Did america lose the vietnam war reddit. I am a Vietnam veteran (68-69) with a Purple Heart.

Did america lose the vietnam war reddit Somewhat late in the war, America did bomb civilian targets as a matter of policy. Thank. And at great cost too. English books on the North Vietnamese side are only now being published. At the end of this war, North Vietnam was a communist dictatorship led by Ho Chi Minh while South Vietnam was all that remained of French colonial rule. The Portal for Public History. Maybe the 2500 that got shot down was their whole air force. The first image of dead US soldiers in World War II wasn't viewable to the public until September 1943 ("Three Dead Americans at Buna Beach", published in LIFE), while much of the Vietnam War was reported on by nightly television news - Americans could watch footage of US Marines in combat in Hue in 1968 in color, with sound, and with casualties visible, in a way that was The Vietnam war is a complex topic, and I don't to get into the long road to its origins or why the US lost, but let's talk about nuclear weapons in Vietnam, which is a relatively bounded issue. First of all, the public support for the war was increasingly low by the end of the war. Mostly planes doing CAS, not strike missions, but definitely concerning the USAF. The war certainly showed everyone that conventional military support is a fools errand in a guerilla conflict. However, this view is incorrect. In the end, America withdrew from the war and North Vietnam accomplished her war goals. American soldiers were better fed, better equipped, better supported and better trained, and they did their job well. In other words, we were fighting two wars. Vietnam lasted twenty (1955-1975). But one thing that we did get out of it was to show the Soviets that we were committed to the doctrine of the Domino Theory. The south Vietnamese government we were supporting lost the war, and the northern Vietnamese government we were opposing took control of Vietnam. Politically it was a loss. The military had a lot of success on the battlefield, but not decisive enough to end the war. Get the Reddit app Scan this QR code to download the app now but I would say that we stayed because Johnson and Nixon did not want to be "the first president to lose a war" more than we stayed for testing tech. It’s not a silly question. Bottom line, the Vietnam-American War was a horrible war that we should have never gone into, much like Iraq (as an American / U. S. America lost the war because they pulled out. It's the South Vietnamese who really paid the ultimate price. Meanwhile in Vietnam bombing villages sometimes killed Viet Cong and almost always built support for resisting the murders who bombed the villages. Or The US joined Vietnam in 1964, the war itself started in 1955 and was almost 10 years old at the point. Our troops had been gone for a while Get the Reddit app Scan this Why did you Americans lose the Vietnam War when you won against the Communist rebels in the Philippines during the years 1946-1954? HISTORY Did you simply know the Philippines better (that country was after all essentially an American colony until 1946) than Vietnam or are there other important They did lose a lot militarily, but the amount of trickery, subterfuge and psychological warfare they conducted allowed for the American public to lose support for the conflict and turn against the government, forcing them to stop the war. Americans never achieved their political mission of isolating communism but they killed far more VC’s than VC’s killed American. the basic problem with US Vietnam policy was the idea that you can win wars by attrition and superior equipment rather than by taking the enemy’s territory, subduing the population, and holding that territory like, uh, pretty much every land war in human history. The US involvement in Vietnam was part of a military phenomena called “containment. Edit: lmao america lost 7k total for the entirety of the wars in the middle east post 9/11 and it's discussed parallel to manner the war in vietnam was. The Americans fought the Vietnam War with a bad strategy and there certainly were the protesters. North Vietnam and the Viet Cong conquered the South and reunited the country under a socialist system. A often forgotten conflict of the Cold war is the Vietnam war. It had recent combat experience and The American media got hold of stories of American atrocities in Vietnam, including the My Lai massacre, and that fueled the anti-war effort. Get the Reddit app Scan this How did South Vietnam lose the Vietnam War despite having a much larger army than North Vietnam? Most sources that I can find say that even when America withdrew its forces that South Vietnam had significantly more troops and The German narrative was that the army hadn't lost the war but had been betrayed by those on the home front. So political pressure and military failures eventually led to our withdrawal and inevitable loss of the war. