, deputy commander of the Ethiopian Navy.  Ultimately, the coup attempt would be abandoned when Desta's mother, Princess Tenague, backed him off of it.  A towering figure of Ethiopia in the 20th Century, this too was a sign of things to come.  Things would not work out well, in the end, for Desta either.

Sunday, January 28, 1973. The war continues on.

US B-52s struck Laotian locations to interdict North Vietnamese supply lines to South Vietnam in spite of the official end of the war in South Vietnam, as the peace accords did not extend to Laos.

From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than 2,500,000 tons of bombs, or 260,000,000 bombs, making Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. The Laotian bombing campaign ended on March 29, 1973 following the Agreement on the Restoration of Peace and Reconciliation in Laos between the central government and the Pathet Lao.

Laos, the only landlocked country in Southeast Asia, remains subject to a Communist government today and is effectively one of the most isolated countries in the world.

March 21, 1971. Coming Apart

Signs that the US Army was becoming ungovernable in the field occurred with two platoons of the 1st Cavalry Rgt of the Americal Division refused to advance to the Laotian border to recover damaged equipment.  The unit had lost men in an NVA rocket attack.

M48 of the 1st Cavalry in Vietnam, 1968.

Their company commander was relieved of duty and and the men resumed their regular duties.  Gen. John G. Hill declined to discipline them.  It was the second time during the late war period in which troops fo the Americal Division had refused to obey orders.

Well known during the period, and for quite some time afterwards, but seemingly forgotten now, by this point in the Vietnam War some units of the U.S. Army was becoming highly undisciplined and some units were becoming defiant to orders.  It impacted the leadership of the Army as there was a fear that this would spread and reduce the Army to the point of uselessness.  Given this, there was an increasing desire inside the Army's leadership to get out of Vietnam before the situation became worse.  It would take the Army years to recover from the war.

February 8, 1971. The birth of NASDAQ and Operation Lam Son 715

On this day in 1971 NASDAQ began operating as the world's first electronic stock exchange.

On the same day, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam launched operation Lam Son 715.  The operation featured ARVN forces entering Laos, on their own, to take on North Vietnamese forces there.

The operation would not prove to be a success, demonstrating that deficiencies in the South Vietnamese military and security were such that it was incapable of such large scale operations on its own.  The North Vietnamese were able to anticipate South Vietnamese actions, due to loose security. Additionally, the South Vietnamese, contrary to their latter day reputation, were over aggressive in going into Laos and failed to appreciate the level of support that they routinely relied upon from the US military.

April 30, 1970. The Incursion into Cambodia

Well remembered, but not well remembered accurately, on this day in 1970 President Richard Nixon announced that Republic of Vietnam and the United States were sending forces into Cambodia.

South Vietnamese M113 Armored Personnel Carries in Cambodia in 1970.

Recalled now most as the "U.S. entering the Parrot's Beak" region of Cambodia, in fact events had been building in this direction for weeks, months and years.

Cambodia was part of French Indochina, along with Vietnam and Laos, coming into French control due to a long struggle between Thailand and Vietnam for control of the country, which left it in Vietnamese hands at the time that Vietnam was colonized by the French.  Like Loas, it became an independent kingdom with the collapse of the French regime, achieving that status in 1953 prior to the French departure from Vietnam.  The establishment of the independent kingdom demonstrated  to a degree how the French envisioned post colonial Indochina, with it being made up of French aligned independent states with a government of a highly traditional model.  Indeed, the installed regent, Prince Sihanouk, was a French choice and installed much like the last Vietnamese emperor was in neighboring South Vietnam.  In Sihanouk, however, the French had chosen a much stronger personality who soon demonstrated that he could not be controlled.

Indeed King Sihanouk resigned his position in 1955 to become a politician in the newly independent kingdom, which made his father the king.  However, upon his father's 1960 death, he resumed the position of monarch, but limited his title to Prince. 

