The Viet Cong were astonished when 'the most respected man in America' announced that they won the Tet Offensive.
Up to that point they were certain they had lost.
Posted on 04/19/2015 7:22:12 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Forty years ago this April, our nation lost the Vietnam War – a war that America could easily have won, and should have. South Vietnam had been invaded by North Vietnam, although the conflict was portrayed by communist apologists as a “civil war.” The Viet Cong did fight, but the primary enemy of the South Vietnam was North Vietnam.
The SEATO alliance pledged France, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan and America to come to the aid of South Vietnam if that nation was attacked by another nation. The moral obligation of France, the colonial power that held Southeast Asia, and Britain, which held Malaya, was greater than our obligation. We had, after all, granted independence to our only possession in Asia, the Philippines, before Pearl Harbor.
North Vietnam was not just an aggressor, but a particularly brutal aggressor and a particularly evil regime. The conduct of the war by the communists in South Vietnam was calculated and sadistic terrorism, particularly focusing on threats to members of the family or the local village, who had no political views at all. Children, for example, were tortured and maimed if their parents opposed the communists.
The consequences of losing a winnable war were even worse. Cambodia experienced genocide equal to the worst crimes against humanity in modern history. The victorious North Vietnamese sent millions to their own concentration camps, and millions of “boat people” fled in desperation as well. Throughout the new communist region, people suffered appallingly.
Communism, as always, promises to help the people but always instead delivers grinding poverty. The noncommunist nations in Southeast Asia – Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia – are all much more prosperous than Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. These communist nations also have dramatically less political and civil freedom than their neighbors.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Yup! I well remember that military victory epitomized by the iconic photo of the helicopter on the embassy roof. Now all shout,"USA...USA...USA!" Then go look at the Granite wall in DC.
The Viet Cong were astonished when 'the most respected man in America' announced that they won the Tet Offensive.
Up to that point they were certain they had lost.
Wars that do not have defined boundaries and placements put in are that way. That is why Iraq and Afghanistan is so hard to put down, simply because resupply and foreign fighters can simply reenter the battlefield. Just as the N. Vietnamese were constantly being supplied from Chinese and Russian support.
I render a hand salute to all who served there, and to our brothers who gave their all.
I recently did a search of newspaper archive on my unit in Viet Nam for the time I was there.
What I read surprised me. The newspapers were reporting as it happened where the units were, the size of the units what their goal was along with casualties.
How hard would it have been for the Soviets to send copies to North Viet Nam?
I have now come to the conclusion we were never suppose to “win” the war. Viet Nam was a proxy war, designed to bleed the communist nations. Our leaders were willing to spend money and the other side was willing to spend blood.
In this case, with a fifth column working in our nation, the side wiling to do a rope a dope won that war.
I will leave it to historians to decides if the strategy was the correct one, and in the end who won the ideological war since all our elite leaders as well as the main stream media appear to be socialist, I suspect we lost that war as well.
Recommended reading...”An American Amnesia: How The US Congress Forced The Surrender of SVN and Cambodia” by Bruce Herschenson...
After our troops obliterated the Viet Cong as a fighting force and fought the NVA to a standstill, the actions of the 94th Congress betrayed the troops, their sacrifices, our gains and the SVN people...
We didn’t “lose” the war, it was won militarily...The SVN needed the military assistance the US promised them to secure their right to self-determination...
And then the Leftist-controlled 94th Congress betrayed that victory and handed the North everything it couldn’t win on the battlefield...
Check it out and see what you think...
the Soviets had issued an order to the Soviet navy to provide escorts for Soviet merchant vessels in the event that Haiphong was blockaded or a Soviet vessel bombed in Haiphong harbor. This order also allegedly called for efforts to break any blockade, including steps to sweep minefields.
politicians LOST... not the military
for future wars politicians must serve on the FRONT LINES AT POINT for 6 months .....
raymond engineering
morrison knudsen (now washington group)
brown and root
j a jones
CRONY KICKBACK CAPITALISM.....
rmkbrj
vinell
rockwell
lockheed general dnamics boeing northrup grumman ge (we bring death to life)
beware of the military industrial comples.... IKE
why
because they fabricate WAR and reap the profits...
THE VOLUNTEER MILITARY IS FODER FOR THE CORRUPTOCRATS
obama empties his colon on them... same for hildebeast
WAKE UP
I saw a news story several years ago about a fellow who had been a North Vietnamese Soldier fighting in South Vietnam when South Vietnam fell. He said that at that time, there were no North Vietnamese males left in North Vietnam. The males in North Vietnam at that time were Chinese. Every able-bodied North Vietnamese male had been sent to South Vietnam.
The Chinese were quietly filling up North Vietnam and we were quietly killing those Chinese Soldiers.
We emptied the male population out of North Vietnam, but the Chinese back-filled them.
