Gulf of Tonkin incident

Based on Wikipedia: Gulf of Tonkin incident

The Attack That Never Happened

On the night of August 4, 1964, American sailors aboard two destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin opened fire on enemy vessels that weren't there. They reported torpedoes in the water. They claimed they were under attack. They were wrong.

This phantom battle would become one of the most consequential non-events in American history. Within days, Congress passed a resolution granting President Lyndon Johnson sweeping authority to wage war in Southeast Asia. Within months, the first combat troops landed in Vietnam. Within years, over fifty-eight thousand Americans would be dead.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident wasn't a single event but two separate encounters—one real, one imagined—that together provided the legal foundation for America's longest and most divisive twentieth-century war. Understanding what actually happened in those waters, and what the American public was told had happened, reveals how easily nations can stumble into catastrophic conflicts.

The Real Attack: August 2nd

Two days before the phantom battle, there was a genuine confrontation. The destroyer USS Maddox, commanded by Captain Herbert Ogier, was cruising the Gulf of Tonkin on a signals intelligence mission. The ship was part of a program called DESOTO—essentially, floating electronic surveillance platforms that prowled close to hostile coastlines, listening to radio transmissions and radar signals.

The Maddox wasn't alone in those waters. Just two nights earlier, on July 30th, South Vietnamese commandos had attacked a North Vietnamese radar station on an island called Hòn Mê. The Americans were running a separate covert operation called Plan 34-Alpha, which used fast patrol boats purchased secretly from Norway and crewed by South Vietnamese sailors to harass the North Vietnamese coast. The raids had been going on for months.

To the North Vietnamese, the distinction between the destroyer collecting intelligence and the commandos blowing up their installations was probably meaningless. As far as Hanoi was concerned, the Americans were waging an undeclared war against them.

On August 2nd, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats from Squadron 135 approached the Maddox. The boats were commanded by three brothers—Van Bot, Van Tu, and Van Gian—under the overall command of Le Duy Khoai. The P-4 torpedo boats could reach fifty knots, nearly twice the Maddox's top speed. They were small, fast, and armed with torpedoes and heavy machine guns.

Here's where the official American story starts to diverge from reality. The Johnson administration would later insist that the North Vietnamese fired first. But according to documents declassified decades later, Captain John Herrick, the commodore of the task force, ordered his gun crews to fire warning shots when the boats came within ten thousand yards. The Maddox fired three rounds before any North Vietnamese weapon was discharged.

The engagement that followed was brief and one-sided. The torpedo boats launched their weapons, but the Maddox evaded them easily—neither torpedo came closer than about a hundred yards. American F-8 Crusader jets screamed in from the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga, strafing the retreating boats. When the smoke cleared, four North Vietnamese sailors were dead and six wounded. Three of their boats were damaged, one severely. The Maddox had a single bullet hole in its superstructure from a 14.5-millimeter machine gun round.

No Americans were hurt.

The Ghost Attack: August 4th

President Johnson responded to the August 2nd attack by ordering the Maddox to continue its patrol, now joined by a second destroyer, the USS Turner Joy. He also ordered both ships to make provocative daylight runs into waters that North Vietnam claimed as territorial—inside twelve nautical miles of the coast. The United States didn't recognize that claim, insisting the limit was only three miles, but the runs were designed to test North Vietnamese resolve.

On the evening of August 4th, the two destroyers reported they were under attack again.

Except they weren't.

What happened that night remains somewhat murky even now, but we know with certainty what didn't happen: no North Vietnamese vessels attacked the American ships. There were no enemy boats in the area. The sailors aboard the Maddox and Turner Joy were shooting at shadows.

The ships had picked up what they interpreted as threatening radar contacts. Communications intercepts seemed to suggest an imminent attack. In the darkness, with nerves frayed from the genuine attack two days earlier, crews on both destroyers began reporting torpedoes in the water and enemy vessels closing in. They fired wildly into the night.

Captain Herrick, to his credit, began expressing doubts almost immediately. Within hours of the supposed attack, he cabled his superiors suggesting that the whole thing might have been a false alarm—that "freak weather effects" and "overeager sonarmen" might be responsible for the reports. He recommended a complete evaluation before any further action.

His doubts were ignored.

The Rush to War

In Washington, the Johnson administration had what it wanted: a pretext for escalation. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and other officials chose to rely on communications intercepts that appeared to confirm the attack—intercepts that the National Security Agency, the government's signals intelligence arm, had deliberately misrepresented to create the impression that an attack had occurred.

This wasn't mere bureaucratic error. A 2005 declassified internal NSA study concluded that the agency had "skewed" intelligence to support the administration's preferred narrative. The phrase the government would later use—that the response was based on "erroneously interpreted communications intercepts"—is a sanitized version of what actually happened.

Within hours of the phantom attack, American aircraft were bombing North Vietnam. Within three days, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution by votes of 416-0 in the House and 88-2 in the Senate. Only Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska voted no.

The resolution's language was breathtakingly broad. It authorized the President "to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." Johnson now had what amounted to a blank check for war.

What Hanoi Knew

Decades later, the truth emerged from an unlikely source: the former enemy. In 1995, Robert McNamara—the same man who had championed the war as Secretary of Defense—traveled to Vietnam to meet with General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the legendary military commander who had defeated both the French and the Americans.

McNamara asked Giáp directly: what happened on August 4th, 1964?

"Absolutely nothing," Giáp replied.

The attack had been imaginary. Giáp confirmed what American investigators had slowly pieced together over the years—that on the night of August 4th, there were no North Vietnamese boats anywhere near the American destroyers.

In the 2003 documentary "The Fog of War," McNamara publicly admitted the truth. The attack that launched America into its most traumatic war had never occurred.

