DBWI: American troops fought in the Vietnam War

CalBear

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It's hard to see the US getting involved in SE Asia seeing as we had our hands full with deciding between 'the lesser of two evils' down in Cuba! Having Che Guevara's revolutionaries duking it out with Raul Castro's govn't after Fidel infamously 'Fell down the stairs' on New Years Day, 1964 really made Vietnam look very, VERY far away.

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Well, that's only if you consider the USSR 'European' ;).

And as both nations have had to adapt to the realities of the wars they have fought and as such have sacrificed in other areas. I mean the old spectre of the Soviets launching a heavy armored invasion into W. Germany through the Fulda Gap is laughable nowadays considering how their armed forces have evolved from massive armies to the types of small unit tactics that deal with the Chicom backed insurgencies happening in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and vice versa while NATO never met a heavy bomber, tank, or other bit of heavy metal they didn't fund immediately... I mean just look at the 55mm 'Archon' railgun SPA they rolled out to replace the Crusader, enough power to punch though 5 meters of steel reinforced concrete and the definition of 'overkill' against the light armor that makes up the bulk of the Soviet or Chinese armies...


You are missing the point with the Archon. If you get five or six T-94 or Type 03 to line up in column or a row, the railgun can zap all six at once.

Huge timesaver!

:p
 
Maybe Vietnam and the US would not be on such good footing?
I know that ho chi minh admired the us, and that there have been long standing contacts between the OSS and its successor intelligence services.

After all the USSR was rather surprised that in a later stage they did a Tito, and moved away from them and more focusing on the west.
 
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sharlin

Banned
And when they did get caught the Soviets and Chinese both accused America of terrorism and it was bad press for the US.
 
LBJ was an idiot and it was his weakness in refusing to send US troops that allowed Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to fall to communism. In 1964 South Vietnam was in a similair position to South Korea in 1951, but on a much smaller scale. They were under attack by a hostile communist foe to the north pretending to justify their aggression in the name of 'reuniting' their people.

Johnson should have taken the lesson from the Korean war and stood up to communist aggression! Given the smaller scale of the fighting a few divisions or real American soldiers backed up by plenty of air support would have been plenty to save democracy in the south. Just like in Korea a few years of fighting would have convinced the commies they had no hope of winning and a truce with a DMZ could have been hammered out.

Not fighting in Vietnam was the worst decision made by the Johnson presidency!

Lolwut? Seriously? North Vietnam turned out better than almost any other southeast Asian country, they're the only one who anyone cares about and they are the only ones that matter for anything more than the prestige of their ally. Also how on earth would Johnson be able to institute the great society reforms while invading someone, it was better for everyone to not get involved there. North Vietnam is prosperous (okay less poor then they would be if disunified) we are in the middle of our biggest economic boom in a while and Chinese actions in SE Asia are contained.
 
You are missing the point with the Archon. If you get five or six T-94 or Type 03 to line up in column or a row, the railgun can zap all six at once.

Huge timesaver!

:p

Yes, and a computerised announcer uses the intercom to say "IMPRESSIVE!" or "DOMINATING!".
 

sharlin

Banned
I have to agree with Elph, the US thanks to Johnson now has a NHS that puts us poor brits in the shade and a military that is first class, going into vietnam would have cost you lots of money and lots of lives and if it went bad, it could have cost Johnson the presidency. Can you imagine someone like Nixon getting in?

Sino-chinese experience from Vietnam shows what happens to western thinking militaries when they try to fight outside of what they are not use to and are forced to react and adapt, they fare poorly. The US for all its military might would have probably done no better.
 
I have to agree with Elph, the US thanks to Johnson now has a NHS that puts us poor brits in the shade and a military that is first class, going into vietnam would have cost you lots of money and lots of lives and if it went bad, it could have cost Johnson the presidency. Can you imagine someone like Nixon getting in?

Sino-chinese experience from Vietnam shows what happens to western thinking militaries when they try to fight outside of what they are not use to and are forced to react and adapt, they fare poorly. The US for all its military might would have probably done no better.