Right from the onset Cambodia, like the other regions of Indochina, contained left wing radicals who had come up during the colonial period, something that isn't really surprising in light of the fact that France also had left wing radicals itself.  And as with South Vietnam, the established government was not sympathetic to democratic elements.  Differing from Vietnam, however, Cambodia's monarchy survived its early independence and went on to form the government, whereas a similar effort in the Republic of Vietnam had left to a rapid downfall of the monarch.  Sihanouk had no small role in navigating this course.

Things were always accordingly troubled in the country but the ongoing wars in its Indochinese neighbors made things particularly difficult for Cambodia.  Prince Sihanouk attempted to place the country in the nonaligned camp, which was understandable under the circumstances but frankly naive given the enormous nature of the local conflict and the overarching global one.  

U.S. Air Force UH-1 helicopters over Cambodia.

On the other hand, the Prince correctly believed that the Communists would ultimately prevail in the Vietnamese War and believed that he had to be capable of dealing with that reality if Cambodia was to remain an independent state.  Perhaps realistically assessing the strength of his own armed forces as too weak to oppose the North Vietnamese, his government allowed the NVA to establish sanctuaries within the country starting in the mid 1960s, although as early as 1967 he commented to an American reporter that he would not oppose American air strikes in the country as long as they did not hard Cambodians, which of course was an impossible limitation.

In contrast right wing elements in the country increasingly wanted to take it in the opposite direction and found the Vietnamese presence humiliating.  Cambodia had its own culture and ethnicity and had long suffered from Vietnamese incursions into the country.  Indeed, large number of ethnic Cambodians lived in the Mekong are of Vietnam which itself was a sore point to the Cambodians that would continue right on into the Communist Pol Pot era.

  

In 1967 things changed for the worst when a spontaneous Communist rebellion took place in a region of the country which was followed by a more planned one in 1968.  In the same year Sihanouk openly revoked his prior comments about allowing US air strikes in the country, which given the increasing deterioration of his government's situation was probably a logical position for him to take.  By that time, however, the war in Vietnam was now highly developed.

With Richard Nixon's election in 1968 the US began to increasingly look towards action in Cambodia aimed at North Vietnamese enclaves there, something comparable to other frontier battles of other eras in which the US sought to address safe harbors across a border.  Following the Tet Offensive and Nixon's election, moreover, the US began to look for ways to withdraw from Vietnam which ironically meant occasional increases in the level of violence in the war.  In January 1969 Prince Sihanouk indicated to the US that Cambodia would not oppose ARVN and US forces that entered Cambodia in "hot pursuit" of retreating NVA forces provided that no Cambodians were harmed.  The US went one step further however and started targeting B-52 air strikes on NVA enclaves in the country, something the US later claimed that Sihanouk agreed to but which he most likely did not.  The events demonstrated the impossibility of the Cambodian position, however, as an allowance of one thing is practically an allowance of another, in war, and at the same time it was becoming increasingly impossible for the US to abstain from action in Cambodia.

In March, 1970 Sihanouk was deposed in a military coup which was supported by most of the educated urban population.  The kingdom was brought to an end and the Khmer Republic established.  A massacre of Vietnamese residents of Cambodia ensued in which thousands lost their lives and which was condemned by both North and South Vietnam.  By that time there were 40, 000 North Vietnamese troops in the country.  The new republican regime demanded that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong withdraw but instead they commenced attacks on the Cambodian state.  Prince Sihanouk, moreover, would not give up and encouraged his supporters to restore him to power. All of this fueled the native communist insurgency and the situation degraded into a civil war.  During the same period the NVA attacks became a full scale invasion and the NVA began to overrun and defeat Cambodian army positions.  Not really well known into the 1990s, the North Vietnamese in the period sound to completely overrun the country, which likely was regarded by them as a strategic necessity.  They scored significant successes in the early months of 1970 in attempting this but, remarkably, the Khmer government did not completely collapse and in fact its armed opposition to the NVA and the Khmer Rouge continued throughout the period, although they were losing ground.

The South Vietnamese and American incursion of 1970 was designed to defeat the North Vietnamese in their safe harbor.  South Vietnamese preparatory actions commenced on April 14.  Perhaps ironically President Nixon announced the withdrawal of 150,000 U.S. troops from South Vietnam on April 20.  Nonetheless plans for the action continued, and indeed they may be seen as related to some degree.  On April 30 the South Vietnamese invasion began in earnest and President Nixon announced to the nation that U.S. troops would be entering Cambodia on a temporary basis, which they commenced to do the following day, May 1.

