WI no Tet offensive

longsword14

Banned
Syngman Rhee kinda sucked. Politically he was ousted in 1960, and he was not that impressive economically
Missed the point entirely.
All the incompetence and corruptions did not stop SK from existing. Ensuring SV's existence was the US goal, never taking over the North, just like in Korea.
In OTL the North won mainly with a conventional invasion.
US conventional forces stay put, NV is incapable against them. Given enough time SV may or may not get a much more capable army.
 
What was going to collapse North Vietnam? They had total internal control of the country.

Within the vicinity of this thread, the most likely cause for the collapse is one of the following (or a combination)
  • A full frontal attack, no-hold-barrel, of the USA on North Vietnam - with the assurance of both China and Soviet is that they would not intervene
  • A prolong siege (up to modern day) - think North Korea but with US forces stay just outside the 12 nautical miles
  • A lot more successful propaganda work
  • A much more competent South Vietnamese government
  • A better-manner US armed force on the ground and destroy all military targets - but military targets only
  • Death of all unification-desire leaders of North Vietnam - preferable in a violent and sudden manner under US hand

None of them happen in OTL, leading to North Vietnam standing strong enough to unite the country
 

raharris1973

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Within the vicinity of this thread, the most likely cause for the collapse is one of the following (or a combination)
  • A full frontal attack, no-hold-barrel, of the USA on North Vietnam - with the assurance of both China and Soviet is that they would not intervene
  • A prolong siege (up to modern day) - think North Korea but with US forces stay just outside the 12 nautical miles
  • A lot more successful propaganda work
  • A much more competent South Vietnamese government
  • A better-manner US armed force on the ground and destroy all military targets - but military targets only
  • Death of all unification-desire leaders of North Vietnam - preferable in a violent and sudden manner under US hand

None of them happen in OTL, leading to North Vietnam standing strong enough to unite the country

Exactly -

And I think that all these comparisons of North Vietnam with the 1990 Soviet Union and 1989 Romania are completely irrelevant. The public morale situations in each case are completely different.

It is hard to think of a more awful analogy to use out of context than the events 1989 to 1991 in the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union.

Those were miraculous events of bad luck for the regimes in question and good luck for the regime's opponents. Expecting something similar to happen in North Vietnam, just because the U.S. is theoretically willing to keep up a military effort at a higher level for a bit longer is quite absurd. The west did not believe its own luck in 1989-1991 until the very moment it happened. And some here are talking as if its the fate of all communist regimes. Well, no. People usually are more obedient to their leaders, and more resentful of whoever they are at war against.
 
The Khe Sanh/Dien Bien Phu 2.0 option
The North Vietnamese could launch a serious attempt to take Khe Sanh and repeat the 1954 victory at Dien Bien Phu instead of launching a Tet Offensive uprising.
OTL the North claimed Khe Sanh was a diversion to draw American attention away from the cities. They could instead decide to go all out and attempt to defeat the Americans in a conventional battle. President Johnson did not want another “DinBinfu” so this would be his greatest fear come to life.
I don’t think the NVA would take Khe Sanh. Lang Vei would fall as OTL and maybe the NVA might get lucky and take the Hill outposts from the Marines but in the end American Air power would wipe them out.
The point I am trying to make is that if Khe Sanh holds or falls the North Vietnamese could still turn American public opinion against the war and cost Johnson the election. People will fear that the war is going to escalate out of control or that we can’t defeat Uncle Ho and company.
On the communist side China and Russia might recommend to the North Vietnamese that they make a settlement and lick their wounds. Johnson or Nixon declares victory and the Americans go home. The Viet Cong reappear in a few years and the cycle starts all over.
 
The Khe Sanh/Dien Bien Phu 2.0 option
The North Vietnamese could launch a serious attempt to take Khe Sanh and repeat the 1954 victory at Dien Bien Phu instead of launching a Tet Offensive uprising.
OTL the North claimed Khe Sanh was a diversion to draw American attention away from the cities. They could instead decide to go all out and attempt to defeat the Americans in a conventional battle. President Johnson did not want another “DinBinfu” so this would be his greatest fear come to life.
I don’t think the NVA would take Khe Sanh. Lang Vei would fall as OTL and maybe the NVA might get lucky and take the Hill outposts from the Marines but in the end American Air power would wipe them out.

