zander_0633 said:I think the US withdraw from Vietnam and not lost the war.
Zander, you'll need to clarify a bit what you mean. Yes there were cases of street battles, but that's War. Its not why we left. We left because of the pressures exerted by the Anti-War folks back home. The Johnson Administration did a pretty bloody good job of ensuring a very long war in Vietnam by how his people got us in there. In effect, our military had its hands and feet tied, yet still managed to severely bloody the enemy. By the time Nixon took office, the war had gone on for too long and was being run too stupidly by Washington, so he gave a valiant effort to save the situation, but was unsuccessful. The VC had had too many years to learn how to foil the US by then. I put a large chunk of the shame of Vietnam onto Mr Johnson head.zander_0633 said:Well, How come the US had to retreat, I thought the Vietcons forced the US troops into street battles?
That was Sarcasm Zander. Sorry if it wasn't obvious. What my intended meaning was is: My Dad was thinking "Oh crap! I've survived this long and now the whole war just got bigger and busier." His chances of being Killed In Action went up with the addition of Cambodia to the theatre you see.zander_0633 said:?? DId the US invade Cambodia? Well, how come your DAD is excited? I thought war is a cruel thing?
bulldogg said:So according to the parameters of this thread's original poll and combining what you have said WD you would say the US did not militarily lose the war. Correct?
Source: http://www.vhfcn.org/stat.htmlMyth: The United States lost the war in Vietnam.
The American military was not defeated in Vietnam. The American military did not lose a battle of any consequence. From a military standpoint, it was almost an unprecedented performance. (Westmoreland quoting Douglas Pike, a professor at the University of California, Berkley a renowned expert on the Vietnam War) [Westmoreland] This included Tet 68, which was a major military defeat for the VC and NVA.
THE UNITED STATES DID NOT LOSE THE WAR IN VIETNAM, THE SOUTH VIETNAMESE DID.
Facts about the end of the war:
The fall of Saigon happened 30 April 1975, two years AFTER the American military left Vietnam. The last American troops departed in their entirety 29 March 1973. How could we lose a war we had already stopped fighting? We fought to an agreed stalemate. The peace settlement was signed in Paris on 27 January 1973. It called for release of all U.S. prisoners, withdrawal of U.S. forces, limitation of both sides' forces inside South Vietnam and a commitment to peaceful reunification. [1996 Information Please Almanac]
The 140,000 evacuees in April 1975 during the fall of Saigon consisted almost entirely of civilians and Vietnamese military, NOT American military running for their lives. [1996 Information Please Almanac]
There were almost twice as many casualties in Southeast Asia (primarily Cambodia) the first two years after the fall of Saigon in 1975 then there were during the ten years the U.S. was involved in Vietnam. [1996 Information Please Almanac]
Its fine, its an international forum so I shouldn't expect everyone here to automatically correctly interpret every subtlety of the English language.zander_0633 said:ok, sorry, I interpreted it wrongly!
Whispering Death said:No, we lost the war in Vietnam. Just because it defies explination when looking at it through a "conventional" millitary viewpoint does not mean it didn't happen. Saying we didn't lose the vietnam war because we didn't lose a major battle is like saying George Bush wasn't president in 2000 because he didn't win the popular vote. The fact we won every battle turned out to be inconsequential. Want to know why?
The doctorien of the current US army is maneuver warfare. To boil it down to extreme basics, maneuver warfare is dislocating the enemy's strengths. If someone has an impenetrable shield, you maneuver to the side and shoot him in the flank.
The NVA beat us through maneuver warfare on such a grand scale we didn't recognize it. They found that our greatest strength was millitary force or arms, but are biggest weakness was our liberal society ruled by free speach and popular democracy. Instead of attacking the giant shield that is the US Armed Forces directly, they maneuvered to attack the vulnerable naive American people. Through tactics from parading POWs on the liberal media to show how hopeless the situation is to funnelling money into "peace" groups through Russian spys the Communist alliance soundly defeated America by dislocating it's strengths and attacking its weaknesses.
It's moralle warfare... like when the US forces in 1991 broke the moralle of the Iraqi soldiers which forced them to surrender en masse. The same thing occoured on a grander scale in Vietnam, the N.Vietnaese broke the will of the American people and deluded them into abandoning their brave millitary men and surrendering.
Yes well that is not the quesiton being asked by the thread, now is it? Yes, if we take the USA as a whole, Vietnam was a war that we lost. Nobody is questioning that. I think that the real quesiton would be, "Was it because of failure on the US Military's part?" My answer to that is NO.Whispering Death said:No Godofthunder. What I'm saying is that you can't talk about millitarily winning or losing a conflict without talking about the political and diplomatic parts of it. When you talk about WW2 it is impossible to not talk about the economic (America's sleeping giant economy) and the diplomatic (just the word "Allied" Powers). All these factors are what makes up a millitary conflict, not just force of arms.
It's also like after getting defeated by the Mongols a bunch of Roman soldiers saying, "Well their infantry never broke through our lines! They just circled around on horseback shooting arrows into us until we where all dead. They may have defeated us bow-and-arrow-illy but not sword-illy!!!" I know that is a smidge to the rediculous but it's to illustrate a point.
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