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?
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?
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.
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.
