This (to me) has to be by far one of the most controversial topics in American History. On this topic I have no information or knowlege whatsoever, so I turn to you for the answer. Why did that war last so long and how did America manage to lose against a country so small and with so few technological weapons? (Sattelites, Aircraft Carriers, Nuclear Weapons, ect.)
Hmmmm… just as a slight history reminder, but it’s worth remembering that hundreds of thousands of French Troops served in French Indochina prior to 1964, and that also, some 50,000 Australians served alongside US forces during the Vietnam War as well.
In this context, the US didn’t lose the war in isolation. “The Western World (in general) lost the Vietnam War” is a more accurate description. Some would argue that the French very neatly handballed the Vietnam problem onto America’s hands, but others would argue that the USA actively bought into the problem with her extensive CIA operations during the 1950’s.
And most importantly, it was a stupid war - a war against a sovereign region which no longer wanted to be part of Colonial Empire. In many respects, the Western World simply walked away from Vietnam in 1975 and bottled it up, and just plain forgot about it. And it was a dumb war in hindsight too. If there’s one lesson to be learnt from Vietnam, it’s this… when a country wants to go independant and break the shackles of Colonialism, fucking let it. You only end up with massive body bag counts otherwise.
The closest we’ve seen to a Vietnam since is the Russian subjugation of Afghanistan in my opinion.
I might also add that we won every battle. It’s not like we were defeated on the battlefield and had to go running for the escape routes.
Certainly we did not try our hardest to win.
Guerilla tactics had a lot to do with it. The “hit and run” tactics of the VC used against American troops, striking rapidly and disappearing back into the jungle, booby traps and apparent ineffectiveness of conventional American tactics used there (bombing, etc) meant the morale of troops was often low.
Hey, I just saw The Fog of War this afternoon. It’s a recent documentary featuring extensive interviews with Robert McNamara, and it’s definitely worth seeing.
One of the scenes that stood out in my mind is when he describes his trip to Vietnam many years later (1995) to meet with the then-foreign secretary of North Vietnam. The foreign secretary told McNamara that the Vietnamese perspective on the war was that it was long, protracted war of independence, and that they would have fought to the last man if it had come to that. The United States viewed the war totally differently, of course, and McNamara said in the documentary that this lack of understanding of the Vietnamese goals was one of the biggest mistakes that he made during the Vietnam War.
Battles are won or lost tactically, by taking advantage of terrain, numbers, equipment, knowledge, etc. to kill more of the other unit’s men or destroy more of their things. Tactically, the US military (and a smaller force of Australian allies) acquitted itself quite well in Vietnam (specially compared to the French who actually suffered a major set-piece defeat).
Wars, however, are won or lost strategically. This deals with damaging the other nation’s ability to pursue the war either materially or economically or politically, including an intangible but important element called the will to fight. In Vietnam, it got to the point that from the grunts in the field to the policymaker in DC, enough people started thinking “this is not worth it” to make the war unsustainable.
I don’t think there is much doubt about what it would have taken as long as the Vietnamese merely kept fighting. The US would have had to go on a full-out mobilization, universal draft, wage and price controls, industry mobilized so as to support enough troops in Vietnam to completely control every city, town, hamlet, crossroads etc.
And then years and years of occupation which probably would have generated guerrillas like the mythical dragon’s teeth.
And all of this on China’s back porch at the end of an 8000 (minimum) mile supply line.
The US couldn’t win that war in the sense that I think the OP means. The South Vietnamese had to do it and they couldn’t. McNamara’s book makes that pretty clear I think. There was a loop that the war bosses went around for years;
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The South Vietnamese have to win the war.
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They are currently unable to do so and need our help.
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Return to step 1.
That’s the answer, in a nutshell. If we were trying to give the Vietnamese what they wanted from the start (freedom from foreign colonialist occupation and exploitation), we would have won easily on all fronts. We actually had a chance right after WWII and squandered it. It’s a little-remembered fact that Ho Chi Minh was on our in the war against Japan, who were in the midst of a brutal campaign of conquest in Southeast Asia. Ho actually approached us shortly after the war, naively believing that the whole freedom from colonial oppression ideal actually extended beyond our borders. He found out quickly that, when push came to shove, the Americans were much more comfortable supporting Michelin’s rubber plantations than fighting for the freedom of a buch of dinks and slopes. With the Axis defeated and France restored to power, we dropped Ho and his supporters like hot bricks.
So, quite reluctantly, it should be noted, Ho et al. turned to the Chinese. It must be understood that there was no love lost between ethic Vietnamese and Chinese, given that China had, before the French, a thousand-year history of brutal colonialsim in Southeast Asia that the Vietnamese were as eager to be done with as French or Japanese colonialism. But no one else was willing to help, so Ho took the bitter pill and made what alliances he felt could to win the best freedom for his people. Hence, he dragged himself and his countrymen into the Cold War. I doubt anyone at the time knew what the repurcussions would be.
