Could the US armed forces of WWII won the 60s Vietnam war?

Great Debates
1

Yup, another time travelling army question, but this time going in the other direction. A post in ongoing thread got me thinking:

Compare that to what they’d done twenty years earlier at Tarawa, Iwo Jima and yeah, [del]the Battle To Save Private Ryan[/del] Normandy too, where guys not long off the farm knowingly waded onto beaches being riddled with machine gun fire and plans went all to hell, but they somehow collected themselves and went on to victory.

So, if the US Army/Navy/Army Air Corps/Marines of ~1944 suddenly appeared (in whatever configuration) to fight in ~1965 Vietnam, what would have happened? Would slightly lower technology levels (no jets, no helicopters) been offset by (arguably?) superior morale, command structure, organization or whatever else?

2

No.

The WW2 forces were geared for open warfare, not fighting guerrillas.

3

If the US Armed Forces of ~1965 couldn’t win the Vietnam War, then I doubt the US Armed Forces of any prior era could.

4

Is it really accurate to characterize Vietnam as simply a “guerilla war”, period? I had the impression that the only significant guerilla force was the Viet Cong, and they were driven out of the country in short order after the Tet offensive.

5

I agree with straggler and (possibly for the first time ever, at least in Great Debates) Bosda. WWII and Vetnam were tottally different wars and totally different scenarios.

Saturation bombing crippled both Germany and Japan. It didn’t do much in Vietnam. World War II had relatively established battle lines – our side over here, their side over there. Vietnam didn’t. Both the Germans and Japanese had much longer supply lines than the North Vietnamese. The civilians in World War II generally wouldn’t lift a finger to help the Nazis. That wasn’t the case in Vietnam. The tactics that worked in the fields and forests of Europe weren’t even possible in the jungles of Vietnam.

Sure, U.S. troop morale might have been higher in 1944 Europe, but that’s nowhere near the deciding factor.

6

Vietnam was not a guerrilla war, at least not the great majority of it. It was largely a conventional war fought against a conventionally armed and organized opponent, North Vietnam. Guerrilla operations against the Viet Cong were a minor part of the war and the United States kicked the crap out of the Viet Cong. The Hollywood image of Vietnam being fought all in dense jungles against wily Vietnamese guerillas is simply not what most of that war was.

The army of WWII wouldn’t have won either, not because they didn’t know how to fight a guerrilla war, but because the USA didn’t lose Vietnam by virtue of losing the battles. The USA lost Vietnam because it didn’t have any objective to win that could be attained through force.

Losing Vietnam had nothing to do with tactics. Nothing whatsoever. American troops were tactically superior in every way to their Vietnamese opponents and won at least nine out of every ten engagements. In fact, American superiority in tactical warfare in Vietnam was vastly greater than it was in World War II, where the Americans did from time to time get their asses kicked by the highly capable Axis powers.

You can win all the battles and lose the war. No army the USA has ever possessed would have won Vietnam.

7

The 1965 forces were not geared for fighting guerillas. Maybe the 1970 forces, but by then, it was too late both politically and militarily.

We definitely learned how to NOT fight a war against a numerically inferior opponent that had all the home-field advantages.

On second thought, what RickJay said.

8

One could argue that if the US had INCREASED it’s forces after the Tet Offensive maybe we could have won. Tet was ultimately a tactical American victory. The Vietcong ceased to be a viable combat force and the NVA suffered huge losses. It ended up being a strategic disaster. It broke America’s will to continue the war and marked the beginning of “Vietnamization”, resulting in a scaling back of American combat forces over a period of 6 years.

It is difficult, however, to imagine winning the Vietnam War without invading and occupying the North.

9

No, it couldn’t. What could have truly won the Vietnam War would have been a smarter, more widespread application of the counterinsurgency tactics that were proven to work, and a progressive, democratic government in Saigon that actually had the support of the people. The first was within the Pentagon’s grasp, if barely; the second, not at all.

10

It’s much easier to conquer an enemy than it is to make the enemy a friend, that was the essential problem underlying the entire Vietnam war.

We could have invaded the North, completely dismantled their government and created a new government to rule a united Vietnam. Then we could have left and within a very short period of time the new government we had just created would have been absolutely wiped out and destroyed and we’d be back at square one.

Essentially imagine what would have happened post-WWII had Japan or Germany decided they didn’t want peace, and that their people were going to continue to fight us no matter how long we occupied them. We’d have seen immense amounts of bloodshed going on for an indefinite period of time.

