Yes, we all know that and it’s irrelevant, so why do we keep dwelling on this point? The US policy in Vietnam was a failure. And it’s a little late in the game to be making the distinction between military and civilian.
The question is whether our leaders made wise decisions going in, not whether our troops were outfought or not, or whether we can come away with any pride from that.
Because it’s not as simple as that. The objective was to prop up S. Vietnam but it was also to prevent other countries around Vietnam (namely Thailand) from falling to communisim (domino theory and all that). In a sense, they were successful in that particular aspect of the war.
Fascinating. Never heard this before. Do you have a citation? Sounds very plausible though.
Perhaps not given the serious distrust between the China and Vietnam.
They didn’t do as bas as is usually assumed. They held out for about 2 years and actually were managing until the US cut aid to the South significantly.
How well did that go then in Cambodia and Laos?..and I wouldn’t exactly call Burma a great success at resisting the domino effect either, your geography is suspect as you do not seem to appreciate the distances involved from Thailand through to Vietnam, especially considering the terrain, overland its going on for 1000 miles.
In a sense, although Great Britain left part of North America, Great Britain actually was succesful in its conflict with the emerging USA as it was able to use its influence to gain assistance in WW1 and WW2.
Of course, that is a ridiculous assertion, but its just looking at defeat and trying to spin it.
…and that is what your quote does, its no more than a spin.
You can write almost any scenario you like, and use any justification, the US poured around 1/7th to 1/9th of its GNP into fighting the Vietnam war, and it did not do this merely as a gesture, nor did it do this in order to write the losses off.
It left Vietnam because it had no alternative, sure they could have tried this, or tried that, but they didn’t, for any number of reasons, but it all adds up to one conclusion.
The US cut and run from the client nation it was supporting, because it could not countenance further losses - Vietnam was overrun, the US lost.
In another way, withdrawal from Vietnam released an immense amount of US industrial power, and financial power, and ultimately its this capacity that led to the '80’s arms race with the Eastern bloc and the collapse of that system.
Maybe if the US hadn’t been tied up in South East Asia for so long the Iron curtain would have come down sooner, who knows.
I have a different interpretation of the same events. The US public had been repeatedly assured by the military that things were under control and the Vietnamese enemy (I’m not sure the average American civilian made clear distinctions between NVA and VC, so I’m using the generic term)could not carry out major offensive operations.
Public trust in the military and government had been eroding for some time. When the scale of the Tet Offensive became clear, it became clear that the military authorities were either outright lying to us or unable to objectively assess enemy strength and intentions. At that point it didn’t matter that the offensive was soundly defeated – after all, the public wasn’t in Vietnam personally, and had to rely on the military and government’s word that the offensive failed and the VC were defeated – but now had excellent reason to suspect that the military wouldn’t be truthful.
I’d say that the media certainly shined a strong light on the military’s lying, but that it was the lying itself – unnecessary, gratuitous lying IMHO – that cost the US the war for public opinion, and ultimately the war itself.
Sailboat
The OP asked if it’s considered a military defeat, so I addressed the question.
There’s a lot of ignorance surrounding Vietnam. Lots of people think that we were regularly defeated on the battlefield and were forced from the country due to military reasons, which isn’t true at all.
Funny, too, that the media and popular culture seemed to treat the withdraw as some victory for humanitarians after we withdrew and quit sending South Vietnam aid, and then various groups - the wealthy, the educated, the politically inconvenient, etc. were all killed or put into re-education camps. That didn’t get much media coverage.
I’m old enough to have been around back then and I don’t recall much of what you’ve said occurred.
We weren’t being told we lost battles. We were being told that we were winning battles and winning the war and that the enemy’s ability to fight was over. But somehow the enemy kept fighting. As others have said, this difference between what our government and military was telling us and what was obvious in reality made us question our government and military. They either didn’t know what was happening or they did know and were lying.
And nobody was denying that a lot of people were hurt or killed in Vietnam. It’s just that after several years Americans finally admitted there was nothing America could do to prevent this. The only thing we could do was stop Americans from being killed in the middle of a mess that couldn’t be fixed.
What do you mean they didn’t? If they didn’t they would fold in 1972-1973. They fell in 1975 because the military supplies ran out, not because they didn’t want to keep on fighting.
We keep seeing things such as the Tet offensive was a disaster, that the VC were on the verge of defeat, but a huge amount of this comes from those who think that US withdrawal from Vietnam by the military was due some sort of betrayal by the peaceniks and the media.
Reality here, even if the Tet offensive had failed, and the US not withdrawn, does anyone seriously think that the US could have won the Vietnam war ?
Its very similar to the German thinking in the trenches at the end of WW1. Germany had been promised imminent victory, and thought they had it in their grasp right to the 1918 spring offensive, and the German public simply could not and would not accept the reality of defeat, instead many of them thought that if only they had held out for a little longer, etc etc etc.
This certainly contributed to an attitude that became the backdrop for WW2.
Around the world, the perception and the reality is that the US lost in Vietnam, calling it ‘withdrawal’ when the US left the field of operations is just spinning it.
The US left voluntarily and were not forced out ? Get real, the US was fighting in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos long after it had officially left.
To admit military defeat for any US leader would have been politically unacceptable, so it was dressed up as a strategic withdrawal, make no mistake, the US was defeated, it realised it was in a war it could never win and took the sensible option.
This in itself was pretty remarkable. To walk away and accept loss - compare that to the previous decade or more when it had already been recognised that victory was impossible but those administrations still kept up the pretence and still kept the war going.
