Paragraph 1. Yeas, I agree. At the end of ww2, Ho Chi Min came to the U.S. and asked our help in driving out the French. He actually followed our Constution as a guide. We messed up and supported the French as a longtime ally.
Para 2. Agree totally.
Para 3. While Communisum was “different things in different countries”, in the main these movement were supported/encouraged by the Soviet Union. That’s why we were so paranoid about Vietnam.
Para 4. Do not agree here. The main imputus behind Al Queida and their associated groups is the return of a worldwide Caliphate. Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Syria, Iran will have their little fiefdoms. But make no mistake about it this time, we are talking of the unifying force of religion here! It is not possible to negotate with them seperately. Syria and Iran will continue to stir up trouble wherever they can. The Arab world looks for weeknes and will expoit this (weakness) to the max. The only type of negotiation with this hard core is ruthlessness. The U.S. President should delare that if a nucular bomb ever goes off in an American city, and it is proven that it was Muslim terrorists, Mecca and Medina would be toast.
This is a topic in itself, probably many,many topics.
If you’d like to pursue it, which I would, how about starting it in Off Topic Militaria in http://www.ww2incolor.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=55
Your quote above is a good opening.
Go ahead, you start. I’m chicken.
You might be wise to be chicken. Maybe we should leave it alone.
If it weren’t all the political stuff in the way, yeah, America and other allies could have gone straight to Hanoi. But with the political stuff, we had to back down. And the causulties considered ‘light’ compared to some other wars. Really, did we lose or not? People have different views and thoughts about the war that makes a topic like this, keep going and going, like the energy bunny.
Unfortunately, Ike had to subvert Democracy by canceling elections in 1956 in order to “fight communism.”
Well, from what I have read, it would seem that the more appropriate question would be - How could America have won?
From my understanding, it was lost before 1965. There are many misleading myths about the war. In the first instance, the French should never have been allowed back there, and after they had been defeated, there was no way anyone was going to defeat the north Vietnamese. If the US had invaded the north and taken Hanoi, they would still have lost. All of the problems of winning in the south would have been small beer comapared with winning and holding the whole of the country. By 1965 it was far too late for anyone to prevent the north from succeeding in ultimate victory. It was probably far too late in 1954.
we lost because of LBJ. and his fear of killing Russian advisors in the north and would bring Russia into that war.
we lost because of LBJ ordered pilots to stop bombing high priority targets.
we lost because LBJ could not stand up under the media storm and pressure from anti war protesters
we knew after tet the north was finished with that war. we were sitting around waiting for the paper to be signed so we could go home.
we lost because in 1968 LBJ ordered a bombing halt of the north. and a general retreat.
and we knew that gave time for the north to rearm and resupply and start a new offensive. which the did.
we lost because the North was counting heavy on the anti war media and anti war movement here. and they got it. in spades.
we lost because of no leadership. and political screw ups that cost us all.
we lost because we were ordered out. or is that really losing ???
I can think of a few reasons.
The US did not appear to have any real military objectives, other than halting communism. Vietnam appeared to be a defensive war where the American military would consider itself victorious if it managed to prevent communist forces from taking a South Vietnamese cities. In World War II, the US could measure their success in the war by how much territory they gained after a battle. I feel that if the US wanted to go all-out, and abandon their “limited war” principles, the US could have just blown Hanoi right off the map and installed a pro-US government in Vietnam. As people mentioned before, it has a lot to do with the politics behind the war.
Also, the US lost the war because of the nature of the enemy. As Iraq also proves, the US military was always very effective against a conventional army, not so against a guerilla one. The Vietcong especially, could use the tactic of hiding in a jungle, wait for an American squad to patrol near there, pop a few grunts, and then disperse into the jungle. It didn’t help that the Vietcong did not have uniforms, so the Americans were not able to tell Vietcong from civillian (hence, the massacre at My-Lai). In Vietnam, the US definitely had air superiority. Again, in World War II, when the US was facing other conventional armies, the air superiority was an immense help. However, in Vietnam, when the US did not even know where the enemy was half the time, air power was not enough to win the war.
