Vietnam War Question

[Dill]

(10-07-2017, 08:26 PM)Bengalzona Wrote: We didn't invade North Vietnam because we didn't want the the war to escalate and include Chinese and Russian troops, which would have also expanded the war to the Korean Peninsula and Germany and probably would have involved nuclear weapons at some point.

We were in South Vietnam at the invite of the South Vietnamese government. A government can invite another country to send their troops to help defend them. By the same token, North Vietnam could have invited Russia and China to send troops to help them if they felt there was a need for it. That was what happened in Korea. When we pushed deep into North Korea, the North Koreans requested aid from China and China sent millions of troops across the border. Eventually, we stabilized a line and were able to negotiate a ceasefire with the Chinese and North Koreans (after we threatened to use nuclear weapons).

When we started bombing targets in North Vietnam, they responded by ordering air defense radars, missiles and guns from China and Russia and created one of the most advanced air defense networks our airmen have faced to date (which is why we lost so many aircraft during the war). There is no doubt that if we had invaded with ground troops, they would have responded with requests to Russia and China for combat troops.

That is why we took the defense and set our goal only on preventing incursions and insurrections in South Vietnam. And that probably would have been successful if the South Vietnamese would have had a government that wasn't full of corrupt and nepotistic turds and dumbasses representing only a small fraction of the South Vietnamese population.

Excellent points, B-zona.   Back in the 80s, I met a Chinese national who said he would have certainly been willing to "go south" as a soldier if the US invaded North Vietnam. The guy was an opera singer, not a soldier, and he liked Americans.  But like many East Asians, he viewed the US as another Western colonial threat, if its soldiers set foot anywhere in Asia.

To expand upon your last point--many Americans still do not realize that the North's Leader, Ho Chi Minh, was regarded as their George Washington by the Vietnamese, including by a majority in the South.  It was HE who threw out the French so the Vietnamese could have their own country. The weak corrupt regimes in the South then tried to capitalize on the Vietminh victory by scrapping the Geneva accords and setting up an administration of mostly former--much hated--colonial officials.  The US wanted to "stop the dominoes from falling" and create a buffer state like South Korea, so it recognized the Diem government.  But South Korea had a mass of hard core rightist, anti-communists.  South Vietnam did not. It had a mass of anti-colonialists who credited Ho with their freedom.

Imagine if, after the colonies won their independence from Great Britain, the Carolinas seceded from the new US government in 1791, lead by Tories and British sympathizers whom most Americans considered traitors, and then Great Britain recognized them and began building them an army. Out of work Carolinians took soldier pay, so they got their army, though with poor morale. Other Carolinians rebelled, joined by their brothers to the north, perhaps led by Washington again, and Great Britain decried US "aggression." That would be somewhat analogous to the Vietnam war, as viewed by most Vietnamese at the time.  At least considering this analogy would help Americans understand the dynamic, whereby northerners were willing to march south for months and fight to the death, while well armed and relatively well paid southerners could not withstand them without American air support.

I should add, too, that invading the North would have been unimaginably expensive and costly, even if China and Russia did not send help. Americans would have to do it, not South Vietnamese, and they might take large cities, but the guerrilla war would continue into the countryside. If Americans at home already had a problem with a pointless occupation that cost almost 60,000 US lives and greatly damaged Johnson's domestic programs, how would they feel about losing another 100,000?  Think about the invasion in stand alone terms for a moment, then come back to the real world and add a sudden infusion of 500,000 Chinese ground troops with tanks, artillery and thousands of SAMs.

B-zona you probably remember Johnson and Nixon also considered bombing the dams and dikes in the North, to destroy their agriculture. Why do you suppose they held off on that?