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US History
The Tonkin Gulf Incident:1964
President Johnson's Message to Congress-August 5, 1964

Last night I announced to the American people that the North Vietnamese regime had conducted further deliberate attacks against U.S. naval vessels operating in international waters, and I had therefore directed air action against gunboats and supporting facilities used in these hostile operations. This air action has now been carried out with substantial damage to the boats and facilities. Two U.S. aircraft were lost in the action.

After consultation with the leaders of both parties in the Congress, I further announced a decision to ask the Congress for a resolution expressing the unity and determination of the United States in supporting freedom and in protecting peace in southeast Asia.

These latest actions of the North Vietnamese regime has given a new and grave turn to the already serious situation in southeast Asia. Our commitments in that area are well known to the Congress. They were first made in 1954 by President Eisenhower. They were further defined in the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty approved by the Senate in February 1955.

This treaty with its accompanying protocol obligates the United States and other members to act in accordance with their constitutional processes to meet Communist aggression against any of the parties or protocol states.

Our policy in southeast Asia has been consistent and unchanged since 19554. I summarized it on June 2 in four simple propositions:

1. America keeps her word. Here as elsewhere, we must and shall honor our commitments.

2. The issue is the future of southeast Asia as a whole. A threat to any nation in that region is a threat to all, and a threat to us.

3. Our purpose is peace. We have no military, political, or territorial ambitions in the area.

4. This is not just a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity. Our military and economic assistance to South Vietnam and Laos in particular has the purpose of helping these countries to repel aggression and strengthen their independence.

The threat to the free nations of southeast Asia has long been clear. The North Vietnamese regime has constantly sought to take over South Vietnam and Laos. This Communist regime has violated the Geneva accords for Vietnam. It has systematically conducted a campaign of subversion, which includes the direction, training, and supply of personnel and arms for the conduct of guerrilla warfare in South Vietnamese territory. In Laos, the North Vietnamese regime has maintained military forces, used Laotian territory for infiltration into South Vietnam, and most recently carried out combat operations - all in direct violation of the Geneva Agreements of 1962.

In recent months, the actions of the North Vietnamese regime have become steadily more threatening...

As President of the United States I have concluded that I should now ask the Congress, on its part, to join in affirming the national determination that all such attacks will be met, and that the United States will continue in its basic policy of assisting the free nations of the area to defend their freedom.

As I have repeatedly made clear, the United States intends no rashness, and seeks no wider war. We must make it clear to all that the United States is united in its determination to bring about the end of Communist subversion and aggression in the area. We seek the full and effective restoration of the international agreements signed in Geneva in 1954, with respect to South Vietnam, and again in Geneva in 1962, with respect to Laos...

The Tonkin Gulf Incidents of 1964

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.

Tonkin Gulf resolution

Tonkin Gulf resolution, in U.S. history, Congressional resolution passed in 1964 that authorized military action in Southeast Asia. On Aug. 4, 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin were alleged to have attacked without provocation U.S. destroyers that were reporting intelligence information to South Vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his advisers decided upon immediate air attacks on North Vietnam in retaliation; he also asked Congress for a mandate for future military action. On Aug. 7, Congress passed a resolution drafted by the administration authorizing all necessary measures to repel attacks against U.S. forces and all steps necessary for the defense of U.S. allies in Southeast Asia. Although there was disagreement in Congress over the precise meaning of the Tonkin Gulf resolution, Presidents Johnson and Richard M. Nixon used it to justify later military action in Southeast Asia. The measure was repealed by Congress in 1970. In 1995 retired Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, in a meeting with former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, categorically denied that the North Vietnamese had attacked the U.S. destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964.