U.S. M48s in Cambodia.

The North Vietnamese were surprised by the invasion and proved to be incapable of resisting it. They nonetheless proved adept at avoiding having their forces destroyed.  American leadership regarded the invasion as a success and US and ARVN forces would withdraw from the eastern portions of the country they occupied in July.  The expansion of the war at the very time that the Administration was committed to withdrawing, while not actually strategically inconsistent, appeared to be and it increased opposition to the war in the United States.  The Cambodian government, in contrast, welcomed the incursion and hoped that US forces would remain in the country, an act which they believed would have helped them combat the native Khmer Rouge insurgency and which they also hoped would lead to the permanent expulsion of the North Vietnamese Army from the country.  Indeed, a remaining American presence was practically a necessity for the Khmer Republic's survival.

Newspaper reading American soldier in Cambodia.

To some degree the action is a tribute to the late Vietnam War American Army and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.  The ARVN were much more fully formed and combat ready by this point in the war than they had been earlier, although they'd also become completely dependant upon American air support, which was enormous in the invasion.  The American Army, in contrast, was severely strained and suffering gigantic moral and discipline problems by this point, so the fact that they were able to effectively rally for a major offensive action is impressive.  It's also impressive, however, that the North Vietnamese were able to react to the invasion and avoid complete destruction.

There are those who want to attribute the ultimate collapse of the Khmer Republic, followed by the horror of Communist Pol Pot's regime, to this series of 1970s events, but the claim is frankly strained.  As noted, the Cambodian government of the time was becoming increasingly right wing and hostile to Communism inside the country and it was actively seeking to destroy it, albeit unsuccessfully.  A more realistic assessment would be that the results in neighboring South Vietnam were always set to dictate what happened in the smaller Indochinese neighbor.  The same political forces that had existed in South Vietnam since 1954 were present in Cambodia since 1953 except, ironically, right wing elements that wished to actively oppose Communism were significantly stronger in Cambodia.

Cambodian civilians dividing captured North Vietnamese Army rice.

At any rate, the Cambodian tragedy, in some ways, has always been strongly linked to being a small country between two larger neighbors.  Vietnam's civil war had spilled into it and now it was raging within its borders.  It's fate would now follow a strongly parallel, but more tragic and bloody course.

Was the Domino Theory Right?

One of the interesting things about the podcast that followed the Burns and Novik Vietnam War documentary is that Burns is interviewed and openly questions whether his pre documentary belief that The Domino Theory was ridiculous was in error.

That surprised me a bit as the documentary doesn't address the theory much other than to note that it was a basis for our going into Vietnam.

I've written on the Domino Theory here before, more specifically in my 2013 post on Looking at the Vietnam War differently. Not a war, but as a campaign in the Cold War.  In that post I urged that the Vietnam War should be looked at as a campaign in the Cold War in order to be viewed historically accurately.  That post came, of course, nearly four years ago and I doubt that very many people search back for post that old here very often (I suppose some might surf into it and I know that occurs with some of our older posts), but in the interesting of not repeating too much what I already have said, I'll quote at length from that post (although, please note, I'm not quoting the whole post):

This brings us back to the "Domino Theory", which was that the if any nation in Southeast Asia fell they'd all fall, one after another.  The general theory is that they'd fall all the way to India, in all likelihood.

As noted, I'm not quoting from the entire 2013 post here.   So perhaps I should flesh that out.  I did so a bit in that post when I noted:

It’s easy to dismiss the Domino Theory now, although erroneously in my view, but at the time dominoes really were falling.  One giant one fell, China, and another one, South Korea, nearly tipped over almost immediately thereafter.  With that history, with Communist insurgencies breaking out all over South East Asia, and with a big huge Communist neighbor behind nearly all of them, geographically, starting in 1947 things looked pretty darned grim. 

Let's still flesh that out just a bit.

