danang vietnam beach during the vietnam war

The students compared the barbarity of the Vietnam War to the crimes of Nazi Germany. Humanitarian aid sponsored by the German government was largely rejected by Germany's reactionary student movement of 1968. Marine Corpsīut there were other lesser-known initiatives, such as the establishment of a medical school in the central Vietnamese city of Hue by Freiburg University, the Catholic mission hospital in Kon Tum, and medical bases in An Hoa, Hoi An and Danang, all in southern Vietnamese territory. The West German hospital ship Helgoland moored in Danang in 1970 Image: Sgt. Particularly well-known was the hospital ship Helgoland, which was anchored off the coast near the South Vietnamese cities of Saigon and Danang for a total of six years and treated about 170,000 Vietnamese civilians. His face-saving slogan: 'Medicine instead of ammunition.' However, rather than sending soldiers, Erhard promised humanitarian support. When US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara declared in 1965 that 'Berlin will be defended on the Mekong River' and US President Lyndon Johnson called for German soldiers to be sent to Vietnam, West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard felt compelled to act. 'The federal government's Indochina policy did not follow any independent foreign policy conception but leaned unreservedly on the policy of its US guarantor power,' Margara writes in his book.

Germany's perceptions of the Vietnam War and the suffering of the Vietnamese people was also divided by east and west, with each side actively supporting their respective ideological partners. The US military dropped napalm and millions of tons of bombs on the country between 19. But in Vietnam, the Cold War became an inferno. 'Through geographical separation, brothers and sisters became class enemies, while strangers became allies,' writes Andreas Margara in his recently published book 'Geteiltes Land, geteiltes Leid' ('Divided Land, Divided Sorrow'), which reviews the history of German-Vietnamese relations.īoth Germany and Vietnam were on the front lines of the Cold War. In 1949, in the aftermath of World War II, Germany was also divided along these lines, into east and west. Starting in 1954, and during the Vietnam War, Vietnam was split into the communist North and the US-supported South. North and south, east and west - the history of Germany's relationship with Vietnam is perhaps best symbolized by the four points.

Danang vietnam beach during the vietnam war