The Invasion of North Vietnam, 1970

MacCaulay

Banned
Okay, I think that this is sussed out.

Conclusion: It was possible to win the Vietnam War by a direct land invasion of North Vietnam in 1970, rather than piddling around with Laos and Cambodia.

Okay...perhaps I need to explain exactly what this whole premise has turned into.

We need to define what "win" means. I'm not talking about the 1st Armoured Division rolling into Hanoi while playing the theme from Team America.

I am talking about a calculated effort by the Nixon Administration in 1970 to force the North Vietnamese into a standup fight (probably just north of the DMZ) on it's own soil, where they could engage and destroy the very units that would be used in any future invasion of the South after a peace treaty was signed.
This is not an ending with a united Vietnam. This is ending (the Nixon Administration hopes) with two Vietnams, one allied to the West and one in the Soviet camp, and with no Americans in the country, preferably in time for the next presidential election.

This conclusion is based on the following premises:

1) The same bunch of soldiers that got themselves beaten like rented mules by crazy incompetent lunatis in the Khmer Rouge would have manned up righteously and sorted out the NVA on their home ground. Gotcha.
Well...we probably have some differences as to the combat performance of the US Army on the ground in Cambodia and Laos, but Linebacker I and Linebacker II were both used to destroy strategic targets in North Vietnam two years later. These were all using assets (B-52s from Guam, fighter-bombers in the South and in Thailand) that were in the South for years before that.
And no matter what the combat effectiveness of the US troops was, Nixon still ordered them to go over the Laotian/Cambodian border at the behest of Creighton Abrams.
You were asking if there were resources available. I pointed out that there were, not only in Vietnam, but also untapped in EUCOM.

Also, in his book Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, William Shawcross makes a credible argument that the Arclight B-52 raids across the border into Cambodia were in fact destroying what passed for "moderates" in the Khmer Rouge regime by taking away any reason not to fight every bit of law and order in the country, both government and US military invading from the east.

2) The Soviet Union would not have escalated or provided any sort of coherent or significant response.


3) The Chinese under Mao hated the Soviet Union and Vietnam so much that they would make no opposition, and that they would have practically held our coats for us.
You're preaching to the choir.

4) The North Vietnamese, faced with being confronted mano el mano, would not have had a response, counter or any way to deal with this and would have folded under our steely American glare.
I think...you're misconstruing what I'm pitching here. Like it's some sort of Toby Keith wetdream.
They would've had a response, and that would be to throw everything they had at us on the the other side of the DMZ. The North Vietnamese Army never really faced us in conventional combat. They saved that until we left.

5) We'll just ignore that 75% of South Vietnam that was under communist control in 1970, and we'll assume that the South Vietnamese forces could actually stand up on its own hind legs. We'll also assume a relatively functional government in South Vietnam.
The ARVN had reliable forces, among them the South Vietnamese Marines. The South Vietnamese government...that was always a problem. There was a series of coups during the American involvement. You are correct in pointing that out. The majority of the time, the South Vietnamese government wasn't much better than any of the other governments in the area, they just happened to be "our bastards."

6) We actually won Vietnam anyway, doncha' know. Or we won it on points at least. And its all the fault of those dirty stinking hippies.
Again, that's not what I'm saying. I don't have a political ax to grind. We shouldn't have been there anyway, just like we shouldn't be there now. But that war made Americans look at something we haven't had to look at before: just what we're willing to walk away with and call a victory. Are we willing to pat our troops on the back and say "Good job," then call that a victory?
Myself, I'd like to be able to say we could. But Nixon seemed to have a hard time walking away. Even when he said he was, he wasn't. America has had a very bipolar relationship with foreign policy and especially with it's dealings during the eventual pullout from Vietnam. And this is one way to look at it.
This is not a "better" way to end it. People are still dying. They're dying no matter what.

Now, I suppose that if we go with all these assumptions, the scenario will work out quite nicely. I can't argue with that.

I dunno, I'm thinking this is alien space bats country.[/quote]
 

King Thomas

Banned
I think it would fail, but not because of nuclear war/ WW3 but because North Vietnam becomes a super-Iraq, ungovernable by the US.
 

Typo

Banned
I think it would fail, but not because of nuclear war/ WW3 but because North Vietnam becomes a super-Iraq, ungovernable by the US.
I think this is the first time I've seen someone comparing Vietnam to Iraq and not the other way around.
 
I have a hard time imagining that the USSR and PRC wouldn't be extremely pissed off at a US invasion of NV; they'd scream bloody murder in the UN and every media outlet they could find. However, I also have a hard time imagining that either the USSR or PRC would throw their own country on the fire over NV's fate. I think both would spend their time and money smuggling weapons over the border to the bound-to-form resistance groups, and China would likely allow NV units to form up on Chinese soil and carry out cross-border ops against the occupiers. And that would be it... no nukes.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
I think this is the first time I've seen someone comparing Vietnam to Iraq and not the other way around.

Especially since the whole point of what the PoD turned into was a Nixon Administration-ordered incursion across the demilitarized zone to draw out the conventional North Vietnamese Army and wind up with two seperate states so the US Army could leave with what they at least felt at the time was some semblance of dignity.
The final result, or so the Nixon Administration would be hoping for in this scenario, would be for a divided Vietnam with a North Vietnamese Army weakened for a sufficient amount of time that the ARVN could build up strength to possibly defend itself.

Basically, there's no hope of unifying the country. It had gone out the window a long time before.
 
Are there any targets near the border that the North would feel compelled to protect?

THat if left undefended would be a clear victory for the South?
 
Now we are getting some where

Mcauley, as a Phd historian of the Vietnam conflict, I buy your basic premise. Chieu Hoi had converted the best of the VC.
The south vietnamese at the top made have been crooked, but there soliders knew how to fight. Anyone who doubts it, read tony joes, Resisting rebellion. Sir Robert thompson, the King of Counterinsurgency said the inner core of arvn was at Isreali levels of affectiveness.
What i'd like to know, is why no one has mentioned the Hmaog and there help to us. Vang pao is 78 and he was thrown in jail for trying to get out the Communists now. This man saved our butt
 

MacCaulay

Banned
Are there any targets near the border that the North would feel compelled to protect?

THat if left undefended would be a clear victory for the South?

Well, that's part of this: the North would feel compelled to protect it's homeland, or so Nixon would hope. There's no precedent for an outright US landing on North Vietnamese soil in large numbers. So when, say, a brigade group crosses the DMZ, the North Vietnamese Army must be mobilized to stop it.
The logic says that this will bring out the conventional forces that the North has in large numbers (they were operating T-34s, T-55s, and other vehicles that were fairly advanced) that would be needed later for any future invasion of South Vietnam.
The NVA would essentially take everything it was hoping to use for the invasion of the South and use it defending the North from this invasion.

Now this is a calculated risk. The US is going into this knowing full well that they are engaging in a war of attrition, where the sole point is to draw out the enemy and kill him. And many US troops will not come back from North Vietnam. But it may be a way for the ARVN to get enough time to steel itself for when the North does come across the border, or in the best case scenario: the North doesn't come across and the there are two Vietnams.

Sean: Thank you. I'm glad to get some small bit of support. Any help is appreciated.

I'm currently reading Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia by William Shawcross to get a better handle on the situation, and hopefully after that I'll be able to find another book that will be useful as a go-to text for the US forces in Vietnam. I've found one for the USMC.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
hmmm, aWI this land invssion of PRVN was preceded by an earlier LINEBACKER-style strategic bombing campaign too ?

Well, originally I was thinking of something along the lines of basically "Nixon takes the troops slated for the Cambodian/Laotian invasion and moves them over the DMZ to force a standup fight out of the North Vietnamese Army while the USAF launches Operation Linebacker I two years earlier."

It's still...I don't know. I've got reservations about that.

What's scary about this is that this is very "Vietnam"-esque to me. It's a battle of attrition, purely to produce killcounts; but it's done with a very calculated political position behind it from the Nixon Administration.
 
Help from one historian to another

The two best stragteic books on possible Northern Invasion are, one novel, Cold war Hot, and Anthony Joes resisiting rebellion, a detailed discription of hearts and minds style counterinsurgency including vietnam
 
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