The idea was, and it was based on prior experience, that once one nation fell to the Communist that put pressure on its neighbors, particularly if the fallen nation was in a strategic area and particularly if there was already Communist activity in the region.

This idea, following Vietnam, was widely discredited.  But was it as absurd as many would now have us believe?  Many historical examples of the success of militant movements would suggest otherwise.  When the USSR was founded, for example, Communist revolutions did in fact spared to nearby states.  Hungary, for example, had one immediately after Russia and while it didn't succeed, it nearly did.  Germany's red revolution in the 1918-1919 time frame nearly did as well. 

Fascism provides a good example also.  It wasn't as if Germany was the only state that went to the far right in the 1930s.  It was preceded by Italy and joined by Spain and Romania.  Arguably it was somewhat joined by France.  When fascism was on the rise, it wasn't on the rise in one state.  Even the United Kingdom and Ireland had fascists movements in the 1930s.

And before we get too far on the topic of the Vietnam War, let's consider Asia as a whole.

Southeast Asia.  It's big. . . but more connected when you take a little higher view.

One of the things that missed in discussions on the Vietnam War, and it was missed in the Burns and Novik documentary, is that it was Australia that was demanding Western powers get into the Indochinese War after France fell there, not the United States at first.  Australia was begging the US to get in and threatened the Kennedy Administration with going it alone if the US wouldn't go.  In retrospect, maybe we should have allowed for that.  Australia had thinner resources but it also had more experience in fighting guerrilla was in the jungle than we did.

Australian soldiers of the Royal Australian Rifles in Vietnam.

They weren't the only nation concerned about what they were seeing, of course, but looking at the map, and recalling World War Two, you can see why the Australians were particularly concerned.

 Royal Australian Rifles in Vietnam. We didn't ask them to come. ..  they asked us.

Stepping back a second, and before considering the validity of the theory itself, you can at least see why there was legitimate concern about it.  China had emerged from a long civil war in 1948 with the Red Chinese the surprise victors.  Everyone would have presumed, to include Stalin, that the Nationalist Chinese would come out on top.  They didn't, and of course, its now clear that one of the many straws that broke that camels back (and there were many) was pretty effective efforts by Soviet agents to hinder and delay US resupply to the Nationalist Chinese.  That deprived them of effective resupply in some instances, but that doesn't explain what occurred in and of itself by a long shot.  Not that we're doing a history of the Chinese Civil War here.  Of interest, the Nationalist Chinese provided some air support to the South Vietnamese early during the Vietnam War and contributed some special troops, some of whom were killed in combat, to the South Vietnamese effort during the war.

 South Korean soldiers in Vietnam.  The ROK had a major military commitment to South Vietnam and late in the war appeared set to retain up to 50,000 troops in the country even after the United States was set to withdraw. American encouragement that they leave, during the "Vietnamization" program period, secured their departure.  "Soldiers of the ROK 9th Infantry Division in Vietnam. Photo by Phillip Kemp.  Photo taken by Phillip Kemp from cockpit after sling-loading water drums to outpost..jpg"  Posted pursuant to Wikepeidia license.  South Korea was second only to the United States in terms of the number of troops it sent to support the Republic of Vietnam.

Anyhow, China fell.  North Korean was left Communist following World War Two as part of an arraignment with the United States on post war occupation.  In 1950 that turned into a North Korean invasion of South Korea that was only halted at great costs to the United States and its allies, and only after the Truman Administration changed its mind about what was going on globally and regionally.  We'll pick up on that in a moment.

 Soviet troops marching into North Korea at the end of World War Two. They'd stay briefly, as would US troops in the South, and set up a state modeled on the USSR while they were there.  That nation would try to reunite the peninsula by armed force in 1950. 

And it wasn't just there.

The Philippines had presented the US with a domestic Communist guerrilla movement to contend with as the US was returning to them during World War Two.  Of the various anti Japanese guerrilla movements that sprung up during the war was the Hukbalahap, more commonly called the Huks.  Relationships with them were tense following the war as the Philippines moved towards independence and they broke out in full scale rebellion in 1949, the year after China fell.  The Philippine government managed to put them down with US military assistance and, significantly, through the co-opting of their movement by some rather brilliant men in the early CIA.  Even at that however, various Communist guerrilla movements continue on in the Philippines to the present day.

