May 19, 1941. Allied Victory In Ethiopia

Italian forces in Ethiopia surrendered.

Today in World War II History—May 19, 1941

This would stand as the first major Allied victor of World War Two.   Amazingly, Italian bitter enders carried on a guerilla campaign against the British until 1943, something which is little remembered, particularly in the context of general Italian ineffectiveness during the war.

The British took Fallujah in Iraq. 

On the same day, anticipating what was coming, the RAF withdrew from Crete.

In Japanese occupied Indochina, Vietnamese nationalist and communists formed the Viet Minh.  The movement was Communist dominated, although at this point it did include some other nationalist elements.  In some ways it was a revival of an organization that had been formed in the mid 1930s, in China, to oppose the French, but Japanese occupation sparked its immediate renewal.

The organization would go on to oppose the French after the war and would become solidly Communist by that time.

On Vietnam Veterans Day

Today is Vietnam Veterans Day.

The reason for that is that it was on this day, in 1973, that the last American combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam.

As we now know, they were withdrawn under an agreement, the Paris Peace Accords, that President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger believed would fail.  That Nixon believed that was cynically assumed, and it turns out correctly assumed, by the first historians of the war, who uniformly regarded the war as an ill though out American disaster. 

Starting about a decade ago, or so, however, revisionist histories, some fairly good and not so much, took the opposite approach.  A statistical analysis of the war conducted by a Marine veteran and expatriate living in Australia fairly convincingly argued that the war had been effectively won by 1968 and that the process of Vietnamization conducted by the Nixon Administration thereafter simply reflected that.  Two books on the early portion of the war when Diem was still the living autocrat in charge in the Republic of Vietnam took charitable views towards the pre 1965 American build up and argued that the war could have been won but for mistakes in that phase.

Then came Ken Burns groundbreaking recent documentary, followed by Max Hasting's new book on the war, which I'm only now just reading. 

Both make clear what the earlier books already had suggested.  The United States failed to appreciate the real situation in Vietnam from the onset, even while the French remained there, and the following intervention was beset by mistakes from the very first.  Worse yet, in some ways, Richard Nixon basically set out to betray the South Vietnam by extracting the United States dishonestly, believing that the North would ultimately prevail.  All that was needed, in his view, was some breathing room to make the departure decent.

Unfortunately for history, Nixon's other activities removed him from the Oval Office so that he was not present to bear the brunt of the impact of his decisions, which came in 1975 with the northern invasion.  The Army of the Republic of Vietnam collapsed in the face of that offensive, but in no small part due to a lack of effective air power.  Having been trained since at least the early 1960s to rely on massive American supplied firepower, without it, it really couldn't fight, and its troops rapidly lost spirit, to the extent they ever had any, and effectively quit.  Thousand and ultimately millions paid the price.

So are the pundits right, that the United States should have never gone in, in the first place?  I'm still not sure.  I find it hard to see a way that the U.S. could have avoided Vietnam, save perhaps for having denied the French any assistance in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  That would have been the approach, to the extent that we can discern one, that Franklin Roosevelt would have taken, as he was universally opposed to colonialism and seems to have been fairly comfortable with independence movements that were heavily communist.  Of course, had Vietnam become a communist state in 1946, it's hard not to imagine that being the case all the way to at least Thailand.

Which is perhaps the point.  Earlier in this blog I posed the suggestion that the Vietnam War ought not to be looked at in a vacuum, but rather as a campaign, and not wholly successful one, in the Cold War.  And that still seems correct to me.

But one fought at great cost that the country has never really gotten over in some ways. 

Making this a good day to remember its veterans.

Some Gave All: Memorial to French War Dead. Gandelu France

Some Gave All: Memorial to French War Dead. Gandelu France:

Memorial to French War Dead. Gandelu France

This memorial in Gandelu, France has been kept current following its original dedication to World War One's lost soldiers.  Those lost in World War Two, the French Indo-China War, and the Algerian War were later added.

MKTH Photographs.

July 9, 1968. North Vietnam raises its flag above Khe Sanh.

In an anticlimactic footnote to the Siege of Khe Sanh, the North Vietnamese Army raised the flag above the outpost that had been abandoned by the United States on July 5.

Khe Sanh bunkers

The entire affair became symbolic for many for the state of the Vietnam War. The US had occupied an interior position, much like the French had at Dien Bien Phu, and then held it against what turned out to be a giant feint in order not to suffer the same humiliating defeat that the French had earlier.  In the meantime, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive and the combined impact of everything made the NVA and VC look to be a much more potent force than they really were.  Having said that, the NVA assault on the Marine Corps base at Khe Sanh was an impressive feat involving moving a large number of men, including artillery, through the jungle without being detected.

The siege commenced on January 21, 1968 and ran all through the Tet Offensive and into the Spring with President Johnson ordering that the base not be allowed to fall after the base was quickly surrounded.  Air support to the surrounded base was massive.  Ground fighting on the neighboring hills was sometimes intensive. 

The 1st Cavalry advancing in Operation Pegasus.

In March of that year Operation Pegasus was commenced, over Marine Corps objection, to relieve the base, which the Marines asserted was not in need of relief.  By mid April the 1st Cavalry Division had reopened the highway and declared the base no longer surrounded.  On April 15 the Marines followed on the Army's Operation Pegasus with Operation Scotland II to clear the area around Khe Sanh. That operation continued into February 1969, but in the meantime the Marines withdrew from Khe Sanh in July, 1968.

Marine Corps memorial service for fallen American and South Vietnamese servicemen on June 19, 1968 the day the abandonment of the base commenced.

Operation Charlie, the withdrawal from the base at Khe Sanh was commenced on June 19, 1968 and was conducted at night.  Hill 689, near Khe Sanh, was occupied for a few days after Khe Sanh itself was evacuated.  On this day, the NVA occupied Khe Sanh. While the military declared the ongoing occupation of Khe Sanh pointless in the conditions that followed Tet, the Press was not kind to the US military after the occupation was learned of. Less well known is that the Khe Sanh plateau continued to be patrolled by the Marines, lending credence to the changed American view on the importance of the base, if not the overall American assessment of the strategic situation in 1967 and 1968.

Khe Sanh was actually reoccupied in 1971, a fact that's rarely noted, by the ARVN and the US in Operation Dewey Canyon II and subsequently used for a jumping off point for the ARVN in the 1971 Operation Lam Son 719 offensive.  That latter offensive turned disastrous for the ARVN in Laos and the base was abandoned for good on April 6, 1971.