(i) Our intelligence was extremely bad
(ii) We were ill-triained and ill-equipped for jungle warfare
(iii) The local inhabitants were not being helpful
(iv) There was a wide gap between our forces
(v) Morale was threatened
Politically: slavish to the doctrine of the Domino Theory of the Cold War (which was the reason why the US became entangled in the first place), and vicitim of conflicting, internal US politics (e.g. civil rights movement; anti-war movement; arms industry).
WWII was the last war America fought ‘Total War’. Since then they have fought with one hand tied behind their back and the consequences have been predictable.
Regards Digger.
Why predictable?
I can think of other small, post-war campaigns which were fought successful: Kenya, Malaya, Borneo and Oman spring to mind.
In Dereliction of Duty, H.R. McMaster has produced the finest volume on the political beginnings of the Vietnam War that has been written to date. His brilliant work benefits from the recently declassified papers and documents of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Vietnam War era.
McMaster tells a profoundly sorrowful tale of political expediency and duplicity, of arrogance and ignorance, and of bureaucratic folly and shameful opportunism at the expense of American combat soldiers. From his point of view, the entire national-security system failed. According to McMaster, President Johnson was concerned with his role in the domestic-policy arena and failed to focus his attentions on the Vietnam War and to establish an attainable and realistic objective.
Robert McNamara, McMaster says, was simply opportunistic and arrogant. He felt his first loyalty was to the president and not to the American soldiers he callously threw into the “meat grinder” that was Vietnam. Moreover, McNamara never trusted the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he ignored and patronized them shamelessly. In addition, McNamara was in love with statistical analysis and believed that wars could be run more efficiently through the quantification of “body count.”
McNamara prosecution of the war was strongly influenced by the battle of La Drang Valley. It was this battle that caused him to adopt the concept of the body count.
In the first phase, the air cavalry fought a successful operation. In the follow up phase, US troops following-up on foot, were ambushed by the retreating NVA who inflicted over 90% casualties(300 plus) on the Americans.
This gave the impression that it was better to prosecute the war by using tactics developed around the use of the helicopter. It supposedly saved American lives and cost the NVA/VC theirs.
Hence the ‘Body-count’.
There’s only one way to fight in the jungle, and that’s in the jungle.
http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/books/Vietnam/tactical/chapter2.htm
http://www.tempslibres.org/awhw/haibun/haib06.html
I visited ‘The Wall’ when visiting D.C. a couple of years ago. One of the most impressive war memorials I’ve ever seen, for it’s simplicity and its message.
I was talking about this a day or two ago acctually. But one of the reasons we came up with was the terrain, The viatmanese used guerilla units and tons of them, and alot of booby? traps.
Anerica losed the Vietnam becouse it tryed to support the
“our bastards” - the regime which had no wide support amond mostly poor viatmanese.
The USA lose ideological war at first.
Moreover the lovely method of Pentagon - to support “democraty” by the Napalm bombing and mass violence above the peasants - is not the best choise to fight for the victory.
Cheers.
War of the flea?
http://www.ausa.org/webpub/DeptAUSANews.nsf/byid/CCRN-6CGMJX
Among the pre-requisites for conventional troops to become successful in jungle counter insurgency operations, they are required to be trained to a level of competence and confidence to enable them to operate with stealth, guile and cunning. After attaining that level, it’s boots on the ground; patrolling! patroling! and patrolling!..dominate the jungle!.. the jungle is neutral!
