Title: The Anti-War Movement – In the US and Vietnam | Socialist Alternative
Headings: The Anti-War Movement – In the US and Vietnam
The Anti-War Movement – In the US and Vietnam
“The Whole World is Watching”
36 Million Oppose War
Army Disintegrates
“Fragging”
GI Opposition
Bombshell of the Pentagon Papers
History Turns Full Circle
Footnotes:

Content: It is entirely false to suggest, as Hollywood has done in a number of movies – with the myth perpetuated by subsequent accounts of the plight of veterans – that hostility was directed at those who fought in the war. The Vietnam veterans found massive support in the antiwar movement and in society at large, particularly in the working class areas from which most of them came. By the time of the US presidential elections in 1968, terrible havoc had been wreaked in the South and an unprecedented bombing campaign in the North had returned parts of North Vietnam almost to the Stone Age. This bombing campaign, initiated by Johnson and McNamara, was supposed to have resolved the war within six months but had lasted seven times as long, producing really awesome and terrible statistics, particularly as far as the North Vietnamese were concerned. Three hundred and fifty thousand US missions had been flown, 655,000 tons of bombs were dropped over the North, 918 US aircraft had been lost and 818 American airmen killed. This was just up to the time when Johnson had decided to ‘end’ the war. In this period, McNamara had estimated that a thousand North Vietnamese civilians were being killed each week. This amounted to roughly 180,000 to 200,000 civilians dead up to 1968 in the air war alone against the North. The terrible destruction even had an effect on the top echelons of the US government, with McNamara declaring in a secret memo: “There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go.