Reconsidering the Vietnam War. . . again.

Vietnam Era manual for the M16A1 rifle.  We still had these when I was in the National Guard in the very early 1980s, but by the late 1980s, they were gone in favor of a conventional print manual.  The M16 has been an enduring Vietnam War innovation which is unfortunate, as its junk.

Most of the post on this blog take place in the pre 1930 time frame, and not surprisingly, therefore, the war that's mentioned the most on the pages here is World War One.  The Great War has over 1,000 posts regarding it, and there's more added all the time, even though we're now past the war's centennial.  Next to WWI, World War Two shows up the most, 277 times, unless you consider the Punitive Expedition, which is the conflict that this blog was formed to concentrate on, sort of.  In spite of that intent, the Punitive Expedition* has only 341 posts compared to over 1,000 for World War One, which is more than the 277 dedicated to the Second World War.

This will be, in contrast, only the 79th post featuring the Vietnam War.

But we have posted on the war before, and we've even done a retrospective of sorts on the war, a topic we're returning to here.  Indeed, we've done more than one.  Following Ken Burn's documentary on the war, we did a series of them, including these:

Vietnam: Could we have avoided it?

Did the Vietnam War wreck the country?

Vietnam: Could we have won the war?

Was the Domino Theory Right?

Looking at the Vietnam War differently. Not a war, but as a campaign in the Cold War.

And that's not all.  

Indeed, I'm finding that I'm now at the point on this blog where I'm repeating myself quite a bit. When you get to that point, it's time to do something, such as maybe quit posting except on stuff you know to be new to the blog.*

Anyhow, as I just noted the other day, I recently read Hasting's Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975.  The last time I really took a multi post re look at the Vietnam War was after Burn's documentary, which Hastings cites in his book.  That might argue against doing this again, but Hasting's book was so complete that it does or should cause a history minded person to ponder prior conclusions.

Hasting's views are pretty clear.  What he basically believes is:

• There was no reason for the U.S. to go into Vietnam; and
• Going into Vietnam was a mistake for the U.S.; because
• The war was unwinnable.

So what of those conclusions?

Let's take a second look

Or a third one.

Why did the United States go into Vietnam in the first place?

This is oddly the least answered and most unclear topic of them all, which is really odd given the vast amount of consideration and retrospect that's been given to the war. Why did we go there?

It's really hard to say.

That takes us back to this entry:

Vietnam: Could we have avoided it?

In which I earlier stated:

Could we have avoided entering the war entirely?

The answer to this question often seems a simple presumed "yes".   I know that was my mother's opinion, "we shouldn't have gone there".  And she certainly isn't alone in that view.  Quite a few people hold that as an opinion of fact, perhaps even the majority of Americans.

But avoiding wars is often more difficult than it seems and the path around the conflict  only apparent, in some cases, after the war's over.  Once you choose to walk down certain streets, it''s hard to run back down them. So we should look at this seriously.  Maybe the Vietnam War was a disaster, but an unavoidable one.

My reasoning was really lengthy, but after going into the history of France in the immediate post war era, and France's defeat in Indochina, and the Geneva accords, I came to this conclusion.

By the time the agreement was reached the United States was heavily involved in efforts concerning Vietnam.  It was just sort of increasingly sucked in.  But that event made some sense.  Being a strategic coastal region of the Asian continent, having been heavily involved in Korea, and being the major democratic power in the world, there was no realistic way that the United States could sit it out.  In the end, it didn't sign the agreement, but by the time it was reached it was heavily involved in the diplomatic developments.

It seems impossible that anything else could have occurred.

I was wrong.

In thinking about it, I really think the reason we ended up getting into Vietnam was due to the Korean War.  And that's why going into Vietnam was a mistake.  The Korean War made sense, the Vietnam War, from a U.S. prospective, didn't.

It's been sort of forgotten in a way that we didn't go into Korean to save Korea, we went into Korea to save Japan.  Our analysis there was off the mark, but that was our thinking.  A look at the map, and a little history, explains it.

There they are.  Korea and Japan. . .and China and Russia.

In 1945 terms what this amounted to, after August, was a Japan occupied by the United States, a northern Korea occupied by the Soviet Union, a southern Korea occupied by the United States, and China, recently liberated from the Japanese and under the Nationalist government of Chaing Kai Shek.

That didn't last long.

No, not long at all.

In 1945 when the war ended, the Nationalist were in control of most of China and the Chinese Communist weren't much, really.  Indeed, their support from the Soviet Union was actually quite marginal.

What occurred can be and is debated, but by 1949 the Chinese Communists had reversed their fortunes and driven the Nationalist off the Chinese mainland.  By 49 the Soviets were fully supporting the Chinese Communists. A country that we imagined (rather naively) towards a western democratic future was, all of a sudden, a Communist behemoth.

The political repercussions were immediate.  The United States had shown no interest in getting into the Chinese Civil War, and indeed who would want to get into a Chinese Civil War?  It's now known that Communist fifth columnist in the U.S. were active in disrupting arms shipments to the Nationalist and were highly effective in doing so, but it's difficult to imagine the war turning out differently.  In order to save the Nationalist an epic intervention would have had to occur, and that wasn't going to happen. And for good reason.

That changed things geopolitically in ways that weren't even appreciated at the time.  Indeed, the United States even after that took the position that the Korean peninsula, which was experiencing a brutal civil war in the south, wasn't in is area of concern. The Reds took note of that.

