📅 On This Day in Military History
1 event across history
North Vietnam's conventional invasion of South Vietnam with 120,000 troops and Soviet-supplied tanks. US ground forces had been largely withdrawn; South Vietnamese troops bore the brunt, supported by massive American air power. Nixon ordered B-52 strikes and the mining of Haiphong Harbor. The offensive was eventually repulsed at enormous cost, but revealed the South Vietnamese army's fragility without US air support.
Proved South Vietnam could not survive a conventional invasion without massive US air support — the central flaw in Vietnamization. Nixon's response, including bombing within miles of Hanoi, led to the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973. The Accords allowed North Vietnamese troops already in South Vietnam to remain — effectively guaranteeing the war's eventual outcome.
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