WI USA invades North Vietnam

What would have happened if the United States invaded North Vietnam in either 1964 or 1965, with 1965 being the more likely date?

I'm midway through Thomas Ricks' "The Generals" where he discusses the Vietnam War. According to the book, in 1965 the advice the Joint Chiefs of Staff was giving Johnson was essentially "go all out and invade the North or withdraw completely".

Johnson rejected this for obvious reasons, but one thing that struck me is that actually trying to invade North Vietnam was more likely for the US government to actually decide on then not fighting the war, or not fighting the war with ground forces, for reasons that Ricks describes in the book. One reason for this is that US policymakers did not yet have the negative experience of the Vietnam War itself, so they were going to try to prop up any allied state facing a communist takeover. Second, the US military-industrial complex described by Eisenhower seems to be a real phenomenon and ti really seems they are going to be fed a major open ended war every few decades. Third, and here Ricks is strongest in describing this, the US army and the rest of the military was really geared to aggressively defeating an opponent in a conventional war, so invading North Vietnam was something they could actually accomplish but they couldn't do counter-insurgency without a top-to-bottom overhaul.

So what if the hawks had gotten their way?
 
FWIW, Martin Van Creveld's verdict: "Operation Rolling Thunder was initiated in February 1965. From beginning to end it was a pure air campaign—-though the possibility of supplementing it by a ground invasion was often discussed in Washington, D.C., nothing ever came of the idea. Had it been realized, then almost certainly the outcome would have been an even larger and less controllable insurgency.." Martin Van Creveld, *The Age of Airpower,* https://books.google.com/books?id=WlaeRJJvsDwC&pg=PT332

Also, the prospect of massive Chinese intervention, which many hawkish critics think LBJ took too seriously, seems to have been real:

"One common misperception has to do with Lyndon Johnson's handling of the war in the 1960s. Critics say that Johnson allowed his fear of China to impede his handling of the war. When he escalated the war in Vietnam, he gradually expanded the bombing from south to north as he was afraid of incurring China's wrath. Like the Chinese side, Johnson remembered the Korean War and wanted to avoid another confrontation. He remembered that during the Korean War, the U.S. had failed to heed Chinese warnings after MacArthur crossed the 38th parallel, thus triggering a clash with China.

"This time, Johnson and his advisers paid close attention to the Chinese role. They were afraid that if the United States pushed too hard or attacked North Vietnam without restraint, they would have a replay of the Korean War. Johnson's critics later said that China was just bluffing, that the Chinese weren't serious about intervening. Harry Summers and other military writers criticized Johnson for allowing his fear of Chinese intervention to undermine his bombing campaign.

"However, the new evidence from China suggests that Mao was seriously prepared to intervene. There was a secret agreement between Hanoi and Beijing that if the Americans launched a ground invasion of North Vietnam (at that time, the United States had restricted itself to a bombing campaign), China would send ground troops into North Vietnam and would not allow the United States to defeat Hanoi. If the Americans bombed North Vietnam, China would match the American military action by taking measures to protect North Vietnamese cities and to rebuild roads and bridges. They would also send anti-aircraft artillery units and army engineers to support North Vietnamese troops and help them deal with the air bombing pressure.

"Meanwhile back in China, Mao was making preparations in anticipation of war with the United States. He relocated industries, universities, and research institutions in the coastal areas of eastern China to the mountainous areas of southwest China. He ordered his people to build anti-air shelters throughout China.

"Mao himself had staked a lot on the outcome of the Vietnamese War in terms of security as well as ideology. Mao took the American escalation seriously; he interpreted it as a security threat. But he also believed that the success of North Vietnam had ideological significance. At that time Mao was criticizing the Soviet Union for not giving enough support to national liberation movements, for pursuing détente with the United States. Thus he hoped to use the Vietnam War as a way to embarrass Khrushchev -- to show him that China had closely befriended anti-imperialist movements of the Third World.

"For all these reasons, Mao was really interested in Vietnam and prepared to intervene. This means that critics of Johnson were wrong. The historical record shows that Johnson was prudent in his approach to the Vietnam War -- that he was right not to adopt more drastic measures. If the suggestions made by these critics had been adopted by Johnson, there would have been a real danger of war between the United States and China."

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/articl...ntially-to-vietnam-war-victory-claims-scholar
 

Ak-84

Banned
Yeah, the US political leadership, would not act unless they were assured with high confidence that the Chinese would not intervene like they did in Autumn 1950. That was never the case.

The OP's quote display a failing of US military leadership in the post war era, one which continues today, which is moaning about how "politics impeded sound military decisions" forgetting that use of military forces is inherently a political decision and if what is militarily necessary, is politically impossible, it won't happen. Powell was an exception and look at how he executed Gulf War 1.
 
Ak 64, your point was actually Ricks' point.

The book is kind of a strange read, since Ricks is very critical of US military leadership and manages to pull his punches at the same time. He bends over backwards to be fair.
 
I don't see that in Taylor. What he wrote was that LBJ authorized the "stationing on Taiwan of one or two American Phantom jets with tactical nuclear bombs as another supposed deterrent to a Chinese nuclear attack. But the real purpose of the jets and their weapons was for possible use against mainland China should Peking intervene directly and massively in the Indochina war." https://books.google.com/books?id=7Kz111Lie-0C&pg=PA526 Those nukes were obviously under US control, and that is very different from saying the RoC had its own nukes!

Later, speaking of the late 1960's, Taylor writes " The secret work on a Nationalist nuclear deterrent had by this time developed a small reprocessing facility (a “hot lab”) and was seeking to acquire a research reactor and enriched uranium." https://books.google.com/books?id=DUg2KGMQWHQC&pg=PA538 In other words, they had not yet actually developed nuclear weapons.
 
In Chang kaishek talks to the nation, The big man himself, said. “I would do anything to restore free government to the mainland”. What else does that mean, but a bomb?
 
In Chang kaishek talks to the nation, The big man himself, said. “I would do anything to restore free government to the mainland”. What else does that mean, but a bomb?

He may have wanted to develop one, but he did not succeed in doing so. The only nukes on Taiwan were American, and under American control. You could just as well say that Turkey and Italy "had the bomb" in 1961 because the US had nuclear missiles there.
 
Ok. I accept your point. Could the Taiwanese take a larger conventional role?

Not only the US but the South Vietnamese government were opposed to this: "Chiang Kai-shek's regime was as hawkish as any country's in East Asia and more hawkish than the United States. Chiang had wanted to invade mainland China in the early 1960s to take advantage of the famine and its ensuing regime crisis. He had also offered to send nationalist troops to South Vietnam to help rollback the communist insurgency. Chiang's offer of troops was vetoed by the State Department and the White House. They saw the possibility of nationalist Chinese troops in Vietnam as both a militarily ineffective force and a political problem for the South Vietnamese. For their part, the South Vietnamese leadership had told the United States, it did not want the use of Nationalist Chinese troops on the Asian mainland because it might greatly increase the chances of communist Chinese intervention on the ground. Other assistance, however, including Nationalist Chinese military advisers, was actively sought by the United States." https://books.google.com/books?id=SPWFL-vj1RkC&pg=PA164
 
Top