The conventional invasion of South Korea by North Korea took place in 1950, as we've earlier noted, and suddenly American policy makers looked at the map and made the conclusion that Korea was a knife pointed at the heart of Japan.

And that's why we intervened. We couldn't risk Japan being invaded next.

That wasn't going to happen, but that's what we feared might happen.  In our view, the invasion of the south by the north was a Soviet invasion by proxy, with Japan being the next step.

Everything about that view was wrong.  The North's actions were licensed by the USSR, which equipped the North Koreans, but they didn't require the North to invade the South. They simply thought that the US, having declared disinterest on Korea, wouldn't do anything about it.  As the war went on, in fact, the Soviet interest in it declined while the Red Chinese interest naturally very much increased. The Red Chinese were fearful of sharing a border with American troops, which made sense.  Indeed, the Red Chinese had no choice but to intervene in the Korean War.

Which doesn't make our having done so wrong.  Thinking Cold War geopolitical we were right, if our assumptions were wrong.

France went back into Indochina for a different reason.  It was their colony.

We stumbled into Vietnam.

Vietnam is in a strategic location, sort of.  Cam Ranh Bay is a major port that provides military access for a vast swath of the Pacific in Indochina, something that was obvious to everyone prior to the Second World War and which made it a target of the Japanese and then the Allies during the Second World War.

Japanese tanker burning in Cam Ranh Bay after U.S. Navy air raid in 1945.

But it's also the far western end of Indochina.  Viewed one way, such as the Japanese did in 1941, its the doorway to Southeast Asia.  Viewed another, it's the last part of Southeast Asia before you are in the sea. Both views are correct.

The only reason for the U.S. to get into Indochina was to keep a global Communist movement from spreading.  But the Indochinese Communists weren't really global but local supported by the global.  Given our assumptions at the time we can be excused for not realizing that, but that was the reality of it.  At any rate, our only reason to get into Indochina was to keep Communism from spreading to someplace else we really cared about.

But where?

Well, our real concerns were India and Southeast Asia from Thailand on.  India was really beyond our ability to really do something about.  Thailand was probably an exception.  Added to that, Australia was massively concerned about Indonesia and urged the US to get into Indochina right from the onset, something the Australians later forgot.  They even threatened to unilaterally intervene during the Kennedy Administration if we did not.

But it was all so murky.

Earlier I said:

That brings us to the period from 1955 to 1963 in which South Vietnam fought against increasing odds against North Vietnam. We've already discussed that.  Having allied with Diem, who was anti Communist and anti French, the United States necessarily became South Vietnam's military supplier and military backer.  Again, it's hard to imagine any other result occurring.  So the period of increasing military involvement, from 1955 to 1963, seems more or less inevitable.

Hmmm. . . maybe not so much.

We didn't get involved in every civil war in which the Communist were active at any point in the Cold War, and we limited our actions to arms and sometimes covert action in others.  We didn't intervene to help the French or the Dutch anywhere in their collapsing empire and we didn't help the British anywhere it intervened in a third world struggle. . and the British intervened a lot.  We didn't try to keep the Greeks from falling to Communism, the British achieved that, and we didn't ask for a role in Malaysia.  We didn't fight in any fashion on the Chinese mainland, thankfully.

It sort of seems that having saved South Korea from the north, and having stepped into a larger Cold War role in the process, we assumed that we could save South Vietnam as well.  

We just didn't give it very much thought and even now, there's no real good explanation for what we were thinking.  One thing just lead to another.

Should we have gone in?

It's interesting that this debate still exists, in a very muted form, over fifty years after we actually did and over forty years after we lost the war.  In 1975 we weren't asking this question.  Now we somewhat do.

If the Vietnam War provides any lesson on intervention, and it provides more than one, a clear lesson of the war is that you shouldn't intervene in a war without a clear goal that serves a necessary purpose.

We probably did think that we had some sort of clear goal, to be fair, in the 1958 to 1965 time frame in which we went from assisting the Republic of Vietnam to intervening in its civil war.  The initial goal was to put down a Communist insurgency that was supported by the North and preserve a non Communist regime in the South. That was a laudable goal.

It was also simply not realistic in context. That is, as the North was absolutely dedicated to reuniting the country under its leadership, and as it was supporting the Southern insurgency, there was no realistic way to deal with the South without dealing with the North.

Dealing with the North, realistically, meant occupying it.  It's infrastructure was too primitive to be damaged to the pint where it couldn't' support the South.  It was really a conduit, for the most part, for Soviet and then Chinese arms to the South.  And it was a brutal Communist dictatorship that didn't care at all about he suffering of anyone, so it couldn't be intimidated in any fashion to quitting.  It's only fear, realistically, was that it would provoke an American invasion launched form the South.

The North never seems to have really feared this, reading the Americans completely correctly in that fashion.  The Soviets very much feared it, as did the Chinese.  But hence the problem.  While nobody can say for sure, the logical assumption would have to be that the Chinese would have sent ground troops into the North if the Americans had invaded it.

They did send huge numbers of anti aircraft gunners in, although they withdrew them prior to the U.S. withdrawing.

Now, this will be partially addressed immediately below, but there is an error in my assumption here.  Keep in mind we're speaking of 1958 to 1965, when these calculations should have been made. So what I'm saying is, when the U.S. committed the Marines to land in 1965, it should have been obvious that what that meant was getting into a guerrilla war with a force that was local but which had a supply chain running back to the Soviet Union.

