Posted on 02/27/2023 5:47:51 AM PST by MtnClimber
Triumph Retaken shows that America’s war in Vietnam could have been won earlier at far less cost, and in fact almost was, even belatedly by 1968.
Military historian and Hillsdale College professor Mark Moyar has just published Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968, which is the second in what will become a massive three-volume revision of the entire Vietnam War. It is a book that should be widely read, much discussed, and reviewed in depth regardless of one’s view of that sad chapter in American diplomacy and conflict in Vietnam.
The first book, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 appeared in 2006. It gained considerable attention for its heterodox analysis of the postwar origins of communist aggression against the South, beginning with the disastrous French colonial experience and its transference to the Americans. Moyar described the Byzantine intrigue through which the Kennedy Administration inserted American ground troops into Vietnam, and why and how his successor Lyndon B. Johnson rapidly escalated the American presence.
Moyar’s controversial argument in volume one centered on the disastrous decisions of these two administrations that ensured Americans would be sent into an uninviting distant theater of operations in the dangerous neighborhood of both communist China and Russia. Worse, they would be asked to fight under self-imposed limitations of the nuclear age in which their leaders could not achieve victory or perhaps even define it.
Still, Moyar argued that there was nevertheless a chance to achieve a South-Korean-like solution at much less cost, one that was thrown away through a series of American blunders. Most grievous was the American support for the 1963 coup that removed South-Vietnamese strongman president Ngo Dinh Diem and led to his almost immediate assassination‚ even as he was evolving into a viable wartime leader.
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
VDH ping
That bassturd, SeeBS’s Walter Crankcase helped the commies win that one.
We never should have been in Vietnam.
“their leaders could not achieve victory or perhaps even define it.”
My dad flew Phantoms out of Da Nang for all of 1970. For the rest of his life, virtually his only comment on Vietnam was, “they wouldn’t let us win“, and he placed the blame squarely on military leadership, which was a bunch of political animals motivated by ambition.
Colonel, USAF JAGCR (Ret)
“We have to fight them over there so we don’t fight them here!” … or some sh!t like that. :-P
The Vietnam War, in which America was the victor in military battles, is perhaps the most manifest modern example of how propaganda affected the outcome of a war, with much of the mainstream media being an all too willing instrument of such, especially CBS News with Walter Cronkite. Cronkite’s infamous report on the Tet Offensive was suspected to be one of the reasons why then-President Lyndon B. Johnson decided not to pursue reelection.[67]
In an exchange during one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. told his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu, “You know, you never beat us on the battlefield,” Colonel Tu responded, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”[68]
The Tet Offensive was portrayed by the New York liberal media as a defeat for the U.S., while in fact, it was an almost disastrous defeat for the North Vietnamese, as General Westmoreland and historians agree. The Viet Cong not only lost half of the 90,000 troops they had committed to battle, but it was virtually destroyed as an army.[69] Some false reports made by biased journalists include claiming the VC managed to overrun five floors of the American embassy, when in reality they never even managed to get past the main entrance, or Newsweek showing 18 out of 29 images depicting Marines either dead or huddled behind cover, neglecting to mention that they were pushing back the NVA onslaught.[70]
British “Encounter” journalist Robert Elegant stated,
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and television screens - never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought, by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondent’s own side.[71]
Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, “Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there.” In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he asked,
What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?... Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi’s repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won “without the Western press.”[72] Ironically, it was also because of the bias from the Western press, in particular The New York Times, that caused the NVA to undergo their Tet Offensive with overconfidence that they would cause the entire South Vietnamese to embrace Communism and go against Capitalism and Saigon.[73]
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite regularly carried news reports from its Moscow Bureau Chief, Bernard Redmont. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became CBS News Paris Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was that he had been a KGB operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious Silvermaster group.[74] Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow Comintern party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called “the living room war.”
The single most explicit example of such biased reporting is typically seen to be the portrayal of the Tet offensive, as mentioned above, in which Western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the Communists.
Truong Nhu Tang, a founder of the National Liberation Front, and a minister of justice for the Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - one of the most determined adversaries of the US during the war - stated years later,
The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang, The New York Review, October 21, 1982)
In addition to Cronkite’s biased reporting, FBI documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Yahoo! News offer evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.[75] - https://www.conservapedia.com/Liberal_bias#Vietnam_War
I disagree.
IMO, the world was a different place back then, and Communism was on the ascendancy. Communism stopped gaining ground around the world only when Ronald Reagan went into office and began fighting back against it rather than engaging in “Detante”, which he vehemently disagreed with.
I think in today’s prism, we might say that there is no strategic interest for us to be involved in a war in Vietnam (in the same way there is no reason for us to be involved in Ukraine) but back then, in the Sixties, Communism was getting countries added to its ranks.
