UK in 'Nam

That seems to be the cure, but would Home commit as many troops, would a large British antiwar movement develop, effects on UK politics?
 
There would certainly have been a large and vocal British antiwar movement, had London sent a force to Vietnam. We did request that the British government send some troops to help us out, but they declined to participate.
 
There were a few reasons: Wilson was worried that like Johnson, he would have to override his party's left wing and deal with the anti-Americanism rife within the Lab Left at the time. Not to mention his rather strange relationship with LBJ. Wilson wrote anti-American pamphlets in his political salad days and then acted friendlier with LBJ than Blair and Dubya. No wonder Johnson called him "that little creep."
 
That seems to be the cure, but would Home commit as many troops, would a large British antiwar movement develop, effects on UK politics?
For there to be a cure, you would require a problem. The UK staying out of Vietnam was a good thing. That being said, a Tory win would likely make it happen.
RogueBeaver said:
There were a few reasons: Wilson was worried that like Johnson, he would have to override his party's left wing and deal with the anti-Americanism rife within the Lab Left at the time.
Whilst that is partially true, Harold Wilson had a dangerous tightrope to walk. He had to keep the Americans onside. If he pissed them off, it might have damaged the UK economy which was still not very strong.
RogueBeaver said:
Wilson wrote anti-American pamphlets in his political salad days and then acted friendlier with LBJ than Blair and Dubya. No wonder Johnson called him "that little creep."
Tony Blair stood on the Labour manifesto of 1983 and was a member of CND. Winston Churchill switched parties more than Paris Hilton. Ronald Reagan opposed Civil Rights at one point. You can change your views during the course of your life you know....
 
With a POD of 1962, make it happen.

One has to remember all the other commitment that the UK had in the '60s - the end of the Malayan Emergency, the Confrontation with Indonesia (a conflict almost on the same scale as Vietnam), Kenya and Aden to name a few. The question is does the UK have troops to spare from these commitments as well as things like BAOR?

One reason we didn't get involved in 'Nam is possibly because we were already fighting several wars already.
 
One has to remember all the other commitment that the UK had in the '60s - the end of the Malayan Emergency, the Confrontation with Indonesia (a conflict almost on the same scale as Vietnam), Kenya and Aden to name a few. The question is does the UK have troops to spare from these commitments as well as things like BAOR?

One reason we didn't get involved in 'Nam is possibly because we were already fighting several wars already.

That is certainly true, Wilson is going to find it tough to get any members of the Labour left to agree to yet another war, especially with such an anti-American feeling on that wing of the Party.

We could get the Tories to win in 1964 if Butler became leader as opposed to Home, the election was close enough that a more competent Conservative leader could well swing it. However, Rab is going to have a small majority regardless so it may also be tricky to get involved in Vietnam, the most we would see would be the Royal Navy assisting the Americans and at most some troops stationed in the south helping out with training the other armies (the British troops in Malaya were perhaps the most experienced NATO army in the world with regards to jungle fighting).
 
The Indonesia Confrontation only resulted in several hundred killed, on both sides over several years. Hardly comparable to Vietnam.
 
The only way America could have possibly have gained the UK as an ally in Indo-China would have been not to have dumped on us at Suez.
 
The British had their own post-colonial problems during the 60s, so why would they embroil themselves in a former French posession?
 
Saying that 'Tories win, we get Australian-style involvement' is very silly, because whoever won in '64 would have been walking on a political tightrope. The Tories hadn't committed militarily up to that point, so why would they go out of their way to commit with little or no majority? Australian involvement started in '62.

You couldn't get it with a POD of '62. That's too late. I suspect you need a variety of things to be in place, which would all neccessitate a much earlier POD - likely less of a Communist prescence in East Asia than OTL (Britain was afraid of the situation escalating with Chinese involvement, a la Korea) a much more economically robust Britain, and the 'East of Suez' men firmly in charge in the run-up to the conflict - I think Home, who was extremely traditional on foreign policy, could very concievably fulfill a British Robert Menzies role.
 
The Indonesia Confrontation only resulted in several hundred killed, on both sides over several years. Hardly comparable to Vietnam.

The overall point is entirely sound though. Britain was already involved in Malaysia, and that included, in the wider sense, the defence of Singapore. That involvement allowed Britain to stress that it was sharing it's own burden in the defence of East Asia within it's own sphere of influence. Britain had the largest number of troops in any post-war deployment in Malaya at the height of the trouble, and that was already a very signifigant commitment.
 
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