It wasn’t pushed out in any military sense. As others have pointed out, the PAVN (People’s Army of Vietnam) and VC (Viet Cong) were badly damaged in the Tet Offensive in 1968. They never managed to recover while the US and other external forces remained in SVN (South Vietnam)
A distinction needs to be made between the PAVN which were regular troops and VC which were guerillas. The PAVN were good troops and generally were about as good as the forces they faced from any nation. The VC were good guerillas. Both were resourceful and adaptable. One simple example is that one idiotic Australian commander, against sound advice, sowed a very large minefield around a major Australian base. I think it was something like 20,000 mines. As predicted, the VC removed most of them fairly quickly and used them against the Australians and others. The VC then knew where the mines weren’t and how to move through the minefield, while the Australians didn’t and were thus excluded from their own and now non-existent defensive perimeter through which the enemy could move at will. The PAVN used simple but effective tactics, such as sneaking up to the edge of the treeline near a base during daylight and tying sticks to trees, or sneaking into more open country and making similar arrangements with sticks of wood and twine, as aiming alignments for RPG’s or MG’s targeted on enemy MG’s, mortars, artillery etc. in the base. Simple, but a highly effective way of getting rid of or suppressing the enemy’s main defensive weapons long before decent night vision was available. Meanwhile the Americans had their state of the art but fairly useless Starlight night vision scopes and couldn’t see much of what was happening in the dark, until the PAVN lit up the base with accurate incoming fire directed by a few sticks of wood. Both the PAVN and VC based their infantry tactics on ‘hugging the enemy’s belt’. This involved getting in very close to the enemy so that he couldn’t use his advantage of artillery and air power because he’d be destroying his own troops. It also overcame the lack of decent artillery support and the total lack of air support for the PAVN and VC. Again, a simple but brilliantly effective tactic in negating the enemy’s huge technological and equipment advantages. There are many other examples of the ways in which the PAVN and VC used intelligent and effective tactics and low tech equipment to great effect.
Japanese using the humble bicycle surprised and helped defeat the British forces in Malaya in 1941-2. The bicycle served NVN (North Vietnam) just as well. It was precisely because of the low tech approach that the PAVN and VC did so well against the Americans in particular. American troops couldn’t move far without trucks and choppers and without carrying huge amounts of gear on their backs and being re-supplied regularly, often daily (with hot meals in some cases!), in the field, thus requiring enormous logistical and transport back up. NVN porters just trotted down the Ho Chi Minh Trail with little more than a bag of rice for sustenance and an overloaded bicycle full of supplies for their troops in the field in SVN. http://www.geschichteinchronologie.ch/as/vietnam/vietnamkrieg-fotos.html
No disrespect to them, but they were like ants. A B52 raid could cut a mile long swathe through the jungle and kill some of them, but the ant column just diverted and kept moving remorselessly. The dispersion of carriers and supplies made it impossible for significant and effective strikes to be carried out in the same way that Western motor vehicle supply columns can be strafed or bombed by a single-seater plane, thus destroying large quantities of supplies for very little effort and with very little manpower. The Americans bombed the Ho Chi Minh Trail for years, and were sufficiently desperate to consider using tactical nukes, but they never stopped the supplies getting through. http://www.afa.org/magazine/nov2005/1105trail.asp http://www.nautilus.org/VietnamFOIA/background/HoChiMinhTrail.html Human ants with bicycles beat the US with spotter planes and B52’s and everything in between.
The error in thinking that the US ‘lost’ the Vietnam War is thinking that it intended to conquer or defeat NVN. That was never the objective, from Kennedy’s May 1961 National Security Action Memorandum 52 http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsam-jfk/nsam-52.htm onwards. The real objective was to maintain the status quo in SVN and stop it falling under communist control.
This was an insane and inevitably hugely costly strategy when NVN forces could come into SVN but SVN, American etc ground forces would not cross the DMZ into NVN and, worse, advertised the fact. They could never stop NVN coming into SVN as long as they refused to go into NVN, so this merely assured a bloody, wasteful, and inconclusive conflict that would last for exactly as long as NVN was prepared to keep sending troops to SVN and supporting the VC, particularly when there was considerable popular support for NVN in SVN.
