Originally Posted by
Azor
Outlaw,
Le Carr was not wrong in his opinion that Germans are such literalists. I will reply in-kind then, with no dark humor or attempt at objective detachment.
Yet Giap refused to repeat the admission of 500,000 NLF/NVA fatalities through 1968 when interviewed in 1990 by Karnow. An aide of Giaps later claimed that the Communists lost at least a million combatants, primarily to the U.S (Karnow, 1990). Authors of Inside the VC and the NVA suggest that Giap was inflating Communist casualties to impress the West with North Vietnams determination to win the war (Lanning and Craig, 2008).
Not exactly. How long could the South Vietnamese state have survived a combination of NVA conventional warfare lavishly supported by the Soviet Union and China on the one hand, and NLF subversion and guerrilla warfare on the other, even with U.S. materiel? Certainly U.S. airpower could have prevented a major conventional offensive by the NVA, but then Hanoi could have resorted to less conventional methods as well as expanding its IADS southward as part of a bite and hold strategy (e.g. Egypts Operation Badr in 1973). Regardless, South Vietnam was not a particularly strong state that its dependency on the U.S. was the crux of the problem. The U.S. defined victory as a strong and allied U.S. state in South Vietnam, albeit probably one that was far more liberal and democratic at the outset than was required either of South Korea or Taiwan.
Militarily, Johnsons restrictions on the use of airpower prior to and during his ground escalation was the death knell for the U.S. effort. By the time Nixon unleashed the B-52s, Hanoi was more than ready and had had years to prepare.
By the wars end, the U.S. had lost the hearts and minds of Americans and Westerners, despite the fact that the Communists were mass murderers and were also sectarian, targeting Catholics for some of the worst treatment. In a similar vein, note that the popular conception in the West of the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War is the idealism of the International Brigades, rather than the raping of nuns and crucifixion of priests, NKVD assassinations, and the dominant role of the Soviet Union. Properly educating people on these histories now would be akin to conducting a fair trial of the Ceausescus.
In many respects, the Vietnam War was a U.S. own goal. It did not commit to South Vietnam the way it had to Western Europe, Taiwan and South Korea, or even the way it had to former foes Germany, Italy and Japan. The U.S. tried to accomplish with a light footprint what only a heavy bootprint would do. The former level of effort was more than enough to set Indochina ablaze (paraphrasing Churchill), and force the Communists into meting out mass murder in frustration, thereby tarnishing their reputation in the manner of Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan (1979).
While the U.S. was busy covering up problems in Vietnam, it was busy producing corny videos of its successes. Yet these rather silly propaganda clips of South Koreans, Germans, Taiwanese and Japanese being brothers-in-arms and just like us (going for dinner and dancing), demonstrate the U.S. commitment to strong and friendly states for these diverse peoples. Interestingly, much as South Vietnam was outside the tent, so too is Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen et al.
The U.S. presence in Europe and East Asia today is as much about alliance solidarity and deterring Sino-Russian aggression as it is about preventing the rise of hostile state and non-state threats in these regions.
But how does 400 Communist bodies counted transform into 4.4 million dead and missing?
Yet the B-52 was not the best tool for that sort of unconventional work. I read that on average each B-52 load dropped on the HCM trail killed three NLF/NVA personnel because of issues with accuracy, but I would have to get back to you with sourcing. The U.S. was so vexed by the Trail that it considered salting the area with fiberglass shards to irritate the skin of those who frequented it.
In any event, the danger of the Trail to any U.S. intervention in South Vietnam was foreseen by Kennedys Brain Trust. Compare the geography of South Korea to South Vietnam and one can instantly see the tyranny at work.
Well, how about we refer to Guenter Lewys work America in Vietnam (1978)? He reduced U.S. estimates of NLF/NVA deaths by 30% to account for U.S. soldiers killing civilians and then claiming that they were combatants. If Lewys figures are to be believed, the NLF/NVA only lost some 530,000 between 1955 and 1975.
Now, if I have any issue with R.J. Rummels research, it is that he includes outliers to arrive at his middle estimates, including minimizers such as Lewy as well as maximizers. Yet his inclusion of low and high estimates provides a range which one can use to determine if a specific estimate is reasonable or unreasonable. Given that the highest estimate for NLF/NVA deaths is 1.5 million, your suggestion of 4.4 million (KIA and MIA) is utterly ridiculous.
Any person familiar with studies on mass murder and casualties of war should be familiar with Rummels work, whether one accepts it on an unqualified basis or not. Rummels middle estimate of 1.1 million deaths is corroborated by both the Vietnamese government (1995) and the British Medical Journal (2008).
As I recall, the Americans fled from the rooftop of the embassy in Saigon and had to push helicopters off carrier decks into the sea in order to make room for fleeing citizens and South Vietnamese refugees. Therefore, there was no opportunity for Americans to fully count the bodies on the ground or get a proper measure of the ground reality, was there?
Bookmarks