Can the US win the Vietnam War

This would require build up for a year and about 1.5 million troops at the border…

But they could have won then.

Mobilisation and draw down in NATO were politically unacceptable. The changes required to make them acceptable would probably mean the United States choosing a different war instead.

yours,
Sam R.
 
1. Coordinate with the press more from the start and make it known some things don't get reported.

2. Provide context for photographs - if a SV cop has a gun pointed at someone's head in a random street, make sure you tell them *why*.

3. Let South Vietnam elect its own government but bar Communist candidates. Make it clear we are there to help them, not rule them (the truth, however, may lay somewhere in between).

4. Hit the dams in North Vietnam early, hit the dams hard, and then hit 'em again.

5. Find a way to neutralize McNamera politicially, chemically, profitably, whatever so long as it works.

6. Talk to Ho Chi Minh earlier. It doesn't mean we have to make him into a flag-waving American puppet, just see if he could be nudged into the Yugoslav camp of non-Soviet Communism.

7. No Operation Ranch Hand! Agent Orange and Super Orange stay home as do Green, Pink, and Blue. No, that is not a joke, they were actually called the Rainbow Herbicides...

8. If the South is to survive we expect to be there indefinitely, so plant a few bases and prop up the economy with industry and infrastructure.

9. As already said, no Hamlet or other similar programs please.

10. Stop the political interference and let the military loose to do its job. War is hell, it always will be, and while our tolerance of casualties is far less either accept that they happen or GTFO. You don't get the best of both in the 1960s/1970s.
 
7. No Operation Ranch Hand! Agent Orange and Super Orange stay home as do Green, Pink, and Blue. No, that is not a joke, they were actually called the Rainbow Herbicides...
I'd disagree.
Now getting Monsanto to watch their Q/C is another matter.

All those 'Agents' were off the shelf commercial mixes of US Defoliants&Herbicides, like Dow Chemicals Tordon (Picoiram), American Chemical Paint WeedOne(2,4-D) and Monsanto 2,4,5-T with the latter with the dioxin contaminate
 
The answer is a US government that was pro Viet Minh and anti French colonialism in 1945.

If we'd said, "Fuck you France, the Viet Minh helped us fight Japan, so we're gonna uphold the Atlantic Charter", what effect would that have on postwar France? Communist insurrection? Civil war ala "For All Time" ?
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
Personally, I think the best strategy would be to abandon former French Indochina, build up Thailand and Malaysia as bulwarks against communist expansion, try to get whatever regimes emerge in Vietnam and Cambodia to agree not to allow Soviet military bases, then continue driving a wedge between the Soviets and Chinese. Without their mutual opposition to American presence in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia the Soviet-Chinese relationship could have broken down even faster and harder.
 
The War lacked clear aims, and when it looked under control, it immediately evolved into something else, and then something else thereafter. It was an enigma wrapped in a mystery, and a dozen different wars at once. Being overseen badly by Westmoreland did not help. Ignorances and a lack of interest in properly understanding the enemy did not help. But it was so far beyond anything conceivable, understandable, manageable in a military effort that it was just a disaster no matter if you had it fought perfectly. Point of fact being you did not address the Vietnam issue and the overall Indochinese Cold War issue with a direct Americanized conflict. To win the war, you avoid fighting it at all.
 
I don't know if "operational" covers the conceits of US independent behaviour in RVN and surrounding states, but we can appraise that they were not sufficient historically and were initiative.

No it doesn't.

'Claret' operations were sanctioned at the highest levels of the British and Australian government as the way to take the war to the enemy in his own base areas in a sustained fashion. This would in effect turn the tables on the NVA, who would go from sneaking around the SthV jungles conducting ambushes to having it done to them. In order to continue their infiltration of the South they'd have to invest in security forces and defend their supply lines and dumps along the entire trail, which would take resources away from their front line effort keeping in mind that NthV is a poor country when its all said and one.
 