Winning a war like that would have  meant fighting it until the guerrillas were so depleted that they were demoralized to the point of quitting, and keeping them from being replaced by regular troops from the North, and cutting of their supplies completely.  

And that would have really required a conclusion that the way to do that would have been to occupy North Vietnam, which we were not going to do.

So, here's my next question:

Vietnam: Could we have won the war?

Hastings says no.

I've read his book, and others, and frankly, I disagree, we could have.  Well, kind of sort of, maybe.

Let's start off where we started before.  I introduced the topic as follows:

Vietnam: Could we have won the war?

 

This is a topic that comes up about any time a discussion on the Vietnam War comes up (along with "how did we get in that?").  Could we have won the war?

This assumes that you agree, of course, that we didn't win the war. That we didn't seems self evident to me, but there's a small group of revisionist amateurs who insist that, no, we (the United States) won it.  The Republic of Vietnam may have lost it, they'll say, but that was after we left and that was not our fault and therefore not our defeat.

Well, by any rational measure, we lost the war.

And frankly the fall was fairly spectacular.  April 1975 saw not only the final fall of the Republic of Vietnam but also the fall of Cambodia.  Laos fell in December of that year.  A pretty spectacular final fall.

But did it have to be?  Could we have won?

At least some historians, some revisionist and some not so much, have answered that question "yes". Are they right, and what would winning in Vietnam have taken, and was that really politically possible?

Before we go further, let's further qualify our answer by noting that we're going to toss out the "if only our hands weren't tied' line of reasoning.  This became popular at some time in the 1980s, after the cycle of contempt towards soldiers swung to a late admiration for them.  While soldiers never deserved the contempt for the war that was levied upon them, the late concept that we fought with restrictive rules of engagement and hindered strategies weighted towards the enemy is just flat out wrong.  In every war since Vietnam we've fought under much more restrictive rules (arguably too restrictive in the case of Afghanistan) and to suggest that the Vietnam War was fought with kid gloves just doesn't match the facts.

B-52 on a bomb run during the Vietnam War.

It doesn't, anyhow, if you don't mean that we should have taken the war more directly to the areas outside of North Vietnam than we did, i.e., Cambodia and Laos, or if don't mean that we should have invaded North Vietnam.  Some do mean that, and we'll address those below.

Anyhow, with those qualifications, we'll look more directly at the topic.

One thing that seems abundantly clear now, given that we have access to their audiotapes, which were played in the recent Burns and Novik documentary, nearly every American President who served during the entire length of the Vietnam War, from Eisenhower to Nixon, felt there was no realistic chance of winning it. That's shocking given the things they actually did in prosecuting the war, or even just in getting into it (which we'll look at later) but it seems to be the case. Given that, we have to seriously question those who seriously maintain we could have won the war.  The men in power, at the time, did not think that was the case almost uniformly.  So, we some say we could have won it, they have to answer those retained doubts, even if those in the White House acted contrary to their own beliefs.

Which is not to say that there have not been those who have come about and challenged those assumptions.  There are at least four serious books that have maintained the war was winnable, or even that it had all but been won, when things developed, which did not need to, which gave us the results we got.  Historians Mark Moyer, Geoffry Shaw, and Mark Woodruff, amongst others, have all maintained that in relatively recent books.  Indeed, while Moyer's book was intended to be volume one of a two volume set (the second has yet to appear and its getting to be a long time), Woodruff's book, relying very heavily on statistics, nearly serves that purpose, with both books together covering the entire war.  Added to that at least books my William C. Westmoreland and William E. Colby, both of whom had active roles in the war, the first as the principal commander for much of the American involvement in the war and the second as the CIA station chief, have maintained, but in very differently fashions, that the war was winnable.

So was it?

From there, I looked at the early war.  As I've done that before, I'll do it again here.

1954-1963 (and maybe beyond?):  Winning or losing with Ngo Dinh Diem

Moyer and Shaw take the war up to the point of Diem's assassination as a separate and distinct part of the war, and I think they're right to do so.  The war after that point was distinctly different than before it. And many of the people who lived through it, including the Vietnamese, tend to view it that way as well, so we'll do the same.

 Ngo Dinh Diem

The basic gist of this argument is that South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was a misunderstood Vietnamese nationalist who had things in hand, but for interference from his ally the United States, and that if let alone, he would have completed the victory over the Viet Cong over a period of years.  That's a summation of the argument, but it doesn't really complete it.  And surprisingly, at this point, quite a few who regard Diem poorly and who also feel that the war was a lost cause from the onset agree with many, maybe most, of the salient points that the revisionist now raise.  Not all, to be sure, but many, maybe most, of the significant ones.

So what do people now generally agree about, in regards to Diem, and where do they disagree?

An imperfect Vietnamese Nationalist. . . but the least offensive one we could find. 

Over time, people have come to an odd consensus on Diem, whether they like him or not.  It's come to be recognized that he was likely the best man to lead his country, which doesn't mean that he's universally admired now or that people agree we should have supported South Vietnam. Basically, for all his defects, real or perceived, he was the best there was.

Personally, he was hard driven and a true Vietnamese nationalist.  He hadn't been a tool of the French and nobody claimed that he was.  Indeed, even the North Vietnamese Communists, who of course did not like him, knew him, as he'd been pro independence.  He remained fiercely independent of mind after South Vietnam became and independent state, but it cannot be pretended that he made any real effort to hold the vote that was supposed to occur over reunification.

