The Failure of the “Neutralization”of Laos and the Second Indochina War：U. S. Policy toward Laos after 1962

This study examines U.S. policy toward Laos from the Geneva Conference of 1962 through the beginning of U.S. military intervention in Laos in 1964. The agreement in Geneva ended the civil war and achieved the neutralization of Laos under the interim government of national union headed by Souvanna Phouma. It also stipulated the withdrawal of foreign military personnel from Laos. But the agreement left intact the administrative and military divisions of Laos among the competing forces of the rightist Phoumi, the neutralist Kong Le/Souvanna and the leftist Pathet Lao (PL) groups. The expected political and military integration of these groups soon bogged down after the assassination of Foreign Minister Quinim Pholsena in April 1963 and the evacuation of the two PL cabinet members from Vientiane. By the end of 1963, civil war seemed to have resumed in Laos. The U.S. supported the rightist group against the neutralist/PL coalition during the civil war. But it started non-military assistance to the neutralist group by the end of 1962 to lure them into rightist/neutralist cooperation against the PL. After the political crisis in April 1963, the U.S. reexamined its policy under the neutralization scheme and adopted various military measures to aid the rightist/neutralist groups in their renewed fighting against the PL. After the unexpected but failed coup against the Souvanna government led by some military leaders in April 1964, the fighting between Kong Le’s force and the PL force intensified in the critical province of Xieng Khouang. The U.S. increased its military assistance to the rightist and neutralist forces. In May, it started reconnaissance flights over Laos, using U.S. military jet aircraft stationed in South Vietnam and Thailand. However, two U.S. reconnaissance and fighter jets were shot down by the PL in early June. June 9, 1964, became the most symbolic day in U.S. military involvement in the Second Indochina War. On this day, the U.S. jet fighters executed “retaliatory strikes” against the PL’s anti-aircraft sites as well as its headquarters in Khang Khay. This occurred two months before the U.S. carried out retaliatory strikes against targets in North Vietnam after the Tonkin Gulf crisis in August 1964. The wars in Laos and Vietnam increasingly became closely intertwined and the U.S. military continued what they called “reconnaissance strike” missions in Laos in the latter half of 1964. In mid-December 1964, the U.S. started “Operation Barrel Roll” ― the code name given to the continuous U.S. “armed reconnaissance and air strike” missions over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. This was three months before “Operation Rolling Thunder” against North Vietnam began in March 1965. Most past studies on the “Vietnam War” don’t mention that the air war in Laos preceded the air war in Vietnam. The beginning of U.S. military intervention in Laos in 1964 was not totally secret at the time, but it is still mostly unknown in general, despite the fact that most of its details were disclosed by the early 1970s. We have yet to reexamine the “Vietnam War” in the larger framework of the Second Indochina War.