# Could the US armed forces of WWII won the 60s Vietnam war? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 10, 2009, 1:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-the-us-armed-forces-of-wwii-won-the-60s-vietnam-war/502516 "2009-07-10T01:16:49Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Martin\_Hyde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/47e85d/32.png) [@Martin\_Hyde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martin_Hyde)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-the-us-armed-forces-of-wwii-won-the-60s-vietnam-war/502516/61 "2009-07-12T16:31:03Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > The likely result would be Chinese intervention and the Korean War 2.0, only this time China had the bomb. China having the bomb is a tad irrelevant. We could have nuked the Chinese armies that attacked us in the Korean War and we didn’t. The same reasons we didn’t use nuclear weapons against China during the Korean war are the same reasons they would not have used them against us in the Vietnam war. China isn’t North Korea or some other insane state, they have never had a desire to start or become involved in a nuclear war. The Chinese use of a nuclear weapon against the United States in North Vietnam would earn condemnation from the world, as they’d kill thousands of Vietnamese civilians. It would also lead to the very real possibility of retaliatory nuclear strikes by the United States, which would lead to the very real possibility of retaliatory nuclear strikes by the Soviet Union which could have quickly escalated into “global thermonuclear war” as 1983’s _WarGames_ would say. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-the-us-armed-forces-of-wwii-won-the-60s-vietnam-war/502516/62 "2009-07-12T21:47:57Z")
I think the main question is:“what would wiining the Vietnam War mean”? Yes, the USA could have won, but at the price of: -killing more than 4 million Vietnamese -mining Haiphong harbor (risk of war with the USSR) -destroying the N.Vietnamese links with China (risk of war with China). The USA entered the war with: -no firm strategy -no concensusof what we were supposed to accomplish -no exit strategy -no concensus of how much blood and treasure would be epended Lyndon Johnson was at heart a bully. He thought he couldbully N. Vietnam, as he had most of his enemies. But it didn’t work-Ho Chi Minh made it clear that he would sacrifie everything in order to drive the Americans out. Johnson had so little respect for Ho, that he never considered this. So , millions of lives lost, and billions of $ spent, accommplishing nothing. ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-the-us-armed-forces-of-wwii-won-the-60s-vietnam-war/502516/63 "2009-07-12T22:18:58Z")
> [@xtisme](#): > > 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 I’m not at all sure that the North Vietnamese, who showed themselves capable of enormous sacrifice, and were just as subject to being fooled by ideology as we were, thought that the Tet Offensive was entirely for show. Certainly they could have believed the sacrifice had a chance of succeeding. But do you know _why_ Tet worked on the minds of US civilians? The US military (Westmoreland in the lead, but there were many others) assured the US public that the war was well in hand – that victory was, if not in the immediate offing, inevitable. The Tet Offensive showed this to be a lie. Tet was shocking not because it was a defeat for America – it wasn’t – but because all the people who should have known better were caught by surprise after stridently insisting such a thing could not happen. After Tet showed the US military (and other elements of government) were either grossly deluded, or willing to lie to the public and act against US interests, the public sharply lost faith in them, which is both predictable, and, it turned out, militarily and morally correct. Do not place your faith in fools and liars. Had there been less emphasis on propaganda, lying, false reassurance, and self-delusion, the US public would have totally ignored North Vietnamese propaganda and been unaffected by Tet’s minor casualties. Lesson: don’t lie to the people; don’t try to “shape opinion” self-servingly and in ways that contradict reality. There’s certainly no reason to have believed that the “counterculture” was right about Vietnam; it may have been an accident. But it’s kind of funny that McNamara and Westmoreland and LBJ and so many others were exactly and elaborately wrong, factually and morally, and your average dirty hippie had it more or less right (although largely for self-serving and sometimes ignorant reasons). ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2009, 5:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-the-us-armed-forces-of-wwii-won-the-60s-vietnam-war/502516/64 "2009-07-14T05:19:35Z")
> [@ashman165](#): > > I have no distortions about WWII. Indeed, for your claim to be the case, it would have to be true that my assertion is, by and large, counterfactual. Now, I’m not an historical scholar, but I don’t seem to recall many cases of our soldiers skipping an island because it was hard. Well, the entire point of island hopping in the Pacific was to skip taking every island just because they were there and to avoid landing on heavily fortified ones as much as possible. There was no point to taking Truk or Rabual by frontal assault when they could be neutralized by bypassing them. > [@](#): > > Or us dropping out of the war because people got hurt. I don’t seem to recall the US doing this in Vietnam either. They stuck it out for 7 years and 58,000 body bags coming home. > [@](#): > > The soldiers, well, I guess for you I’ll have be quite specific, our non-dead soldiers (those lazy bastards died and then stopped fighting, the fucks.), those who were still able to fight, by and large, continued to do so. Despite your implication that a group of cowards happened to have gotten it right by some fluke accident, there is a reason that Marines were given their nickname. It isn’t because they ran away when their friends died. It’s because despite this, they were relentless. Put down your absurd straw