I can't agree with you there. Okay, Communist China got a bloody nose when they went up against Vietnam, but are you seriously suggesting the same thing would have happened to regular U. S. troops? Even if by some miracle the communists could have outfought the US army, the USAF would have bombed Hanoi into the stone age in nothing flat.
 

sharlin

Banned
Thing is this is the modern age its not WW2 and it wasnt a full blown war even for the Soviets and Chinese, more a very costly kerfuffle. I doubt the US would bomb anywhere flat, remember that nowdays wars are also fought in the hearts and minds of your voters. Unless a major threat comes along a-la WW3 or as happened in WW2 it seems to be viewed as the wrong thing to do area bombing on major populace centers. We didn't do it in Korea, the Soviets and Chinese didn't do it that badly, I doubt the USAF would either, nothing hits a president harder than body bags and bad press, and flatening a city with B-52s would do both, probably to international outrage.
 
I can't agree with you there. Okay, Communist China got a bloody nose when they went up against Vietnam, but are you seriously suggesting the same thing would have happened to regular U. S. troops? Even if by some miracle the communists could have outfought the US army, the USAF would have bombed Hanoi into the stone age in nothing flat.

The Chinese did the same thing, all this did was make the Vietnamese government move underground.
 
I can't agree with you there. Okay, Communist China got a bloody nose when they went up against Vietnam, but are you seriously suggesting the same thing would have happened to regular U. S. troops? Even if by some miracle the communists could have outfought the US army, the USAF would have bombed Hanoi into the stone age in nothing flat.

And what does bombing Hanoi do to prop up South Vietnam?
 
I have to agree with Elph, the US thanks to Johnson now has a NHS that puts us poor brits in the shade and a military that is first class, going into vietnam would have cost you lots of money and lots of lives and if it went bad, it could have cost Johnson the presidency. Can you imagine someone like Nixon getting in?

Sino-chinese experience from Vietnam shows what happens to western thinking militaries when they try to fight outside of what they are not use to and are forced to react and adapt, they fare poorly. The US for all its military might would have probably done no better.

Well the big learning experience for that wasn't so much either of the Vietnam conflicts but the 1988-89 Iraq Iran war where Sodumb Insane tried to invade with his Soviet backed army in a set piece large scale engagement vs the Shah's NATO equipped army.

First stage saw 200k Iraqis and their massive swarms of T-74 light tanks, Mig-26's and everything else basically commit suicide against the rolling retreat of the 1st Armored Div and the IRAF equipped with M1A2's and having just unloaded their shiny new Crusader SPA's and backed up by F-12's... Then we saw the 'Road of death,' which saw to the elimination of the rest of the Iraqi Regulars where they basically did what I guess the Archon's designers counted on and crowded all in simple lines of retreat for the ten... TEN B-81's the IRAF had, to bomb them to hell and back over the course of three days...

And then we saw 30k Iranians killed over the rest of the war when they crossed over into Iraq and were infiltrated and cut up by the Iraqi Republican Guard, which actually had a Soviet commander as its head rather than Sodumb's idiot kids Uday and Qusay.

It's amazing though how both sides are so entrenched that, despite the lessons of that war... weapons systems like the Archon still saw the light of day when its patently obvious any competent commander of a Soviet/Chinese style military can easily run rings around it, sure, if the NATO commander is willing to pave everything over regardless of collateral damage he'll 'win', but that's a really, really big if...
 
The crucial element, however, was that the Iraqis under that Soviet leader were able to ultimately destroy the second Iranian attack in the 1990s, and while Iran adopted US doctrine a little *too* much (focusing on gadgets, a bit of weakness in terms of strategy, defective small-unit concepts) Iraq's leaders fixed their defects in using their own technology and won one of history's most lopsided wars to the degree that like with Israel after 1973 nobody's gone to war with it since. Of course it has the atomic bomb now and this has ensured that Iran has the Bomb, too, as well as Turkey but hell, Israel alone having the Bomb was never going to last and when the Soviets put their own advisors into building a nuclear weapons project after their invasion of Afghanistan the Israelis were unable to exploit the general distrust of Iraq again while the Iraqis having the Bomb enabled them to win that 1990s war as much as their own skill did.
 