longsword14

Banned
"Fuck you France, the Viet Minh helped us fight Japan, so we're gonna uphold the Atlantic Charter"
But the Viet Minh did not help the US.
You do realize that Ho was part of a Vietnamese delegation who tried to get Wilson to respect their national sovereignty as well as whitey's but weren't even allowed in the door, right?
Had he been white then the result would have been the same. Which mandate did he even have ? Plus, he came from a communist background.
Who cares about opposing communism? Let's get real, the Cold War was first and foremost about American vs. Russian political interests, and as time went on that became considerably more apparent. It doesn't matter what ideology the Soviets held and encouraged, but that they were snapping up the planet into an alliance network. We got into Vietnam because Ho was chummy with the Soviets and we didn't want another Korea disaster, so we supported a dictatorship run by thieves instead.
This is the point. The US would probably have bolstered whichever power put its feet firmly in Vietnam against the Chinese, but considering the past why would communists be supported ?
Communists who had in fact support from the Chinese.
Ho wasn't a wholly owned subsidiary of a gang of thieves. He and North Vietnam also had considerable support from the Vietnamese people. Boom, better than Diem right there, and a better pal for the US if we had tried subversion rather than supporting a rival state.
A dyed in the wool communist, who never held an election, forcibly collectivised land and had a hand in every act of the party. What little is commonly known about the man called Uncle Ho is propaganda.
He was the human face of the communist movement. Be assured that you hardly know anything about him, there are no detailed sources on him either.
We do know he was a communist, with all the baggage.
Chile democratically elected a socialist leader, he refused to fuck with the democratic process, and that fuckhead Nixon decided that replacing him with a thieving thuggish dictator was a good idea.
Chile had a president who was enacted disastrous policies, a president who was removed by an elected body through the military. That the military did not leave hardly changes that Allende was going to get the boot.
 
Last edited:
The argument that the Viet Cong were no longer a serious threat ignores the likelihood of the Viet Cong regenerating.

I haven't seen any evidence to suggest this was happening, and this ignores the fact that the ARVN was by that point a capable force.

There was simply no meaningful way to interdict the Ho Chi Minh trail. At least, not by South Vietnam. Even the United States using massive air power for bombing and chemical defoliants found itself hard pressed, and the effort destabilized and destroyed two neighboring countries. I don't think that the Trail was ever cut completely by the United States. Certainly interdicting it was out of the question for South Vietnam.

Cambodia operations disrupted it very well and Creighton Abrams had adopted very effective tactics to suppress the VC by the time of the pullout.

So, with literally an open highway, the Viet Cong could simply continue to access money, supplies, weapons and ammunition indefinitely in open ended quantities, so long as the Soviet Union, China, North Vietnam and other states chose to do so. There's no reason that any of them would just walk away.

Which ignores that China won't be very soon and ignores the fact that the VC largely did walk away after 1968; there's a reason Saigon fell to tanks afterall.

The likelihood is that even if you butterfly the fall, the odds are that within a few more years, you'd be back to the pre-Tet offensive situation of the South Vietnamese government steadily losing control of the countryside.

There was no sign of this occurring during the 1970s, and ignores the fact that another couple of years would've meant the PRC becomes a threat to North Vietnam.

By the way, I like the quote - the ARVN "with continued American support" was capable of standing up to and defeating the NVA. Certainly, after a decade of massive support and investment and the expenditure of vast wealth and resources in trying to prop it up and train it, the ARVN was capable of fighting "with continued American support." That's pretty much a blanket admission that after a decade of investment and support, it still couldn't handle the job on its own.

So we're seem to stuck with permanent or at least indefinite American support. We're not talking tripwire forces as in South Korea. No, we're talking continuing American support... basically fighting, or bombing indefinitely. Continuing American support until such time as....

And by the way, we're still back at the snapshot vs the movie. In 1972 the ARVN after a decade of hard work could almost stand up all by itself. Could they sustain that high water mark without ongoing, continuous, massive infusions of American money or help? Or were they going to slowly or rapidly degrade? The real question is just how stable was the ARVN and how effective was it at sustaining its level of competence?

Cognitive dissonance; you've spent a lot of this posting talking about the Ho Chi Minh trail and how North Vietnam is getting supplied by the Communist Bloc, but then disparage South Vietnam for getting the same from their own patron.
 
