I don’t know enough really to comment, but I just wanted to say that this is one of the most interesting OP questions I’ve ever seen. I seem to recall that the US forces in WWII did fight a form of guerrilla warfare by parachuting behind enemy lines and such. Also, lots of great posts and comments in this thread.
People dismiss the political factors of the war as if they were somehow trivial. But they were real and important.
The reason we didn’t invade North Vietnam was because it would almost certainly have triggered a Chinese intervention as had happened when we invaded North Korea. A relatively small war in Vietnam would have become a general war between the United States and China.
So we tried to pressure North Vietnam by indirect military means: aerial bombing and naval blockade. It didn’t work. The North Vietnamese government was willing to accept whatever casualties and damage we could inflict rather than give up on retaking the south.
And we tried to get South Vietnam to develop a viable government that would make the country capable of defending itself from the north. It was unable to develop such a government.
It was more heavily armed too…the point though is that they would have been overwhelmed the same way the German fighters were. If the US was willing to pay the same price we were in WWII, then we are talking about a battle of attrition…and the US had hundred of Mustangs for ever Mig 17. Even if the Migs shot down 10 to 1 it would have been a price we were willing to pay…and those Migs had to land sometime.
Agreed. It might have brought the Soviets in as well.
The problem was we tried to bring up the pressure slowly, incrimentally. This gave the North time to modify their tactics and to bring in (from China and Russia) more and heavier weapons. Also, bad as people think the US was, we were selective in our targets, especially initially…we aren’t talking about full on war but, again, as you said, an attempt to apply pressure to the North to get them to stop attacking the South. This was a fundamentally weak military position for us to be in…the North had faced MUCH worse from both the French and the Japanese, and they were able to weather the storm. By the time things heated up to the point where the restrictions started to be taken off they had built up their defenses, civil and military, had brought in state of the art ground to air missiles and sophisticated radar, etc.
I think this is the key point…WWII style US military (and civilian leadership), assuming it could actually be motivated to fight an all out war in Vietnam (:dubious:), wouldn’t have tried a gradually increasing pressure…they would have gone in full bore as soon as it was militarily possible to do so. They would have been better prepared mentally for the cost in terms of causalities both militarily as well as civilian. And the populace at large would have been more prepared and tolerant both of heavier causalities(450,000 US battle deaths in WWII vs 50,000 in Vietnam, for instance) and a more brutal approach to enemy civilians (look at some of the things US citizens tolerated during WWII). And, IMHO, relative military capability has nothing to do with whether the US could be successful…it all hinges on the US citizen and his or her support for the war. If they are willing to continue support for the long haul, through heavy causalities, through the bad press when bad things happen, etc, then I don’t see how we couldn’t have won in Vietnam. Of course, winning would probably have entailed making it the same kind of desert that we made of Western Europe and especially Germany and then calling it peace, and I don’t see WHY we would have wanted to do so…but I think we COULD have done so with our armed forces in WWII. Or, as I said, with our military in 1960 for that matter, given full and complete support back home, and a willingness to pay the price needed to win militarily.
-XT
The North Vietnamese never bombed Pearl Harbor. Remember what eventually brought the USA into WWII–even after Hitler had begun his fell work.
Over here, we were quite aware that Vietnam was not Daddy’s War.
Personally I don’t think the Soviets would have intervened in Vietnam. If for no other reason than the Chinese would have been almost as unhappy with Soviet troops in Hanoi as they would have been over American troops there.
But what I think could very likely have happened was the American military getting tied down by the Chinese in Southeast Asia and the Soviets taking advantage of this by advancing into the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa.
Yeah but in Malaya we were fighting a minority population which was nominally resented by the majority. The communists in Malaya were mostly Chinese. As for Indonesia, other than taking responsibility after WWII because of Dutch inability until they arrived, we didn’t really have much to do with the ensuing rebellion afterwards.
The US lost in Vietnam because they supported a weak and nasty regime, which was only interested in maintaining it’s own power in the short term, even at expense of winning the war, not to mention the credibility gap with the US public and the Military.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_SEAsia.html
The link is a chapter from Noam Chomsky’s little book “What Uncle Sam Really Wants” published in 1993. The book is a distillation of the public record concerning US post-war foreign policy and is an absolute must-read for anyone trying to make sense of what we do abroad. Not pretty.
No, because the US did not lose the war militarily, it lost politically when the American populace lost the will to fight. The US Military in the Vietnam war could have won the Vietnam war, and it was better suited to the task than the WWII military because it had better tech and was fighting a guerilla war. The military didn’t lose Vietnam, Washington did.
Which is a good example of why no sensible person takes Chomsky seriously. The purpose of the Vietnam War was to destroy Vietnam’s economy? At what point did the Illuminati decide to destroy Vietnam as an example to other countries? 1945? 1956? 1959? 1964? These were all major turning points in American involvement in Vietnam. Was the Chinese attack of Vietnam in 1979 part of our plan?