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan seem like distant alien worlds by comparison. It was becoming political suicide. South Vietnam was also seen as a puppet government for foreign powers to By contrast, regular US troops deployed to Vietnam in large numbers beginning in 1965, marking the official start to the ground war a full ten years after the US began its direct involvement and roughly the same time as McNamara had begun losing confidence in his own strategy; that is, the principal architect of the war had lost confidence in his ability to bring it to a successful Get the Reddit app Scan this QR code to download the app now. Crypto America didn't suffer a military defeat in the sense that they lost a battle. Well anyway the point of my post is the Vietnamese population here are the most successful demographic in the city, two parent families, higher income than other ethnic groups, perform better in education. Answers must be in-depth and comprehensive, or they will be removed. The way the war was fought in Vietnam was a cluster in so many ways. I would like to take the opportunity to recommend Ken Burns’ recent documentary series: The Vietnam War. Americans had fatigue with Afghanistan like a decade ago when the war was already a decade old. We lost control when we decided we'd never eliminate islamism in that country. While the North did suffer higher casualties, the massive disparity that you are imagining with regards to the dead is due to the fact you are omitting casualties sustained by the allies of the US forces, most importantly the South Vietnamese (but also Australia, Thailand, and South Korea, the three other nations to lose at The Communist leadership of NK wouldn't have even been around if they hadn't been protected from the Japanese by the USSR. We lost. Tank vs tank engagements did occur in Vietnam, but were not common early on. They were going to come in and liberate Vietnam from communist influence and restore democracy. Arguably the first signs that the US was going to lose the war were in 1965, with the very existence of Project 100,000, which we can see as a quiet admission that the US could not see a way to win the war without a massive investment of troops and material that it did not have and could not find except a) actually asking the American public at large to actually support the While some might not say that the Vietnam war was any worse than other wars, I'm very certain that it's one of the few wars that truly severely damaged those doing the fighting. they kicked out french, japanese, chinese, usa with their allies. Answer by Tony Morse, managing partner, Spatial Analysis Group: Basically because the Vietnamese wanted to win more than the Americans did. war educated me, and told that USA did NOT lose. Ngo Dinh Diem was a dumbass and a Considering that the Chinese and Soviets directly intervened in the korean war but did not in the Vietnam war yet the Americans and South Vietnam lost. I would say, that is more reflective of their age than merely being American. Vietnam had an ongoing civil war long before the Americans arrived. As we all know, the Vietnam War was a tie and if America juuuust held out for a couple more months, they would have crushed the entire Viet Cong. Source: A good read on the subject of the latter half of the war under Gen. But go It's still one of the best first person documentary style films on the war in Vietnam. We were in South Vietnam with the permission and even by request of the South Vietnamese government. A lot of Americans thought it was a theater in the next world war, like the Posted by u/HistAnsweredBot - 1 vote and no comments Therefore the two war aims of America, to invade Canada and stop impressment fail. The US did a lot of things right in the war. the media at this time did turn towards the negatives of the war which the war was brutal and i do agree that sometimes the American government Many historians believe this was a lie Many historians believe that the 2nd Gulf of Tonkin incident was a lie. In many ways the American War of Independence was divisive in the Britain much in the same way that the Vietnam War divided American LBJ very much limited the American capabilities in Vietnam. The US lost thousands of aircraft in Vietnam, and only dozens in Desert Storm, which, although not too long, was still a massive operation. Here in Houston we have a rather large Vietnamese community, so much so that some local OTA tv channels are in Vietnamese and Chinatown is really more like Little Vietnam. The post-war international monetary system used a pseudo gold standard where the USD was fixed to gold at $35/ounce and all other European currencies was fixed to the USD at rates delimited by their governments. David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (2007) is a good resource. America pulled it's troops out and South Vietnam did not defend itself. Much how the US lost in Afghanistan, this was the case because it was impossible to achieve the goal. On the other hand, they were unable to deal a decisive blow to the NVA. they did effectively lose. Vietnam ultimately won the conflict and deposed Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Both wars involved brutal guerrilla warfare, horrible atrocities and both wars were very unpopular with the general populace, but the Americans were able to win in the Philippines, resulting in the surrender of the Philippino guerillas. So, he did some to help the war effort in Vietnam. One I heard was that America lost because it was because the moon landing was fake and the US agreed with the USSR to keep it a secret in exchange for the US leaving Vietnam. This should be expected as both sides had advantages and disadvantages. The US and PRC had no equivalent. We could help the south establish it's claim to be the defacto government of the people, but it was their country and their policies. But Afghanistan just sort of fizzled out. So in this context not only did the US lose the war but actively assisted the success of the enemy and defeat of the US war goals. World War II ended in 1945, and the Korean war was in 1950, so the soldiers who fought in World War II likely did not get recalled to fight the Korean War five years later. In the revolution American population was much lower than that in GB, but casualties (plus 7k hessians) were higher on the British side. The kill ratio was certainly in American favor. Vietnam was in a civil war and some of the Vietnamese thought the North was the legitimate government, and others thought the south was. With the departure of the French, South Vietnam was left as an anti-communist dictatorship with U. I can appreciate that there are disagreements about