Last edited:
A dyed in the wool communist, who never held an election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Vietnamese_legislative_election,_1946

Pre-distributed list type election. 82-89% turnout, 25% turn out required. That's a margin of at least 57% of the potential electorate favouring the election. Wiki's source is Dieter Nohlen, Florian Grotz & Christof Hartmann (2001) Elections in Asia: A data handbook, Volume II, p331 ISBN 0-19-924959-8

Compare to the 1960 election (99.9% turnout) and 1964 election (97.8% turnout). Source op.cit.

Given the lower than "normal" turnout for a pre-distributed list election, the presence of the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang (KMT aligned), and the presence of a formally named "Socialist Party" (very unusual for the progressive intellectual's party in a soviet-style state), there's good reason to believe the 1946 election was a moderate gauge of popular opinion in favour of independence generally, if not for particulars of party support.

Hyperbole tends to hurt argument. Try, "who never held a competitive election," next time.

yours,
Sam R.
 

longsword14

Banned
I know. A token election that did not take place in SV does not strengthen the argument.
In 1946 , after that how many elections were actually held after the Indochinese War ? Once VM had consolidated its position ?
My response was to the usual reply of American puppets are : 'brutal, undemocratic' so we should simply flip the the choices, as if doing that would make it more 'fair, democratic'.
As for differing vies and parties, they got their usual due later on, so 1946 does not prove anything at all. VM had hardly started showing its true colours.
Not that many palatable options left, are there ? If Diem is to be not supported for forced population exchanges, brutality against perceived enemies etc. then you do not have a better option in the North with its whole history of collectivisation.

My reply was to a poster who uses some truly awful line of reasoning to get where he did.
 
Last edited:
after that how many elections were actually held after the Indochinese War ? Once VM had consolidated its position ?

Legislative elections? 1960, 1964, 1971, 1975, unification, 1976, 1981. Given these were single list elections, we can only go by voter turnouts, indicated above for early elections; or by front participating party list-composition, which I can't get at readily (Vietnamese Fatherland Front of North Vietnam / Vietnamese Fatherland Front). Given the nature of soviet-style list elections we could use party list-composition to determine the extent to which the VWP modified its behaviour to suit the perceived balance of power.

Significant actual decision making occurred in committee, but there were at least three ambushes in the period. The NFL "we're getting killed here guys" ambush which forced the northern VWP into authorising the 1959-61 type NFL actions. The Duan "southern war" ambush against the "northern development" line. And the "return of Giap," too late to prevent Tet going ahead.

forcibly collectivised land

I just had a bit of a brain fart on this reading up on the Red River collectivisation on wiki. The death tolls are low for a soviet-style collectivisation. The rent reduction and land redistribution pleased way more people than it pissed off. This, and the million refugees strengthened the DRVN politically. Party cadre were a primary purge target, which "cleaned house" after 1956. And the apology process certainly helped legitimise the party. It provided an economic basis for the DRVN's capacity to support the NFL without requiring the volumes of fraternal aid that the RVN required from the free world. A Northern Development line would probably not result in a similar collectivisation process. Correspondingly a kholkoz-type collectivisation would gut the economy. Either of these could leave an incompetent basket case with a pissed off agricultural populace, relying on foreign military aid to control a dissident peasant population. Which, of course, would be useless to help the NFL/PLAF. Which leaves the PLAF fucked by 1967 if the US intervenes in the RVN.

Maybe we should consider, "What if the VWP / DRVN leadership were as grossly incompetent as the RVN leadership?," as a way to resolve this. Only problem is you need a POD after 1956 to ensure that the DRVN/RVN form at all.

yours,
Sam R.
 
We should have understood that Ho Chi Minh would become a South East Asia version of Marshall Tito. The Vietnamese feared and hated the Chinese more than they feared and hated us and if we had worked with HCM from the end of WW2, he would have become a neutral nationalist leaning our way because of Vietnamese antipathy to the Chinese.
 
That's very poetic. But a quick search doesn't turn up any clear evidence that the South Vietnamese population was so thoroughly depopulated of combat age males that the Viet Cong would have found it difficult or impossible to regenerate. There were certainly massive numbers of casualties, but no sign of the social collapse that this level of depopulation would have required. Can you back up your argument? It's an interesting one.

According to Unheralded Victory, by (I think) 1969 or 1970, 80% of the VC were actually North Vietnamese that had been sent down the trail.
 
Top