B-29s vs. Mig-21s / SA-2s etc. wouldn’t be much of a contest (IMO). I’m pretty sure the USAF would have given up after the first coulpe of hundred losses.
Equally, how would the Army fight? It wouldn’t have any helicopters to resupply troops, the NVA would have complete air superieority. It wouldn’t have been pretty for the Americans.
Actually, after Tet the NVA increased it’s own infiltration of it’s own troops and operatives into the South to fill the void left by the casualties inflicted on the VC. The NVA were also being supported (heavily) by both the Russian’s and the Chinese in terms of money and direct military aid (as well as advisers).
As for the instability of the South, that’s true enough…part of that was just the corruption of the South’s government, part of it was our own doing. No doubt they were unstable and, after we kicked the props out, they fairly rapidly folded under the attacks from the North. They did manage to hold out for a couple of years on their own, however, despite the fact that we had mainly cut off our own aid to them, and despite the fact that China and the Soviet’s had not cut off aid to the north, but I think fundamentally the South’s government was fundamentally flawed.
Of course, South Korea also had similar flaws…the difference being that we never let it go completely to hell and eventually they managed to pull it all together and become a very strong and healthy nation.
-XT
A couple of things. First off, we didn’t give up on bombing Germany using day light raids despite thousands of losses. Assuming the same level of commitment by the American people for a war in Vietnam, I fail to see why we wouldn’t be willing to take the same losses.
Secondly, the North Vietnamese would have been in the same boat as the Germans…a superior air plane that is over whelmed by sheer numbers. They US would have over whelmed the NVA air forces few Mig 17’s (they didn’t get Mig 21’s until '65 or so…which would have been 5 years after the conflict started with a WWII style war).
I don’t believe that the Vietnamese People’s Air Force would have been able to gain complete air superiority…only local air superiority. And I don’t believe they would have been able to maintain it in the face of WWII style bombing attacks on their logistics and C&C, nor on their air fields. Massive numbers of P-51’s would have over whelmed their abilities to fly CAP or protect their air fields, and would have worn them down the same way the German’s were worn down.
Next, you are assuming attempting to fight the same kind of fight that the US did in the 60’s but using 40’s technology. Why? We didn’t have helicopters in WWII, and didn’t use air mobile tactics. We weren’t playing a defensive game of trying to suck the enemy in and attrit them…we were doing all out, offensive war. Not only were the tactics completely different but the over all strategy was different too.
-XT
There’s a major qualitative difference between an Fw-190 or Bf-109 and a 60’s-era MIG, not to mention SAM capabilities. A WWII-era bomber, or group of bombers (say, 60+) would be cold, dead meat against 60’s-era air defenses. Their were enough blond-haired, blue-eyed “Vietnamese” named Yuri flying those MIGS and manning those SA-* radars and launchers to wipe out any number of WWII-era aircraft we could field.
This, more than anything, might mitigate the quality gap.
Does our Armed Forces of WWII include the Bomb?
Remember that the air defenses in North Vietnam were not in place at the beginning of the US’s involvement as they were later on in the war. Our tactic of graduated force allowed them to build up their air defenses.
As to the other, I’d say that the difference between an Mig-17 (which is what they started the war with) and an ME-262 is pretty minor. Essentially, we killed most of them as they were attempting to land or take off…and that same tactic would have worked fine for the few (maybe a couple hundred) Mig-17’s the North had at the beginning. Even assuming lot’s of Soviet pilots, I don’t think they had near the same quality of air crews as the German’s did, even after '44.
-XT
You all seem to be forgetting that the US couldn’t of just ‘won’ Vietnam without a proper functioning Vietnamese government, one which wasn’t just a Catholic oppresive government of a Buddihst majority country, which also tied itself with wealthy landlords and the elite of Vietnamese society.
Not to mention the in parallel with this government (VC,NV) was an organisation which was a meritocracy, completely dedicated to bringing the peasantry on its side which had excellent discipline and fought for hardly any financial gain (as opposed to ARVN) and was complete opposites to what the South Vietnamese government was, a throw back to the old ‘colonial’ style of rule of the French.
Sure, if we were willing to sustain any losses and pay any price we could have stayed in Vietnam indefinitely. But what’s the rationale for paying a heavy price and sustaining heavy losses? So Vietnam doesn’t fall to the Commies?
We won almost every battle in Vietnam but lost the war. That tells me that sending more troops to win more battles wouldn’t have helped any. And as we’re driving to Hanoi, what are the Red Chinese and the Soviets doing? It’s easy to forget in 2009 the level of hostility between the Russkis and the West. Nuclear missiles on a hair trigger, Soviet Tank battalions in Eastern Europe, Third World liberation movements everywhere.
What would occupying Vietnam for another 10 years have gained us? I suppose if we continue the occupation till the 1990s then with the fall of Berlin Wall the communist guerrillas would run out of steam. And then, yippee, Vietnam is a finally a free country and we can pull out and go home.
Sure we could have won.
Vietnam has now become our proxy instead of the Communists’. So the people would support us much more than they did without our having to set foot there.
Does that “whatever else” include manpower? The American armed forces had approximately twice as many troops in uniform in 1944 as it did in 1965.
To listen to the guys of my father’s generation in 1968, they coulda licked Uncle Ho with one hand tied behind their backs AND with no need for a time machine. But they were drunken blowhards.
