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being sent to Vietnam without congressional approval. Only the two of them voted for it.
    The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was only repealed in 1970 on the initiative of Senator Robert Dole of Kansas (a supporter of Nixon and, later, a Republican presidential candidate) after President Nixon had been censured for extending the war into Cambodia. Dole figured that, by 1970, the resolution had become obsolete. Nixon did not oppose its repeal, asserting that his authority to conduct the war in Vietnam did not depend on the Resolution but rather on his power as commanderin-chief. The bill was passed on 24 June by eighty-one votes to ten.
    Even though the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave Johnson all the powers he wanted to prosecute the war, the Communist leadership in Hanoi decided to step up the struggle in the South, even though it realised that the US was likely to intervene. The Vietcong went on the offensive. They attacked an isolated government forces camp near Binh Dinh, hurling themselves against the perimeter for six hours. An estimated 500 died. One hundred bodies were picked off the wire by the defenders when the assault force withdrew. On 31 October 1964, the Vietcong attacked Bien Hoa airbase, northeast of Saigon, floating past on sampans disguised as farmers, before opening up with mortars. Four Americans were killed, five bombers were destroyed and eight more damaged. But with the election just a few days away, Johnson rejected proposals for retaliatory raids against the North. Johnson was re-elected president on 3 November, and did not have to wait long for a fresh excuse to attack the North Vietnamese. On 24 December the Vietcong blew up the Brinks Hotel in Saigon, where US officers were billeted. On Christmas Eve, the hotel was packed with US soldiers waiting for Bob Hope, a regular performer for the troops in Vietnam, when a VC driver parked a truck packed with explosives outside. The explosion ripped through the hotel, killing two Americans and injuring fifty-eight others. Again Johnson stayed his hand.
    The event more than any other that brought the Marines to the beaches of Da Nang occurred on the night of 7 February 1965. At Camp Holloway, an airbase near the provincial capital of Pleiku, some 400 Americans of the 52nd Combat Aviation Battalion were asleep when 300 Vietcong crept up on them. For the previous week, there had been a ceasefire for the Vietnamese festival for the lunar new year, Tet. The Vietcong had used that time to stockpile captured American mortars and ammunition. At 0200hrs, they began bombarding the airbase, turning it into a conflagration of exploding ammunition and burning aircraft which left seven American dead and 100 wounded.
    'They are killing our men while they are asleep at night,' said President Johnson. 'I can't ask American soldiers to continue to fight with one hand behind their back'.
    On 2 March 1965, 100 US jet bombers took off from Da Nang airbase to strike at targets in the North. As it was Vietcong who had attacked Camp Holloway, this was the first air strike against North Vietnam that could not be justified as retaliation and it began a sustained campaign of graduated bombing known as Operation Rolling Thunder that continued, on and off, for the next three years. Its aim was to slow the infiltration of men and supplies from the North and bomb the Communists to the negotiating table. It succeeded in neither, but America was now committed to a course of action and President Johnson had raised the political price of failure. That same day, the four ships of Amphibious Task Force 76 set sail from Japan. The Second Indochina War – the American war in Vietnam – was now underway.
    Soldiers of the US 101st Airborne drag the body of a Vietcong fighter to the rear after fierce fighting around An Khe, September 1966.

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THE WAR ON THE GROUND
    ALTHOUGH US GROUND TROOPS had now been committed to a land war on the Asian mainland, President Johnson still hoped to make peace. On 7