He also took a fiercely independent view of the war with the Viet Cong in the South, frequently in huge disagreement with his American advisers and the United States in general once the US became involved.  One of the real subjects of his disagreement was on the topic of American arms and military advice.  He wanted US military assistance, but the level of advanced mechanized equipment he was receiving concerned him.  And he did not always agree with the suggested strategy offered by his American advisers by any means.  Over time, particularly given the results after American withdrawal from the war in 1972, his concerns over American equipment and what it meant have come to be seen as correct.  Moyer is convinced he was correct in the early 1960s and that this was already playing a role in things going wrong in the war.

So both Diem's admirers and his detractors (and he has many detractors) have come to view as being about the only leader in South Vietnam who could lead the country at the time, that assassinating him was a huge mistake that threw the country into unending turmoil until its 1975 collapse and that his concerns that the South was receiving too much in the way of mechanized American equipment and advice on how to use it was correct.  Beyond that, however, there is little in agreement.

Some claim that Diem was a despot, ruling in a Western suit with an iron hand, and a minority hand at that as he was a Catholic in a Buddhist land. Others point out that Buddhism was fading in Vietnam and Diem actually acted to revive the Buddhist monasteries.  Self immolation of monks in protest of his rule is pointed out to be proof of his unpopularity, but it has since been conceded by some in that community that Communist infiltration was influencing their actions and that the first such act may have had more to do with a personal pledge than protest.  The truth of it is now difficult to sort out and it was then as well. What can be taken for granted, however, is that he wasn't a democrat in the Western sense and that he governed as a type of strongman.

None of which answers the question we posted from the start, although it does hint at the fact that his assassination made it more difficult to win the war, contrary to what the faction in the United States government who quietly hoped for his overthrow would have supposed.

 The American Way of War. . .or a Vietnamese War with American Arms?

 Early version of the ubiquitous M113 Armored Personnel Carrier in use by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.  In some ways, the US turned a huge percentage of its own Army and the ARVN into cavalry, or at least mounted infantry, rather than infantry, in the traditional context.

As early as the French Indochinese War the French had run into problems when units equipped with American equipment and trained to expect support from the thickly supplied American logistical system was not available.  It should not be surprising, therefore, when the Army of the Republic of Vietnam ran into the same problem. 

In 1963 when Diem was overthrown the situation in the countryside was not good.  Looking at it today there seems to be no real hope in the retrospective offering that things would have somehow improved. But at least Moyer has claimed things were not as grim as they might appear.  Nonetheless Moyer concedes that part of the appearance of a problem, at any rate, is that the ARVN in the early 1960s had been supplied with American armored personnel carriers to fight a jungle war that their much more poorly supplied opponents fought on foot.

Now, at first blush it would seem that the advantage should have gone to the ARVN, and indeed the American military mission to Vietnam understood it that way.  With better equipment and with equipment of all types the ARVN should have done well, right?


Well yes and no.  The war they were fighting was a bush war to start with and some American equipment was of doubtful utility except to a larger Army trained to use it.  The ARVN wasn't that army, and the mere existence of such expensive equipment in an army that was not used to it raised issues on how to use it, and whether nor not to use it at all out of fear it would be lost in battle.  It granted mobility, but the mobility in a way operated to deter the remote stationing approach that the British had used in Malaysia before the advent of such equipment.

 M41 light tank in use by the ARVN. The M41 was a truly light tank at the time of its adoption, but its armament was sufficiently heavy that it would have been a conventional medium tank in the World War Two context.  For the fighting in Vietnam, it wasn't a bad choice. The US would come to equip the ARVN with the M48 "Patton", a tank that the US used very heavily in the war itself.

Moyer argues that in fact the ARVN was doing better, in its own way, with American equipment and its tactics than American adviser credited with. And quite a few people now seem to concede that American equipment may not have been the best thing that the ARVN needed in some cases.  Moyer argues that the American press was grossly negligent in reporting what was going on and that one well known military adviser at the time was personally creepy and wrong in his advice.  All of that may or may not be correct.

What does seem to be plain, however, is no matter how you view it, the war on the ground wasn't going well and therefore just letting it progress as it was, it seems plain enough, was going to result in an ARVN defeat sooner or later.  So just doing nothing or to keep doing what we were doing wasn't going to bring a victory about. Defeat truly seems to have been on the horizon.


 A South Vietnamese Syngman Rhee?

Which doesn't mean that the assassination of Diem did any good, in any sense, at all.  Everyone now agrees that this was a huge mistake.

That the US was complicit in his death is quite clear.  No, we didn't argue for him dead but only an idiot would encourage a Southeast Asian coup and not expect the deposed leader to end up in a bloody pool.  Murder is murder, and the murder of Diem, worst of all, put a bunch of corrupt figures in uniform in charge of a revolving chair presidency in the South. That alone was going to make the war harder to win.

But what if we'd operated to keep Diem in power and intervened like we ultimately did?

Well, we'll address the expanded infiltration below.  It would have, no doubt, have been a better thing to do than what we did do. But we likely never would have been able to ignore Diem to the same extent we did Syngman Rhee during the Korean War.  Rhee was a strong figure, to be sure, but the US presence in South Korea came to so completely dominate the war that we could, and basically did, ignore South Korean input after a certain point.

Diem was too strong of personality. But that likely would have been a good thing, quite frankly.  US hubris was part of the ultimate reason for the defeat.

 What about those Aussies?