I’ve read Tuchman’s book also, and she mentions the very important fact that we almost did stay out of Vietnam, and it was not Kennedy, not Johnson, but Harry Truman who screwed the pooch. While no US president gave much attention to Ho Chi Minh, Franklin Roosevelt was determined that no colonial power would receive US aid in reasserting control of former colonies. Harry Truman was not so set against colonialism, however, and promised US support to France due to fears that French communists would seize power if De Gaulle lost prestige. As American anti-imperialist sentiment gave way to anti-communist fears, US support for the French Indochina war increased, culminating in the Mutual Defense Assistance Act of 1949. The US provided increasing amounts of aid and support through 1954, when France left following the Geneva Accord.
In 1955, Eisenhower dispatched the Military Assistance Advisory Group to train the ARVN, and continued to support the Saigon government after Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem refused to hold the national unification elections required under the accord. Kennedy did likewise, and in 1961 said, “Now we have a problem making our power credible and Vietnam looks like the place.” In 1962, he created the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV). Whether it’s the MACV or Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that put the nail in the coffin, it’s Truman who blew our chance for a friendly Vietnam. We’ll never know, but I sometimes think that America could have stolen many of those “wars of national liberation” right out from under the USSR’s nose, if we hadn’t been so damn stubborn and paranoid.
Well, except that the Mig was faster, had about a third more thrust, could stay up in the air longer, could carry more firepower, and had onboard radar.
I’m fairly confident that if we could somehow transport the exact same group of people from WWII to the Vietnam era (and trained them on the current technology), success would be certain. This, of course, presumes that they felt equally as strong about each war.
But if they held the same views to the necessity of the Vietnam Conflict as they did to WWII, they would have succeeded. For months these brave souls would charge enemy locations watching their comrades in arms die by the dozen. They never relented. The Nazis, or Japanese, could have killed two thirds of everyone in every battle, and the will to fight on wouldn’t have been lost. These people were a force of nature; they aren’t called the Greatest Generation merely for rhetorical flourish.
They would just simply not stop until either victory was ours, or we were all dead. It’s the only time in history of which I’m told where people were lying to get qualified for military service instead of out it. My roommate’s late mother had a very crippling joint disorder which locked her joints in a static position for the duration of her life. Even she took to the factories to build ships for our military. I don’t know what the word is for that kind of desire, fanatical I suppose would fit, but these people, these Americans would just never have quit. Ever. There’s no way in hell.
The US military that left Vietnam in 1972 was not the one that was sent to Vietnam in 1965. Fragging officers, rampant drug use and refusal to obey orders were entirely unheard of in 1965. They were all serious problems in 1972. The US military in 1965 was very good - it was the largest, most professional, and best trained peacetime military that the US had ever fielded at the start of a war up to that point. The breakdown in good order occurred as a result of the war. A better point of comparison would be the US military in 1941 vs. 1965, but in any event the US military of WW2 would have done no better than the US military of 1965. The problem wasn’t with the military, it was with the situation. Lacking an actual strategy to win the war, attrition was used. Attrition is useful as a tactic, but it isn’t a strategy - it’s the lack of one, but it was all that there was to realistically use.
The fatal flaw was the assumption that the NLF was going to break at some point once some casualty level had been achieved before the US did.
Excellent post, and I agree with you on everything else - and that invading the North wasn’t going to result in a lasting peace in any event. I just wanted to note that China was not going to allow the occupation of North Vietnam and the US sitting right on its border to happen unchallenged. The likely result would be Chinese intervention and the Korean War 2.0, only this time China had the bomb. There was already a large Chinese military presence in North Vietnam:
Aside from looking at WW2 through severely distorted rose colored glasses, have you thought about how insulting this is to Vietnam veterans who charged enemy locations for months watching their comrades in arms die by the dozen?
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. Or us dropping out of the war because people got hurt.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s also worth noting that you don’t seem to understand the enormity of purpose the country put in during WWII versus Vietnam. So much so that our resources were largely put exclusively into the war. The same isn’t true in Vietnam. Also, the desire to be there wasn’t as great. And, ultimately, our government just called the whole thing off. That wouldn’t have happened in WWII.
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.
Britain had her own Vietnams,Malaya and Indonesia both of which we won with conscript troops and WW2 equipment.
The U.S. lost in Vietnam because the home population of the time didn’t have the will to keep fighting the war and was squeamish about taking casualties.
This is a funny post.
It’s hard to argue the USA was “Squeamish about taking casualities” when it took sixty thousand of them. They’d have to fight the Iraq War over and over again for over a century to equal that.
The American people turned against Vietnam because they felt they were being deceived as to its progress and cost. By 1969 the U.S. had been heavily engaged in Vietnam for longer than they had been in the Second World War and it wasn’t being made apparent what progress was being made. It’s easy for us now to look back and say “well, hey, the VC were ripped up by the Tet Offensive” but to the observer of the time, it was impossible to gauge progress and difficult to believe the government’s claims. The U.S. armed services kept coming out with body counts and tales of battles won, but no ground was being gained and the war continued seemingly without end, eventually to the point that it involved attacking entirely new countries.
People WILL accept casualties if they think the war is accomplishing something worthwhile. Then they can balance the loss of lives against the gain. It wasn’t easy discerned to any honest observer what Vietnam was accomplishing, so they had nothing to rationalize the casualties with.