In general, I define the Vietnam War as an American experiment in Asia gone horribly wrong. If anything, far from preventing the spread of communism, the Americans helped spread it by getting Laos and Cambodia in on the side of the communists; they wound up bombing those two countries when trying to get to the Ho Chi Minh trail.
So why didn’t Nixon win it all?
once again. with clarity
It was a war of attrition, designed to wear down the North in their goal of uniting the South without provkoing a confrontation with the Soviets or the Chinese. Nor did the US have the resources nor fortitude to invade the North, which would have resulted in tens of thousands more US casualties and possibly Armageddon…
Also, the US lost the war because of the nature of the enemy.
The couldn’t “win” nor “lose” the war because it was a Vietnamese civil war. Not “our” war. The Saigon regime was hideously corrupt and largely comprised of the soft “Catholic” minority leisure class. Most of whom had collaborated with the French during their colonial occupation, and were thusly tainted and devoid of legitimacy…
As Iraq also proves, the US military was always very effective against a conventional army, not so against a guerilla one. The Vietcong especially, could use the tactic of hiding in a jungle, wait for an American squad to patrol near there, pop a few grunts, and then disperse into the jungle. It didn’t help that the Vietcong did not have uniforms, so the Americans were not able to tell Vietcong from civillian (hence, the massacre at My-Lai).
Completely untrue. The US, and their RVN allies, largely destroyed the VC/National Liberation Front via the “Phoenix Program.” Something that was largely forgotten by the US military until “the Surge” in Iraq. The failure of Iraq was that the US forgot some of its successes in Vietnam regarding counterinsurgency…
It was the tanks of the North Vietnamese Army that took Saigon, not the black-pajamaed revolutionaries of the VC/NLF…
Incidentally, they DID have a uniform. The infamous “black pajamas” uniform. In any case, there was even a difference within the VC, from “Main Force Regulars” to the paddy farmer that had an AK and might join an attack occasionally…
In Vietnam, the US definitely had air superiority. Again, in World War II, when the US was facing other conventional armies, the air superiority was an immense help. However, in Vietnam, when the US did not even know where the enemy was half the time, air power was not enough to win the war.
The US air power question was again one of a high tech industrial society building an air arm designed to destroy another high tech industrial society…Which is why it largely failed in the agrarian world of Vietnam…
In general, I define the Vietnam War as an American experiment in Asia gone horribly wrong. If anything, far from preventing the spread of communism, the Americans helped spread it by getting Laos and Cambodia in on the side of the communists; they wound up bombing those two countries when trying to get to the Ho Chi Minh trail.
I would characterize it as an abortion and a complete blunder in the vein of the Cold War mentality of binary oppositions of US vs. USSR, monolithic communism, and a complete acquaintance to the French post-WWII neo-colonial aspirations. We possibly could have made Ho Chi Minh “ours” if we had forced a French withdrawal and had not been so paranoid about “commies.” I mean, he did cite the US Constitution in his declaration of independence and we did cancel an election in the late 1950s to prevent him from winning…
Meaning?
It has long been forgotten in most circles that the original US aim was only to maintain the status quo in SVN. Although the situation in SVN changed after that, the war continued essentially on that basis but with the objective becoming more confused and harder to obtain, and less easy to identify if ever it was obtained.
It was a failure, through political control of military matters, of the basic military principles of:
- Identify the Aim.
- Maintain the Aim.
The military was hamstrung by the politicians. The military failure lies primarily at the feet of American politicians who hamstrung the military. As do the deaths of far too many people on both sides during an idiotic military excercise lie at the feet of the same politicians.
Who in their right mind fights a war with no intention of taking the steps needed to win it?
Politicians, obviously. :evil:
I disagree, so far as a military conquest of NVN is concerned. It was entirely within US, SVN and allied nations’ military capacity.
NVN survived only because its enemies refused to advance through the DMZ, or just leapfrog it and land by sea further north to deal with what was left after an unrestricted bombing campaign.
The Tet Offensive damaged NVN and the VC militarily to the point that SVN, which did the bulk of the ground fighting, and the US etc could have pressed the advantage all the way to Hanoi under American air and sea power, if the political will was there.
But, as you say, it was the Armageddon factor which inhibited such an attack on NVN, and continued a miserable abortion for pointless years by waving a bloodied knitting needle at the patient’s groin rather than thrusting it into the womb.
