USS Maddox
The USS Maddox is probably responsible for more American deaths than any other destroyer in history, and she never fired a shot that caused them. On August 2, 1964, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. That part actually happened. Maddox returned fire, took one bullet hole in her superstructure, and the torpedo boats got chewed up by aircraft from the carrier Ticonderoga. A minor skirmish by any standard.
Two days later, on August 4, Maddox and the destroyer Turner Joy reported a second attack. Radar contacts. Sonar contacts. Both ships fired into the darkness for hours. The problem is that the second attack almost certainly never happened. The radar and sonar returns were ghosts caused by weather, sea conditions, and jumpy operators. Captain Herrick of the Maddox sent a message within hours expressing doubt about the whole thing.
It didn't matter. President Johnson went to Congress with both incidents and got the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave him authority to escalate military operations in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war. Congress voted 416-0 in the House and 88-2 in the Senate. The two senators who voted no were Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, and they were right.
58,220 Americans died in Vietnam. Somewhere north of two million Vietnamese died. The war tore the country apart for a decade. And it was launched on the back of an attack that a destroyer captain doubted before the gun barrels cooled. Robert McNamara admitted decades later that the August 4 attack didn't happen. The NSA declassified documents in 2005 confirming that intelligence had been deliberately skewed to support the narrative.
The Maddox herself had an unremarkable career otherwise. She served in three wars, did her job, and was scrapped in 1972. The ship is gone. What she started isn't.
1944-1972 · warship
