Vietnam.

It occured to me that we do not have a general thread on the Vietnam war. Although notionally referred to as a "Police Action" this was arguably one of the more influential conflicts of the post-WWII period both in terms of the French campaign in Indochina through to the involvement of US forces till the end of the war in 1975.

It seems that in a forum that is as wide ranging as this one there is a place for a discussion on the Vietnam war.

I have no specific question to ask here, it's just trying to open up another discussion really.

Now, I am aware that this is potentially flame-bait so I will ask individuals to think carefully before posting. Constructive comments or questions only please.

 

*Moderator Post*

Just backing this up.
Any daft posts will be removed or edited.

 

I will contribute the first post on this topic in order to clear up a misconception that some people, especially those who weren't around at the time and get their information from media sources, apparently have about the war in Vietnam.

The offensive by the North that resulted in the fall of South Vietnam was begun about 2 years after all US military forces , except for embassy guards, had been withdrawn from the country. Many people confuse the news reports showing Marine helicopters evacuating embassy personnel from the roof of the embassy in Saigon, with an erroneous perception that the US military had fled South Vietnam in the face of the Communist offensive. A Treaty had been signed 2 years before that the Communists violated when they invaded in 1975. By that time the US had withdrawn and turned over the responsibility for the defense of the country to the South Vietnamese regime. Unfortunately they were unable to defend the South against the Soviet and Chinese supported North Vietnamese communists.

 

Were none of the Special Operations troops and Advisers retained in Vietnam after the 1973 treaty or were they all pulled out too?

 

My understanding was that 'Vietnamisation' meant (in very simple terms) continuing to give the South Vietnamise material aid, but withdrawing all actual Americans.

 

Simon wrote:

Nothing but embassy guards remained AFAIK.

 

I believe some advisors were left in Vietnam to help quicken the Vietnamization of the war, but they were all out of there by May 1975.

:lol: I can't believe some people would actually think that. Once per ounce, the American war effort in Vietnam was the most powerful military force the world had ever seen. It would take more than some VC country boys and some NVA regulars to scare off the Americans. :lol:

What disgusts me is that some years back Robert S. McNamara wrote his autobiography, and in it he stated that he knew the war could not be won. When several Veteran groups asked if he would donate the profits of the book to the people he helped send to fight a war he knew would not be won, he polietly declined.

If the Army/Marines/Navy/Air Force could have done the job they were trained for, North Vietnam would have fallen. Of course politics got in the way; McNamara/Johnson's view that any invasion into NV would bring the intervention of the Chinese. This would most likely not have happened, if they had done their homework, they would have seen that the North Vietnamese hated the Chinese more than the Americans, and vice versa.

 

Which pretty much sums up the Vietnam War...

But to them, all Communists were brothers in arms, and the Vietnamise were getting an awful lot of supplies from China...
(IIRC!)

 

And it didn't take many years before Vietnam was at war with China ( 1979 ? ). I believe the US eventually ended up supporting China.

The American withdrawal was more costly to the people of Vietnam than many of those people who demonstrated against US involvement like to talk about. A lesson there to be learned regarding the present situation in Iraq perhaps ?

 

You recall very correctly. However, the Chinese also hated the Americans, so by supplying weapons, ammunition, and equipment, China could have the North Vietnamese fight the American for them. Kill two birds with one stone, theoreticly of course.

And that pretty much sums up the major problem of American foreign policy.

 

I disagree. They were in point of fact indeed brothers in arms. They didn't have to like one another..China supplied arms and other support and the NVA/ Viet Cong put them to use..for their own purposes and as a proxy for both China and the USSR. If that doesn't make them brothers in arms, I don't know what would?

 

I think Zhukov is trying to point at the fact that pretty much any and every uprising anywhere in the world during the Cold War was interpreted by the US as another step on the road towards communist world domination that had to be prevented. Sometimes they were right, sometimes not; what stands above doubt is that it cost the US and the local populations of the countries involved many lives and much money.

