before US President John F. Kennedy, too, was assassinated), to the
aftermath of the fall of Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964, changed
both the face of the war in South Vietnam and its international
context. In the political turmoil that followed the overthrow of Diem,
the Viet Cong insurgency gained swift momentum, aided for the first
time by PAVN units infiltrated down the Ho Chi Minh trail. The US
response was to increase American aid and the American military
presence in South Vietnam. In August 1964, in response to an inci-
dent in the Gulf of Tonkin in which American warships were
reportedly attacked by DRV patrol boats, American aircraft bombed
DRV military installations. Incremental escalation followed until, in
1965, the United States began systematically bombing North Vietnam
and sent combat forces to South Vietnam.
The Second Indochina War soon spilled over the borders of
Vietnam. In Laos the Second Coalition government had effectively
collapsed following the assassination in April 1963 of the neutralist
foreign minister. The neutralists themselves were divided, and neu-
trality was no longer a political option. PAVN forces assisted the
Pathet Lao to seize control of the eastern third of the country, includ-
ing most of the Plain of Jars and the Ho Chi Minh trail. In response,
the US recruited its own ‘secret army’ in northern Laos and began
bombing communist targets. In Thailand, the Communist Party of
Thailand laid the organisational groundwork for its own Chinese
backed and directed insurgency. Only Cambodia managed at this stage
to insulate itself from the gathering storm.
Beijing closely monitored the growing American presence in
Indochina. The Chinese response was to provide strong support for
Hanoi, while reassuring the US that Chinese forces would only
become involved if China itself were directly threatened. What
would trigger Chinese intervention would be an American land
invasion of North Vietnam. Short of that, Beijing would avoid con-
frontation with the US. This was not quite what Vietnamese leaders
had in mind. Hanoi wanted China to deploy anti-aircraft batteries
A Short History of China and Southeast Asia