Unfortunately the many sources I found were not all in agreement with one another about numbers of deaths/troops/et cetera. Some of this stems from people being meticulous in determining exactly what constituted what time period to include as the beginning and ending of the war (such as the deaths on the hijacking of the Mayaguaz container ship which occurred 2 weeks after the fall of South Vietnam but is still considered by some to be a part of the conflict). So after several hours of filtering through a bunch of different websites, I cited some of the sources I used as a reference.
"Question 1: What's the estimated Combat Deaths per year of the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam)?"Answer:A look into this shows many different estimates depending on which source you refer to. Here is a Wikipedia chart from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietna...#ARVN_Deaths"year.......Regular.......RF/PF.......Para..........Total
1966........4,418.........7,535........ - ..........11,953
1967........6,110.........6,606........ - ..........12,716
1968........12,930.......11,393.......3,592.........27,915
1969........8,652........10,286.......2,895.........21,833
1970........9,647........11,738.......1,961.........23,346
1971........8,864........13,118.........756.........22,738
1972.............38,697.................890.........39,587
where RF/PF=Regional Force/Popular Force militia, Para=paramilitary forces"
Another website simply cites an "From 1969--1971 there were about 22,000 ARVN combat deaths per year" (
http://www.factasy.com/vietnam_war/army.shtml). The overall total estimates that I could find online vary with the extremes being given as 216,000 to 316,000.
"Question 2: How many RVN [sic] allied countries sent military personnel to Vietnam?"Answer: The US, Philippines, Republic of Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Taiwan, and Spain -- for a total of 8.
The last 8 in the above list were actually under a coalition named the Free World Military Forces (FWMF)
"Question 3: Please list the number of personel [sic] sent to Vietnam by those allied countries."Answer:US -- 536,100
Philippines -- 10,450 (most of these were involved in medical and civilian pacification project efforts)
The FWMF members listed by country:
Australia: 7,626 (with more than 60,000 Aussie personnel involved during the course of the war)
Korea: 48,879
New Zealand: 552 (3000 actually served at different times during the war)
Taiwan (Republic of China) : 29 (although another source says, "there were several hundred military personnel" while citing: Moïse, Edwin E. (1996). Tonkin Gulf and the escalation of the Vietnam War (1996 ed.). UNC Press. ISBN 0807823007.)
Thailand: 11,568
Spain: 30 (10 1966/1967 - 20 1967/1968) Medical and sanitary forces.
This comes to a total of 69,864 soldiers, over two thirds of them Korean. Altogether, the US contributed over 1.4 million troops to the Vietnam War.
"Question 4: What's the total number of US military personel [sic] served [sic] in Vietnam during the war?"Answer: http://www.uswings.com/vietnamfacts.asp states that, "2,709,918 Americans served in uniform in Vietnam."
"Question 5: How many died during the war and how many POW/MIA during the war?"Answer:If speaking only of US deaths:
58, 148 US personnel were killed during the war (
http://www.mrfa.org/vnstats.htm cites 58,156 including the people formerly classified as MIA and casualties when the Mayaguez container ship was seized by Kampucheans 2 weeks after South Vietnam had fallen)
If speaking of total deaths on both sides:
This is a hard one to answer b/c of the numbers cited by numerous sources. This website:
http://necrometrics.com/20c1m.htm#Vietnam has a huge list of sources covering the death tolls on both sides (military and civilian). It also has a list if cited death tolls per country. And although these numbers are for each country, the numbers differ depending on the source! The site, therefore, gives a median of total for the whole conflict of 2,850,000 and also totals the medians from the lists as being 3,000,000.
During the American phase of the war, the median of totals is 1,700,000 and total of the medians is 1,300,000
According to
http://www.vhfcn.org/stat.html , concerning the POW-MIA issue, "While there are still officially more than 2200 MIA cases, there are only 55 incidents of American servicemen who were last seen alive but aren't accounted for."
According to
http://www.uswings.com/vietnamfacts.asp, "As of January 15, 2004, there are 1,875 Americans still unaccounted for from the Vietnam War."
Edited to make the chart line up better and the info easier to sort through... although the chart still is not perfect in the final post but is in the submission
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Posted 06/04/2011 06:48 am
Good job Earl!
