WI: US loses the Battle of Ia Drang?

What do you mean by lose? Do you mean in the initial landings to control the landing zones that they get overrun? Or is it at any point that they get overrun in the period after they initially land?
 

ThePest179

Banned
What do you mean by lose? Do you mean in the initial landings to control the landing zones that they get overrun? Or is it at any point that they get overrun in the period after they initially land?

The latter; think a disaster like Little Bighorn.
 
The latter; think a disaster like Little Bighorn.

Well... The Battle of Ia Drang to some extent was just like Little Bighorn for the 7th Cavalry Regiment (amusingly enough the 7th might be deemed a 'cursed' regiment). The US suffered heavier casualties in Ia Drang in comparison amounts than in Little Bighorn. I would acknowledge that the Battle of Ia Drang as it stood was a defeat for the United States in the tactical sense, but a victory in the strategic sense that it showed the actual usage of airmobile uses in fire.

They were nearly overrun several times, and it was lucky that they weren't to some degree. Air power and artillery helped save it. If you are suggesting that all the troops on the ground are slaughtered, it could harden the American view in Vietnam towards actually going in perhaps.
 

Deleted member 1487

Probably major public backlash, escalation even sooner, perhaps calls to invade the North, LBJ gets the brunt of all sorts of issues.
 
Yes, there would be a greater backlash from the public. Within the US Army, & military in general, there would be some serious rethinking of both strategy & tactics.
 
Relatively minor POD, but assuming the US loses the Battle of Ia Drang in '65 Vietnam, what would be the effects, if any, on the rest of the Vietnam War?

Here's the battle for those who don't know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ia_Drang

South Vietnam may not last long enough for the American public response to be anything other then a post-mortem.

It depends on whose version of the state of the ARVN you take. According to Dennis Warner - who had been covering the fighting since 1946 - the South Vietnamese were months away from total collapse at this point. They were hanging on by their fingernails. Others insist it was not quite that bad, some gave it as much as a year. Warners's 'Not with Guns Alone' would be one source of info on the South Vietnamese mood at the time.

The Ia Drang battle was part of the same strategy the NVA actually used ten years later to win the war. Attack a major outpost in the central highlands, ambush and destroy the relief force then swallow up the plateau cities and sweep to the coast cutting the country in half. The rest collapses in a screaming heap and Saigon becomes a communist capital. The end.

The Ia Drang was the 'ambush and destroy the relief force' part. Foreign forces in country were too small to counter a collapse of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. If the 1st of the Seventh had been destroyed whatever morale the ARVN still had would vanish.

When the French were running the war they had a term for what the US forces in various encircled outposts would have gone through trying to fight their way out to the coast. "Croutons in the soup" was the term for the units, "Looking like Christ off the cross" was the term for what any survivors who straggled in to surviving outpost weeks later looked like.

That kind of ending would have seen President Johnson impeached amid the uproar. The image of the US military would take a huge hit. Major effects on the credibility of the western world and anti-communist viewpoints in third world countries.

That the whole airmobile idea might be seen as discredited would be a trivial issue by comparison.
 
1. Westmoreland gets relieved. Who would be the next senior General to take command? Could a Marine Corps general take over MACV?
2. The myth that the war is a civil war between North and south dies as people see that the US Army is defeated by NVA regulars supplied by the communist bloc.
3. Operation Rolling Thunder turns into operation linebacker OTl
 
Have a friend who was with 1/7 Cav at Ia Drang. It took him 25 years to be able to talk about it. Another friend from 173rd LRRP led two recon patrols (5 man team) into Ia Drang. A lot of the NVA bodies that had been buried had been washed out in the two years since the battle.

Tactically it was a victory for us but as Nguyen Hu An (NVA commander at Ia Drang) told LTG Harold Moore, "we learned how to defeat you at that battle" General Giap said: “We thought that the Americans must have a strategy. We did. We had a strategy of people’s war. You had tactics, and it takes very decisive tactics to win a strategic victory….If we could defeat your tactics—your helicopters—then we could defeat your strategy. Our goal was to win the war.”
 
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