Be all that as it may, the US achieved its objective of keeping SVN from becoming communist for the whole time that the US was in Vietnam. It did not ‘lose’ at all in that sense. Once the US and other allies (including Korea which was the second largest external force in Vietnam and from memory lost something like 5,000 troops) left, SVN was incapable of defending itself. It would have gone under in 1972 but for American air and naval support and other steps by America, including subtly threatening tactical nuclear strikes on NVN. http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/vietnam/vietnamization/easteroffensive.aspx Although the final campaign in 1975 was a fine run thing in some respects, new strategies by NVN were completely successful http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/99winter/pribbeno.htm
It is somewhat of a mistake to conceive of the Vietnam war as a US war. This reflects the Western perception of it, which overlooks the fact that the primary combatants were NVN and SVN, fighting to resolve national, political and ethnic issues left in the wake of the destruction of the French colonial period by the Japanese occupation in WWII. America got itself involved for its own purposes, essentially to contain communism. These purposes happened to coincide, more or less, with the reasons why the dominant, unrepresentative (ethnically, politically, and religiously), privileged, and corrupt ruling classes in SVN wanted to resist the communists.
The preoccupation with America’s involvement ignores the realities of SVN’s experience. While America committed large forces and had large losses, SVN suffered (from memory) about ten times the military casualties America did, and committed larger forces for a longer period, before, during and after American involvement. SVN also suffered immense civilian casualties and had the country ravaged by war, while America suffered none of this. The South Vietnamese also didn’t have the luxury of withdrawing when political factors affecting America and other external forces changed and left SVN vulnerable.
As a minor but interesting point, there is evidence that America got involved in part because of goading by Australia, which felt very vulnerable to the spread of communism (e.g. Malaya, Indonesia in 1950’s early 1960’s) from China / NVN down the same land chain which the Japanese had advanced and threatened it less than 20 years earlier. Australia’s goading related to an apparent switch or indifference in American foreign policy towards Australia arising over West Irian and Indonesia. This alarmed Australia as it feared being cut adrift by the US, to which it had hitched itself during WWII and Korea. Australia wanted to engage America militarily in the defence of S.E. Asia against communism, to lock America into forward defence of Australia which was beyond Australia’s military capacity. This happened to coincide with America’s own reasons for getting into Vietnam. A much more detailed analysis is here http://www.vvaa.org.au/bross-2.pdf
Could anyone shed any light as to the political powers or otherwise that brought the war to a close?
This has probably as good a summary of a long and complex process as you’ll find http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761552642_1/Vietnam_War.html
Was the war really lost before it began?
Probably. The US backed what was essentially a corrupt dictatorship in SVN which suited America’s interests (as if that would be a novelty!), but which couldn’t survive without US support. A fair comparison is with Chiang’s Nationalist forces in China after WWII, which like SVN fought with varying degrees of competence, but like SVN the troops in the field always had above and behind them a politically, financially and morally corrupt bunch of bastards feathering their own nests and pulling in different directions while thousands of men, women and children died pointlessly in their service and as a result of their actions, on and off the battlefield. Both the Nationalists and SVN were probably doomed to lose, sooner or later, to a determined and united enemy like Mao and NVN, and for much the same reasons.
There’s a few hidden factors in comparing Australian and US forces, which put American forces at a disadvantage in a comparing the effectiveness of troops and units.
Although Australia had conscripts, if they really didn’t want to go to Vietnam, in most cases they didn’t go. There were processes for giving troops the choice before they went, although not uniformly applied in all units. Australian soldiers didn’t want to serve with people who didn’t want to be there as they would cause obvious problems on and off the battlefield. My understanding is that US conscripts didn’t have the same choice. This gave Australian units an advantage in cohesion, determination and general morale.
Training is another factor, particularly from the late 1960’s when the quality of US troops fell off, and certainly compared with US troops who were there in the mid-60’s. Australian infantry had the usual basic training plus months of infantry or other (armour, artillery etc) corps training plus specialised jungle warfare training at Canungra, which was one of the best jungle warfare schools in the world. By the time the average Australian infantry conscript reached Vietnam he had 9 to 11 months of good quality training specifically directed to jungle warfare in Vietnam.My understanding is that the demand for increased numbers of US troops resulted in many being sent over from the late ‘60’s with a great deal less training than Australian troops, which ensured that they could not perform as well. This is an indictment of the American military leadership, not the poor American grunts who had no control over what training they received.
