Suppose we never got rid of General MacArthur during the Korean Conflict. Lets also suppose he ran the show in the Viet Nam Conflict.
Could we have won?
No. MacArthur was insufferable after his victory at Inchon and refused to believe his intelligence reports and got lazy. He was also getting quite old and ready to fade away. If he had retired within a few weeks after Inchon, we wouldn’t have had a President Eisenhower.
He also died in 1964, so he would have had to have hurried up and won quickly.
No way…the US would have lost no matter what.
First realize that MacArthur was NOT a very good general. He was all smoke and mirrors and when push came to shove he didn’t stand up very well.
Secondly, and perhaps more to the point, the US never lost a single set-piece battle (i.e. two armies square off face-to-face…certainly ambushes and such happened where Americans lost) during the entire war. A better general is not what we needed. We needed better politicians who would let the generals we did have prosecute the war as they saw fit to achieve victory.
So you’re saying we needed a president who was weak enough to let the generals just use the A-bomb to end the war quickly? :rolleyes:
UnuMondo
Uno, that was a pathetic attempt to put words in your opponent’s mouths.
The problem, per se, was not that politicians wouldn’t let the Generals fight, but that they wouldn’t decide anything one way or another, period.
That is to say, the military was stuck doing “something” in Vietnam, but wasn’t allowed to bring the needed conventional force to bear, nor leave the area of conflict.
We probably could have won had we the will to, and, in all honesty, the true face of the war was quite a bit different from the popular image of the quagmiric nightmare of film and legend.
Thanks SB…that was kinda lame of Uno.
True enough but I think it did extend to not letting them fight. Not so much that a general couldn’t fight a battle at hand but they couldn’t take it to the enemy the way they would have liked to improve their overall chances for a strategic victory. For instance, didn’t the politicos in Washington restrict our military from attacking Hanoi? This left the North Vietnamese a wonderful area for staging troops, stockpiling weapons and so on. It wasn’t till Operation Linebacker towards the end of the war that attacks were allowed and then it was only to force the North back to the negotiating table.
It’s UnuMondo. I don’t quite understand why nobody spells that right.
And no, I wasn’t really putting words into his mouth. MacArthur was forced out of a role in the war because he wouldn’t shut up about ending the conflict quickly with atomic weapons. If someone says that the generals should have been allowed to do what they want, that includes letting MacArthur do what he wanted, which was use atomic weapons. Thankfully the administration at the time was strong enough to not give in to that temptation. The US is based upon civilian control of the military, never should one just let the military do whatever it wants.
You’re saying that Vietnam was a nightmarish quagmire doesn’t reflect reality. Why are so many Vietnam veterans scarred to this day if it was a war like any other?
UnuMondo
Well, if you weren’t putting words in my mouth you were taking what I said to a ridiculous extreme. I never suggested that generals be given a blank check and free reign to whatever they damn well please. However, politicians shouldn’t tie their general’s hands behind their back either. The politicians should setup the basic guidelines for the generals to work withing (e.g. no nukes under any circumstances) and then let them have at it.
Consider it like a football team where the owner dictates to the coach that under no circumstances should he run the ball but otherwise go win the game. More appropriate would be the owner telling the coach not to let his players break the other guy’s knees but beyond that do whatever he can to win.