64 The Tonkin Gulf Incidents of 1964 (Vietnam)
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This article is from the Vietnam FAQ, by Brian Ross, John R. Tegtmeier, Edwin E. Moise, Frank Vaughan, John Tegtmeier with numerous contributions by others.
64 The Tonkin Gulf Incidents of 1964 (Vietnam)
On the morning of July 31, 1964, the US Navy destroyer MADDOX (DD-731)
began a reconnaissance patrol, called a DESOTO patrol, along the coast
of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin. The main goal was to gather
information about the coastal defense forces.
It was expected that the North Vietnamese coastal defense forces would
be quite active, so a lot could be learned about them, because a
number of covert operations were being carried out against the North
Vietnamese coast around this time. These operations, under OPLAN
(Operations Plan) 34A, were carried out by moderate-sized vessels
(some old American PT boats with the torpedo tubes removed, and some
new Norwegian-built Nasty boats, about the size of a PT boat), based
at Danang.
Around midnight on the night of July 30-31, OPLAN 34A raiders from
Danang shelled two of North Vietnam's offshore islands, Hon Me and Hon
Ngu (a.k.a. Hon Nieu).
On the afternoon of August 2, when the MADDOX was not far from Hon Me,
three North Vietnamese torpedo boats came out from Hon Me and attacked
the MADDOX. The attack was unsuccessful, though one bullet from a
heavy machinegun on one of the torpedo boats did hit the destroyer.
This is often referred to as the "first attack."
Warning: many books have the interval between the OPLAN 34A
raid on
Hon Me and the attack on the MADDOX much shorter than it
actually was:
two and a half days.
The MADDOX left the Gulf of Tonkin after this incident, but came back
on August 3, accompanied by another destroyer, the TURNER JOY
(DD-951).
There were more OPLAN 34A raids on the night of August 3-4, this time
shelling two points on the North Vietnamese mainland. The destroyers
did not participate; the raids were carried out by the boats from
Danang.
Late on the afternoon of August 4, the two destroyers headed away from
the North Vietnamese coast toward the middle of the Gulf of Tonkin.
That night, they began picking up what appeared to be high-speed
vessels on their radar. They believed they were being attacked, and
opened fire. Most of the supposed attacking vessels, however,
appeared only on the radar of the TURNER JOY, not the radar of the
MADDOX. Some men on the destroyers decided later that what had
appeared on the radar had just been ghost images; others think the
radar images were genuine torpedo boats attacking them. This is often
referred to as the "second attack."
The following afternoon, aircraft from two US aircraft carriers, the
TICONDEROGA and the CONSTELLATION, carried out retaliatory airstrikes.
The targets for the most part were coastal patrol vessels of the North
Vietnamese Navy, but a major petroleum storage facility at the town of
Vinh was also hit, and in fact the destruction of this facility was
the most important accomplishment of the airstrikes.
On August 7, the US Congress passed, almost unanimously, the "Tonkin
Gulf Resolution," giving President Johnson basically a blank check to
use "all necessary measures" to deal with "aggression" in Vietnam. The
Johnson administration had been wanting to get such a resolution from
the Congress; the Tonkin Gulf incidents made a good excuse. It does
not appear, however, that the incidents had been deliberately
concocted in order to provide the excuse.
Bibliography:
Everett Alvarez, Jr. and Anthony S. Pitch, Chained Eagle
(New York:
Fine, 1989). Alvarez was one of the pilots who flew air cover
over the destroyers during the Second Tonkin Gulf Incident. The
following day, during air strikes at Hon Gai, he was shot down;
he was the first pilot captured by the DRV.
Anthony Austin, The President's War (New York: Lippincott, 1971). A
quite detailed account of the Tonkin Gulf incidents, and the
internal processes by which the United States Government dealt
with them.
Joseph F. Bouchard, "Uses of Naval Force in Crises: A Theory of
Stratified Crisis Interaction." Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford
University, 1989. 1236 pp. (When Bouchard later published this
as a book, he had to cut it to a much smaller size. Tonkin Gulf
was one of the things that got cut.)
William B. Cogar, ed., New Interpretations in Naval History: Selected
Papers from the Eighth Naval History Symposium. Annapolis: Naval
Institute Press, 1989. Contains papers on Tonkin Gulf by Edward
Marolda and Edwin Moise, and comments on them by James A. Barber,
Jr.
Steve Edwards, "Stalking the Enemy's Coast", Proceedings 118:2
(February 1992), pp. 56-62. A very unreliable account.
John Galloway, The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (Rutherford: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 1970). The actual text is rather
short, but this volume has long useful appendices, including the
complete official transcripts (classified material deleted) of
crucial Senate committee hearings on the Gulf of Tonkin
incidents, held August 6, 1964 and February 20, 1968. Note that
some of the deleted passages have now been released by the
government.
Joseph Goulden, Truth is the First Casualty. Chicago: Rand
McNally,
1969.
Samuel E. Halpern, M.D., West Pac '64 (Boston: Branden
Press, 1975).
By a medical officer who was aboard the Maddox.
Gerald Kurland, The Gulf of Tonkin Incidents.
Charlotteville, NY: Sam
Har Press, 1975.
Edwin E. Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Sen. Thurston B. Morton, "Only the G.O.P. can Get Us out of Vietnam",
Saturday Evening Post, April 6, 1968, pp. 10-12.
"The 'Phantom Battle' that Led to War", U.S. News & World Report, July
23, 1984. A good retrospective study of the Tonkin Gulf
Incidents of August 1964, with a lot of information from
interviews with participants.
Harry F. Rosenthal and Tom Stewart, "Tonkin Gulf" (AP dispatch),
Arkansas Gazette, July 16, 1967, reprinted in Congressional
Record, February 28, 1968, p. 4582.
John W. Schmidt, The Gulf of Tonkin Debates, 1964 and 1967: A Study in
Argument. Ph.D. thesis, Speech, University of Minnesota, 1969.
290 pp.
Jim and Sybil Stockdale, In Love and War. New York: Harper & Row,
1984. Revised and expanded edition: Annapolis: U.S. Naval
Institute, 1990. Memoirs of a senior U.S. Navy pilot and his
wife, important for the pilot's account of the Tonkin Gulf
Incidents (Stockdale was in the air above the Maddox both August
2 and August 4, 1964, and commanded one of the retaliatory
strikes against the North August 5), and also for the POW issue
(Stockdale was a prisoner from 1965 to 1973; his wife was a
leader of the League of POW/MIA families). A substantially
expanded edition was published in 1990(?).
Susan B. Sweeney, "Oral History and the Tonkin Gulf Incident:
Interviews about the U.S. Navy in the Vietnam War," International
Journal of Oral History, 7:3 (November 1986), pp. 211-16.
I.F. Stone, "McNamara and Tonkin Bay: The Unanswered Questions", The
New York Review of Books, March 28, 1968, pp. 5-12.
Eugene G. Windchy, Tonkin Gulf. New York: Doubleday, 1971. The best
of
the early books on the topic.
David Wise, "Remember the Maddox!", Esquire, April 1968, pp. 123-127,
56-62.
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