RickshawAt it's most basic, American strategy acted as if the fUSSR was a direct counterpart to itself. As the US was controlling and directing the war basically from 1965 onwards, the US Government believed the fUSSR was doing the same in the North. In reality, it was the Vietnamese who called the shots. The fUSSR Ambassador to Hanoi, when he wrote his memoires post-war revealed that when the Politburo met to decide strategy in Hanoi, he'd be kept waiting in the corridor outside until he was called in and presented with a list of equipment requests to enable their strategy to be accomplished.
Did we have any actionable intelligence known to the President, and the Secretary of Defense that realized this?
Down south, in Saigon, the US established a complete shadow government which called the shots for the Republic of Vietnam.
I didn't know that -- admittedly that means that South Vietnam was basically a puppet of the US
No, the fear was that the Chinese hordes would pour south, just as they had in Korea, if the PRC decided that the North was likely to lose the war and the US would establish itself directly on the PRC's southern border.
Did we think this would happen immediately, or would happen only as we had started to build up in numbers near the border?
That has been a question asked ever since. Remember, the US thought it was fighting the fUSSR in Vietnam. The Vietnamese knew they were fighting the US. The Soviet Union had no illusions it was even in the Vietnam War (directly).
They were basically operating around selling them weapons... quite a lot if I recall (from what I remember just around Hanoi there were more artillery than German had in all of WW2)
The result was a disconnect between the reality on the ground and the decision making in Washington.
Was this due to not paying attention to the facts, or the facts weren't clear?
In Rolling Thunder they went for the classic "military-industrial complex" style of target in an attempt to stop the North from being able to wage war on the South.
Didn't they realize that
1. Every nation is different in it's own ways? (General Max Andrews realized this and likened nations to being like watches with all their complexities and moving parts)
2. That there weren't much industrial targets?
3. Did LBJ or McNamara realize that 1 & 2 was so, and couldn't they just order them to do what worked?
In Linebacker, they went for some of the same targets but also concentrated on population centres and harbours
The harbors were to move stuff in and out; the populations were either to nail strong-holds where NV troops were known to be or terrorize the population correct?
even attempted "weather war" (the plan was to see the clouds and cause the rivers to swell, and then the dykes would be bombed and widespread flooding would occur).
Is this why a treaty was created so as to forbid using technology to alter the weather (it sounds nuts but it's there)?
You do realise that Vietnam is in the tropics and it has Tropica/b] rainforests? They don't tend to burn very well...
True enough, but there are chemical substances that can burn very effectively in unusual circumstances: One substance I can think of is Chlorine Trifluoride. The stuff bursts into flames in contact with air and will even cause ashes and concrete to burn (it's some pretty insane stuff), it also has the benefit of producing toxic fumes and hydrofluoric acid which are highly corrosive and eventually cause bones to demineralize and cardiac-arrest (effectively killing anything that's got a pulse); incendiaries based on magnesium are nearly impossible to put out as well.
You should also remember the USAF and Pentagon had been raised on the lessons of WWII. That war had featured classic Douhet/Trenchard/Billy Mitchell air strategy - destroy their industries and their ability to wage war would cease and they would be demoralised and surrender.
Well, the destruction of industrial resources played some role in the defeat of Germany, though their industrial rate went up after they were bombed seemingly every time (I suppose it could have gotten worse, but the fact is sometimes injury stimulates regrowth and improvement -- that is the premise of exercise -- you basically end up causing microscopic tears to the muscle fibers: Your body repairs all the damage; then thickens and strengthens the fibers making it harder to do the same thing requiring increasing exertion to do the same task); early on bombing Japan was a failure because we couldn't carry reasonable bomb-loads to Japan; even when we could and even had fighter escorts: We couldn't hit accurately because of the jet-stream. This resulted in the switch from high altitude "precision" bombing to low altitude incendiary attacks which were aimed predominantly at the population; industrial targets while a goal were secondary. There were some requests to focus on industrial targets so they were hit sometimes deliberately when the weather was good, other times night attacks were done on radar, some attacks were just outright razing of cities.