 Royal Australian Rifles in Vietnam. We didn't ask them to come. ..  they asked us, as noted just the other day.

As can be seen from above, I don't think the ARVN was going to win without foreign intervention and I don't think any victory was on the horizon in the 1960-63 time frame. The South was loosing.  But what if the US hadn't chosen to be in charge of all actions everywhere?

One of the little secrets of the Cold War that occurred through successive administrations but is rarely talked about is that the US determined that, most of the time, it was better off running the show everywhere. We'd accept weak military partners if we got to call the shots, which is how the original financial and military imbalance came about in NATO. That only became really open in recent years when debates about whether to carry on with this or not broke out. Around about the time the civil war broke out in Libya we openly debated if we were better off carrying the freight and accepting the costs if we got to have the top hand on the stick for determining what occurred. We never really finished that debate.

In the early 1960s there was no debate. We just accepted that we were the Western superpower and it was up to us. We'd like help, but be sure, but if help was not in the offering we could do it alone.

Well, that probably was never the smartest policy.

It is a policy that Australia bought into as it was used to being a junior state.  Australia, as a result of World War Two, and accepted that the sun was setting on the British Empire and purposely decided to cast its lot with the United States, with Australia being the junior and the United States being the senior.  The Vietnam War soured Australia on that role and it doesn't view things that way anymore, but maybe the United States would have been much better off viewing things that way then.

Australia had a very vested interest, given its position on the map, in who won the Vietnam War.  The US could easily have urged Australia to act when Australia was threatening to go it alone.  And there's the one unexplored option that is never talked about. What if, when Australia said "if you don't go in, we will" the US had said in reply, "that's a great idea. . . we think you should do it"?

The Australians were, by that time, veterans of two jungle wars and had their own way of fighting them.  Less richly equipped than the US, they were more accustomed to fighting and staying in the bush itself and had seen how such a war could be won. They would have been unlikely to accidentally escalate the war as the US ultimately ended up doing. And they may have been willing to endure the long haul that winning a war in Vietnam would have taken, and it would have taken one.

This hypothetical has a lot of unknowns and frankly it ignores some things.  One thing that the Malayan Emergency had not featured was a border with a hostile nation, as the Republic of Vietnam had with North Vietnam.  North Vietnam was willing to match any opposing effort for as long, it seems as it might take. The Australians would still have faced that.

But they would also have faced the war differently.  There never would have been 500,000 foreign troops in Indochina. There wouldn't have been a massive bombing campaign against hte North. The war would have been more of a light infantry war in the bush, and the NVA wold likely not have been committed in the numbers which they were.  Indeed, at that point  the threat that the Australians might have to call upon the US and other Western powers might have deterred the Northern effort from getting  that large.

Or maybe it would have been an Australian failure, rather than a US one.  Even at that, however, perhaps an Australian failure would have been less of a major Western Cold War failure than the loss of the Vietnam War was for awhile.

After looking it over again, I'll answer this part pretty directly.  Diem was doomed to go down in defeat.

Revisionist historians notwithstanding, his regime was corrupt and his Army, inherited from the French but staffed with cronies, was inept.  There were some good units, but only some. By and large it was officered with cronies of one kind or another who were more interested in lining their pockets than saving the country.

Indeed, for much of the Vietnam War its' hard not to see the ARVN officer corps as sort of like being drunk men at a major natural disaster.  The earthquake is collapsing the building but they're in the bar whooping it up.  

Diem, who was personally highly honest, was never going to be able to reform a colonial military mess left by the French, who were good at leaving colonial military messes (one thing they very mcuh differed in comparison with the English).  His army was never going to defeat a dedicated Communist foe that was brutal, bloody, but singular minded and not nearly as corrupt.  

There was no saving that Republic of Vietnam.

So lets' look at later.

1963-1975:  Could we have won, did we, and could we have prevented the fall?

 US Army advisers and Vietnamese Special Forces wearing the ARVN pattern "tiger stripe" camouflage uniform.  In this photograph the ARVN troops are still carrying M1 or M2 carbines while the US troops are equipped with the M16A1 rifle.

Most Americans who look at whether we could have won the Vietnam War look at the war after 1965, when we really came in, in strength.  A few a historians, like Woodruff, in fact claim that we had won the war by the late 1960s and then gave the victory away.

The conventional narrative, and the one that Burns and Novik take, is that we came in during 1965 in a series of escalating and poorly grasped steps and were matched by escalating supplies and men coming in from North Vietnam (with equipment from the Soviet Union and Red China).  By 1967 we knew that we were bogged down and couldn't figure out how to get out.  Under Nixon, a cynical deal was struck in which the US "Vietnamized" the war and negotiated a peace, knowing full well that the South had no long term chance at all.  In 1975 the North invaded and the game was up.

There's a lot to support this view, even though some historians do not accept it.  Perhaps the best evidence for it is that the Nixon White House tapes expressly had this view at the time, making it hard to contest.  Kissinger and Nixon on tape admitted that they didn't think the South was going to make it more than a couple of years.

So how can anyone contest that view?

Well, some do, and of course one of the things about the Vietnam War is that it seems a lot of people were wrong about what was going on at any one time, and we generally were completely clueless about what was going on in the North.