In Red-scared America, the issue was never “Give the Vietnamese what they want.” It was “prevent the communists from gaining territory.” We bought into the notion that indigenous puppets propped up by Western powers, and supported by a half-hearted home-grown army, would be sufficient to stem the Red Tide. When the French got their asses handed to them by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu, the US somehow was of the oppinion that the same would not happen to them, and continued the colonialist folly, this time ostensibly for the higher motive of fighting Communism.
What a mistake. We weren’t wanted. To the many (perhaps most) Vietnamese North and South, we were just different foreign oppressors. They were right, in effect, because our only sure way of defeating Ho’s forces was to kill them all, since negotiation with a Communist guerrilla was simply not an acceptable option. That basically meant killing everybody in wide swaths of the country, and in other countries (where it was illegal for us to go) for the paradoxical purpose of “saving” them from Communism. The fact is, if Communism brought the only viable route to independant Vietnam, enough Vietnamese wanted communism that we weren’t really freeing them from anything but their own political aspirations. We deluded ourselves; we claimed we were bringing them democracy and freedom, when in fact all we were doing was fighting a proxy (and not-so-proxy) war with Beijing and Moscow. The Vietnamese by and large weren’t having it, and kill ratios didn’t matter to them.
Indeed, the numbers are telling: Some three million Vietnamese to our 60,000 soliders. By sheer numbers, we won handily on the battlefield, and gained nothing worth having for our efforts. For every VC soldier we killed, for every villiage we napalmed, for every jungle road we carpet bombed, more fighters rose, more villiagers fought, more routes on the Ho Chi Minh trail were built. They would fight, literally, to the last man, woman, and child, and we simply had no answer to that. Our choice was to wage further unacceptable human devastation, or leave. So leave we did, probably irredeemably scarred for our ill-guided efforts, leaving oppression and destruction in our wake, and nothing worthy to show for it. Truly, we lost a lot more than a war.
SUperb post there Loopydude - and I might add, at the risk of approaching an entirely inappropriate thread hi-jack, that the same “dellusional self-belief” seems to be taking part at the moment on the part of the current US Administration regarding a certain Middle East country - namely, “We’re the United States and we know what’s best for you (insert smaller foreign country name here…)”
Now I recognise that my last paragraph there is open to all sorts of debate and controversy, but I offer it for a very salient reason - that is, as you all know, unless we learn from the mistakes of the past we’re often condemned to repeating them - and I have to say that I’m seeing very similar overtones at the moment. Perhaps not at the proxy Cold War level, but certainly at the “we know what’s best for you and we’re gonna shove it down your throats whether you like it or not” level. My point here is that, with hindsight, Ho Chi Minh should have been a great ally and Vietnam should have been a shining little light in South East Asia, and we in the West went about it all wrong and alienated the Vietnamese population for decades. See the parallels?
We made a couple of strategic errors in installing unpopular leaders:
house debate on covert operations
All our efforts to the contrary, the Vietnamese still made up their own hearts and minds.
Because we didn’t have defined, acheivable goals. We got into the Vietnam War in much the same way as the bevy of futile, bloody wars that fill European history.
We had a big army. Something was happening we didn’t like. We decided that smashing stuff would correct the situation somehow. Napoleon would have applauded.
Making the Vietnamese embrace modern, western leadership was a laughable notion. Making them accept western-aligned dictatorship was slightly more realistic, but still not tenable. But after the first few years, that wasn’t even at issue any more. At a certain point, we were fighting in Vietnam because we were there and we didn’t want to “lose.” We had no idea what winning or losing meant, but we figured that if we marked time long enough, everything would work out… or something. There wasn’t some target we could havee bombed or some guy we could have shot to win, our goals involved a complete divorce with history and human nature.
Compare that with our goals in successful wars. Destroy fascist rule in Europe. Drive Iraq out of Kuwait. Steal land from the Native Americans. Get out of paying British taxes. Specific things we wanted to achieve, which involved a specific chekclist of military objectives. The military works great when you can get what you want by blowing up certain impediments. It doesn’t work worth a damn when you want nuanced political negotiations or a change in general public opinion.
Vietnam was like an unsuccessful internet company in the 90s. We sat at our desks forty hours a week filling out paperwork, but we were never actually doing anything. We put out a bunch of ads and sales pitches to get people to buy up our stock to finance these operations. Eventually the capital burns up, nobody is interested in the sales pitch, and the whole thing collapses.