particular events, timelines, and motivations, and I completely believe that even 18 hours of carefully curated footage and narrative can't come close to fully capturing the war---how it was waged, and what it meant. China had historically oppressed Vietnam and Vietnam did not like China propping up the Well, there is 100mil vietnamese. There aren't many records available regarding PTSD on the other side of the combatants, but I'm hoping some day that a historian would be able to accurately tell the stories of the damage caused to the Business, Economics, and Finance. I partially agree. aircraft lost in air-to-air combat, regardless of whether or not they were fighter planes. The war itself wouldn't change much the UK army was a tenth of what the US had and while a recruitment drive may have been possible its unlikly to be too impressive as the British public were against the war and the national servicemen (conscripts) were dismissed in 1963 and it was unlikely too return especially for such an unpopular war. Decent books on the Vietnam war are only being written now. Also a fact. Through a system of patrolling and interdiction of Viet Cong forces, this was to an extent achieved. lost Vietnam from a multitude of factors. At the end of the day, they knew that the Afghan government would fail (though most didn't think it would fail while they were driving to the airport) and the US had achieved the strategic objectives that brought them there in the first place. Republican thing, btw, because Nixon didn't help and dealt the death knell. ) It did, though. They lose their capital, they are entirely bankrupt, and their war aims are not fulfilled. Kathleen Wilson has a chapter in The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 which deals with radical support (and conservative opposition) for the Patriot side during the war. At the end of the war, the Pentagon listed fewer than 800 soldiers as either prisoners or missing in action. GameStop Moderna Pfizer Johnson & Johnson AstraZeneca Walgreens Best Buy Novavax SpaceX Tesla. I don't know why every American gets so butthurt when it's mentioned that they lost in Vietnam. It wasn't until the Vietnam War and the economic troubles of the 1960s that Americans, most prominently the New Left, questioned the premises of the Cold War; hence the era of detente followed. south korea was possible because it was the beginning of the cold war and we had 100% energy and enthusiasm towards fighting the commies. There were, throughout the war, insinuations that the US could use nuclear weapons. The communist led by HO Chi minh started guerilla action against the south, leading to America taking notice and starting a military intervention in 1964 after accusing the I am watching Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War and I hadn’t realized that the French-Vietnamese War was just as gruesome before the American presence. Please read the rules before participating, as we remove all comments Ah I see. Perhaps I did a poor job in explaining that it was symmetrical. Absolutely amazing. The withdrawal of the Americans pretty much allowed the North to take over unimpeded, undermining the American war aims of protecting the South Vietnamese and impeding the domino effect. They believe the 1st one happened: The Gulf of Tonkin incident (Vietnamese: Sự kiện Vịnh Bắc Bộ) was an international confrontation that led to the United States engaging more directly in the Vietnam War. Please read the sidebar before posting and be kind to one another. So what if they never left? Nixon'a Vietnam witdrawal plan never passes, and US involvement in war conitnues post-1973. Vietnam were a major ally of the Soviet Union and relied on them heavily- similar to Cuba. Though as the war dragged on the US priorities and reasons for fighting the war began to shift. American here. Abrams is The US can't really "lose" a war like Vietnam because we weren't invaded and there was no direct threat to the United States which would force us to the table in a negotiated peace treaty. America can't afford to loose another battle, like the Vietnam and the Korea war. ” Members Online. I think they sort of won each and every one of them. The contemporary view, however, is understandable since it genuinely did seem like the US never lost during the Vietnam War. Most Americans point to New Orleans as The original plan was for the US to just sort of bolster South Vietnam so they could fight their own War, but the South Vietnamese government was extremely corrupt and unpopular. In the 1950s, Vietnam descended into civil war, with the Southern government and US forces attempting to stop the spread of communism. People don’t understand North Vietnam lost more than 10 times as many soldiers as America did. vietnam was absolutely dreadful, media was more common, color TV was around, lost 60k China saw the American involvement in Vietnam as a threat on the same level as the US involvement in Korea 2 decades earlier, and this time resolved to reduce the cost of their intervention by "fighting using Vietnamese bodies" instead of Chinese bodies. they were flying GIs out in helos in the morning and bringing them home for dinner at 5 PM; while US troops were It's interesting to note that both China and the US supported Democratic Kampuchea in the Cambodian-Vietnamese War. There's a pretty new Vietnamese quote about why the Vietnamese hold a pretty positive view on the US: "We were at war with America for 20 years, France for 200, and China for 2,000, but only America has shown regret. America has almost nothing in common with the governments or people in those countries by any measurable metric. Aerial Combat Scorecard, Vietnam "The Vietnam War kill ratios were calculated using the total number of U. I took these points from Halberstam's work: The PLA was a veteran force from its long years of war against the Nationalist Chinese forces. No. They were not friendly with China and there was a war between them when China invaded after Vietnam overthrow the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. As far if it was pointless is something I'm not going to get into, however the spread of communism in Asia which was one of the reason to for the US to enter Vietnam, was actually a bit of a success for the USA because the spread of communism by Vietnam wasn't as great as America worried. 