It was a very real option or scenario in OTL. But personally, despite all the trash talk on the US, they knew how to fight.

In Dien Bien Phu, the France lost because they lost air supremacy and their logistic was fucked. However, in Khe Sanh, the US had enough high-level air superiority. Sure, low-level tactical strikes of F-4s and/or F-105s would have to brave the AA guns, but B-52s were un-opposed. In addition, all attempts of digging trenches to "choke" Khe Sanh fails - no trench was able to cut into the complex.

Taking Khe Sanh with resources available to Vietnam in 1968 was hard, if not impossible. Sure, an option would be loading their own men into captured/hijacked C-130s and mask them off as reinforcement, but despite the infiltration of spies into the ranks of SG regime, it was an impossible task.
 
What would have happened if the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong decided not to try something like the OTL Tet Offensive, but to just keep plugging along doing what they had been doing until the Americans got tired of propping up South Vietnam?
Without Tet, there is no way LBJ quietly walks away from the White House. Tet broke him. Specifically Eugene McCarthy going from 7% in the polls to 40+ in New Hampshire and showing how far a peace candidate can go and that shifted the whole tenor of the conversation in the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

Without Tet, there is also no Nixon surge at the polls. January 1968, Nixon wasn't taken seriously compared to George Romney (who himself was being dismissed as a stalking horse for Rockefeller to jump into the race and undo the damage to the GOP that the Goldwater run was alleged to have done to the Party). Then came Tet, and suddenly Nixon, the foreign policy wonk and the coldest of Cold Warriors (at the time), was speaking to packed audiences of terrified middle class voters who were worried their sons would end up fighting in Southeast Asia or was already fighting there and Romney, with his little to no foreign diplomatic credentials was on the outside looking in. 1968 was such a pivotal year that it is sometimes hard to picture what the figures were like before the after-, but if you read the papers from December of '67 and January of '68, the popular image of Nixon emerges as an indecisive middle of the road fella who waits for opinion polls to guide his thinking and is seen as a loser.

Without Tet, it is hard to imagine RFK getting involve in a run for the presidency. And it is harder to picture him running with LBJ secure in his position and McCarthy's Children's Crusade going nowhere. Once again, after everything that went down with RFK in
'68 it is not possible for us to really imagine him as he was mocked and thought of in late '67 - a ruthless hack who kept a list of enemies and made us vs. them judgements on the fly. He was JFK's hatchet man and that was the East Coast media fed image of him. Post-Tet and collapse of LBJ, RFK reinvented himself and became the figure and martyr we now remember. But that was then.

Without Tet, LBJ would have pulled Westmoreland and put in Abrams without handing Abrams a dumpster fire. LBJ was not warm on Westmoreland already, but Tet drove home the message for him that Westmoreland was not the guy. Without Tet, LBJ would have still pulled him, but the next man up would not have dealt with an immediate crisis and could have implemented a better strategy.

Without Tet, with LBJ entrenched and the American people believing the victory is near, but not quite there, the war would have dragged on and on and on and on and the body count would have piled up, but without that sudden jolt to shift thinking. In terms of actual war results for the Viet Cong, NVA and etc., I am not sure. It is an interesting "what if" to explore.
 
No Tet has huge butterflies. Vietnam however, had a couple of basic problems that no Tet won't fix. The first, and most important one, is that the South Vietnamese government, in whatever iteration from 1954 on, had very little internal legitimacy. From the get-go it was a kleptocracy, and then after one coup or another it was on quicksand. ARVN units and individuals could be quite brave and effective, but absent land reforms and some level of government honesty and competency the best you could expect from the peasants was a cautious neutrality which is not good enough. Even without Tet, the war dragging on and the body count rising with the light at the end of the tunnel being an oncoming train, is having an effect on the US public. The draft was a disaster - during my 4 years as an undergraduate in the 1960s it went through several iterations of how to put the select in selective service. Not use of the reserves/guard and the draft system was breaking and did break the US military in many ways. Without Tet, and the war continuing with no "Vietnamization" on the horizon, this gets worse.

