The Vietnam Virtual Archive (developed at Texas Tech University) includes finding aids for collections and seven million pages of materials online, including documents, photographs, slides, negatives, audio and moving image recordings, artifacts, and oral histories.
Map Collection (over 1500 maps on Vietnam, Indochina, and Southeast Asia)
Oral History Project and Interviews
Guides for How to Search the Vietnam Virtual Archive and Maps Database
Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)
TIP: To find after action reports or lessons learned, type the phrase "after action" or "lessons learned" AND Vietnam into the DTIC search box.
Consider registering for a DTIC account (if you qualify) to gain access to Advanced Search functions and more documents.
Marine Corps University, History Division
National Archives Vietnam War Research
Pentagon Papers (official title: "Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force," commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967)
(The Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum is administered by the National Archives and Records Administration. The LBJ Library website is hosted and maintained by NARA partner, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation.)
Exhibit: The Vietnam Conflict (Speeches, diaries, photographs, oral histories)
Bibliography of the Vietnam War by Edwin E. Moïse
Edwin E. Moïse is a military historian, published author, and professor. He has developed an in-depth bibliography on the Vietnam War.
The bibliography includes helpful lists of resources organized under topical headings such as: Propaganda, Technology and Weapons, and Theories of Limited War and Counterinsurgency.
The bibliography is useful in guiding a researcher to relevant sources in the Vietnam Virtual Archive. For example, see the Marine Corps Unit Reports and Documents.
Books written by Edwin E. Moïse at CARL (see below)
Historical Dictionary of the Vietnam War by
The Vietnam War, also known as the second Indochina War, began in 1959 and 1960, and ended with the Communist victories of 1975. An excellent resource that deals with both the military and the political aspects of this controversial war, and with the events--especially those from 1954 onward--that led up to it. Its main focus is on Vietnam and the United States, but Laos, Cambodia, and other countries are also covered. The author highlights the essential elements, presenting significant military and political persons, battles and confrontations, weapons, places and events. The chronology traces the long course of the war and the introduction discusses the issues that have been and still are in dispute among historians. Also contains a bibliography, an index of names, and an index of operations.
The Myths of Tet by
Late in 1967, American officials and military officers pushed an optimistic view of the Vietnam War. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) said that the war was being won, and that Communist strength in South Vietnam was declining. Then came the Tet Offensive of 1968. In its broadest and simplest outline, the conventional wisdom about the offensive--that it was a military defeat for the Communists but a political victory for them, because it undermined support for the war in the United States--is correct. But much that has been written about the Tet Offensive has been misleading. Edwin Moïse shows that the Communist campaign shocked the American public not because the American media exaggerated its success, but because it was a bigger campaign--larger in scale, much longer in duration, and resulting in more American casualties--than most authors have acknowledged. MACV, led by General William Westmoreland, issued regular estimates of enemy strength in South Vietnam. During 1967, intelligence officers at MACV were increasingly required to issue low estimates to show that the war was being won. Their underestimation of enemy strength was most extreme in January 1968, just before the Tet Offensive. The weak Communist force depicted in MACV estimates would not have been capable of sustaining heavy combat month after month like they did in 1968. Moïse also explores the errors of the Communists, using Vietnamese sources. The first wave of Communist attacks, at the end of January 1968, showed gross failures of coordination. Communist policy throughout 1968 and into 1969 was wildly overoptimistic, setting impossible goals for their forces. While acknowledging the journalists and historians who have correctly reported various parts of the story, Moïse points out widespread misunderstandings in regard to the strength of Communist forces in Vietnam, the disputes among American intelligence agencies over estimates of enemy strength, the actual pattern of combat in 1968, the effects of Tet on American policy, and the American media's coverage of all these issues.
Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War by
Retracing the confused pattern of planning for escalation of the Vietnam War, Moise reconstructs the events of the night of August 4, 1964, when the U.S. Navy destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy reported that they were under attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. Using declassified records and interviews with the participants, Moise demonstrates that there was no North Vietnamese attack; the original report was a genuine mistake.
Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies