WI: Earlier Coup against Ngo Diem

I recently brought this up in another thread. I know of three attempts or plots against Diem before the November 1963 coup. One took place on November 11th, 1960 and was very similar in tone to the eventual 1963 coup, but fell apart because the rebels hesitated and negotiated with Diem, which gave him enough time to have friendly soldiers come to Saigon and put down the coup (the rebels didn't cut the phones). Another took place in 1962 when two pilots of the airforce planned to kill Diem and his brother by strafing and bombing the presidential palace. That also failed. And there was supposedly a plot to commit a coup in August of 1963 which felll apart due to mistrust and suspicion amongst the conspirators.

Three attempts that I know of (1960, 1962, earlier 1963), each of which failed. But what if those earlier attempts had proved successful; what if the 1960 coup succeeded, or Diem and Nhu were killed in 1962 by those two pilots, or a coup had proceeded earlier in 1963?
 
The major problem was, killing Diem was just Step One. Nobody had any $%^&&* clue who would be in charge afterwards or had any grand plans
beyond being first hog at the trough.
Whether Diem died in Coup One or the airstrike doesn't change the political vacuum left by Diem's demise or the lack of leadership and vision in the plotters.

Until Thieu rose to power, you had the revolving door of strongmen- Minh, Air Marshal Ky, and so forth whose assclownery made any attempts at US support look like giving plasma to a corpse for several years before Tet. IMO Thieu was no great statesman, but he had a better handle on things than the folks mentioned before.

LBJ's decision after Gulf of Tonkin to double down and put enough US troops on the ground to secure RVN no matter how fubar the political situation was in Saigon was IMO the biggest strategic blunder of the war.

US losses were small potatoes from 1956-1964 so IMO cutting bait in 1964 made the most sense outside of recognizing HCM and the Viet Minh in 1948 or 1954 after the French surrendered.

Hindsight from 2013 makes it easy to make those calls.

I highly recommend Stanley Karnow's summary of the Vietnam War and the personalities involved. America's major blunder is that they didn't know or care what Vietnam wanted or needed- everything done was about making things in Vietnam suit the narrative in Washington regardless of the facts on the ground.

The United States military at MACV demonstrated a fecklessness and inability to listen to anyone else or profit by their input under Westy that truly embarrasses me as an American.
Abrams was a significant improvement, but was politically behind the eight ball after Tet.
I feel that if Abrams had a quarter of the carte blanche given Westy, the US and ARVN would've been able to get a Korea-style partition that stuck.

LSS, butterflying the whole escalation and Americanization of the Vietnam War requires a kind of leadership and statesmanship lacking in the RVN upper echelons in 1963. Killing Diem didn't fix the problem.
 
The major problem was, killing Diem was just Step One. Nobody had any $%^&&* clue who would be in charge afterwards or had any grand plans
beyond being first hog at the trough.
Whether Diem died in Coup One or the airstrike doesn't change the political vacuum left by Diem's demise or the lack of leadership and vision in the plotters.

Until Thieu rose to power, you had the revolving door of strongmen- Minh, Air Marshal Ky, and so forth whose assclownery made any attempts at US support look like giving plasma to a corpse for several years before Tet. IMO Thieu was no great statesman, but he had a better handle on things than the folks mentioned before.

LBJ's decision after Gulf of Tonkin to double down and put enough US troops on the ground to secure RVN no matter how fubar the political situation was in Saigon was IMO the biggest strategic blunder of the war.

US losses were small potatoes from 1956-1964 so IMO cutting bait in 1964 made the most sense outside of recognizing HCM and the Viet Minh in 1948 or 1954 after the French surrendered.

Hindsight from 2013 makes it easy to make those calls.

I highly recommend Stanley Karnow's summary of the Vietnam War and the personalities involved. America's major blunder is that they didn't know or care what Vietnam wanted or needed- everything done was about making things in Vietnam suit the narrative in Washington regardless of the facts on the ground.

The United States military at MACV demonstrated a fecklessness and inability to listen to anyone else or profit by their input under Westy that truly embarrasses me as an American.
Abrams was a significant improvement, but was politically behind the eight ball after Tet.
I feel that if Abrams had a quarter of the carte blanche given Westy, the US and ARVN would've been able to get a Korea-style partition that stuck.

LSS, butterflying the whole escalation and Americanization of the Vietnam War requires a kind of leadership and statesmanship lacking in the RVN upper echelons in 1963. Killing Diem didn't fix the problem.

This.

Filler.
 
I would like to bump to get this topic going, since I do believe it's a very interesting and worthy topic and one very important to the topic of Vietnam in alternate history.
 
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