Australian training was specifically directed to Australian tactics which were more suited to small scale jungle operations against a fluid enemy than were American tactics, which were more suited to larger scale operations against an enemy which would stand and fight. There was a place for both tactics as both types of engagements occurred in Vietnam. The Americans did well in their general tactical approach of applying overwhelming firepower in large engagements, but they generally failed to adapt their tactics to the smaller engagements which were the daily grind in Vietnam and in which Australians were very good. There is no reason that American troops couldn’t have been just as good as Australians in this area, except that American military doctrine which informed their tactics and training was too focused on firepower and force.
Short term junior leadership is another factor. American units, or at least Army units, tended to rotate officers through at platoon and company level for relatively short periods, as little as a month, to give them experience, or even just to let them get their combat badge. This ensured that troops often didn’t know or get to trust their officers, and vice versa, which has obvious implications for both groups in discipline and battle. Australian units normally kept the officers they trained with until they were killed, wounded, or, in rare cases, removed because they weren’t up to the task. The US practice undermined cohesion at platoon and company level, which is where it matters most on the battlefield. Troops who don’t trust their officers won’t follow them in sticky situations if they can possibly avoid it.
Another factor that may bear on cohesion and morale is that I think the US Army continued its WWII practice of not returning recovered wounded to their original units but sending them to another unit. Australians went back to their units when they recovered. If so, and combined with the rotating officers, some American units were bound to be less cohesive than Australian units.
I feel it wasn’t a political defeat either, maybe more like military leadership/intelligence/PR defeat…
U.S. Generals/military said things like “NVA is getting weaker” - the exact opposite happened with TET - U.S. Military lost their credibility. Without that the political pressure wouldn’t have been so bad.
But U.S. military wasn’t exactly winning the war on the battlefield with it’s static military base tactics and so on.
Most insane thing, in my opinion, is that in Philippines 1946-1955 U.S. soldiers/advisers formed and used (with locals) a nearly perfect counter-guerilla warfare campaign. And then in Vietnam War, they used totally wrong/opposite methods, ignoring everything they have learned. :-o
_
Ignorance was never a factor in the American endeavour in Vietnam pursued through five presidences, although it was to become an excuse. Ignorance of country and culture there may have been, but not ignorance of the contra-indications, even the barriers, to achieving the objectives of American policy. All the conditions and reasons precluding a successful outcome were foreseen at one time or another during the thirty years of American involvement. American intervention was not a progress sucked step by step into an unsuspected quagmire. At no time were policy-makers unaware of the hazards, obstacles and negative developments. American intelligence was adequate, informed observation flowed steadily from the field to the capital, special investigative missions were repeatedly sent out, independant reportage to balance professional optimism - when that prevailed - was never lacking. The folly consisted not in pursuit of a goal in ignorance of the obstacles but in the persistance in the pursuit despite accumulating evidence that the goal was unattainable, and the effect disproportionate to the American interest and eventually damaging to American society, reputation and disposable power in the world.
The TET offensive was a media victory for the NVA. NV and the US press portrayed it as this. In reality it was a total defeat for the NVA. After Tet they could not field major units in one place and if they did they were destroyed. The bombing of NV, if continued would have ended the war but this method was not acceptable to the US media and was stopped.
The US lost because America lost the will to win.
Up until Tet, the U.S. thought they were winning. A perceived defeat for the NVA/VC in the field, but a victory for the North in the political war, where it mattered. Giap and Ho were aware that the North could not succeed militarily with Tet (not in the orthodox sense that is), that wasn’t the mission. The mission was accomplished successfully.
Khe Sahn, as a ‘come-on’ - superb move. Tet was a fanastically planned and executed offensive.
Giap’s name should be up there with the greats.