We now know, and somewhat knew at the time, that the Communist forces were in fact having an increasingly difficult time contesting the American and ARVN after 1965 and by 1967 were in pretty desperate straights.  It was getting difficult to recruit in the South for the Viet Cong and the northern attrition rate was ghastly.  Only a fanatic level of dedication on the part of the North allowed the war to go on at all.  By 1967 things were so bad that northern leadership had decided to gamble,in an act of massive self delusion, on throwing in all their chips on one big offense. That offensive became the Tet offensive, which was a massive bloody North Vietnamese defeat.

That it was a defeat is well accepted by every historian.  That it was a shock to the American public is not contested.

What is less well known is that as bad as Tet was for the North, they'd attempt offensives like that, albeit in a smaller scale, at least twice more before the United States had completely withdrawn. That suggests that the common view that many historians have had that the north was finished after Tet was wrong.  We have to keep in mind that with the North the United States was dealing with an army of a Communist dictatorship.  Such nations have never had any regards whatsoever for the lives of their own troops and have always been willing to suffer attrition rates that no democratic nation could stand.

And that's the problem with the "we could have won view".

Those who argue that we could have won after the 1968 Tet Offensive usually cite to morale figures and attrition rates for the proposition that the North had to give up. But in fact the North did not give up.  Some, like Woodruff, have argued that the ARVN had improved sufficiently so that it really could go it alone and that Nixon's Vietnamization program was not a cynical cover for getting out of the war, but rather a realistic turning over of the war to the native army on the ground.  Others have argued that the war could then have been won with one big push.  Let's take a look at the various views that existed and those that exist now.

One Big Push

 ARVN Rangers during the Tet Offensive.  Some ARVN units fought well throughout the Vietnam War including special units such as this.  By Tet, the ARVN on the whole was fighting well.

Little considered now and not at all public at the time, some in the government argued after Tet that Communist losses were so high that there was an opportunity to end the war the same way that the North did in 1975.  Go big and invade.


William Westmoreland argued for that in his autobiography and, at the very least, he did approach Johnson for more troops following Tet.  After the Tet Offensive he went to President Johnson and asked for a couple hundred thousand more men.  I can't recall if he then expressed the view that the time was ripe for the US and the ARVN to go into North Vietnam but he was completely frank in his biography that this was his view.  Johnson rejected him flatly. And well he should have. Everything was wrong with Westmoreland's ideas at this point.

The concept that winning the war required another couple of hundred thousand men, even if they just stayed in South Vietnam, would have meant that we were obviously loosing it.  You can't have nearly 3/4s of a million men in a country just to contain it and pretend things are going well. And the idea of actually invading North Vietnam was berserk.

Invading North Vietnam only would have worked in an Avalon Hill rule book sort of way.  Avalon Hill games, for the un-initiated, were a set of strategy games that were closely based on actual military table war gaming.  Avalon Hill still exists, but the type of games we're speaking of it no longer makes, although some other companies do.  They're highly detailed and very closely model the actual military version that military men use to game strategy.  A feature of those games are limiting and expanding scenarios.

For example, I don't know if the original Korean War was ever a subject of an Avalon Hill type game (a later hypothetical Korean War, set in the 1980s, was) but if it were, it would be typical to put in a rules scenario for the Chinese not intervening when they did.  It would be an exception to the rules.  Or you might build in a rule that has the Russians intervening.  Various games of this type that gamed hypothetical second Korean Wars or a hypothetical war with the Soviet Union had all sorts of scenarios of this type.

So, in order to imagine an invasion of North Vietnam working, you have to build in a scenario in which the Chinese do not intervene. The trouble is, in a real war, they certainly would have.  If they intervened in 1950 to save a Soviet client state on their border, why on earth would they not have done the same thing in 1968?

So that idea was nuts.

The idea of simply adding 200,000 men wasn't any better either, as it wasn't politically or militarily realistic.  This too is something that could have only existed as an Avalon Hill option. That Westmoreland asked shows how disconnected from reality he was.

Invading North Vietnam would have surely brought the Chinese in to defend North Vietnam in force, and likely with far more men than we had committed to such an invasion.  There's absolutely no reason to believe that was not the case. They'd done that in the Korean War and they would have done it in the Vietnam War which was, after all, not that many years later.

Just adding 200,000 men to South Vietnam and perhaps raiding into Laos and Cambodia  probably wouldn't have done it either.  The United States already had 400,000 men in South Vietnam.  Ramping it up to 600,000 might have added a lot more combat troops to the field but at that number the US would have had a very significant portion of its existing military in Southeast Asia; beyond that which it already did. That would have required mobilization of nearly one third of the National Guard or a huge increase in the number of draftees if the nation wasn't to strip its defenses in other areas.  And it wasn't politically realistic.  

Assuming that Johnson would have been willing to add 200,000 men to the South alone, and keep them there for a few years, perhaps that would have worked, but perhaps not.  The same thing could have probably been achieved in a less taxing and risky fashion, however, by simply keeping on keeping on.

Keeping On Keeping On

U.S. paratrooper in Vietnam, equipped with M14, during 1967's Operation Junction City.

One thing that maybe the US could have done would have been to do, well, nothing.

I don't quite mean that the way it probably sounds.  Rather, what I mean is, if we were winning the war in some fashion by 1968, maybe we should have just kept doing what we were doing.  Not increasing the number of troops, and not decreasing them either.

That might have actually worked, if we could endure it.  The question is how long it would have taken.  A decade?  Longer?  It's really hard to tell. But at least we're at an option that isn't completely unrealistic.

But it darned near is.