Neither the Japanese or the Germans as a people were necessarily opposed to the sort of government we imposed on them post-WWII. The Vietnamese were generally much more supportive of communist political philosophy and that is how they wanted to run their country. We also made it clear we respected the Germans and Japanese as peoples deserving of running their own states, while we occupied them for some years there was never any doubt that we were transitioning them to self-rule.

The Vietnamese were very sick and tired of being treated like a colony by the West. Remember we didn’t actually join at the beginning of the Vietnam war, from the perspective of the Vietnamese the war was a lengthy battle against imperialism, a battle for their own right to determine their own future. It’s actually not exactly an inaccurate way to look at things. First the Vietnamese start to kick France out, a country that had made them part of its empire by force years before, and then another Western power (us) roll in to try and impose its political will. Regardless of the whole Communism/Capitalism divide, we essentially went in to try and prop up a puppet government simply because we weren’t pleased with the decisions the Vietnamese had made as a people about how they were going to run their own country. Once you realize this and look at the war from the perspective of the Vietnamese you realize that for them, they were fighting a war they could not lose–because they were never going to accept what they saw as the occupation and subjugation of their country.

It’s actually startlingly similar to the American Revolution–we got our asses kicked in the field time and time again but even with our major cities occupied the British never really were able to stamp out the revolution. Winning the battles in the field doesn’t do a lot for you when the entire population of a country, thousands of miles away, is united against you.

Strategically the war would have happened differently had we invaded and occupied the North. It still would not have changed the underlying fact that the majority of the population did not want us there, and felt that we were behaving as an imperialist Western power–a point that is hard to disagree with when you look at why we went into Vietnam in the first place.

If we had invaded and occupied the North then that would have simply made Vietnam a purely guerrilla war and ended the conventional war. It wouldn’t have given us lasting peace on our terms.

11

I think the WWII American military leadership, untouched by the “disease of victory” and with a palpable sense that they could actually lose, probably would have been more realistic about the situation in Vietnam and would not have done things such as coming up with meaningless metrics (body counts) to measure victory that reflected the war they were capable of fighting, rather than the war that had to be fought.

12

I cannot find the cite but IIRC I read an interview with with a Vietnamese commander a few years ago who said the US came a whole lot closer to defeating them than anyone knew at the time. Apparently the NVA was horribly stretched and nearing a breaking point (perhaps a few months more) but only the NVA commanders knew this. The US backed off and gave them the breathing room they needed. Had the US kept up the pressure the NVA may well have collapsed.

In short, we almost won but gave up too soon.

13

I have to agree that unless we were ready to colonize and occupy Vietnam, we were going to lose that war as soon as we took out the majority of our combat troops. This was the Cold War and we were trying to prop up Pro-American, Pro-Capitalist governments around the world, even if those governments were corrupt, despotic or frikking whackos people (Noriega, Hussein, Taliban, etc.)… by force if necessary.

The Vietnamese people just didn’t want foreigners controlling their country.

14

Are you perhaps referring to this (link to snopes).

15

Could very well be.

Apologies for the bad info.

Carry on!

16

The more interesting what-if is whether the Vietnam War could have been entirely avoided.

People don’t realize Ho Chi Minh asked European and American powers for help establishing independence, under the possibly naive assumption that the US valued independence for its own sake. Proper application of diplomatic muscle right after 1945 could have peacefully separated Vietnam from French colonial control while steering Ho in a much more democratic direction – he was a committed nationalist more than communist, at first. Of course that would have infuriated France, causing it to not support NATO and to be disdainful of America for decades – we wouldn’t have lost much, would we?

Before significant American involvement in the war, according to Barbara Tuchman in The March of Folly, Kennedy sent 7 separate missions to Vietnam to check out the situation and assess whether the US should intervene. These were various combinations of subject-matter experts, trusted advisors, and the “best and the brightest.” All seven missions returned and advised the president NOT to get involved in Vietnam.

And yet…

17

Losing in Vietnam had nothing to do with our armed forces. It had to do with the will of the American people to carry on the fight.

Certainly. So could the US armed forces from the Vietnam era. The caveat being, would the American people have continued to support the war? Would the American people wanted to expand the war, to take the war into the North and risk a more general war?