The Road to Tonkin

The Gulf of Tonkin incident didn't happen in a vacuum. To understand why the United States was so eager to escalate—and why the North Vietnamese were prepared to challenge American warships—requires stepping back to the end of French colonial rule in Indochina.

In 1954, the French suffered a catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The Viet Minh, the communist-led independence movement under Ho Chi Minh, had decisively beaten a European colonial power using guerrilla tactics and sheer determination. The Geneva Conference that followed was supposed to settle the conflict.

The agreement reached at Geneva temporarily divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel. Ho Chi Minh's forces would control the North; a non-communist government under Emperor Bao Dai (soon replaced by Ngo Dinh Diem) would govern the South. Crucially, the accords called for nationwide elections in 1956 to reunify the country.

Those elections never happened. President Eisenhower would later acknowledge that if they had been held, Ho Chi Minh would have won perhaps eighty percent of the vote. The Diem government, with American backing, refused to participate. The United States, while not signing the Geneva Accords, had pledged not to use force to disturb them—a promise that would prove hollow.

By the early 1960s, an insurgency was growing in South Vietnam. The National Liberation Front—which Americans would call the Viet Cong—was waging guerrilla warfare against the increasingly unpopular Diem regime. North Vietnam was supporting the southern rebels with weapons, supplies, and eventually soldiers, funneled down a network of jungle paths that became known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

President Kennedy sent military advisers—eventually over sixteen thousand of them—but resisted committing combat troops. By the fall of 1963, Kennedy had grown disillusioned with Diem, whose persecution of Buddhist monks had sparked international outrage. A CIA-backed coup resulted in Diem's assassination in November 1963. Three weeks later, Kennedy himself was dead.

Johnson's Dilemma

Lyndon Johnson inherited a deteriorating situation. The parade of military governments that followed Diem offered little stability. The Viet Cong were gaining ground. American advisers were increasingly taking casualties.

Johnson faced a political calculation as much as a military one. The 1964 election loomed. His Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, was running as a hawk, advocating aggressive action against communism worldwide. Johnson wanted to appear tough on defense without actually plunging into a ground war—at least not until after the election.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident gave him exactly what he needed: an apparent act of unprovoked aggression that demanded a response, followed by a congressional resolution that provided legal cover for whatever came next. Johnson could bomb North Vietnam, appear decisive and strong, and still campaign as the peace candidate compared to the bellicose Goldwater.

He won the election in a landslide. By early 1965, he was sending combat troops to Vietnam.

The Norwegian Connection

One of the stranger footnotes to the Gulf of Tonkin story involves Norway, a small Scandinavian country that most Americans wouldn't associate with the Vietnam War.

The fast patrol boats used in the Plan 34-Alpha raids against North Vietnam had been purchased quietly from Norway. More remarkably, three young Norwegian boat skippers were recruited for covert missions in South Vietnamese waters. They were hired by a man named Alf Martens Meyer, who they believed was simply a businessman. In reality, Meyer was a Norwegian intelligence officer working on behalf of the Americans.

The Norwegians had no idea who was really employing them or what the broader strategic picture looked like. They found themselves participating in sabotage missions against North Vietnam, part of a secret war that would soon become very public indeed.

The Lies Compound

The deceptions didn't end with the phantom attack. For years, the Johnson administration maintained fictions that were steadily eroding.

Officials insisted the Maddox had been in international waters, on a routine patrol, when attacked without provocation. In fact, the ship had been inside the twelve-mile territorial limit that North Vietnam claimed—even if the United States didn't recognize that claim—and had been engaged in espionage, not routine operations.

Officials denied any connection between the Maddox's mission and the South Vietnamese commando raids. Four years later, McNamara admitted to Congress that American ships had indeed been coordinating with those operations.

Officials presented the North Vietnamese as irrational aggressors. In reality, from Hanoi's perspective, American destroyers were lingering suspiciously close to islands that had just been attacked by American-backed commandos. The North Vietnamese response, whatever its wisdom, was not unprovoked.

The cumulative effect of these deceptions was corrosive. As the war dragged on and casualties mounted, the credibility gap between what the government claimed and what the public could see became a chasm. The Pentagon Papers, leaked in 1971, would reveal the systematic dishonesty that had characterized American policy in Vietnam from the beginning.

The Broader Pattern

The Gulf of Tonkin incident fits a disturbing pattern in American history: questionable incidents used to justify military action that leaders had already decided to take.

The explosion aboard the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898, blamed on Spain, helped launch the Spanish-American War. Modern analysis suggests the explosion was probably accidental. The Lusitania's sinking in 1915 helped build American support for entering World War One, though the ship was indeed carrying munitions as the Germans claimed. The weapons of mass destruction that justified the 2003 invasion of Iraq were never found.

This isn't to suggest these events are identical or that the pattern reveals some grand conspiracy. Rather, it illustrates how nations that have decided to go to war will find—or manufacture—the necessary justification. The Gulf of Tonkin incident is simply one of the clearest examples, because we now know with certainty that half of it never happened at all.

What Remains

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was repealed in 1971, long after it had served its purpose. The war it authorized killed between two and three million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, along with fifty-eight thousand Americans. It scarred a generation and fundamentally altered American politics and culture.

The incident also changed how Americans think about their government. Before Vietnam, most citizens gave their leaders the benefit of the doubt on matters of war and peace. After the revelations about Tonkin, after the Pentagon Papers, after Watergate, that trust never fully recovered.

Perhaps that skepticism is the incident's most enduring legacy. When leaders claim they must act immediately based on intelligence they cannot share, when they demand broad authority to respond to attacks that may or may not have occurred as described, citizens now know to ask harder questions.

On the night of August 4, 1964, American sailors fired into empty darkness, convinced they were under attack. The echoes of those shots are still with us.