Vietnam War, Army Activities, Army Nurse Support.

The Vietnam War was Australia’s longest military commitment to any conflict. Between 1962 and 1975, about 60 000 Australians served in Vietnam or its waters and airspace.
Up until 1954, North and South Vietnam had both been part of French Indo-China. The area was occupied by the Japanese during World War II, then French forces returned to reassert colonial rule. The First Indo-China War, an uprising against the French, started in late 1945. When it ended in 1954, an agreement was made to split Indo-China into North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The division between North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam) was intended to be temporary, with free elections scheduled for July 1956. Reunification was not achieved until, after nearly two decades of war, it was forcibly imposed with the military victory of Communist North Vietnam in April 1975.

The breaking up of Indo-China occurred as the Cold War between the Communist Bloc and the West escalated. Having prevented a Communist takeover of South Korea during the Korean War, the United States (US) was determined to also support South Vietnam. As the French withdrew from the region in the mid 1950s, US support for South Vietnam was stepped up. Direct aid began in 1955, and in 1956 a US Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) was formed to train South Vietnamese forces.
This was an important development, as in 1959 the North Vietnamese sanctioned, and then subsequently supported, a Communist insurgency to destabilise the government and eventually mount a revolution in South Vietnam. The US, Australia and several other countries declared their support for South Vietnam and, in the face of mounting guerrilla successes, soon found themselves under pressure to increase their support by providing direct military assistance to the South Vietnamese. The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, and in Vietnam as the American War, occurred from 1965 to April 30, 1975. The Vietnam Conflict is often used to include what occurred from 1959 to April 30, 1975. The war was fought between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the United States-supported Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). It concluded with a North Vietnamese military victory and a United States defeat. The war resulted in the unification of Vietnam under the communist government of the North.
Noted historian and author Gabriel Kolko has observed, "If we use conventional military criteria, the Americans should have been victorious. They used 15 million tons of munitions (as much as they employed in World War Two), had a vast military superiority over their enemies by any standard one employs, and still they were defeated." Edward N. Luttwak of Time magazine said, “The customary reward of defeat, if one can survive it, is in the lessons thereby learned, which may yield victory in the next war. But the circumstances of our defeat in Vietnam were sufficiently ambiguous to deny the nation (that) benefit.”
Over 1.4 million military personnel were killed in the war (approximately 6% were members of the United States armed forces), while estimates of civilian fatalities range from 2 to 5.1 million. On April 30, 1975, the capital of South Vietnam, Saigon fell to the communist forces of North Vietnam, effectively ending the Vietnam War.