The other factor is the arbitrary definition of what constitutes victory in a battle. The Viet Cong weren’t a regular army - they weren’t trying to capture and hold battlefields. Their strategy was to conduct hit and run raids to kill Americans until the United States withdrew from Vietnam.
So the Americans and the VC could fight a “battle”. Afterwards, the Americans could say they had “won” because they had driven off the VC and successfully defended their base. But if you had asked the VC, they would have told you they weren’t trying to capture the base - they wanted to kill American soldiers and had succeeded in that mission.
Claiming otherwise is like claiming the Germans won every battle they ever fought against the American and British air forces in World War II because the planes always retreated at the end of the battle and the Germans held on to the city.
Sure, cite it for me. I’m certain what it says isn’t what you claim it does, because it is patently untrue. The NLF most certainly did not lose control of the countryside due to Tet. There’s a list here of Allied military operations undertaken in 1969, the year after the 1968 Tet offensive. That’s a hell of a lot of clear and search or cordon and search (the term search and destroy having fallen out of favor) operations to be undertaking against an enemy who’s control of the countryside was in your own words “essentially none". Just as an example, the Iron Triangle, only 25 miles north of Saigon, remained a bastion for the NLF throughout the war despite intensive efforts to dislodge them from the area.
Yes, you are still conflating two things, the VC and the NVA, I’m not wanting to use a broader term. You keep insisting that the VC was “essentially destroyed” and “unable to recruit sufficient southerners to maintain operations” when that clearly was not the case. It’s almost sounding like a press release from Westmoreland just prior to Tet on how America was winning the war. Prior to Tet a slight majority of communist forces in the South was VC, after the percentage shifted more towards being NVA. That doesn’t mean the VC ceased to exist, was essentially destroyed, or was unable to recruit sufficient southerners. See the above example of the Iron Triangle.
Wait, didn’t you just say that 30% of the VC were still Southerners just a second ago? Yes, the NVA took a larger and larger role in the war as it went along, but that doesn’t make the VC non-existent either at the end of the war or after Tet, nor does it mean they didn’t contribute greatly to the attrition that wore American support for the war down. In spite of your odd segue into the US Civil War which was quite a different sort of war altogether, there is in fact nothing erroneous in saying the United States won the Civil War. It did. The Confederacy’s attempt at secession failed.
The problem is that the US military had studied how the French had fought and were familiar with the enemy’s tactics. The whole idea of the helicopter-based mobile warfare was to implement non-traditional tactics and to fight by not holding territory but by killing the enemy. In the fight at LZ Albany and other battles, the US got ambushed and suffered a loss, but the US military did not acknowledge it.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have press briefings and emphasis body counts to claim you’re winning the war then afterward whine that because the enemy didn’t fight on traditional fronts that you weren’t losing.
That is not really true. The problem with the position that the U.S. lost no battles (depending on however you define “battle” and “lost”) is that it ignored the fact that the U.S. was not winning the war and in fact was losing it. It was basically a meaningless assertion because it ignored the strategic reality.
In the specific though, LZ Albany was just part of Ia Drang, which I do not think any neutral observer could possibly claim as a victory for the PAVN. Now was it a victory for the U.S.? I lean towards thinking it was inconclusive, with a lean towards it being more credibly called a victory for the U.S. than for the PAVN. Either way though, definitely not an unambiguous defeat or victory for either side. Nor does it really make sense to complain about the U.S. not recognizing “defeat” in one piece of a larger battle. That’s like arguing the U.S. should call parts of the Battle of Gettysburg a defeat since the Confederates got the upper hand in some localized engagements in the larger battle.
Typically the Pentagon would explain less-than-acceptable results in one of two ways. Firstly, say the U.S. was attacked at some point it held and suffered heavy losses in fighting off the attack. It doesn’t matter that the goal of the enemy wasn’t to capture that point, but to harass and inflict casualties, the Pentagon is going to say “we held the territory” so to them that will be a victory.
Secondly, if the U.S. say, suffered a lot of casualties in some engagement, but killed a larger number of the enemy they would tout the body count. If you define victory as a positive kill ratio and / or holding territory under attack then the Pentagon can in truth claim victory in virtually every battle large or small in the entire war. Only a small handful (proportionally) are unambiguously defeats under those criteria. However, there are some battles that the U.S. clearly lost under any real definition of losing, and those were simply unacknowledged as battles or just simply ignored.
So yes, the Pentagon in the 60s/70s was unambiguously duplicitous and full of shit, this was proven repeatedly by internal documents being leaked to the press and etc that gave a more accurate view of how they really viewed the progress of the war. It’s kind of an expected feature of our system though, while possessing some bureaucratic power base of its own the Pentagon is still just a lap dog of the sitting President, they are never going to be a font of uncritical information about the progress of a war when the President wants very much for any uncritical information to not be given out by the Pentagon. Congressional investigations can pry some of that out as military officers are sworn to tell the truth and the political opposition very much wants dirty details, but even then the Pentagon and its power structure are built to respond to the wishes of the President and you can bet the ones who aren’t on board with protecting the President suffer consequences. So really, at least in terms of misleading the public you really have to blame Johnson and Nixon much more than the Pentagon, who by design are not supposed to be oppositional to the Presidency.