The trouble with it is that the US commitment to the Vietnam War was a long one at that point as it was, and the casualty rate was sufficiently high that the public was growing very weary of it.  It doesn't seem to have been politically possible to carry it on forever.  To take, that is, a couple of hundred casualties fairly regularly, to keep POWs in the north indefinitely, and keep up the expense of a major tropical war indefinitely.  In a war of attrition, we may have indeed been winning, but we were suffering a societal and economic attrition as the NVA and the VC were suffering a human one.

It's easy to forget that now that we've been in Afghanistan for so long. But the difference is that the country just isn't bleeding at Vietnam War rates, and it isn't using a conscript Army to fight in Afghanistan while its holding a DMZ in Korea and a tense peace exists in Europe.  All that, except for the DMZ in Korea, has changed.  We had huge commitments in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and keeping a large army in combat for a decade would have been extremely taxing in every sense.

But perhaps we could have done it for a few more years.  Had Johnson decided to run for reelection, maybe we would have.  And maybe that would have worked.  The cost would have been very high in very fashion, but its a possibility that can at least be contemplated. But it also wasn't a sure thing.

Not stabbing the ARVN in the back.

Maybe Victimization. . . with American air power, could have worked.

It did for awhile.

Vietnamization may or may not have been a cynical ploy by Nixon, but the fact was that by the late 1960s the ARVN was fighting quite well, to a degree.

Taht is, some South Vietnamese units were showing themselves to be quite capable fighting in the style the Americans had taugth them, as long as it was in South Vietnam.  Outside of South Vietnam, as in the large scale attempted 1972 raid into Laos, they were second best to the NVA.  Inside of Vietnam, however, they were sometimes at least equal to it. They were improving. But they required American air power and logistical support.  After all, they were equipped like US troops and trained in the American way of war in fighting on the ground. U.S. airpower speaks for itself.

With American air power, they were able to stop the 1972 conventional invasion of Vietnam by the NVA.  That was costly, but it was also impressive.  There's no reason to believe that this would have been the case later on.

Specifically, there's no reason to believe that the ARVN wasn't perfectly capable of stopping the 1975 Northern invasion of the South with the aid of American air power. That air power simply didn't come as Congress wouldn't permit it and President Ford didn't want to get involved once again. So we backed out of Nixon's promise to provide US air power and we let the South fall.

Had we provided air power in 1975 the NVA invasion would have been an enormous and cost NVA defeat.  The North would not have given up, but it would have been hugely bloodied in a way that would have been hard for it to recover quickly from.  That alone would have given the South at least until 1980.

Had that occurred, it's possible to imagine a slowly improving, militarily and politically, South.  If the South could have held the VC back until the mid 1980s, it would never have fallen.  We'd still have two Vietnam's today, but the northern part of the country would not be the equivalent of North Korea, as North Vietnam was never ruled in such a woodenheaded fashion.  The North would have had to lighten up, as it ultimately didn't after the fall of the Soviet Union, and chances are it'd be hostile, but not as aggressive, toward the South as it was from 1954 through 1975.

So, maybe it was winnable.  Not in a pretty, the war just stops, fashion.  And not without the US over a long period of time.  We probably could have done that, however.  But politically, after the long war, the revelations about the truth of what had gone on in the corridors of power, the societal destruction of the 1960s, and then Watergate, we didn't have the will to.

Sic Transit
 

Which leaves us with this.  We, that is the United States, really did loose the war. We blundered along for a really long time, and in the end, we just chose to loose it, selling the Vietnamese allied to us down the river in the end.

Okay, now at the present time I have the advantage of having read Hastings work.

Hastings does something that almost no American historian has.  He really studied the concluding battles of the war from 72 through 75.  And what that very much reveals is that in 1972 the Viet Cong were bled white. That had started with 1968 Tet Offensive and then it increased in the 1972 conventional invasion of the South.  By 1975, in the final Communist effort, they were ruined as a force in every sense.  

What is also plain is that by 1975 the NVA was down to soldiers in their early teens in many instances. They'd been wrecked by the war as well and only had discipline left.  

And the ARVN, which is portrayed as completely collapsing in 1975, actually did not.  The South Vietnamese president, a military man, gave it orders that were inept.  Some units collapsed. Others fought hard righ tot he bitter end.

A commitment of American air power in 1975 would have stopped the 1975 NVA offensive.  Moreover, at that point, it likely would have wrecked the NVA for a decade.

And there's the key.  

Had that occurred, by 1985 things would have been considerably different in the Republic of Vietnam, or at least they could have been.  Local support for the VC had dropped off substantially by 1975, even if ti had not really been boosted for the southern government.  If the South had a decade of peace in full occupation of its country, and if the U.S. had used that interval to support a transition to a more representative form of government, which would have been highly likely, by 1985 the Southern government would have been much more popular, much better equipped to handle anything the North threw at it, and would have been fairly well off economically.

Indeed, by 1985 the Soviets were in trouble in Afghanistan and economically and the Chinese were on the outs with Hanoi.  Neither nation would have been very likely to be very enthusiastic about a renewed Communist effort and it'd have been unlikely that the North would have been been in any condition to pull it off.  If 1985, more or less, came and went without a conventional invasion by 1990, when the Soviet Union collapsed, ti would have been out of the question.  By 2000 we can imagine a Republic of Vietnam that would mirror a Republic of Korea. . .western, wealthy and not too interested in its northern neighbor save for something to be wary of.  Today the question would be whether or not Hanoi was going to fall any time soon, although it's proven to be much more adaptable to change, however reluctantly, than North Korea.