And look at what they won. A whole new crop of rich and powerful. The Chinese were moving factories to Vietnam a few years ago because they could get away with paying workers $100 a month. There’s a victory for communism. The head guys are being driven around in Mercedes limousines while the regular people are working for $5 a day.
Yup, even their top military leader, General Giap, admitted in his memoirs that the North was losing and close to throwing in the towel. Between Cronkite's erroneous reporting and the hippies, he changed his mind.
There are too many people yet alive, Don, for anyone to be able to perpetuate successfully the myth behind the fraudulent MSM BS photo, Don.
The photo will likely outlive us all, however, and survive in the history books courtesy of the left.
The photo they want to burn into your mind was taken some 2 years after US ground forces had decimated the NVN and left the region.
The folks on the rooftop were not US military personnel, they were individuals who had assisted the US or who otherwise had ample reason to believe they would be assassinated by the arriving NVN.
Much, if not all of that lift and other local air operations at the time was by SVN choppers and pilots. US air assets at the time were largely a normal part of off shore naval forces.
Would you please fix your damn tagline!
Precisely. We won every major battle, from the Ia Drang, to A Shau valley, Kontum to Tet.
My father and his counterpart commanded ARVN troops, and as late as `72 they were bravely killing NVA tanks with LAWs in the central highlands.
Democrats started the war, then didn’t have the stomach for it—and lost it.
The old man—Airborne and Ranger, CIB, EIB, Legion of Merit, Bronze Star and Air Medals—died from Agent Orange complications about a year ago.
On his behalf, let me say that anyone who says that American troopers lost or surrendered in Vietnam can kiss my ass.
This son of a WWII, Korea and Vietnam vet Marine agrees.
The DEMOCRATS lost the war just as they are doing in the mid east and with the same results.
A US invasion of North Vietnam would have put American troops on China's border. This was seen as out of the question because it was calculated -- correctly -- as certain to lead to direct military intervention by China, just as happened in Korea. This would put the US in another lengthy and costly Asian war with China that would weaken NATO and undermine our position in Europe. This would in turn create a dangerous military and political opening for the Soviets to force Europe to abandon NATO and align with the USSR in return for a guarantee against military attack and a relatively free hand in domestic matters.
Our original goal in South Vietnam was to brake the progress of Communism in Asia. In the 1950s and 1960s, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, and several other countries in the region were seen as vulnerable if Communism prevailed in South Vietnam. In the 1960 campaign, Jack Kennedy took up that view and criticized the Eisenhower administration's refusal to commit to a defense of South Vietnam.
Once in office, Kennedy put US advisers and troops into South Vietnam. With our men on the ground in combat and South Vietnam's government disintegrating, we were stuck. We then discovered that as much as Kennedy and Johnson and the country did not want to lose in South Vietnam, we had no clear understanding of how to achieve victory.
Worse, the US Army lacked the institutional knowledge of how to defeat a popular insurgency. As it was, Westmoreland -- beloved of his fellow generals but vain and dense as a rock -- adopted search and destroy tactics that put the US tactically on the offensive and incurring casualties in pursuit of a strategy of attrition.
Westmoreland's approach led to absurdly inflated body counts promoted as a false metric of victory, the expansion of US ground forces in Vietnam to over half a million men, and to a collapse in public support for the war effort once the 1968 Tet offensive demonstrated a lack of clear progress toward a US victory. Fortunately, at that dark moment, Westmoreland was relieved and his replacement -- Creighton Abrams -- embraced classic counter-insurgency doctrines. It worked.
Even with US troops being rapidly withdrawn, Abrams destroyed the Viet Cong and pacified the South Vietnamese countryside. When South Vietnam fell in 1975, it was to a conventional invasion from North Vietnam that was enabled by the cutoff of war funds by a Democratic Congress with a large class of anti-war radicals elected in 1974 due to the Watergate scandal and a weak US economy.
If one is looking for alternative history scenarios, one can imagine a free South Vietnam today if Abrams was in charge of the war early on instead of Westmoreland and there was no Watergate scandal. Yeah, I too love to imagine Iowa class battleships pummeling North Vietnam, followed by a crushing conventional invasion, but that is implausible due to the near certainty of Chinese intervention and a US-China ground war.
People shouldn’t discount the endemic corruption of the South Vietnamese regime. It becomes magnitudes more difficult to win when your key ally, the one who you are shedding blood and treasure to defend and protect on their own soil, have a national leaderships that is so completely unworthy of help.
All too true. A friend of mine fought several tours in Vietnam and was a friend and colleague of John Paul Vann’s and part of his body detail. Oz liked the Vietnamese as individuals but saw them as mostly having little sense of responsibility for the fate of their country. Sadly, many of Oz’s stories about his Vietnamese friends ended with a report of them being killed in reeducation camps.
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