Escalation with B-52s over North Vietnam and no off limit targets, a true blockade of North Vietnamese ports, and even limited incursions across the border might have preserved South Vietnamese independence long enough for the USA to leave, but unless basic issues internally are solved who knows. As others have speculated, the best possible outcome would be a North/South Korea analog with permanent US presence and a hope South Vietnam would get its act together like South Korea did. It appears we now know neither China nor Russia would have gotten involved deeply as long as this was the end game, a full scale invasion of the north...not so sure.

Bottom line, while Tet may have "broken" the US effort in Vietnam, no Tet does not "make" it, although Mothra size butterflies would fill the skies over SEA.
 
Though its better PR for the American government, wouldn't both the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army be in a stronger position without the Tet casualties? Wouldn't this set them up for a success later that was more than a PR success?
 
Though its better PR for the American government, wouldn't both the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army be in a stronger position without the Tet casualties? Wouldn't this set them up for a success later that was more than a PR success?
The VC had been shedding men at the rate of 6-20,000 men a month from 65 till Tet.

No Tet, extends the life of the VC as a viable force by the 45,000 that were killed.

So OTLs result of the VC being bled white would still be on the horizon with no Tet, and would still need the influx of PAVN troops in by whatever the result of the standard Spring Offensives they had been doing.
 

raharris1973

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Even with VC big units going out with a whimper instead of a bang, why can't the North Vietnamese just ultimately win the war with northern manpower. There were 21 million plus northerners. None of their home territory was occupied. Nobody has suggested that there was ground action against the Ho Chi Minh Trail or destruction of Cambodian and Laotian sanctuaries.

It might be useful to compare their situation with the North Koreans. Even though the Chinese took on the bulk of the fighting, the North Koreans kept an army in the field even after their first one was mostly destroyed and nearly all North Korea was briefly occupied by UN and South Korean troops.

In the scenario of no Tet, even if the VC are on the downward slide and having to scale back formations and ops, North Vietnam was there, with a whole infiltration apparatus, and had not suffered anything like the injuries North Korea had. And by the way the destruction of VC/NLF political networks and assassination squads in South Vietnam was never, repeat never total in the southern provinces even after the losses of Tet.

Besides, it's not like Vietnam's the only war America's lost and we need to show how we were "so close". There's other wars we could do that for now, like Ira and Afghanistan.
 

longsword14

Banned
In the scenario of no Tet, even if the VC are on the downward slide and having to scale back formations and ops, North Vietnam was there, with a whole infiltration apparatus, and had not suffered anything like the injuries North Korea had.
Because it is not actually possible ?
nations have conventional armies for a reason. Once the South manages to get on its feet, any attempt to slip men and material in through penny packets could be dealt with.
The question is why are people so fascinated by irregulars 'wining', when history says otherwise ?
 

raharris1973

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The question is why are people so fascinated by irregulars 'wining'

I'm not fascinated with "irregulars" winning, and never said the North Vietnamese would win without using conventional tools, mass and maneuver. They had a lot of assets in this theater for both "irregular" and "conventional" warfare, and didn't hit near the bottom of their barrel. Infiltration in penny packets would be their "economy of force" operations to support "mass" operations for their decisive result.

...and clearly we are reading from different books - here's the one I am reading from:


by Edwin Moise



Edwin Moise is a professor of history at Clemson University. He earned a Ph.D. in Chinese and Southeast Asian history from the University of Michigan in 1977, but more recently he has specialized in the history of the Vietnam War. He is the author of The Myths of Tet: The Most Misunderstood Event of the Vietnam War (University Press of Kansas, 2017).



168409-ajnbasfcfcefw.jpg


Black smoke covers areas of Sài Gòn during Tet Offensive



In January 1968, American commanders in Vietnam were aware that their enemies were planning a major offensive, but the Americans for the most part did not understand what sort of offensive was coming, or how widely it would be spread. A wave of attacks throughout South Vietnam caught the Americans and the forces of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) partially by surprise on January 30 and 31, 1968.

