AHC: US Victory in Vietnam

RousseauX

Donor
2. Destroying the agriculture is the other way. LBJ never allowed the bombing of dams. This would have flooded the rice fields causing a massive famine. I doubt that China or the Warsaw Pact had enough surplus food to feed North Vietnam. And even if they manage to send "enough" food, there isn't enough transport capacity to send military supplies and food.
Surplus food was there, North Vietnam population was...what 20 million? A tiny fraction of the total population of the Warsaw pact.

But yeah, transportation is the bigger issue.
 
was there actually a lot of restrictions on bombings in the south?

I mean, that's how the common legend has it, but then you look at South Vietnamese civilian death figures and those are pretty high: and you had things like free fire zones or entire villages being obliterated to get a handful of Vietcongs out of them, I mean the US policy in Vietnam wasn't very restricted.

The restrictions in the South weren't really the problem, as you say the enemy was usually elusive and the war in the south usually involved trying to find and kill the VC/NV who only offered open battle occasionally.

The restrictions were most heavy on the action against the North, primarily for fear of provoking direct Chinese intervention like the Korean War. It was all well and good to assist Sth Vietnam with a high intensity counter-insurgency but the US didn't have enough at stake to accept a stand-up war with nuclear-armed China.

In the most basic sense it can be seen that strategic bombers were used on tactical targets in the south while tactical attack aircraft were used on strategic (operational) targets in the north. Its the action in the north which would be the most effective use of US combat power, it plays to US strengths in high-end combat power and mobility setting this against NthV weakness of poverty making the damage done to operational and strategic targets like railways, bridges, weapons and resource stockpiles, high-end military equipment very hard to replace. A NthV fighting against air, land and amphibious raids on its own territory would find it difficult to support an insurgency in the south, giving the SthV government time to take control of the country.

The question is; can this be done without provoking direct intervention from China?
 
I am surprised that there has not been any more discussion about mining Haiphong Harbor, the main problem was that there was fears that doing that would have escalated the war to include the PRC and Soviet Union.
If the United States was willing to take that risk and mined the harbor in 1965 and continued to bomb the rail links from the PRC, that would have put a severer crimp in arms and ammunition coming from other countries.
 
was there actually a lot of restrictions on bombings in the south?

I mean, that's how the common legend has it, but then you look at South Vietnamese civilian death figures and those are pretty high: and you had things like free fire zones or entire villages being obliterated to get a handful of Vietcongs out of them, I mean the US policy in Vietnam wasn't very restricted.

The restrictions were on operations north of the border. Once the north was committed (ground troops openly operating in the south, NVA tanks in the later years, artillery fire across the DMZ) then the north should have been an open hunting ground but it wasn't and the NVA took full advantage. The VC were supplied and increasingly controlled from the north, and as the war went on they were often replaced or absorbed by regular NVA units coming south. There are plenty of pictures of ammunition trucks parked in residential streets up north, safe in the knowledge that the most that would happen would be a camera run by the USAF. Dams and water courses that would have hindered movement and food production were off limits, and certain geographical zones were also marked as free from harassment. The big failing was that the north knew about these restrictions and made full use of them. South of the DMZ it was pretty much a free fire zone in much of the country (which creates its own problems).

The other thing is a lot of the things you've named required much higher troop presence than actually was available: if the US troop presence was 1.5 million instead of 500k then yeah I could see the US permanently holding down territory and block Ho Chi Minh trial but you can't do that with a 1960s era mass conscript cold war army with otl troop levels.

True, but how many of the troops in Vietnam were actually combat troops? Many of the troops in country were in rear echelon, essential of course but far in excess of what you would want as a tooth-tail ratio, even then (probably worse than WWII, Korea or either Gulf War). Figures suggest even in 1968, the high point when over 500,000 American military personnel were in Vietnam, perhaps only 60, 000 were actually in combat units. The ratio was nearly 10-1 between support and combat. Granted it would have been extremely hard to find more units to send considering the European theatre was also a heavy drain on combat units at the time, but that ratio reflects the fact that people assumed the Americans threw half a million fighting men in and still lost. They didn't have anywhere near the boots on the ground people that imagine. The south probably mustered three quarters of a million troops under arms towards the end, although of dubious quality at times (especially some of the local militia and 'special' types). The north didn't manage much more, many of whom didn't come south anyway. It wasn't the numbers but their use that made the impact.
 
