What if Congress kept the American word and resupplied the South Vietnamese as said in the Paris Accords?
What if Congress kept the American word and resupplied the South Vietnamese as said in the Paris Accords?
Then Communist Vietnam would be pleased with all the new hardware they get for free?
Considering South Vietnam held out for quite a while even after they were cut off from supplies it would cost them quite a bit.
Considering South Vietnam held out for quite a while even after they were cut off from supplies it would cost them quite a bit.
19 months is "quite a while" ? more so when you realize that the North never went on a full offensive in December 1974, NV thought it would take them 5 years to over run SV, it took less than 2
In modern warfare, yeah, 19 months without resupply is a long time. ARVN's supply situation got so bad they could barely manage to ever use life ammunition in training, and when they did, had to detail people to sweep up to try and find unfired rounds for save.
19 months is "quite a while" ? more so when you realize that the North never went on a full offensive in December 1974, NV thought it would take them 5 years to over run SV, it took less than 2
On supplies:
There were plenty of supplies delivered to South Vietnam up until the
fall of Saigon, with more in the pipeline. There _had_ been a cut in
military aid. But was Congress to blame?
Here is Doug Muir from the January 2005 thread _A Fish Called Wanda_:
On Blame
=======
"The Class of '74 had nothing to do with the fall of Vietnam. (Among
other things, the final, conventional offensive that destroyed the
South started before the 94th Congress was sworn in. Cripes, the 94th
didn't even cut aid.) But they were liberals, they were standing
nearby, so they must have been guilty. "
And again from the same thread:
"Final point: if any one person's fingerprints are on the knife, it's
R.M. Nixon. IMO the key moment came in 1973, when aid was cut between
FY 1973 and 1974. The _cut_ in aid was about $1.5 billion. South
Vietnam's entire GDP at that time was less than $10 billion. So it's
not surprising that this had fairly godawful effects on their ability
to defend themselves. But Nixon agreed to this with scarcely a
glance
backwards; he had other fish to fry, and he wanted Vietnam to be
behind
him.
"But note that the budget negotiations for FY 1974 took place in late
'72 and early '73. Watergate was barely a blip on the horizon then,
and Nixon had just won re-election in a landslide. (And gotten a
slightly more conservative and Republican Congress to work with, too.)
RMN threw the Vietnamese overboard more than a year before his
resignation, many months before Watergate had reached crisis level.
He
did it because he wanted to, not because he had to."
On the Quanta of US Aid
==================
"That is so wrong it's not even wrong.
"Correct figures for US aid to the South
"FY 1973 (July 1, 1972 - June 30, 1973) -- $2.5 billion
"FY 1974 (July 1, 1973 - June 30, 1974) -- $1.1 billion
"FY 1975 (July 1, 1974 - June 30, 1975) -- $900 million*
"*700 million appropriated, but went into cost overruns, so a bit more
than $900 million eventually spent
"Now, the 94th Congress -- the very liberal "Class of '74" -- was
elected in November '74 and took office in January '75. They didn't
cut the aid budget to Vietnam; they couldn't. That money had already
been appropriated by the 93rd, and would continue to flow for another
six months, until the end of June '75. By which point the South would
have ceased to exist."
Why would it take five years? A little less than two years is quite a while considering the circumstances. One side gets weapons and resupply from a superpower and the other gets very limited supply.