We weren’t beaten militarily in Vietnam…we were beaten at home. Mind, I don’t think we should ever have gone into Vietnam in the first place…this was France’s mess, and we should have let the chips fall where they would when France got it’s ass kicked trying to hold onto it’s former colonies.
The question you have to ask is, what would motivate the PEOPLE in the US to support a war in Vietnam throughout the conflict? What would it have taken to get that kind of commitment from the US populace at large to do the military things necessary to win in Vietnam? And would the general citizenry in the US have been more apt to go along with what was needed (and to stay for the long haul) in the 40’s or the 60’s?

Personally, I can’t think of anything that would have motivated the US populace to do what was needed to ‘win’ in Vietnam. Instead, through to '65 or so in general people supported the war…but, for the most part it didn’t really effect them, so ‘support’ really meant indifference, by and large. They never supported a direct invasion of the North, for instance…which was really the only way the war was going to be ‘won’. After '68 though people increasingly turned against the war and became more and more vocal in their opposition. THAT is what finally caused us to withdraw. Not military defeats on the battlefield.

Tet is a perfect example of this. The VC and NVA literally got their asses kicked in this battle. The VC never recovered from this (military) defeat in fact, and was never able to bring it’s capabilities back up to where they were pre-Tet. 10’s of thousands of NVA and VC died because they came out into the open. It was one of the most one sided military defeats of all time. However, politically, it was a disaster for the US, and I’d have to say that it was one of the big turning points of the war. And, of course, the master minds behind Tet KNEW this. While I doubt they planned to get spanked as hard as they did, they had to know that coming out into the open, was going to get them pounded by the American’s. And the brutal nature in which they did so was going to preclude anything like a popular uprising of the citizens in the South to join the cause. So…the entire show, all of those ten’s of thousands of VC and NVA (and civilians) killed (and something like 200-300 American’s) was purely for propaganda purposes…to further erode support for the war where it REALLY mattered…back home in the US.

-XT

18

I haven’t read The March of Folly, but I’ve read a lot about JFK’s decision-making on Vietnam (including, most recently, this book, which I highly recommend http://www.amazon.com/Kennedys-Wars-Berlin-Cuba-Vietnam/dp/0195152433/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247245497&sr=1-1), and I’d disagree with this. JFK sent several missions to Vietnam (I don’t recall as many as seven) and although those who reported back differed considerably as to the exact ideal mix of military, diplomatic and foreign-aid components in U.S. policy, I recall none before his death which recommended that the U.S. simply not get involved in Vietnam - in part, of course, because it already was. Certainly there was not unanimity on the question. (One of the missions included both a general and a diplomat. The general said everything was going great, the diplomat was far more pessimistic, and JFK joked, "Did you gentlemen visit the same country?).

Kennedy seemed to have a keener understanding of the issues than LBJ did, and had the advantage of having visited Vietnam himself while in Congress and having then warned against the U.S. being drawn into France’s last-gasp colonial war (much to the French government’s displeasure at the time). At the same time, he was a very canny politician, and certainly recalled GOP accusations that Truman and the Democrats had “lost China.” He gave an interview to Walter Cronkite a few months before he died and said that the war was, when all was said and done, for the South Vietnamese themselves to win or lose. In private discussions with aides he often hinted that he would scale back U.S. involvement after his anticipated reelection in 1964, and he called one State Department advisor (I think it was Chester Bowles) “crazier than hell” when he said that up to half a million U.S. troops might be necessary to win in Vietnam. Skeptical of military advice after the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy clearly did not plan for the massive military effort that LBJ later made, and was not as tied to Cold War domino theories as his successor. U.S. policy might have taken a very different course, had he lived.

19

WWII military would have bombed Hanoi Desden style (perhaps making John McCain into a variation of Kurt Vonnegut! - oooh - alt history short story possibility here).

WWII military would have closed the entire coast of the North.

WWII military would not have counted bodies - they would have counted villages and cities occupied, and time to make it to Hanoi for occupation.

The European theater was focused on moving to Berlin. The Pacific theater was focused on getting to Japan. Neither cared about body counts, or winning hearts and minds.

20

While I agree with RickJay that our goals weren’t militarily achievable, I’d like to point out that in between the VC getting crushed in the early-1968 Tet offensive, and the peace treaty of January 1973, the U.S. and ARVN still lacked control over much of South Vietnam. This couldn’t have been due to the North Vietnamese regular army, because we were capable of destroying a traditional army, and the VC was gone. So why did we lack control over so much of the country? Who, exactly, was the adversary?