The Tet Offensive was a very influential event, but it has been widely misunderstood, and some of the myths about it are still widespread even today. The conventional wisdom about the offensive, that it was a military victory for the American forces but a political defeat, because it undermined support for the Vietnam War in the United States, is basically correct. But both halves of this are often wildly exaggerated. The Tet Offensive was not nearly as devastating a military defeat for the Communists, nor as devastating a political defeat for the US government, as has often been asserted.

In the months leading up to the Tet Offensive, intelligence officers at Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), had been issuing estimates showing relatively low Communist strength in South Vietnam. They said that the Communist forces were weakening and that the United States was winning the war. The relatively weak forces portrayed in the MACV estimates would not have been capable of conducting heavy combat for an extended period.

After the shock of the Tet Offensive, senior officers, especially General William Westmoreland (commander of MACV) and Brigadier General Phillip Davidson (Westmoreland’s chief of intelligence), tried to come up with an interpretation of the offensive that was compatible with the pre-Tet estimates. They argued that it had been an act of desperation, and that the Communists had been unable to sustain heavy combat very long. General Westmoreland claimed that “almost everywhere except on the outskirts of Saigon and in Hue the fighting was over in two or three days.” Few later authors went that far, but most were persuaded that the heavy fighting lasted no more than about a month. The reality was that the abnormally heavy combat that had begun at the end of January 1968 continued absolutely without interruption for twenty-one weeks, going into late June.

Even while claiming that the heavy fighting had been relatively brief, the mythmakers claimed it had been absolutely calamitous for the Communist forces. Westmoreland said the Viet Cong were “virtually destroyed as an effective force” in the offensive. Davidson said, “In truth, the Tet Offensive for all practical purposes destroyed the Viet Cong.” “The Viet Cong guerrillas and the VC political infrastructure, the insurgency operators, were virtually destroyed in the Tet offensive.”

Many later authors have been persuaded that the Viet Cong were not a major factor on the war after the Tet Offensive, and had to be replaced by North Vietnamese troops. Again this was false. The Viet Cong units that led the attacks, on January 30 and 31, suffered terrible casualties. But most of the Viet Cong military forces survived. The Viet Cong were still important participants in the war even after the combat actually did subside, for a while, in late June of 1968. They still carried almost the whole load in the very important Mekong Delta; North Vietnamese troops did not begin to play a major role there until 1969.

There were places where cadres of the political and administrative organizations that Americans called the “Infrastructure” came out in the open, attempting to lead the “general uprising” against the Saigon government, and suffered grievously as a result. But claims that the Infrastructure as a whole was crippled are wildly exaggerated. When the Phoenix Program began to inflict serious losses on the Infrastructure in late 1968 and 1969, this was not a sham; it was not attacking a target that had already ceased to exist.

The exaggerated claims about the impact of the Tet Offensive on the Communists should have posed a logical problem: if the Tet Offensive had been such a massive disaster for the Communist forces as was being claimed, the United States and the Republic of Vietnam should have gone on to win the war. The explanation that has been proposed for this paradox is that the Tet Offensive was such a shock to the American public, and the US government, that the United States lost its will to fight, and did not attempt to follow up its advantage. General Westmoreland wrote, “President Johnson and his civilian advisers . . . ignored the maxim that when the enemy is hurting, you don’t diminish the pressure, you increase it.” Of all the myths of the Tet Offensive, this has been the most enduring. Many Americans still believe that Tet was a brief spasm of violence, and that it utterly devastated the Viet Cong, but this is mostly because they have read these ideas in works written years ago. The myth that has appeared far more often in works published very recently is that the Tet Offensive was such a shock to the United States that it caused the US government to abandon the pursuit of victory in the war. Mark Bowden’s best-selling book Hue 1968 is typical of many. Bowden writes that the battle for the old imperial capital of Hue, which lasted until late February 1968, was “a turning point not just in that conflict, but in American history. When it was over, debate concerning the war in the United States was never again about winning, only about how to leave.”