Whenever the Vietnam war is described as an American defeat I always feel a need to point out the casualty scales. Roughly 60,000 Americans died, against more than 3 million Vietnamese. It isn't as if the American war machine or American warfare wasn't effective; it was simply that politics and a tenacious enemy prevented them from ever becoming victorious. This probably wasn't possible in hindsight, but the defeat of for example the Tet offensive shows how the American troops there amy have easily believed differently.

 

I was going to come out of my usual lurk and mention Tet, but you beat me to it. What Tet did was show that in a straight up fight, with out it's hands tied, the US forces could and did win.

From an operational view Tet was a disaster for the North. The downside of Tet for the US was the political aspect as internationally it was seen as a political victory for the North. The TV coverage of the times could certainly be taken that way e.g. how much footage was shown of the embassy compound for instance in comparison to that showing the wreckage of attacking forxes artound US bases and in the countryside?

PS anyone read "A Bright Shining Lie" by Neil Sheehan?

 

Exactly!

By no means was the Tet Offensive a military loss for the US, but it was a major political and, as you pointed out, morale sapping defeat.

Simpily supplying a country with weapons does not make two countries "brothers in arms", and there are other examples to prove this. China only supplied weapons to North Vietnam because it served their best interest. What can be better for China than watching two of its worst enemies duke it out? I don't believe two countries being communist automatically make them allies, as Chinese and North Vietnamese relations as well as Chinese and the Soviet relations highly contradict this. But thats my opinion (and what can you buy with my opinion and a dollar? ), and I will agree to disagree with you on this.

Good point. When it comes down to hard facts, American won the battles, but lost the war, which is rather unfortunate for anyone who fought in Vietnam. I have the upmost respect for those who fought over there, and it is a damn shame the way they were treated by the public and media once they got back.

 

But how were the Americans to know that they hated each other? All they got was the fact that the North Vietnamise had Chinese weaponry, the fact that Communist countries tended to stick together in the UN (not China, of course, because Taiwan was still 'China' then ), and Communist propaganda tended to stick to the 'world revolution' line...

 

They might have tried asking their South Vietnamese Allies what the Vietnamese people thought of the Chinese. That would have been a good start. Prisoner interrogations would be another way.

Don't forget that the OSS were in contact with (On occasion face to face contact with Ho Chi Minh) and providing arms to the Viet Minh (Or their fore-runners) when French Indochina had Japanese troops and aircraft based there during WWII. There were ample opportunities to gauge Vietnamese opinions to the Chinese.

 

But the opinion of the South Vietnamise would not neccessarily be the same as that of the North Vietnamise - especially given the ideological similarities. Besides, even if your average Vietnamise peasant / soldier dislikes the Chinese, that says nothing about the more important factor of the political will of Ho Chi Minh et al. Oh, and what was the Chinese attitude to Vietnam?

And IIRC NVA soldiers were notoriously tight-lipped under interrogation.

 

The division of Vietnam was arbitrary. There were two states there for a few decades but there weren't two peoples, which is shown by the reluctance of the South Vietnamese army to continue the war.

 

Yes, but the Northern State was subject to decades of Ideological indocrination, while the Southerners were not. This could cause a slight difference.

Anyhow - what difference does that make to whether China would get involved?

 

The attitudes of the people of North and South were largely the same. Both wanted an independant and united Vietnam. Both had grown up with the same desires and shared the same historic dislike of the Chinese. Just because the Viet Minh, NVA and Viet Cong were willing to accept training and equipment from China doesn't make China any more likely to get directly involved than accepting weapons and training from the CIA made the US likely to intervene in Afghanistan against the Soviets.

The Chinese never showed any inclination (AFAIK) to become directly involved in Vietnam, although at Dien Bien Phu there were apparently People's Army advisors with the Viet Minh, these were not combat troops.