men, okay? Or tell me where I stated or implied that US soldiers, airmen, sailors and marines were lazy, or cowards, or any of this other tripe you want to assign to me. > [@](#): > > If you really want to assert the case as being otherwise, you better have some pretty special evidence which conclusively shows beyond all question that my claim is counterfactual. A coward here and coward there, incidentally, doesn’t make such a case. Your claim **is** counterfactual. Believe it or not, American and allied soldiers in WW2 were not supermen possessed of superior qualities to all other generations. They were ordinary human beings fighting in war (which is sadly pretty ordinary). If you really need some evidence that they were normal human beings and would sometimes lose battles and/or surrender en masse when reality dictated it: [US surrenders to Japan in the Phillipines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Philippines_(1941%E2%80%9342)), [UK surrenders in Singapore to the Japanese](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Singapore), [Tobruk falls to the Germans, 35,000 Commonwealth soldiers surrender](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gazala), [Kasserine Pass, the US falls on its face in its first major battle with the Germans](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Kasserine_Pass), [2 Regiments (2/3s) of the US 106th Infantry Division Surrenders to the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/106th_Infantry_Division_(United_States)) > [@](#): > > This has nothing to do with what the generation fighting in Vietnam did. This has to do with WWII era generation if they were the ones fighting in Vietnam. To imply that I have insulted them is a conjecture of your mind not borne out in reality. I mean really, it will not do to imply that I suggested the Vietnam era generation didn’t do as much. Ya know, it has a lot to do with the Vietnam generation whether you know it or not. The implication is that the courage and valor of the soldiers that fought and died for this country in Vietnam was lesser than those who fought WW2 since, well, we lost the war. By your own words: > [@](#): > > But if they held the same views to the necessity of the Vietnam Conflict as they did to WWII, they would have succeeded. > [@](#): > > But, you, it would seem to have troubles understanding mathematics given that the total size of the military fighting in WWII was quite superior to the number of people we had in the entire military during Vietnam. This, of course, says nothing about the fact that in WWII, we spared practically nothing in support of fighting the war. To that end, our considerable numbers of soldiers were brought to bear. Such wasn’t the case in Vietnam, and I find it highly offensive that you would suggest I’ve suggested that, on balance, our soldiers in Vietnam were cowardly and didn’t take that hill, or charge that enemy. Though some surely would fit that bill, the same is true in any war anytime in history. I’d suggest you crack open a history book. Vietnam was not some sideshow. Here’s a thought for you: the US dropped more tons of bombs on **Cambodia** during the Vietnam war than it dropped on **every** Axis nation combined in WW2. > [@](#): > > Also, WWII’s generation might have just nuked them and been done with it. It’s been known to happen. Twice. Well, perhaps more than twice since I apparently only look at history with some rose colored glasses. Get some sense of reality, please? Nukes weren’t hidden away and not used in Vietnam because the Vietnam generation of the US military was somehow more pansy than it was in WW2. They weren’t used because it would likely have led to a strategic nuclear exchange between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2009, 5:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-the-us-armed-forces-of-wwii-won-the-60s-vietnam-war/502516/65 "2009-07-14T05:47:58Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > China having the bomb is a tad irrelevant. We could have nuked the Chinese armies that attacked us in the Korean War and we didn’t. The same reasons we didn’t use nuclear weapons against China during the Korean war are the same reasons they would not have used them against us in the Vietnam war. China isn’t North Korea or some other insane state, they have never had a desire to start or become involved in a nuclear war. This part I agree with, with the caveat that the UN forces in Korea were not directly fighting a power with nukes. There was always, however, the threat of the USSR who did have nukes during the Korean War. Having two nuclear powers being directly involved against each other in a ‘conventional’ war does increase the risk of things getting out of hand though, no? If insanity is a qualification for the use of nukes, then the whole time from the 50’s 'til today should have been free from any worries of nuclear war. It wasn’t though - and if nukes weren’t an issue, the USSR should have directly intervened in Korea, and China in Vietnam, and the US in Afghanistan - nukes are an issue, which is a large part of why the cold war was fought by proxy. > [@](#): > > The Chinese use of a nuclear weapon against the United States in North Vietnam would earn condemnation from the world, as they’d kill thousands of Vietnamese civilians. I seriously doubt that ‘world condemnation’ would be the first thought on anyone’s mind when unleashing nuclear attacks. > [@](#): > > It would also lead to the very real possibility of retaliatory nuclear strikes by the United States, which would lead to the very real possibility of retaliatory nuclear strikes by the Soviet Union which could have quickly escalated into “global thermonuclear war” as 1983’s _WarGames_ would say. Exactly. It’s not just a very real possibility, the US **would** reply with nukes of its own, which would very quickly get out of hand to the point of a strategic exchange between the US and the USSR. This was a pretty big reason against going north and involving China directly in the war. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-the-us-armed-forces-of-wwii-won-the-60s-vietnam-war/502516.md?page=3)