During the Vietnam War the Philippines would supply 10,000 non combat troops to aid South Korea.

Of course, as we've already noted, the British also contended with Communist guerrillas in Southeast Asia in the Malayan Emergency, which they successfully managed to counter in a combined policing and military operation that went on from. . .  yes, 1948, and lasted until 1960.

Malayan police patrol in 1950.

And then there was Burma.

Burma was a region which was, at first, largely happy to see the Japanese take over from the British during World War Two, but soon grew discontent with the Japanese. Some armed groups that supported the Japanese at first actually switched sides during the war.  This did not mean that they looked forward to the return of the British.  They country, now Myanmar, became independent in that fateful year of 1948 and did not join the English Commonwealth.  In 1962 a military coup brought the military into power and it chose to rule the country in a manner inspired by the Soviet Union to a significant degree.  The country even changed its name to the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma.

Between Burma and Cambodia/Laos is Thailand. Thailand did not participate in World War Two and was not a colony of any nation during that period or any other.  It's the only nation in Southeast Asia that has never been colonized (it even sent an envoy to the Pope as early as 1688.) A monarchy, it had acquired Japanese military aid prior to World War Two, it was in a difficult spot during the war and more or less participated on both sides of the war, while technically, due to a declaration of war, was at war with the United States and the United Kingdom, after having fought briefly against Japan.  It's treaty with Japan provided that Japan would assist Thailand to reacquire territories lost to colonial powers on all sides of it, include to the French in what became Laos and Cambodia.

Following World War Two Thailand faced an encamped Nationalist Chinese army in its far north (for decades) and a domestic Communist insurgency that broke out in the 1960s.  Thailand would provide air bases to the United States during the Vietnam War and would ultimately contribute combat troops just as the United States started to withdraw. Thailand's commitment to the war would amount to 12,000 men just as the United States was pulling out, with their troops including contributions of elite units.

 Artillerymen from New Zealand's army in Vietnam.  New Zealand was still more English than the English the time, but unlike the UK or any European power (excluding France) they also sent troops to Vietnam. . . no doubt looking at their position on the globe.

That takes us to the Vietnam War.  Communist forces were not just active in South Vietnam or even North and South Vietnam. They were active in Laos, where they succeed after the fall of South Vietnam, and in Cambodia, where they also did. They were also active throughout Southeast and Central Asia.  Indeed, the Communist Party is still a political force in India.  So, no wonder:

And not only in our view, but in the view of nearly every Western nation.  The UK had been in nonstop combat against some Communist force since before the end of World War Two up through 1954, and at least Australia had been involved in two wars against Communist forces by the end of 1954.  The French had been involved in two such wars, one in Indochina, and had actually sought our aid there, but the British vetoed it (we were reluctant) as they felt, probably rightly, that the French had a hard time distinguishing the difference between a war against Communist insurgents and a war against French colonialism, with the latter being doomed even if the two efforts were mixed.

Looking at it that way, with Communist insurgencies breaking out everywhere in Asia, with the potentiality for more breaking out where they hadn’t already, and with a lot of the insurgencies seeming to be successful, it’d be hard to imagine Western nations regarding any of the wars as mere local affairs without global implications.  A person might ask “why Vietnam” but the answer might just be that it was Vietnam’s turn.  The British and Australians had already fought one war against Communist in Southeast Asia and it reasonably looked like not putting the fire out where it broke out would make things worse. Indeed, it almost certainly would have.  The Australians were, for their part, urging the US to take action in Vietnam before we did.  And in terms of the big Communist powers, China and the USSR, Vietnam did have a good deep water port which was strategic enough that the US had attacked it from the air,during WWII, when the Japanese occupied it.

Maybe the theory was, therefore, correct.  At least it seemed rational to believe it was, as we noted:

The question almost would have been whether to draw the line in Vietnam or somewhere else,with all the other somewhere else’s being increasingly bad choices.  I don’t really see how the war could have been avoided.