We can argue that the U.S. won the tactical battles of the Tet Offensive, or not, but the U.S. certainly lost the strategic battle, and that was the one that the U.S. should have won to succeed in Vietnam. It was the battle that the Vietnamese did win. Why did the U.S. lose the strategic battle? Well, it goes back many years.
The road to American failure in Vietnam began with the death of Franklin D Roosevelt in April 1945. Roosevelt was against allowing the French back into Indo-China, and for an independent, Vietnamese government.
With the ending of the war in Europe, De Gaul was, eventually, able to convince Truman that it was necessary for France to re-occupy Indo-China to prevent France itself becoming a satellite of the USSR. This action succeeded in driving the Vietnamese into the ‘communist camp’.
With the fall of China to the communists, the war in Korea, the Malayan Emergency, and the inevitable defeat of France in Indo-China, it became more paramount to the U.S. that communist expansion must be halted in Vietnam.
John F Kennedy, neither a liberal nor a conservative, Kennedy was an operator of quick intelligence and strong ambition who stated many elevated principles convincingly, eloquently, even passionately, while his actions did not always match. In major offices of government and the White House staff, he put men of active mind, proven ability and, as far as possible, a hard-headed attitude to match his own. Mostly men of his age, in their forties, they were not the social philosophers, innovators and idealists of the ‘New Deal’.
Robert McNamara, a prodigy of the Harvard Business School, of ‘systems analysis’ for the Air Force during WW2 and of rapid rise afterwards to presidency of the Ford Motor Company, was characteristic and outstanding choice for Secretary of Defence. Precise and positive, McNamara was a specialist of management through ‘statistical control’, as he had demonstrated both in the Air Force and at Ford. Anything could be quantified was his realm. Though said to be sincere as an Old Testament prophet, he had the ruthlessness of uninterrupted success, and his genius for statistics left little respect for human variables (Hmmm?) and no room for unpredictables (even louder –Hmmm?).
Kennedy: “If it (Vietnam) were ever converted into a white man’s (read non-Asiatic) war, we should lose it as the French had lost a decade earlier.”
McNamara: “We have the power to knock any society out of the twentieth century.”
Like Kennedy, many of his associates were combat veterans of WW2, having served as Navy officers and fliers, as bombardiers and navigators, and in the case of Roger Hilsman, the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, as leader of an OSS unit behind the Japanese lines in Burma. Power and status exhilarated these men and their fellows: they enjoyed the urgencies, even the exhaustion, of government; they liked to call themselves ‘crisis managers’, they tried hard, applied their skills and intelligence, were reputed the ‘the best and the brightest – and were soon to discover that rather than controlling circumstances, circumstances controlled them.
Military theory and strategy underwent a major change with the advent of the Kennedy administration. Appalled by the plans based on ‘massive retaliation’ which the military under Eisenhower had embraced, Kennedy and McNamara turned to the ideas of the new school of defence intellectuals expressed in their doctrine of limited war. Its aims were not conquest but coercion; force would be used on a rationally calculated basis to alter the enemy’s will and capabilities to the point where ‘the advantages of terminating the conflict were greater than the advantages of continuing it’. War would be rationally ‘managed’ in such a way as to send messages to the opposing belligerent, who would respond rationally to the pain and damage inflicted on him by desisting from the actions that caused them.
One thing was left out of account by the new doctrine – the other side.
War is polarity.
What if the other side failed to respond rationally to the coercive message? Appreciation of the human factor was not McNamara’s strongest point, and the possibility that humankind is not rational was too eccentric and disruptive to be programmed into his analysis.
Source: B W Tuchman - The March of Folly.
and others which I am forgetful of.
Well it all started as a fight to end communism… such as with the soviets Apparantly Eisenhower thought that if vietnam was allowed to be a communist country, then all other asian countries would follow , like a domino effect.
If i am wrong sorry! I have only studied up to WWII so far.
Interesting that you should bring Eisenhower into the equaion. Eisenhower’s attention was somewhat focussed on Laos. Yes, Vietnam did become the pre-dominant ‘Domino’. Not so much a fight to end communism, but a fight to halt the expansion of communism. Hence, the Domino Theory.