The crucial element, however, was that the Iraqis under that Soviet leader were able to ultimately destroy the second Iranian attack in the 1990s, and while Iran adopted US doctrine a little *too* much (focusing on gadgets, a bit of weakness in terms of strategy, defective small-unit concepts) Iraq's leaders fixed their defects in using their own technology and won one of history's most lopsided wars to the degree that like with Israel after 1973 nobody's gone to war with it since. Of course it has the atomic bomb now and this has ensured that Iran has the Bomb, too, as well as Turkey but hell, Israel alone having the Bomb was never going to last and when the Soviets put their own advisors into building a nuclear weapons project after their invasion of Afghanistan the Israelis were unable to exploit the general distrust of Iraq again while the Iraqis having the Bomb enabled them to win that 1990s war as much as their own skill did.

Well, noone... including the Soviets... believed the Iraqis would actually use a nuke as they did against the Iranian 2nd Armored Division. Honestly though, that war was just scary for the whole world, thankfully it woke the big three up to the fact that, despite the profit and industry, selling first line military equipment to nations that aren't necessarily ideologically or diplomatically aligned on major issues isn't the greatest idea in the world.

Although we also learned just how far NATO has taken their tech considering the nasty surprise the Iraqis got when they saw that their ultimate weapon hadn't knocked out a single one of the 24 M2A1's and only 53 out of 315 other vehicles (all of which were jeeps or other lightly / unarmored vehicles) despite the near perfect targeting of the 10kt air burst over the heart of that formation.

It's certainly arguable that the Iraqis would have won considering the asskicking they gave to the Iranians on the ground around Basra and Amarah before Iran could bring the full weight of its heavy gear into play, but after 2nd armored got nuked the Iranians just turned around and went home, more out of enormous outside diplomatic pressure than because they were 'beaten'.

That's the big problem, imo, with NATO's 'weapons plan', if the M2A1 could survive a nuke the newest "Main Battle Tanks", the M2A3, the Challenger III and Leopard III can surely survive as well, which means the Soviets or Chinese couldn't hope to kill one aside from using BIGGER nukes, something that has prompted the military industrial complex to dig in even further for even better protection...

The brinksmanship is truly frightening at times ever since the Chinese jumped into the game and forced the Soviets to do a 180 degree spin in their ground combat doctrines and focuses while at the same time the technocrats in Washington, Bonn, Tokyo, London and Paris seem to think Keith Laumer's 'Bolo'* series is more a good mission statement than good fiction.

OOC: If you don't know what they are, the gist of a Bolo is this... if Teddy Roosevelt was a tank... he'd be a Bolo... ;)
 
Well, to be fair the Iraqis kind of did break a major taboo when they did that airburst. It's worth noting that since then Iraq and North Korea have been allies because neither has been liked by anyone else. The whole "Axis of Evil" thing was self-inflicted there as the USSR found a nuclear-armed and ready to use them power on its borders to be just as scary as we found it.

Ironically Saddam Hussein may have really been the man to end the Cold War by uniting everyone else against him. I mean Yasser goddamn Arafat, that hostage-using bloodstained murderer dropped any pretense of favoring Iraq and other Arab nationalist states like a hot potato after that and it even did much to smooth Arafat into having the Palestinian Authority. Albeit that had more to do with Syria, the Soviets, and Jordan and Lebanon and Egypt wanting to make him Israel's problem as opposed to their own.
 
I wouldn't say the Cold War is decisively done, but there has been a noticeable thaw in relations between all three power blocs after the second Iran Iraq conflict.

I mean for both the US and Soviets it was quite the rude awakening since Soviet knowhow and material is what gave Saddam the bomb in the first place just as the Iranians were able to quickly turn their civilian nuclear industry... bought, built and paid for by the US... into weapons of their own, with N. Korea being China's big mistake in trying to keep Kim happy and on their side against the Soviets.

It's indicitive of how epically all of the big three failed when the best thing one can say about any of their three 'nuclear spawn' is that at least Iran hasn't acted with aggression and brinksmanship towards any of its neighbors since their last war and isn't a pariah state... :rolleyes:
 
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