anton wrote:President L.B. Johnson warned us of the domino effect if Communism took hold in Vietnam, he said the communists would annex SE Asia before moving down to Indonesia and Australia. Our Government believed the propaganda and sent young Australians to their deaths in Vietnam, the rest is history.
Our Administrators must be slow learners because they listened to Bush regime propaganda and sent our young people to Iraq and Afghanistan, but I am sure the Australian people will never let that happen again.
This is false. The "domino theory" was first used by Harry Truman to justify intervention in Greece in 1947, although he did not call it that. Dwight Eisenhower first coined the expression in 1954, ten years before Johnson, as President, expanded the American commitment in southeast Asia. Eisenhower said: ""You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is certainty that it will go over very quickly."--and he was specifically referring to the effect of communist-backed national liberation movements in what had been French Indochina. Australian military advisers first arrived in the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) in 1962, when John Kennedy was President. The involvement of Australian troops in Vietnam, although on a much smaller scale, mirrors the American experience of sending advisers, and a gradual expansion until finally the situation reached the proportions of full-scale war after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, when Johnson was President.
This site at Trinity College, Western Australia is a page of links to lots of good information on Australian involvement in Vietnam.
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