Well the USA did not lose the War on the ground, it lost the War on the television in the sitting room of American families. But for all practical purposes it was much the same thing, since the North overran the South and several other Asian states fell to “communist” rule. It is very difficult to give a simple analysis of just how things went wrong for America in Vietnam, because the US made so many mistakes and the mistakes were all interacting together to make an even bigger mess, it is hard to see exactly what were the critical problems.
First of all should the US ever have got involved in the first place, one can produce a reasoned argument that Ho Chi Min was a Vietnamese nationalist first and a communist very much second and that US should have backed Ho Chi Min and since China and Vietnam have a tradition of regional animosity even a Communist leaning Vietnam would have had a very standoff relationship with China. So Ho Chi Min could have been a Vietnamese Tito for the West, communist leaning but not part of the Anti-western Communist block. The other argument is that there is a definite cultural difference between the North of Vietnam and the South and that the Southern regime corrupt as it was, was a legitimate national Government ( and as for the corruption issues, yes for sure the Southern regime was corrupt but so were then and still are today many states and America e.g. did not abolish slavery till after the civil war and immediatly after 9/11 there seemed to be one rule as to who and what could fly with respect to the Bin-Ladens, so that even medical ambulance aircraft that fly organ donor transplant materiel were grounded but the Bin-Ladens had apparently no problem arranging a private jet to whisk them back to Araby ) and who are more corrupt than the Communists? Like if Jane Fonda thought North Vietnam was such a great place, why didn’t she go live there instead of appearing on the TV flogging a fancy French face cream that will do the same thing as a cheapo brand sold in the likes Walmart except at the privledge of costing several times the price of the cheapo brand, for the French product. So the US did have the choice of supporting Ho Chi Min or the South and it chose the South. In fact there was a third choice the US could have decided not to have got involved at all. But the US chose the South, any of the three choices 1 supporting Ho Chi Min 2 Supporting the South 3 decideing not to become involved, were legitimate options in my view. So that the US in deciding to support the South was a legitimate choice.
Then the mistakes started, the US pursued a gradualist approach to the build up to the War, this gave the North an opportunity to develop the skills to negate many of the advantages provided by superior American technology, North Vietnam should have been hit hard from the get go. The risks of bringing in the Russians were slight, in that why would European Russians from Moscow want to go to War over a bunch of “slanty eyed” [ NB I am not being racist, I am just trying to put myself in the shoes of the Soviets ] Vietnamese foreigners. As for China, the Vietnamese and Chinese hate one another, so I can’t see them having been too particularly concerned, as long as the objective did not go beyond making it non-viable for North Vietnam to threaten the South. The idea of bombing North Vietnam in to the stone age was a particularly silly one, since North Vietnam was an agricultural third world country and the important high technology military products were coming from the USSR, what was certainly possible was to reduce North Vietnam to the level of bicycle and horse transport and reduce any North Vietnamese military facility like airfields to ruin. This was not done and instead we had the idiocy of major military targets in North Vietnam being off limits to US airstrikes, whilst the US was engaging in heavy duty air strikes in South Vietnam using fastmovers like the F4 Phantom II, which was frankly nuts since the South was the country the US was supposed to be defending. The idea of rotating the US forces out of Vietnam after a twelve month tour of duty was another dumb ass thing to do, in that as soon as the troops started to get a feel for the country they were shipped out and officers rotated out after an even shorter time. Then there was the greatest dumbass of them all, General Westmoreland who pursued a War of attrition, when the primary objective was not to kill NVA or Vietcong but to secure the future of South Vietnam. The killing of NVA and Vietcong in a strategy of attrition was doomed to failure from the get go, in that since North Vietnam was essentially off limits to attack by the US, the North Vietnamese could turn up and down the war as it suited them and whilst America with its superior technology and firepower could always kill more NVA and Vietcong than they could kill Americans, since the Americans were fighting in a foreign country [ South Vietnam ] with a freepress back in the US, all the North Vietnamese had to do was kill enough Americans to convince the folks backhome in the US, that they were in a War against an enemy which would never give up for a country [ ie South Vietnam ] that was not worth fighting for, which the North achieved. The Americans were not beaten by crafty North Vietnamese guerillas making ambushes in the jungle as is popularly believed but an inability of the US Government once having decided to become involved to pursue old fashioned military tactics of hitting an enemy so hard he decides he is playing out of his league and decides to throw in the ball, which is what would have happened if the fierce determination of the North Vietnamese regime to annex South Vietnam had run in to the problem that their activities in seeking to over-run the South had so provoked the US that the regime in the North was in danger of imploding due to US attacks on its infrastructure.
Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer
Fixed.
And which war does this remind me of…?:rolleyes:
Correct.
It was a failure, through political control of military matters, of the basic military principles of:
- Identify the Aim.
- Maintain the Aim.
The military was hamstrung by the politicians. The military failure lies primarily at the feet of American politicians who hamstrung the military. As do the deaths of far too many people on both sides during an idiotic military excercise lie at the feet of the same politicians.
Who in their right mind fights a war with no intention of taking the steps needed to win it?
Politicians, obviously. :evil:
It was both politicians and the military. The military and civilian planners at the Pentagon routinely sent gloomy reports of what was actually going on on the ground, and also the inherent fallibility of the Saigon regime. There was little hope nor optimism that the South could survive against determined Northern efforts to unify the country, and most of that traces back to the very legitimacy of the South in the eyes of its citizens and the near constant turmoil of the political situation which led to a military system that was inherently corrupt and pretty much sapped the will of the ARVN. It has been stated more than once that both the LBJ and Nixon Administrations routinely made private analysis’s that directly contradicted their rosy public statements; and Nixon especially only sought to delay the fall of Saigon for as long as possible after the US exit.
I disagree, so far as a military conquest of NVN is concerned. It was entirely within US, SVN and allied nations’ military capacity.
NVN survived only because its enemies refused to advance through the DMZ, or just leapfrog it and land by sea further north to deal with what was left after an unrestricted bombing campaign.
The Tet Offensive damaged NVN and the VC militarily to the point that SVN, which did the bulk of the ground fighting, and the US etc could have pressed the advantage all the way to Hanoi under American air and sea power, if the political will was there.
But, as you say, it was the Armageddon factor which inhibited such an attack on NVN, and continued a miserable abortion for pointless years by waving a bloodied knitting needle at the patient’s groin rather than thrusting it into the womb.
Really? The South could barely defend itself against the NLF, and they were almost useless against NVA. What is often conveniently forgotten is that most of the ARVN soldiers were still carrying WWII vintage US rifles in 1968, somewhat silly since they average height of the South Vietnamese soldier was about 5’4" and they probably weighed less that 130lbs., yet they were carrying heavy, ten pound M-1s and Carbines that were no match for the AK-47s and SKS rifles carried by the Northerners, had a tank force that was vastly inferior to the North, had a very static warfare-centric mindset that was strictly “nine-to-five,” and they were heavily dependent on US firepower…
Could the US have invaded above the 17th parallel? Perhaps. But I think you’re looking at things in a vacuum a bit. Firstly, it WAS considered and Gen. Westmorland put in a troop request for 200,000 additional soldiers that would begin heading Northward. The problem with this? Where exactly were they going to come from? General mobilization? US forces assigned to NATO would have been severally weakened, and if the Soviets had decided to make a move, the US would almost certainly have had to use nuclear weapons. Secondly, the North Vietnamese Army had heavily fortified their border with bunker complexes and were employing classic defense in-depth that would have drastically increased US casualties making the War completely politically untenable at home. And as mentioned, simply the chance of bringing the Chinese into the War was a risk too great to even fathom. But also, the public support for the War was spiraling downward as American “boys” were coming back too their small towns in silver caskets. One of the key factors to the Tet Offensive destroying the last major vestige of majority US support for the War was the continued “Saigon Press Conference” madness in which statements and body counts, vastly inflated ones, were touted as a continued mantra of “we’re winning! The light is at the end of the tunnel!”
