For the Vietnam War, the Shot Heard Round the World

By M.C. Farrington
HRNM Historian

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution, passed by Congress on August 7, 1964,  gave President Lyndon Johnson the authority he needed to vastly broaden American military involvement in Vietnam. It reads in part:

Public Law 88-408

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the Congress approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repeal any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent any further aggression.

A major catalyst was a sea battle five days earlier, during which a single enemy machine gun round hit an American destroyer.

Lieutenant Commander Dempster M. Jackson, executive officer of USS Maddox (DD 731), kneels next to the hole made by a machine gun bullet that hit his ship's Mk.56 director pedestal during the engagement between Maddox and three North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats on August 2, 1964. The original caption claimed, "The bullet is lodged in the hole," but it is unclear how the bullet in the photograph seems to have come through the base of the fire director intact, apparently stopping just at the exit point, or whether another object (such as an intact American .50-caliber projectile) was placed there to indicate where the 14.5-mm round had exited the base. Taken by a USS Ticonderoga (CVA 14) photographer on August 10, 1964. (Naval History and Heritage Command image NH 97897)

The reasons as to how the Vietnam War began are legion, but the path leading towards just about every major armed conflict in American history involved an American warship. We remember the Maine (the battleship the Spanish were blamed for destroying in 1898), but also the frigate Chesapeake (attacked by the British in 1807); the destroyer Reuben James (sunk by the Germans in October 1941); the battleship Arizona (attacked by the Japanese in 1941, not to mention the gunboat Panay just shy of four years earlier); the guided-missile frigate Stark (attacked by Iraq in 1987); and the guided-missile destroyer Cole (bombed by al Qaeda operatives in 2000).

The circumstances of the incidents involving each of these warships was unique and controversial.  The attack that took place against the destroyer USS Maddox (DD 731) over 55 years ago, setting the stage for the passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, was no exception.

USS Maddox (DD 731) steams off Oahu, Hawaii, on March 21, 1964. The destroyer had recently been refitted with an SPS-40 air search radar. The base of the Mk. 56 fire director (highlighted in yellow) was hit by machine gun fire from a North Vietnamese torpedo boat on August 2, 1964. (Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Antoine/ NH 97908- Naval History and Heritage Command image)

At about 3:30 pm local time on Sunday, August 2, 1964, between 15 and 28 nautical miles off the coast of North Vietnam (known officially as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam), three P-4-class torpedo boats made a coordinated high-speed run at Maddox. Signals intercepted by a special communications team who joined the ship before the patrol began gave critical forewarning of the attack, so the destroyer took evasive action and opened up with its 5-inch guns when the torpedo boats came within 9,000 yards.

Each Chinese-made torpedo boat could carry two torpedoes at the ready, and, with the exception of one torpedo apparently damaged by 5-inch fire from Maddox, all were fired at the destroyer and missed.

Track chart of USS Maddox (DD 731) and three North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats, during their action on August 2, 1964. Attacks by aircraft from USS Ticonderoga (CVA 14) are also shown. Note that the projectile that struck the destroyer is called a shell and not a machine gun round.  Chart prepared for The United States Navy and the Vietnam Conflict, Volume II, page 416. (NH 96349/ Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph)

According to Edwin E. Moïse, who meticulously covered the incident in his book, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (revised ed., 2019), “The only damage to the Maddox was one hole made by a bullet from a 14.5-mm machine gun.”

Immediately after the attempted assault, four F-8E Crusaders from the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga (CVA 14), one of them piloted by Commander James Bond Stockdale (who would later become the highest-ranking American naval officer imprisoned by the North Vietnamese), reached the area and attacked the retreating torpedo boats with Zuni rockets and 20-mm cannon. Although sources vary as to whether the rockets did any damage, the strafing hit all three boats, disabling one and killing the captain of another.

Secret commando raids carried out along the North Vietnamese coast by South Vietnamese forces with American assistance that summer, the last being on July 31, set the stage for the attack against Maddox. Despite this, the torpedo boat attack against Maddox was presented to the Congress as an unprovoked action that fairly begged for an overwhelming response.

Above a metric ruler, a B-32 14.5-mm projectile is displayed here with the hardened-steel core just above it.  The jacket is composed of copper-washed steel.  A layer of lead separated the core from the jacket.  (Vic2015/ Wikimedia Commons)

The jittery Sailors who approached North Vietnam once again just two days later aboard Maddox and the destroyer Turner Joy (DD 951) fed the confirmation biases held by officials within the Johnson administration by declaring, erroneously, that they had been attacked a second time. The plausibility of such an attack was high, so much so that even high Soviet officials believed the North Vietnamese had attacked once again. Writing decades later, Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of defense who presided over the Americanization of the war, steadfastly believed that another attack had happened on the fourth.

When it seemed that another attack had been launched against Maddox and Turner Joy, this was portrayed as an intolerable outrage.  Despite an after-action report from Turner Joy expressing uncertainty as to whether enemy boats had in fact been engaged and before some of the American pilots had even reached their targets for retaliatory strikes, President Johnson went before the American people on live television the evening of August 4 and declared, “The initial attack on the destroyer Maddox, on August 2, was repeated today by a number of hostile vessels attacking two U.S. destroyers with torpedoes…. Air action is now in execution against gunboats and certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam with have been used in these hostile operations.” 

Operation Pierce Arrow was underway, the opening round of a years-long bombing campaign against North Vietnam in addition to areas of Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam being used by its forces.

In his formerly top-secret history Spartans in Darkness (2002), National Security Agency historian Robert Hanyok wrote, “The air war against North Vietnam… had been a gleam in the eye of Johnson administration officials for several months before the first bomb was dropped.” National Security Advisory Memorandum 288, which proscribed a range of bombing targets in North Vietnam to retaliate for Viet Cong attacks against American military personnel, had been composed in March 1964.

According to Hanyok, “What the Johnson administration lacked was a potent-enough rationale for air intervention against North Vietnam…Hanoi had obliged by attacking the U.S. destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. The purported second ‘attack’ on 4 August gave Washington its first reason to retaliate directly against the DRV….”

“The real benefit of the second ‘incident,’ at least for LBJ’s political agenda,” wrote Hanyock, “was the passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.”

Buoyed by overwhelming Congressional support, the Johnson administration would ultimately send over half a million Sailors, Soldiers, and Airmen to South Vietnam, and drop thousands of tons of munitions over North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and, of course over South Vietnam as well in a bid to stem the insurgency and rend its supply lines asunder. 

Writing in Vietnam magazine in June 2008, retired naval intelligence officer Carl Schuster wrote, "Speculation about [Johnson] administration motives surrounding the Tonkin Gulf incident itself and the subsequent withholding of key information will never cease, but the factual intelligence record that drove those decisions is now clear. The string of intelligence mistakes, mistranslations, misinterpretations, and faulty decision making that occurred in the Tonkin Gulf in 1964 reveals how easily analysts and officials can jump to the wrong conclusions and lead a nation into war." 

The shattered core of the 14.5-mm round that hit USS Maddox (DD 731) on August 2, 1964. (M.C. Farrington/ Naval History and Heritage Command artifact 79-74 A)

Fragments of the hardened steel core of that single armor-piercing incendiary round that hit Maddox and helped escalate the Vietnam War is now a part of our new exhibit, The Ten-Thousand Day War at Sea: The U.S. Navy in Vietnam, 1950-1975, which is slated to open to the public on October 9, 2019.