Of course, that counterfactual assumes something.   And that is the assumption that the US could have committed air power in 1975.

Which takes us to this:

Did the Vietnam War wreck the country?

This came up from the Burns documentary.

In that thread I explore that hypothesis, and I'm not going to deal with it at length again here.  The war didn't ruin the country.  There were a lot of things going on that changed the country, but the war was merely one of them.

What Hastings does a good job of, however, is showing that the war did ruin the military and the American public was fatigued with the war in the extreme.

Both of those things are really significant and have been underplayed in recent years.  Hastings, once again, as an Englishman can take on topics that Americans don't want to. And again, here he has.  

Hasting demonstrates that fighting in Vietnam had, by 1970s, pretty much destroyed the larger American military.  It was a mess.  In that sense, the same thing that happened to the VC happened to us. The fighting demoralized the Army and Marine Corps and wrecked it.  It infected the Navy and the Air Force as well, but not to the same extent.  And that was a real Communist victory.

Hastings states that the war wrecked the American military for a period of fifteen years, which would pace the recover between the late 80s and early 90s.  I disagree with him on that, but I was in National Guard From 1981 until 1987 and things were realy different in the very early 80s.

In my view, the Army didn't recover until the Reagan Administration, but during that era, an infusion of money and new arms translated into really effective training and things rapidly changed.  By the mid 1980s it was a new Army.  But that process had really started when the draft was ceased on January 23, 1973.  

Ending the draft in 1973 meant that conscripted soldiers were out of the Army by 1975. By and large, the Army wanted them gone as they'd become a problem.  The ones taht it didn't worry about elected to stay in and were not a problem.  The military remained badly damaged in lots of ways throughout the 1970s but by the end of that decade it was well on its way to recovery.  Perhaps ironically, a corps of Vietnam veterans who weren't disenchanted remained in both the NCO and officer ranks and were accordingly really wise about combat.

Basically, if you want to look at it this way, we would have had a hard time taking on anyone anywhere from 73 through 77. After that, not so much. By 1985 we would likely ahve taken on anyone anywhere.

But, as you might note, that means than in 1975. . . . . 

Yes, in 75, we couldn't have gone back into Vietnam as an effective ground force. We were done.  We could have tried, but it would have been ugly.

We could have committed the Air Force and the Navy, however.

Evne the Air Force as having problems with discipline by 1972.  It overcame them and it 1975 it would have done fine.  The Navy experienced a mutiny in the late stages of the war on an aircraft carrier, and that speaks for itself. But it too could have committed air assets in 1975.

If the public supported it, maybe.

It's clear that he public didn't support it. The American public was also done by 1975 and by that time, partially due to fatigue, and partially due to American press influence, it wasn't ready for the military to lift a finger to help the Republic of Vietnam.

Neither was Congress, which was reflecting the public's views.  Indeed, Congress had been parsimonious with the RoV since the later stages of he war and it was starting to starve a client Army trained to fight in the American way of war.  That didn't cause, as some have claimed, the ARVN to collapse, but it did have in impact on its fighting.  But beyond that, Congress acted to prohibit the US from intervening.

But was that legal?

We don't know, because nobody tested it. That would have required President Ford to have ignored Congress and ordered the USAF and the USN into the air, which he was not willing to do.  And perhaps he can't be blamed for that.  Determining to flat out ignore a Congressional mandate is something any President ought to question, let alone on matters of war and peace.

And frankly, I'm of the view that by and large Presidents aren't free to go to war without Congressional authorization, although here we get into a legal oddity.  Committing troops to aid in putting down an insurrection is technically not going to war.  Of course, committing troops to stop a foreign invasion of a foreign power is going to war.  So, in my view, Ford would have required Congressional authorization at some point, and that would have been equivalent to a declaration of war with a limited war aim.

So, we turn to Clausewitz.

War is the continuation of diplomacy by other means.  But that continuation requires the will to engage in diplomacy and the will to engage in war.

And by 1975, that was gone.

So, as it turns out, we could have militarily have won the war.

But it would have required a Presidential act that was arguably illegal.

Ford was as weak President, and that just wasn't going to happen, and there's no telling what the Supreme Court would have done, had that been presented to them at the time, and it would have been.

Of course, time and history move on. And the impacts of things go on and on.  Fighting in Vietnam may have had the collateral effect of saving Indonesia and Thailand from their own communist revolutions, as we've addressed before.  If that's the case, and we can argue that it was, the war was a hugely expensive delaying action a la the 1941 defense of the Philippines.  And ultimately, while the North won the war, it's slowly loosing the peace.  While the South Vietnamese never came to love or even like their government during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, as Hastings book makes plain, many now look back on it and view it as a massively corrupt but much freer and better government than the brutal one that came in with the NVA.  Now, they look outward at what they lost with regret.  But they also look in with what they learned, and Ho Chi Minh City residents refer to it as Saigon once again, and tiny Vietnamese women are buying luxury underwear at Hanoi's Victoria's Secret.

And that last fact says a lot.

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*Some people refer to the entire 1910s episode on the Mexican border as the "Border War" and in fact the U.S. Army issued a campaign ribbon recognizing it as such.  In retrospect I wish I'd included that term as a topic, but it's a bit late to do so now.

**Which would reduce its content, but that's fine.  At this point, this seems like a necessary change here as we've covered the big events of the 1910s on a day by day basis and its time to go back to odds and ends.