True, but how many of the troops in Vietnam were actually combat troops? Many of the troops in country were in rear echelon, essential of course but far in excess of what you would want as a tooth-tail ratio, even then (probably worse than WWII, Korea or either Gulf War). Figures suggest even in 1968, the high point when over 500,000 American military personnel were in Vietnam, perhaps only 60, 000 were actually in combat units. The ratio was nearly 10-1 between support and combat.

US combat support, including armour, artillery, Army aviation, USAF and USN, was used widely in support of non-US forces; Australia was very unusual as a Vietnam combatant by sending its own bombers, warships, helicopters and tanks.

The Koreans for example sent 2 Army divisions and a Marine Brigade, but provided no helicopters, fighter-bombers, warships or tanks, only 4 C46s and 5 LSMs. If Australia's contribution is any guide Korea should have provided 5-7 bomber squadrons, 5-7 warships, 5-7 helicopter squadrons and 2-3 tank regiments. Instead the US provided these units for the Koreans, as well as many other contributions including SthV, which accounts for the prevalence of US combat support units to some extent.
 
Once a government fighting an insurgency introduces foreign troops, its own population pretty much unites against the foreigners.

Except the RVN 'won' that, the VC were spent after Tet, and the remains cleaned up by the RF/PF and Phoenix. Things were actually in pretty good shape in 1972 when US combat troops were gone

Insurgency wasn't what ended RVN, it was a standard Blitzkrieg in 1975
 

thorr97

Banned
Anchises,

The operations necessary to destroy the North's 1975 offensive wouldn't be "continued" to any great length. They'd be enough to support what few Arc Light strikes were needed to turn that multi-division NVA force into just so much churned up burnt debris and mud mixture.

That offensive smashed, the expenditures drop back down to surveillance flights. And with the guts of its regular army - including all of its armor units - wiped out it'd be many more years before the North could recover and rebuild its army to have another go at the South. If at all. And by then - early 80s perhaps - the South would be much stronger and more capable on its own as well.
 
But the US did achieve very favorable loss-exchange ratios all throughout the war, but the US public didn't care about the 10 Vietcong who were killed, they cared about the 1 american.

I think we're actually in agreement on this. Maybe I should've phrased my post differently. My point wasn't that the CAPs had better atrittion ratios than conventional units. My point was that they could split the the VC off from their support base and raise local, ARVN-backed militias, all while putting fewer Americans on the ground.

The goal is not to defeat the NVA and VC. The goal is to deny them victory while the RVN builds up the ability to do all the fighting on their own.

The key word is OUTSOURCE! Give RVN all the supplies, training, and logistical and air support they need, but let ARVN do the bulk of the fighting. It's not worth it to decisively engage the US military in Vietnam. It was always a proxy war with the deck stacked in the USSR/PRC's favor. The US could aford to spend dollars, but not lives
 
The key word is OUTSOURCE! Give RVN all the supplies, training, and logistical and air support they need

My earlier post applies to the SthV forces to a large extent.

US combat support, including armour, artillery, Army aviation, USAF and USN, was used widely in support of non-US forces; Australia was very unusual as a Vietnam combatant by sending its own bombers, warships, helicopters and tanks.

The Koreans for example sent 2 Army divisions and a Marine Brigade, but provided no helicopters, fighter-bombers, warships or tanks, only 4 C46s and 5 LSMs. If Australia's contribution is any guide Korea should have provided 5-7 bomber squadrons, 5-7 warships, 5-7 helicopter squadrons and 2-3 tank regiments. Instead the US provided these units for the Koreans, as well as many other contributions including for SthV, which accounts for the prevalence of US combat support units to some extent.

During the Vietnamisation period apparently the US pulled out infantry units first, leaving behind armoured units (and aviation etc) which provided more combat power within the smaller manpower ceiling. This coincidentally would have been what the SthV needed, combat support units.
 