I rather thought the goal was very well-defined: Prevent Communist rule in Vietnam. My understanding has always been that the goal was what was untenable. We had an objective, but our means of implementing it was driven by unrealistic optimism, and our efforts soon collapsed into farce. No commies? Easy: Install a pro-Western dictator. Arm a bunch of people under that dictator who say they support us. Send some advisors. Oh, OK, send over a few soldiers. Wait, not enough? Well, send more. How many did you kill? Great! What, they’re still fighting? Well, damn those South Vienamese slant gook pathetic excuses for warriors, send more GIs. OK, how many VC are you killing now? Wow! That’s a lot! Wait, you tell me they’re still fighting? What, now they’re in Cambodia and Laos? More troops! More bombs! On the double! How now? Still fighting? Are you kidding me? Don’t these crazy slopes want to be free? Westy says we need more soldiers! What, we can’t have any? You say you’ve got hippies and flowers in guns and Nixon’s got some issues with some Watergate something-or-other, and Kissenger is ready to bolt? Fine, let the South Viet dinks rot, pinko traitors. We’re out of here.
I think one of the main issues that prevented the US from winning Vietnam is that we had to restict are fighting to prevent the Chinese or Soviets from directly entering the war, thus starting WWIII. Without the threat of their intervention, the US could done wide-scale carpet bombing of population centers, occupy Hanoi & the rest of North(you don’t want to fight a war in which you can’t go on the offensive), and block/reduce arms shipments from China. The only way to stop a group of people willing to fight to last man, women, and child is to KILL every last man, women, & child.
IMHO, it’s because we elected Johnson as President in '64 instead of Goldwater.
What you are talking about is not strategy but politics. War is political. You win when the other guy decides he’s had enough. How hard you have to push him before he yells “Uncle!” depends upon your political goals. Lets use Iraq as an example. Everyone agrees that the invasion itself was a success but the occupation has been more difficult. One reason is because it takes a lower force to space ratio to raid hostile territory than it does if you want to occupy it. If we wanted to occupy it and forcibly convert all the Muslims to Christianity we would need a hell of a lot more military power over there.
In Southeast Asia as interviews with Robert McNamara show we didn’t even understand the mindset of our enemy. Thus we stood little chance to change it. This was the fundamental problem. The lesson of Vietnam was “Know your enemy.” In case you hadn’t noticed, that’s the lesson of Iraq too.
Come on then, expand on this. Are you saying Goldwater would have won the Vietnam War for the US because he would have prosecuted the war more fiercely or devoted more resources to it?
I believe Johnson made the US just about as committed as it could be (many hundreds of thousands of soldiers, the draft etc) without going to ‘total war’ mode (ie a complete ‘war economy’ as in WW2, nuclear weapons). What would have been the main differences if Goldwater was running the show?
Lambchops recently there was a recording released of LBJ talking to one of his cohorts at the very beginning of his stint as the Commander-in-Chief that I believe relates to your question about LBJ and Goldwater.
Here is what Lydon told the person on the other end (I’m paraphrasing). “We cannot win the war. The Vietcong will sit in a wet cold hole for three days without eating or sleeping. Our GI’s cannot sit in such a hole for more than 20 minutes without needing to light up a cigarette.”
Now that sentiment does state somewhat what has already been said in previous threads, so there was some truth in it. However my point is that if the man in charge has no faith in the endeavor the war is already over. Goldwater would not have given up so easily. This is not to say that he would have won the war since there were many other problems, but at least he would have gone into it with a positive attitude or he wouldn’t have done it.
All the praise of McNamara is for his amazing hindsight. His performance as Secretary of Defense was almost as sterling as was his record as one of Ford Motors’ “Wonder Boys”.
Easily? Easily? Easily?Easily?
But here is my take. The reasons for the US participating in this war were extremely poor but fit the mindset of the time. Keep in mind that Vietnam was already divided when we began limited operations in 1964. Communism was a bad thing, and we were afraid that the fall of one nation to Communism could cause others to fall as well (the “domino effect”). South Vietnam needed our help, or it would fall to the bad Communists in the North. And the fact of the matter was, that both South VN and North VN could be very nasty regimes.
US participation was at first very limited, but things escalated. The fact that, for the US, this was a conflict based on gradual escalation is one key to understanding why things did not go well for us.
One other key fact: we never invaded the North with ground troops. We bombed the living f*** out of NVN with convential bombs (but with so many we might as well have used nukes), not to mention neighboring countries. As another poster mentioned, we did not want to scare China by sending actual troops into the North. It is now basically a truism that you cannot win an offensive war without occupying the territory of the enemy. Further, we could not hurt war production very much by bombing the North, since Russia was supplying their materiel anyway (this answers the OP’s question re “primitive weapons”–they weren’t).
By denying ourselves the ability to occupy cities and towns in the North, we denied ourselves the ability to win. Not that the goal was worthy in the first place. Hence, whether we could admit it or not, the goal for all practical purposes was defending the South from Viet Cong and regular North incursion. We succeeded pretty well at this task until we got sick of the whole deal and left in '75.
[QUOTE=Plan B]
…It’s not like we were defeated on the battlefield and had to go running for the escape routes.QUOTE]
But that’s pretty much just what happened! We Americans in particular are quite loath to admit it, but the military historians I’ve read agree that we were beaten militarily, by regular troops even more than by the guerrillas.
Face it: they were defending their homeland and they beat us.