The truth is that the military was every bit as disingenuous as the civilian leadership, and there are clear schisms that the the civilian leadership felt somewhat deceived by the officer corp on the ground as well. As for the VC/NLF being destroyed by Tet, I agree. But only to an extent…
Some argue that in fact the Hanoi regime purposefully ordered the VC into a suicidal battle of conventional attrition that they could not hope to win against withering American firepower. It is thought by some that the Vietnamese and the US gov’t are currently still actively touting the myth that the Viet Cong, or more correctly, the National Liberation Front was little more than a partisan extension of the North Vietnamese Army. But in fact, it did not start out that way. The VC also had an independent political leadership -one that was sorely tested and attrited by US search and destroy operations- and was slowly supplanted by Northerners. But they were still considered a potential rival by Hanoi for complete domination of the South in a reunification. If Tet severally damaged the NLF, they were actually largely defeated by the US-RVN “Operation Phoenix” designed to eliminate the NLF hierarchy in much the same way they have previously attacked the Saigon regime: through captures of high value targets, state terror, and outright assassination.
Which is why I referred to (a) amphibious landings further north, thus getting behind the enemy’s strongholds, rather than trying to punch through them from the south by land, and (b) unrestricted (conventional) bombing and naval support.
The North was weaker in its resolve to continue the war than the US understood, as demonstrated by the way it backed off when Nixon let it be known he was thinking about nuking the North.
If the air ordnance actually applied to ploughing up jungle in NVN and SVN and elsewhere (often for fairly futile purposes like trying to stop supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail) had been applied to softening up major strategic points for amphibious landings and for supporting those landings and subsequent operations, and if Agent Orange had been applied to NVN food crops instead of to jungle in SVN, I suspect that the North would have been a lot more amenable to withdrawing from SVN when facing the prospect of defeat and starvation in its own territory.
The biggest flaw in the whole SVN, US etc approach was in making it clear to NVN that they wouldn’t go north of the 17th parallel by land. This allowed NVN to export the land war to SVN while suffering aerial bombardment with no prospect of it being invaded or conquered. The NVN leadership was always prepared to accept that as the cost of continuing its war in SVN, secure in the knowledge that aerial bombardment couldn’t conquer it.
We’re witnessing something similar in Afghanistan, with Pakistan playing the part of NVN and exporting war into Afghanistan while being largely immune from incursions into its own territory by the US etc, although one recently pissed them off mightily. If you don’t go into the enemy’s heartland on foot and conquer him, the war will go on as long as your enemy wants it to. It’s not rocket science, but politicians and their military advisers seem incapable of grasping this simple fact.
From a purely military standpoint, an amphibious landing would have been the way to go. But the two factors I’ve mentioned, the constrictions of US military power place on it by its global commitments, the anti-War movement at home, and the specter of again fighting huge numbers of Red Chinese “Volunteers” was probably not palatable to either Johnson nor Nixon. Also, this would have healed the schism between China and the USSR, at least temporarily. Westmorland already had 500,000+ US servicemen in Vietnam at the peak, and asked for 200,000 more. There simply were not enough to send without total mobilization in the event that tensions increased with the Soviets. In some circles it was viewed on whether one would rather save South Vietnam, or West Germany. It’s been a while, but I think the US Army of the period was perhaps 1.1 or 1.2 million men? How many would have been committed to an Asian backwater and for how long? Would the US’s unreliable, sketchy ARVN allies be much use? What of the occupation even if China doesn’t become directly involved?
I think one of the real factors was that the US was doing almost all of the real fighting by 1966, and the ARVN was little more than a rear security force aside from the elites like the Rangers and the Marines (who were armed with M-16s like the average GI). One thing I’ve always thought was that the US should possibly have dissolved the useless, corrupt Saigon regime that set an example of rot allowing pansy, dandies to lead the ARVN, men who spent more time stealing their soldiers pay than really dealing with the threat of the VC or NVA. In short, the US should have started “Vietnamization” much earlier, reconstituted the RVN forces with officer promotions based on merit rather than family connections, and essentially allowed the Vietnamese ARVN to take on its own cultural identity. Many ARVN officers felt as if they were trying to turn them into a mini-US Army…
It was a Vietnamese Civil War when it comes down to it, and unfortunately, the US failed to sway Uncle Ho over to its side, and mindlessly backed the French colonialists. The War was really lost in 1946…
All true, and all the more reason why the US should never have got so deeply involved when it was well aware beforehand of the problems involving the Soviets and China if it tried to fight the war to win, as distinct from keeping NVN out of SVN.