I think people underestimate the degree to which the Tet Offensive actually alienated South Vietnamese opinion against the PRG and the North. The devout Buddhist population, for what it is worth, regarded the actions in Hue to be sacrilegious, and they had previously been vehemently against Diem and his successors. There WAS a shift in public opinion on the ground in the South, and there is a reason why the NVA had to be infiltrated to take up the positions formerly held by the insurgents, who to a large degree had been decimated by Tet. In fact, debates about whether Tet was supposed to reduce the power of the PRG and VietCong in proportion to the leadership in Hanoi, who often saw things differently both tactically and ideologically from the southern insurgents, has gotten a lot more attention after records decommissions and reveals in recent years.

The idea that there was no way that the South could have won is in my view, inaccurate, after Tet. Before Tet, you had a broadly unpopular government fighting a movement that was more popular and better attuned to the regions it operated in. After Tet, those patterns were completely disrupted, a large proportion of the population became internal refugees dependent on the (admittedly extremely corrupt) government in the South, and the power of the Viet Cong over areas in the Mekong Delta and mountainous west central regions of the country diminished. The security status of the South after 1968 (and further, high casualty, low yield on the ground, offensives) was actually not that bad, and it was good enough that the war became a regularized stalemate with the South Vietnamese government broadly more powerful and influential over events in the rural parts of the country, with much of the conflict switched into neighboring countries over the flow of NVA regulars and NVA equipment southwards.

The South Vietnamese were not vulnerable to guerilla action overthrowing the government after Tet. What they were vulnerable to is large scale conventional offensives using massed armored and artillery support. Much of their population were internal refugees who clogged the roads and the ability of ARVN to respond to large scale offensives. Once it became clear that US help was not coming in the form of aerial bombardment with B52s to smash the formations of attack, there was a panic in much of the country and this only exacerabted the problem.

The South Vietnamese could have survived for as long as the USAF was there to smash large scale offensives with intense napalm and carpet bombing efforts. Localized offensives could have worked for the NVA, but they would not have been able to tip off the kinds of panic that they did in January 1975. Keep in mind that Hanoi was surprised by the collapse in Da Nang and the Central Highlands almost as much as anyone else was. The South had numerical superiority for almost the entire time up until the fall of Saigon. But it evaporated pretty quickly once panic set in.

The decision to focus on the "core national areas" by Thieu after the initial border fighting was a disaster, as it created situations akin to the Six Day War pullback to Suez happen where units lost complete cohesion as they streamed to what they were told was safety, but only exposed them to flank attacks already underway.

So really, this should not be too hard. You need American bombers to show up, and it would help if there is better ARVN leadership.
 
Don't coup Diem in 1963.

Move US troops into Cambodia and Laos in 1964 immediately after you land troops in South Vietnam. Keep them below the 17th parallel to avoid antagonizing China. Cut off the Ho Chi Minh trail with ground troops instead of trying to bomb it out of existence. Allow the use of sea mines on Haiphong Harbour as early as politically feasible to cut off Soviet supply shipments.
 

Ian_W

Banned
The key word is OUTSOURCE! Give RVN all the supplies, training, and logistical and air support they need, but let ARVN do the bulk of the fighting. It's not worth it to decisively engage the US military in Vietnam. It was always a proxy war with the deck stacked in the USSR/PRC's favor. The US could aford to spend dollars, but not lives

How are you going to solve the ARVN's corruption problem, to prevent these supplies and logistics ending up on the other side ?
 
Its interesting that it seems that what happened was that South Vietnam lost a conventional campaign in 1975. If it really wound up coming down to that, that is changeable.

Arguably, the USA "lost" by the decision to get involved in the way it did in the first place. Assisting South Vietnam wasn't the problem, using GIs to chase insurgents was the problem.
 

Ian_W

Banned
Its interesting that it seems that what happened was that South Vietnam lost a conventional campaign in 1975. If it really wound up coming down to that, that is changeable.

Arguably, the USA "lost" by the decision to get involved in the way it did in the first place. Assisting South Vietnam wasn't the problem, using GIs to chase insurgents was the problem.

The problem wasn't just the 1975 campaign - it was the one after that, and the one after that. Remember, 1972 was South Vietnam winning a conventional campaign.
 

Ian_W

Banned
Yep, the US strength was in the high intensity stuff with tanks, artillery, attack aircraft; infantry wandering around in the jungle are not special.

Regrettably for the US, the "high intensity" stuff can only be used by risking general war with China via an invasion of the North.
 
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