From the historical perspective, once you move away from Vietnam as current conflict, you definitely can scorn and mock the Pentagon old guard that spout frankly delusional bullshit along the lines of “not winning the war because our hands were tied behind our backs” or “not winning the war because of domestic politics” or etc, but in the war in the present tense it’s pretty much par for the course that the Pentagon is going to cover up failures as best it can to protect the image of the President conducting the war.
But really, the problem wasn’t so much what the Pentagon’s criteria was for winning or losing individual battles, it was that they thought just harping on about battle victories was an accurate way to portray the conflict as a whole.
Even the British didn’t believe or even try to sell that kind of nonsense about the American Revolution. In a conflict like that, the goal of the British is to stop the rebellion. No one back home cared how many battles they won if the rebellion wasn’t stopped and in fact was getting worse and worse. The British politicians of the day formed a strong anti-war faction in part because they recognized (and the public recognized) the rebellion wasn’t being successfully quelled. That’s the goal when you’re the ruling power trying to end a rebellion: to quell it. Part of that will surely involve some battles here and there and killing the enemy, but in the grand scheme of things until you can actually stop the rebellion from not only perpetuating, but actually increasing in strength, it doesn’t really matter if you win every single battle in the entire war. The country has to stop rebelling to be governable and if that isn’t happening you aren’t winning the war regardless of anything else you want to talk about.
The conflict in Vietnam wasn’t really the same situation as a colonial rebellion some two hundred years prior, but there are actually some valid comparisons that many before have drawn.
Well they can/did, and a lot of people still buy into it, but a lot recognized it as bullshit then and now.
If you do not want to read the cite, not my problem.
I never said the VC had no operations in the South after Tet, by the way, which appears to be the strange point you’re countering.
The Viet Cong was both a political and military movement made up of South Vietnamese people who wanted to overthrow their government, that was their history and their purpose. They worked in coordination with the North, whose government they viewed as the legitimate government of all Vietnam, but they were not part of the North or its military. After Tet, simply too much of their leadership infrastructure and membership were killed for it to continue on along those lines. After Tet the VC is more properly looked at as an unconventional part of the NVA. I never said the VC “ceased to exist”, “was essentially destroyed” but what I did say is as an independent faction the VC ceased to exist after Tet.
Where you seem to be getting confused is this, you seem to think I’m saying the NVA had no operations in Vietnam prior to Tet, I never said that, that’s ludicrous. The NVA conducted both conventional and unconventional operations in South Vietnam during the entirety of the war. But prior to Tet this was in conjunction with the VC which are a truly independent force with its own leadership. After Tet, they were essentially no longer independent. But they were not just simply replaced by NVA forces. You seem to think I made some claim that the VC “were annihilated during Tet, totally ceased to exist, and were replaced exclusively by NVA” I never claimed that. What I said happened, and what did happen, is the VC as an independent faction ceased to exist. But the VC had an organizational and command structure in place, and operational outfits after Tet, the problem was much of their org chart so to speak wasn’t properly filled out. The NVA could have just stopped working with the VC and tried to totally replace their activities, but that made little sense. What instead happened is the VC, which was previously almost entirely made up of people from the South, and lead by Southerners, had lots of NVA leadership move into VC leadership and recruits started coming from the North, too. After Tet the VC operated in conjunction with the NVA as essentially a subordinate part of the NVA’s greater military apparatus (but not part of the PAVN itself) whereas before it was more properly looked at as an independent ally of the North.
Right, which is why I’m confused you are countering some point I never made, that the VC totally ceased to exist. I never said that. You don’t seem to recognize or understand there is a difference between “ceased to exist as an independent faction” and “ceased to exist.” Then you here go on again about “NVA took on a larger and larger role”, you seem to think I’m saying because the NVA took on a larger and larger role that demonstrates the VC ceased to exist. That was not what I was saying. What I was saying, in reference to the VC itself, was that after Tet the VC itself was mostly populated by Northerners and ran by the North, whereas prior to that it was much more independent and ran/populated by Southerners.
The point about the Civil War was to point out how silly it is to say it’s “wrong” that the NVA won the Vietnam War. If it’s wrong to say the NVA won the Vietnam war then it’d be like saying “it’s wrong to say the Union won the Civil War, and insist on saying only that the United States won the Civil War.” I never said it was wrong to say the U.S. won the Civil War, only that it wasn’t wrong and would be ludicrous to say wrong, that the Union won the war. I have no problem with someone saying the “NLF won the Vietnam War” but it’s no more accurate or correct than saying the North won the war.
As we both agree, the Vietnam war is not comparable to the Civil War, but in a convention war which had two clearly separated engagement, then what exactly is wrong with looking at each fight? Side A won this skirmish, they drew in this skirmish? If that’s wrong, then I’m going to have to toss a lot of my history books out the window.
There is a question of how much responsibility does the Pentagon have to be honest to the public, or at least to Congress if they were opposed to a war which the President had ordered. Also what actions do they take. The standard answer is to resign. For the Vietnam War, was there any indication that the Pentagon had any desire to be open about the actual situation and was simply being quiet out of respect for the President? It doesn’t seem to be the case and they were very willing to actively mislead the public. Attempting to shift the blame to the Presidency fails to acknowledge their part. Not that the civilian leadership up to and including the Presidents is in anyway absolved of their responsibility, it’s just that that is outside the scope of this thread.
Or rather, by harping on “battle victories” they actively avoided discussing the overall picture, which was that they were losing.