It was only two weeks before Kennedy was sworn into office as President of the USA, that Nikita Khrushchev presented the U.S. with a very decisive chellenge by declaring that national ‘wars of liberation’ would be become the vehicle for the advancement of the communist cause. These ‘just wars’, said Khruschev, wherever they occurred, be it Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria, would receive full Soviet support.
America’s biggest success in Vietnam was disengaging successfully, which it did when it accepted the political reality that China was the regional power and that it could not contain regional communism militarily.
Nixon, who is remembered most for some misdeeds, was masterful in engaging successfully with China to enable American disengagement, although that was disastrous from the South Vietnamese viewpoint. It was all the more remarkable given Nixon’s rabid anti-communist activities in the 1950’s.
What’s interesting is that before and during WWII, Roosevelt saw China as the dominant force in the region, and in time as a major world power, and wanted to nurture and cultivate it. His successors lacked the same foresight.
What’s even more interesting is that in the late 1940’s or early 1950’s (rusty on dates) Ho Chi Minh, foolishly believing in America’s advertised commitment to liberty and independence, made approaches to the US for US support for Vietnamese independence. IIRC these approaches never got far beyond the relevant desk in the State Department. Given America’s hostility to French and British colonialism, it’s surprising that more attention wasn’t given to these approaches, but America’s obsession with communism blinded it to any engagement with communists for a couple of decades until Nixon engaged fully with one of the two main communist powers. An awful lot of death, destruction and misery in both Vietnams could have been avoided if America had engaged with Ho at the outset.
The lesson for the future is that America is now in much the same position in Iraq, being forced to stay there to contain Iran as the major regional power exporting the current feared ‘ism’ (Islamo-fascism) without having any prospect of long term military success until a new Administration can free itself of the blinkered approach of the current mob and engage successfully with Iran. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Of course, the Brits shared occupation with China in 1945. Chek didn’t want to know, he had enough problems with Mao. When Ho’s delegation introduced themselves to the Brits, they were chucked out. The Brits were concerned for their own colonies and, therefore, didn’t want to be seen supporting another group of discidents.
Ho was reputedly a communist and, given the terror of the time, could not be condoned by the U.S. even though the OSS had been supporting him against the Japanese during the war.
An independant Vietnam would have been a good defense against communist China’s expansion, but everyone at the time figuered that they would collaborate with China to spread the social message.
Nixon was good for America. He taught them not to trust their presidents.
We lost because the Congress cut off the funding of the war and the media did everything they could to cast our attempt to defeat the Communists as a losing proposition. Plus, the politicians did not let the military prosecute the war to the fullest extent. We only have to look at how the majority of the media is reporting the war in Iraq. Nothing piositive -everything negative. Also, the Democrats seek to appease the Islamo - Facsists, and not giving the President any support, even though they voted to invade Irag. What happened concerning Vietnam is happening again.
I think that when it came to understanding Vietnam America, just as it has done in Iraq, failed to appreciate both the realities and subtleties of the situation.
Vietnam and China were traditional enemies rather than allies. Vietnam accepted help from China during the Vietnam war, but the Sino-Vietnamese war in 1979 indicates their attitude to each other when not united to fight a common enemy.
The essential problem seems to be that up to about the mid/late-1960’s, and especially to the mid-1950’s when Vietnam’s future was being decided, the West and the US in particular tended to regard “communism” as a monolith crossing all borders and representing a unified threat to the West. In reality it was different things in different countries and not in the least united, but the West failed to grasp this, and so failed to grasp the opportunities that went with it for different relations with different communist inspired national independence movements.
Again, this parallels current events where “Islamic terrorists” or “Muslim fundamentalists” or “Islamo-fascists” are lumped into one basket when they have different aims in different places and in some instances are in full-out war with each other. Tarring everybody with the same brush prevents negotiation with individual groups on terms that might be productive, at least in those cases where it is possible to negotiate with them.