The debate that actually occurred inside the US government, in the days immediately following the end of serious fighting in Hue, was not about how, when, or whether to pull out of South Vietnam but about how many more troops to send, beyond those already there. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were urging President Lyndon Johnson to send large reinforcements. Clark Clifford, who had just taken office as secretary of defense, was indeed looking for a way out of Vietnam; the Tet Offensive had been a terrible shock to Clifford. He and a group of his subordinates opposed the military’s request for a large expansion of the American force. But they did not dare suggest that no reinforcements be sent; they argued only that the number of additional troops to be sent to Vietnam be kept relatively small. They knew that President Johnson was still determined to prevail in the war, and that if they proposed an abandonment of that goal, the President would reject their proposal and probably accept the military’s plan for massive reinforcement.

President Johnson decided on a modest expansion of the American military effort in Vietnam—tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands, of additional troops. But he could see a growing hostility to the war in the United States, especially in his own party. He wanted to appear to be making every possible effort to end the war, even as he pursued victory. So in his famous speech on March 31, 1968, in which he announced that he would not run for another term as president, he said that in an effort to ease the way for a negotiated settlement of the war, he was “reducing—substantially reducing—the present level of hostilities.” This was, however, false. He wanted any peace negotiations to produce a settlement under which Hanoi abandoned its war aims and abandoned the Viet Cong, allowing the Republic of Vietnam to impose its full control on South Vietnam. He was increasing the level of hostilities, not reducing it, in an effort to bludgeon his enemies into accepting such a settlement.

Johnson continued to strengthen the American forces on the ground in South Vietnam. At the end of January, as the Tet Offensive was beginning, there had been 498,000 American military personnel in South Vietnam. At the time of Johnson’s speech at the end of March, there were 515,000. There would be 537,000 by July. And Johnson was telling them, right to the end of his term as president, to put as much pressure as possible on the enemy. “Follow the enemy in relentless pursuit. Don’t give them a minute’s rest. Keep pouring it on. Let the enemy feel the weight of everything you’ve got.” Of the twelve bloodiest months of the American war, those in which the numbers of Americans killed in combat were the largest, eight came after Johnson’s speech.

Johnson intensified the American bombing campaign. The most the United States had ever dropped on Indochina in a single month before the Tet Offensive had been 83,000 tons of bombs. Responding to the Tet Offensive, Johnson had increased this to 97,000 tons for March, the month leading up to his speech. It would be more than 110,000 tons in every month from April through August.

The Congress, the press, and the public were deeply divided over the war. But the executive branch of the US government continued pursuing victory in Vietnam through 1968 and well into 1969. What broke the will of the United States, leading President Richard Nixon to announce on June 8, 1969, that he would begin withdrawing American forces from Vietnam, was not a brief spasm of violence at the beginning of 1968, but well over a year of mostly heavy combat. The number of Americans killed in action in Vietnam had been above 1,000 in only a single month before 1968. It was above 1,000 in twelve of the eighteen months from January 1968 to June 1969. The first significant reductions in the number of American military personnel in Vietnam, and in the total monthly bomb tonnage, were in August 1969.

-----I would also recommend
The Dynamics Of Defeat: The Vietnam War In Hau Nghia Province
 
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longsword14

Banned
...and clearly we are reading from different books - here's the one I am reading from:
My comments were hardly aimed at Tet.
By the time the final offensives came, North Vietnam had written the possibility of insurgencies getting the job done for them. Find me an assertion that says that around the Easter Offensive the South could not control its countryside.
Edit: as histories show, a lot happened after Tet that culled problems, so no Tet might have implications for the methods used later, but the final effect it may have is far from fixed.
 
There are two major points of discussion missing here:
  1. The revolutionary / "left"-nationalist perspective of the NFL & PLAF and the VWP (North) & PAVN
  2. The perspectives of the ARVN & RVN
unfortunately I am only equipped to deal with the first point.