It diminishes the decisionmakers who had to take a pretty unpalatable pill, it took some rational thinking to walk away and not continue to sacrifice US lives.
But it was still a defeat.
The irony is that if the US had “won” in Vietnam we would still have troops over there at an enormous cost. We would still be having skirmishes with an insurgency. We would be dumping money into maintaining places like Cam Ranh Bay. Security would be a constant headache and it would probably be an unsafe place for American visitors.
Perhaps people especially outside of the US on an early stage grew a bit tired on the United States’ efforts to free the world with bombs, or the vast majority of the world population simply do not appreciate the humanitarian passion that is the driving force behind the invasions and bombings, a still current strategy. Damn that media and popular culture. Damn it. You should consider a Reichspropagandaleiter, and get rid of that damned media an popular culture.
We did not! It was a tie!
You misunderstand me. I’m not even advocating that the US involvement in Vietnam was good. It was essentially an extension of French colonialism. But the popular perception seemed to be that the US was this unambiguous evil and that when we left Vietnam they lived happily ever after with puppy dogs and sunshine.
We agreed to keep supplying arms to the South Vietnamese to maintain their independence and within a few years went back on our agreements, hung them out to dry, and like with most communist revolutions, large parts of the populace suffered greatly. The US withdraw from Vietnam was certainly not without severe consequences for the Vietnamese people.
There is no GQ answer to this OP. There is no technical designation of victory in a war (or armed conflict), so it hinges on one’s opinion (based on this thread some informed…some not so much).
We weren’t ‘kicked out of Vietnam’, so the question is loaded right off the bat. We withdrew from Vietnam, certainly, but not because of military reasons (or even economic reasons…we didn’t go broke like someone up thread suggested relating to WWI Germany)…we withdrew for political and internal reasons.
My own take on this (and frankly, as I said, this is a GD or IMHO type question) is that the US was defeated politically, not militarily. Though we fucked up militarily, we were simply to powerful to be defeated that way. It was our political will, and the will of our people back home who were defeated…the strength of our country is also a weakness sometimes as democracies like ours are subject to this kind of pressure. We don’t WANT to fight long, drawn out and seemingly endless wars…we want to go on vacation and buy new TV’s and hang out grilling in the back yard on weekends. Even during WWII, arguably the most ‘just’ war the US ever fought, there was a sense of fatigue toward the end of the war. Had the war dragged on for a couple more years I have no doubt there would have been movements in the US to negotiate a peace with Germany…and probably with Japan as well, though that is less likely.
Anyway, my suggestion is to move this thread to GD or one of the other forums…there simply is no actual answer.
-XT
I remember the exodus from S. Vietnam, quite a number of S. Vietnamese generals seemed to have been well prepared.
No, Vietnam was an unwinnable war because of the wider reality outside of Vietnam.
Winning a clear victory in Vietnam would have required occupying the entire country. And if we had occupied the North we would have been facing a war with China. Instead of fighting a guerilla movement and a conventional army simultaneously in the South, we would have been fighting a larger guerilla movement and a larger conventional army in the North. Then we would have been arguing about whether we should double up again and invade China (which had nuclear weapons and wasn’t going to lose gracefully).
So we had to accept that we were not able to bring our full military power against Hanoi. That wasn’t a failure of political will - it was an acknowledgement that defeating Hanoi wasn’t worth getting into a nuclear war. With this knowledge we developed the strategy of limited war - attack the North as hard as we could without prompting direct Chinese intervention and hope that these attacks were enough to make Hanoi willing to negotiate. As it turned out these limited attacks were not enough to force Hanoi to give in.
Oh, please, haven’t we outgrown this?
It’s not as complex as that. The Vietnamese war of independence (to give it it’s real name) was solely that. The North Vietnamese weren’t even communist at the beginning, pretending they were was just a way to get military resources out of the Russians. They had no interest in exporting communism anywhere, they just wanted foreign militaries out of their country, and simply would never have stopped fighting until that occurred.
They invaded Cambodia to overthrow the nominally-communist Khmer Rouge, for what was really humanitarian reasons (as well as not to have such deranged lunatics running the asylum next door).
BTW Thailand is not a country around Vietnam, they would have had to have gone through Laos and/or Cambodia to get there. But they had absolutely zero interest in doing so.
I disagree, but concede that regardless it was a stupid war for us to have gotten entangled into. We never conquered North Korea, yet today there is still a North and South Korea. South Korea in it’s early days was not markedly less corrupt than South Vietnam was in the day, nor was North Vietnam notably more fierce about unification than North Korea was. Granted, it was a different kind of war, but I disagree with you that it would have taken nuclear war (or seriously risked nuclear war) to ‘win’…win being defined by maintaining a viable South Vietnam to this day.
Thing is, all this is debatable…we’ll never really know because we chose to pull out and let the South Vietnamese face the music and pose for gun fire, or take to the seas.
Um, I don’t accept that. We CHOSE not to bring our full military might to bear on Hanoi…in fact, we CHOSE to bring it to bear incrementally over time instead of immediately and fully. Whether that was a good choice or a bad one is debatable, as is the OP. Personally, I think we should have never gotten entangled in Vietnam…it was the French’s problem and when they lost we should have worked towards peaceful unification (if we didn’t work against the French from the first…Ho was an ally of ours during WWII after all). Hindsight and all that.
But I disagree that either the Soviets or the Chinese would have risked nuclear war over Vietnam. Korea? Yeah, I think the Chinese would have been a bit more ticked off if we attempted unification by force. But I don’t think they would have risked nuclear war over Vietnam at the time. YMMV of course…that’s why it’s a debate.
-XT