It’s a paradox that the US was keen to fight in Vietnam to stall expansion by ‘the communists’, which the US tended to see as one group rather than as quite distinct forms of communism and nationalism in various countries, but at the same time it wasn’t game to fight the NVN communists to win because doing so might bring in the Soviet and or Chinese communists. Just another example of poor thinking at the time, rather than the wisdom of hindsight.
I’m not sure about that. ARVN deaths were around 200,000, some say around 250,000, which is around four times American deaths. Perhaps they had a higher death rate than Americans because of inferior training, leadership, equipment and air support, but they were clearly heavily engaged in action.
I seem to recall some analysis (maybe several) which showed ARVN did the bulk of the fighting, and they certainly did all the fighting after the US and its allies pulled out, but that this is not recognised outside Vietnamese circles as the Western media concentrated on Western, primarily American, operations.
What were the chances of that when the US started out by supporting the biggest crook of them all, Diem, and his rotten crew?
Supporting that bunch of crooks was doomed from the outset.
Definitely.
There was an element of American arrogance that American military superiority would prevail in a type of war American forces were ill-equipped by training and outlook to fight because American military doctrine focused on the application of crushing force. This flowed from WWII experience and was fine in Europe during the Vietnam era against anticipated Soviet regular forces, but wholly inadequate against irregulars and hit and run NVA forces. American military policy in Vietnam should have been to engage more closely with the Vietnamese and understand the war from their perspective rather than from the American military operational perspective, which could have avoided alienating a lot of the SVN civilians and military. The essential problem was that American military leaders lacked the right training and attitude to deal with an insurgency, as shown in the following quote, which also outlines other deficiencies in America concentrating on conventional military actions in SVN, and which reinforces the points you have made about the wider geo-political aspects. It’s from a paper about the Australian counter-insurgency adviser, Ted Serong.
And just how was a foreign advisor to press advice upon the leaders of a national army of a sovereign state? In his diary entry for September 21, 1962, Serong wrote: “I am sickened to see these little bastards getting away with murder, and to see our boys getting killed while they’re graciously making up their minds whether or not they’ll take our advice. Maybe they won’t want to stop the insurgency”. He was in Quang Ngai, commenting on the activities of the 1st Corps of the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN). He continued, “visited CIA station…Brigadier General Kelleher and Gill Strickler both distressed…in I Corps (Military Region 1) an ARVN operation compared to Sherman March through Georgia…this comes back to our
advisory' effort. We must have agoad’ and a `veto.’”(5) Built into the advisory relationship was the urge to take over.Serong was Advisor on Counterinsurgency to General Paul Harkins, the American commander. General Harkins did not believe in counterinsurgency, but he did not want an advisor. If the U.S. government required other nation’s troops to be present in Vietnam, as a show of flags in support of American foreign policy, General Harkins, understandably, did not want other nation commanders in his executive councils. Major General Charles Timmes, the head of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group, Vietnam (MAAG), the command structure to which the Australian team reported, told Serong in mid-June 1963 that Harkins did “not want the Australian crowd as initiators of policy” a concern, Timmes said, which had increased with the possible arrival of a New Zealand contingent. Throughout 1962 and 1963 we find Serong presenting Harkins with a steady stream of reports. A draft for a code of conduct, advice on broadening his sources of intelligence on the enemy, and a note on the key points necessary for the training of the ARVN. Serong’s three requirements here were always the same: physical fitness, weapons drills, responsiveness to discipline. The same entry is repeated throughout the diaries. His training notes elaborate: inspection-concentrate on one thing each month, simple things are more important than technology, never give up a pursuit-no matter what. By February 1963 he was writing “at tonight’s briefing Harkins gave the appearance of having lost his grasp of the strategic direction of the war, and being prepared to settle for the happenings of the day, the day to day trivia.”(6 ) He resolved to accept an invitation from Major General William Yarborough to lecture at the Special Forces Training School, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and to put his case in Washington for a unified U.S.-South Vietnamese command.
CONTINUED …