Tet was chosen by the "General Uprising / General Offensive" line of the VWP which had previously won the "war first" line, and purged Giap's supporters and Giap. Similarly Khe Sanh was chosen by this line in the party. These both reflected the "General Uprising / General Offensive Line" which perceived the NFL and PLAF mainline forces as independently capable of toppling the RVN state, with relatively minor strategic support by infiltrated PAVN forces. The line was utterly incorrect as demonstrated by the failure of forces to bring Khe Sanh under decisive artillery blockade; and, by the incapacity of the PLAF to lead a General Uprising while withstanding ARVN and US manoeuvre warfare.

Giap was rehabilitated prior to Tet, and told the VWP that it was a bloody dog's breakfast. However, everyone was aware that the line had to be tested, in part due to overcommitment to the line, and in part because no alternate strategic action could be conceived, organised and implemented to deal with the failure of the PLAF to withstand manoeuvre warfare as it had existed.

To "avoid" Tet, Giap needs to be rehabilitated by 1966. This is no easy thing. Giap had always supported a "General Offensive" line, namely 1972 and 1975 as models for the strategic conception. Such a line would have to fight off the predominant northern line, the VWP in the South's rather obvious interest in the "revolution" occurring as rapidly as possible, and the NFL and elements of the VWP in the revolution in the South demanding military capacity to protect the actual revolution in villages in liberated areas. While these party and revolutionary positions aren't insurmountable, Giap's historical faction lacked the capacity to make their claims recognised as immanently essential in the factional fighting typical of line disputes in Stalin influenced parties.

Moreover, in 1966-1968 it is unclear what Giap's strategic plan could have been. While US manoeuvre forces had been pinned and mauled occasionally, they supplied a reserve manoeuvre force protecting the ARVN in the case of an active theatre wide offensive. Giap's line was also associated with a "Northern Development" line in DRVN politics. Such a line would be yet more reluctant to use PAVN forces in 1968.

Given the perception of a crisis in strategy in the northern VWP, and a desperate need for change in the military balance of power in the southern VWP and NFL / revolutionary villages something "had to be done." And such a "something" will be ineffective due to US and ARVN force effectiveness in 1968.

Even more significant is that VWP strategy did not countenance US forces as politically significant. They certainly did not countenance US domestic reactions to the war as significant in the least. The VWP, north and south, were focused on the ARVN and RVN apparatus, and on the generation of liberated areas or a general uprising.

The continued importance of the NFL(PRG) / PLAF, particularly in local forces and liberated areas, is demonstrated by the continued investment of the VWP in these institutions even after a "General Uprising" was clearly impossible.

I've not been able to find a PRG controlled areas map for 1972, but the Iron Triangle appears to be the core area of the PRG; and the influence of the NFL throughout the period to 1975 was significant in weakening the ARVN's internal justification for rule.

This source may be useful in judging the ideas of VWP associated Vietnamese, from a PRG minister I believe, https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~ebolt/history398/TranVanTrasCommentsOnTet68.html

yours,
Sam R.
 

raharris1973

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My comments were hardly aimed at Tet.
By the time the final offensives came, North Vietnam had written the possibility of insurgencies getting the job done for them. Find me an assertion that says that around the Easter Offensive the South could not control its countryside.
Edit: as histories show, a lot happened after Tet that culled problems, so no Tet might have implications for the methods used later, but the final effect it may have is far from fixed.

To be fair to you @longsword14, I may have been inadvertantly blending or confusing your post in mind with the posts of others in detecting a trend of argument. Perhaps it was a composite view of a few other posters and not your view, but there seemed to be an implication that the US political will to continue propping up South Vietnam would have outlasted North Vietnam’s will if not for the shock of the Tet Offensive and the US media reaction to it. My argument is that the theatrical Tet operations of penetrating the Saigon Embassy, attacking in all the cities and causing press commentary doubting ultimate victory were not necessarilly irreplaceable factors in eording American political will. No matter what the format of the battles, whether grinding or dramatic, time + casualties could have achieved the same erosion of political will..
 
Giap had always supported a "General Offensive" line, namely 1972

That failure got him relieved of Command. He was a General who always had high casualties, in victory or defeat. With the result of the Easter Offensive, he was kicked upstairs, and his Deputy took over.
 
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