Indeed, I was less clear on the challenges faced in my earlier post than I have been in this one (which I researched on this topic a bit more).  During the early 1960s, when the Kennedy Administration was faced with trying to decide how much, and how, to support South Vietnam, it faced a situation in which nearly every country in the region had been challenged by a Communist insurgency and some had been successful while others had only been recently defeated by hard effort.

I went on from there in my original post to ponder what that meant, and I'll leave the reader to review that in the context of my Cold War analysis that I offered there, but I'll note that it started off with this:

And maybe the war, if considered a campaign in the Cold War, the campaign worked, although it certainly wasn't an unqualified success.  It would have been, rather, a type of extraordinarily long, and unintentional, delaying action.

This went on, and looked at the war in the context of a Cold War campaign.  You can judge for yourself whether I was right or wrong, or partially right or wrong on that, but I'm going to divert from quoting that post here to go on to the main point here.  That is, was the Domino Theory correct?

Well, the evidence would suggest. . . it was correct.

The proponents of the theory argued that if Vietnam fell (or continued to fall, as North Vietnam had fallen to Communism) then Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma and India would all follows suit.

So how can you say that it was correct, critics (now) say, Thailand didn't fall the Communists?

That's right, Thailand didn't.  But you have noticed that Laos and Cambodia did, correct?

And they fell after South Vietnam, which is more than a little coincidental.  Both nations had been part of French Indochina and both had Communist movements in the 1940s, but neither fell to Communism until after Saigon fell in 1975.

Now, to be fair, Laos was falling in slow motion since the mid 1960s. . . or even the 1950s.  But something kept it from teetering completely over the edge.  That something was the war in South Vietnam.  North Vietnam was willing to dominate parts of the country and to force it into an uneasy neutrality but it apparently feared tipping it over the edge as that might have caused the United States to intervene full scale in Laos, rather than low scale as it was doing.

Pathet (Communist) Laotian troops, 1972.

That came to an end when the South collapsed in 1975. At that point, the North basically invaded Laos and forced it into Communism, where it remains. 

So, I suppose, a person could argue that it didn't fall, it was pushed.  The significant thing there, however, is that it wasn't pushed any earlier than that.

Cambodia wasn't pushed, it fought it out late in the Vietnam War and then fell to the Khmer Rouge as it received increased support, for awhile, from the North Vietnamese.  Cambodia had favored the Communist effort, slightly, during most of the Vietnam War but when its monarchy fell in a coup the Army chose to actively enter the Vietnam War, albeit on its own soil.  This turned into a fierce civil war and when the war went badly for the South Vietnamese in the end it went just as badly for Cambodia.  Like South Vietnam and Laos, it fell in 1975.

By that time, of course, Burma had already gone to its own odd brand of near Communism. Thailand was surrounded.

But nobody else fell. So surely that means that the Domino Theory was wrong, correct?

Well, that''s hard to tell, in the end.  What we do know is that nearly every Southeast nation fought a war against a communist insurgency.  Some were successfully fought, some were not.  A person might argue that the long war in Indochina gave other nations that had already fought a war against Communist insurgents the chance to consolidate politically so that their wars would not renew.  Arguably the war in Thailand failed as it came too late, after the Thai government had been given an extra decade to plan against it and to have cut its teeth on the war in Vietnam.

Of course, you can argue it the other way around.  After the North Vietnamese won against the South and then intervened with finality in Laos, they ended up invading Communist Cambodia and fighting a guerrilla war against the Khmer Rouge.  China invaded North Vietnam and was thrown back.  The rift between Chinese Communism and Soviet Communism proved to be pretty bitter and the respective allies of those nations would fight amongst themselves.  North Vietnam proved to be highly Soviet at first, but it was never a Soviet puppet and ultimately, would be forced to later abandon much of its hardcore economic Communist that it espoused.  Cambodia would reemerge from Vietnamese rule as a free state and a royal one at that, no longer Communist. So things didn't work out they way they were hoped for or feared for anyone.

None of which answers the question. Was the Domino Theory correct?  It's impossible to say, but even now, the evidence suggests it might have been.