But I wholly agree that the way we fought that war was shameful and wasteful (not the men doing the fighting-the people like McNamara and LBJ making the totally politically based decisions.)
I understand we may disagree on this, and I respect your point of view, even if I don’t agree with it.
Michael Lind’s unorthodox but well-argued thesis that the “necessary” Vietnam War sought to ensure American Cold War credibility and diverted communist aggression from other more strategically important U.S. allies and vulnerable neutrals.
The latter thesis is typically ignored.
Re #4, yes. Tell that to Truman, Ike, JFK, and LBJ.
Re #4, yes. Tell that to Truman, Ike, JFK, and LBJ.
The military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us against needed to sell war materiel to refill they pockets with cash. The FED was in the end to the business cycle and needed to refill the reserves that they had pilfered. The gold backed dollar was holding then back so they got rid of it making trillions in the process and went to the worthless fed one that they could manipulate. Follow the money!!!
I don't, however, see how there can be debate on the lack of our civilian leadership's effort to win. Sadly, it seems as Yogi would say, "It's deja vuall over again" in the Ukraine.
the actions of
British Commission for Military History, January 2023, page 38
British Commission for Military History » Mars & Clio, January 2023 (bcmh.org.uk)
www.bcmh.org.uk https://twitter.com/Mars_Clio ... https://twitter.com/BCMH_ECR_
38
W. R. (Bob) Baker, Break in the Chain: Intelligence Ignored: Military Intelligence in Vietnam and why the Easter Offensive should have turned out differently. Casemate: Philadelphia and Oxford, 2021. pp. 251.
Bob Baker’s Break in the Chain is difficult to categorize. It is, in part, an American soldier’s Vietnam memoir and, as such, one of a vast number, though accounts by enlisted men such as Baker, are rarer than those by officers. In addition to personal recollections, however, Baker aims to offer unprecedented depth of analysis of aspects of one of the war’s greatest events: the massive Communist offensive that commenced at Easter 1972.
Though, in November, the vast majority would vote for a presidential candidate who claimed to offer “peace with honor”, there was, on the part of the American public in 1972, an increasing sense of detachment from the war in Vietnam and a growing desire to be rid of it. Under pressure of public opinion, the vast majority of American infantry and artillery units had, by the beginning of the year, already been withdrawn, though some logistical units, combat aircraft and helicopter units remained. In addition, American advisors (though far fewer than previously) were still serving with the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF) - troops belonging to the anti-Communist government of South Vietnam. Finally, and often forgotten, while many American intelligence personnel had gone, some remained, and Baker was one of these.
It is well documented that, in what was, for them, the final phase of the war, 1968-1972, there was a profound decline in the morale of American armed forces. By the early 1970’s, they exhibited widespread problems of indiscipline: alcohol and narcotic abuse; racial hostility and violence; combat avoidance and combat refusal; and, at the most extreme end of the spectrum, the practice known as “fragging”: murderous attacks on officers and NCOs. The picture was, however, very mixed, with some combat units apparently continuing to function reasonably well as late as 1971.
“they wouldn’t let us win“
No kidding! I was there from ‘66 - ‘72. Civilian Contractor (IBM).
The $$$ was flowing to the MIC & politicians who had links to “support” entities. AB&T and USAID immediately come to mind. Millions a day were ripped off. And most got away with it.
Good post.
I believe it was back in the Sixties that the Communists fully realized how vulnerable our national actions were to being directed and shaped by hostile elements via the use of propaganda and domestic public opinion.
They knew all that before the Sixties, of course, but I suspect they didn’t realize just how easy it would be to implement, especially with the help of Fellow Travelers/Useful Idiots like Walter Cronkite.
Heck, now we have vast swaths of the political parties, on both sides of the aisle, up to and including the President who are willing to serve the role of Fellow Traveler/Useful Idiot to fulfill the goals of a hostile power.
Nixon had the war won in 1972 with his bombings of everything and port minings but by that time all he wanted was the POWs. Had the bombings lasted another week, the NVs would have been finished and sued for peace at our price.
Yes, it could have won if we had mined their harbors and hit them where it hurt most instead of bombing swaths of empty jungle.
Also know as a Fifth Column The first identified public use of the term is in the October 3, 1936, issue of the Madrid Communist daily Mundo Obrero. I... A series of photos run in the June 1940 issue of Life magazine warned of "signs of Nazi Fifth Column Everywhere". In a speech to the House of Commons that same month, Winston Churchill reassured MPs that "Parliament has given us the powers to put down Fifth Column activities with a strong hand."[22] In July 1940, Time magazine referred to talk of a fifth column as a "national phenomenon".[23]
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