As for morale: It never broke the back's of the British, who then responded with an avalanche of destruction that only we could approach; Germany surrendered because they were occupied; Japan did surrender from the bomb -- but were incinerating cities by the dozen already -- what made Japan surrender was the fact that there was a shock-n-awe in both the rapidity in which it occurred and the massive fireball that seemed almost like something you'd imagine an angry god doing than something a human created; it also took only one plane to do the job whereas previously around 300 were needed, and this would make it damned near impossible to stop as their aircraft had trouble intercepting B-29's; furthermore they could never launch any equivalent reprisal against us (CONUS). The fact that we dropped them in rapid succession also made it appear as if we had more than we really did
(we had 3... after that we'd need a week to produce another... there were only 7 cities IIRC that we spared so after the first three, there'd be four more bombs over the next month and in that time LeMay's command could have just flattened all those cities the old fashioned way).
Interestingly, I don't know if the civilian population ever rose up at all, or in levels that couldn't be squashed by the Japanese government: Hirohito wanted to surrender, his Generals begged him not to, and some officers may have tried to kill him so he couldn't broadcast the message. Still if you argue -- we dropped the bomb and they surrendered -- yes, it did. However, Germany didn't despite the fact that we had basically smashed and burned every city to rubble without a nuke (I suppose they figured if it worked in Japan, it'd work in Germany admittedly).
If the Pentagon was dictating everything
I was under the impression that the level of micromanaging was unique to Vietnam compared to WW2 and Korea...
It had worked against Germany, it had worked against Japan and it had sort of worked against North Korea, therefore it would work against North Vietnam.
I'm not really an expert on the Korean war... I know there were bombing attacks but I don't know to what extent...
Would you be amenable if I took this to PM on the What If Forum? I could ask more questions without clogging up the forum.
Partially. It was, too. The US Marines tended to be more successful mounting "hearts and minds" operations and saw value in doing so
Because they were smart -- especially when fighting an enemy like this their minds are so made up that you'll basically have to kill every last one of them in order for them to crack. Hell CIA's Operation Phoenix made things nightmarish
(and mind-numbingly cruel -- all targeted at civilians, torture, rape, and behavior that looks like it was from either the Dark Ages or something that only the deranged could conjure up), yet they still kept going anyway.
the US Army was often half-hearted and preferred just to "kill everybody and let God sort 'em out!"
Half-hearted isn't quite the word I'd have used -- half-minded maybe -- but not half hearted.
Funnily enough, I'm reading a book at the moment on the Soviet experience in Afghanistan and their attitude was very similar. Their view was the US was the enemy and Europe was where it was going to be fought. They made similar mistakes to the US.
Yeah, and the Afghanis did the devil to them (there were cases where they skinned people alive and turned them inside out or something) -- the Russians responded by doing the devil back: They were killing everything that moved, rigging bombs that looked like toys to murder children figuring that it would take more resources to take care of a child so as to tie up everybody in having to take care of their mangled children. The sad thing is most people when pushed hard enough are capable of actions just as sadistic and sociopathic in nature.
Smaller armies tend to adopt more flexible approaches to wars. The British and by extension the Commonwealth had a long history of "imperial policing", dealing with insurgencies/rebellions/etc. They also tended to concentrate a great deal more on small unit tactics and this was reflected in their approach to tackling "Wars of Liberation".
Didn't the British tell the US that it would be suicide to go into Vietnam?
The real lessons of Malaya, where the Communists were beaten, weren't applied in Vietnam and instead policies which were ill-suited were undertaken on advice from British "experts" with disastrous results.
Wait, if the British knew what to do in Malaya, why did the "experts" fuck us over so bad in Vietnam?
BTW: Would you be amenable if I took this to PM on the What If Forum? I could ask more questions without clogging up the forum.