Of course it’s good to see that the forces of evil are so easily defeated. Despite their decades long effort to destroy Vietnam, the country is actually doing pretty well and has a thriving economy.
Military forces cannot solve political problems. All the troops in the the world wouldn’t have turned South Vietnam into a stable country. And without a stable government in Saigon, there would never be a victory in Vietnam.
I agree, though with one caveat…remember that South Korea also had a pretty rocky beginning after the division, and it took years for them to get their shit together and become stable and economically viable. Today, however, it IS stable and VERY economically viable. We’ll never know if South Vietnam would or could have similarly been a stable entity because, frankly, they never had a chance.
Water under the bridge now, however. Between us, the French, the Soviets, the Chinese and Vietnamese both north and south, the situation is what it is. Maybe the way things worked out is actually for the best…and perhaps North Korea wouldn’t be the totally fucked up place it is had we pulled out of South Korea and let that fall as well. In both cases we’ll never know.
-XT
@ Little Nemo
It was shortly after we realized the French couldn’t do it for us in 1954. Of course, that was 9 years after we reneged on Roosevelt’s promise of self-determinism and helped the French reinstall themselves as local war lords while along the way we gave them a lot of military assistance.
This link is to A Vietnam War Timeline from 1945 when Ho declared Vietnam independent to 1997 when we exchanged ambassadors. Quite a drama.
http://www.english.illinois.edu/MAPS/vietnam/timeline.htm
You are also right that there were many
There are quite a few in the Timeline that qualify but I think this was THE turning point
Eisenhower admitted that if popular elections were held in 1956, Ho would get 80% of the vote. It’s here we took over from the French.
I’m familiar with recent Vietnamese history. What I’m disputing is Chomsky’s conclusion:
All the evidence is that the American objective in Vietnam is exactly what we said it was: to keep Vietnam from being united under a Communist government. And I think it’s pretty clear we didn’t achieve that objective.
But Chomsky is apparently arguing that we had a secret goal - to demolish Vietnam - that was our real objective and which we accomplished. And in that, I feel Chomsky is wrong.
I’m inclined to disagree.
Ho was a nationalist. Their Declaration of Independence was modeled on our own. He would have been happy with an accommodation with the US, he originally expected it. But as this little excerpt from the Timeline shows, we equated nationalism with communism and brought the Soviet union and China into it. It was all downhill from there.
Not that it really relates to the question in the OP (after all, if we had gone along with Ho Chi Minh we would never have gotten into a war in Vietnam, whether with WWII era forces or 1950’s or 60’s era forces), but FWIW I agree…it was monumentally stupid of us to toss out our relationship with Ho and his faction and support the French (the FRENCH for gods sake! Like THAT would turn out well).
I also agree that, initially at least, Ho et al were Nationalists, not Communists, and their over riding interest was a unified Vietnam.
-XT
Thanks. I’ll shut up.
I was an Anthro, specifically, Linguistics, student in the 70s and we were indoctrinated into the Cult of Chomsky and I find it very liberating to say, loud and proud, CHOMSKY IS A MORON!
Always was and always will be. Whatever the topic. 
I think it might be fair to say you think he’s outright wrong on <insert topic(s) here>, but it’s far from accurate to label him a moron. He is a man who thinks deeply, and in earnest. That you look at the same information he does and conclude otherwise doesn’t make him a moron. He provides reasons and reasonably logical inductions.
That’s more than I’ve seen you do; your tack is merely make grand conclusion without the benefit of the slightest degree of evidence to support your claim. Does that make you a moron? No, merely undisciplined and misguided.
Ho Chi Minh was not, as I recall, a prominent figure in American government (I believe the highest policy making position he held in the United States was pastry chef). So what his beliefs were really isn’t relevant to a discussion of American policies.
So we equated nationalism with communism. That supports my point that our goal in Vietnam was part of our general opposition to communism.
Chomsky’s the one who’s claiming that we didn’t really care about communism and were just using that as an excuse to prevent Vietnam from serving as a role model to the third world for progressive economic development. Chomsky even goes so far as to claim we worked with the communist government in China to prevent this.
There’s no evidence to support this. Why would we regard Vietnam as a potential leader in third world economic development back in the fifties? Vietnam at that point was dominated by its struggle to overthrow the French - there were no signs of significant economic reform on the horizon.
Chomsky’s assertion is ridiculous. Vietnam had known nothing but near constant warfare before the US had even arrived. As a society, they weren’t prepared for any sort of progressive economic development, not until they had secured their independence.
Further, it’s inaccurate to say the US equated nationalism with communism. We equated any communist movement as part of a worldwide communist conspiracy; we completely underestimated the nationalism of so many of these countries, even after Tito’s example. One of the great tragedies of Vietnam was that the US was looking to create a democratic Vietnam as a bulwark against China expanding its influence, when the reality was that China and Vietnam had historically hated each other.