AHC: Korean War as an early Vietnam

With any POD after 25 June 1950 (the outbreak of Hostilities), turn Korea into a traumatizing unwinnable quagmire for the US.

Bonus points if you can give South Korea a fate similar to South Vietnam (annexation into the communist North).
 
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Without TV and with Truman ordering wartime press controls on the Korean War which LBJ didn't for Vietnam it wasn't going to have a Vietnam type effect even if seen as a quagmire which the public by 52 did see the conflict as.
 
Korea was pretty traumatizing OTL, one of the reasons the US was so politically circumspect in Vietnam was that it was afraid of another Korea

The Korean Peninsula is ~200 miles wide or less, the South Vietnamese border was over 700 miles long, the US could maintain a continuous line across the Peninsula it could not do in Nam and stop flow of supplies to any guerillas in the South. The only way to make the lines wide enough the US can't cover them to stop supplies going to guerillas, is for the US to occupy the whole Korean Peninsula. The issue there is that means the Communists have lost a lot of cred, and are relying on bases within China and the USSR, making them look like foreign puppets, plus the US can just withdraw the 39-40 parallel and it has a line it can control, and SK still owns Pyongyang and half of North Korea, that's a victory

This assumes that the war is unconventional. Conventional it is hard for it to end up too much worse than OTL, Armistice around the 38th parallel was the goal after Chinese intervention. The US and allies had enough conventional superiority they could force an armistice if the Chinese would not accept one on reasonable terms
 

samcster94

Banned
Have U.S. intervention get there later might work. The OTL war was clearly traumatizing too, but this prompt implies Korea is ruled entirely by the Kims.
 
I admit i don't know that much about the korean war and plausible PODs to change it, but even more soviet and chinese involvement is feasible? Maybe a few soviet rifle and tank divisions getting involved, so maybe the americans never get far into the NK when they launch their offensive, with the war stalemated then NK, China and USSR funnel and arm insurgent groups in the south? Obvioulsy, i disregard any of those eerie nuclear war escalation TL some are keen on.
 
I admit i don't know that much about the korean war and plausible PODs to change it, but even more soviet and chinese involvement is feasible? Maybe a few soviet rifle and tank divisions getting involved, so maybe the americans never get far into the NK when they launch their offensive, with the war stalemated then NK, China and USSR funnel and arm insurgent groups in the south? Obvioulsy, i disregard any of those eerie nuclear war escalation TL some are keen on.
You mean earlier Chinese involvement, they only started discussing involvement when the UN crossed the 38th parallel, by the time the Chinese crossed the Yalu the UN held Pyongyang

The problem with more Chinese and possible Soviet involvement early on in their intervention is doing so will hurt the UN more, and if the UN forces are hurt much more then OTL the nukes are getting broken out, it was seriously considered OTL. Later in the campaign, the Chinese have issues with logistics, they had a hard time supplying the forces they had, more troops mean more mouths to feed, making the starvation issues worse. Soviet intervention could do something about that, but that risks escalation. Officially all Chinese forces in Korea were volunteers, to maintain the legal fiction that China was not involved, hard for an entire motor rifle division to volunteer. And if that intervention is air based, a large air attack from China or the USSR would authorize Ridgeway to deploy nuclear weapons

Supporting insurgents in the South is difficult, US controls the seas, and even the Red Navy can't change that. On land, the front is narrow enough that supplies can't be smuggled through in quantity
 
For what I heard one of the reasons that ROK had a better and stronger government than SVN is that the Japanese left intact in a better system of governance and a more capable security forces. While South Vietnam was forced to inherit a shakey French bureaucracy that was that wasn't effective at governing the nation and hell, the French even awkwardly divided up the whole of Vietnam during the colonial period.

Also, the South Vietnam was incredibly diverse(even more so than North Vietnam) while the whole of Korea is one of the most ethnically homogenous places in the world.

So you'll have to get the factors in play to keep the ROK government more incompetent so Communist guerrillas can flourish better.
 
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