1: The first MANPAD, the SA-7, was deployed to Vietnam at the tail end of the war, and brought down about 30 American planes until they learned to stay high where the missile couldn't get them. Ironically, Johnson (and Kennedy before him) always thought that the grand strategic gesture made by the US in Vietnam could be done relatively cheaply and quickly. " It might not have been the US government that actually apologized but the Vietnamese knew that the war wasn't very popular in Neither is true. They couldn’t deal with the idea that a lesser power defeated them, or that they probably shouldn’t have been in that fight at all, so they pretended that war is some idealized contest fought only between soldiers, without political social A quarter of the time. The Vietnamese won on the battlefield, and arguably lost at the negotiation table, leading to the War with America. He also nearly successfully negotiated for peace but Nixon reached out to convince the Saigon administration not to accept the peace deal under the promise that Nixon would extend the war. The Vietnam War should have been treated as a counterinsurgency war but was treated as a conventional conflict by the US government (and US Army leadership). Fiona Apple - Casualty number for revolutionary war were much different than in Vietnam. Many of our wounded ended up having a lot of physical and mental problems because of the war experience, it was the first war in America in which post-traumatic stress disorder started being recognized in returning troops. To resume,after the Indochinese war and the end of french colonisation in 1954, vietnam was divided into a capitalist south and communist north. However the Vietnam war heavily lined some pockets. Posted by u/le_unknown - 3 votes and 12 comments Actually, it looked so much like World War II that when Gallup polled Americans in 1950 and 1951, a majority thought that they were already fighting the opening stages of World War III, which I think is a very underappreciated piece of context for the Korean War. Just before the offensive, there were public statements by the The conventional view remains that the United States lost the Vietnam War because our opponent, North Vietnam, conquered the side we backed, South Vietnam, which surrendered in April 1975. We didn't lose the war, South Vietnam lost the war. In addition, Americans drove back the NVA in a number of offensives. They didn't lose because they were backstabbed at home or mis-supplied or misled. Lots of upsetting sights and sounds. Civil War was 4 years 3 weeks and I am going by a rough estimation of when American involvement started escalating. Vietnam essentially became the American "post-war model" of following capitalism and so-on. There were a couple of reasons for this. Since there was no wish to change army doctrine due to the fact that some generals felt that this would "ruin their tradition", one can easily see that a change in this would have been tough. Fighting a war in Vietnam was unpopular. Big cultural icons and cultural movements sometimes centered around the opposition to the war in Vietnam. " As a Vietnamese, it was never near the war against the US, more like our war against the pol pot. Thanks for your clarification. A goverment funded by a superpower, they viewed our battle as we are the demons, lots of sanctions. Vietnam after the war lost monetary support and donations from the Chinese and Russians and had not updated their air force until 2000. The US (and allies) support the southerners resulting in The United States did not win the war because they did not entirely achieve the goal. Doing nothing to help the war was unpopular. Dear America: Johnson was in effect envisioning a different war being fought in Vietnam - a grand-scale Cold War conflict between great powers, not a local insurgency and civil war. And to be fair the USSR never learned America's Vietnam lesson when they invaded Afghanistan. As a born and raised Vietnamese in Saigon, after 18 years of education and spent time reading history books, I just wish the U. I literally pointed this out before in a Vietnamese circlejerk thread with people truly believing Vietnam would have stood a chance against an all-out American invasion as if their soldiers were superhumans and pointed out that beyond other geopolitical constraints, why the US didn’t just land armies in the north, With the lack of heavy American air assets to attack the trail from the air, as well as the inability of the South Vietnamese to successfully interdict traffic on the route, the North Vietnamese were able to stream an amazing amount of forces into the South for their conventional offensive. . Frankly, we didn't lose Vietnam on the ground either. S America did not really plan to invade the north Fucking. South Vietnam lost the war. even the Vietcong were commiting atrocities on a daily basis compared to the Americans. The type of warfare also did not allow America to display it's strength. I also believe protest of the Vietnam war was pretty huge until pretty close to the end of the war. On a different note the Vietnam war was not technically a war to the United States as Nixon never actually made a formal declaration of war. It’s an excellent question and one that the toughest brains in the US Air Force and US Navy had been pondering for years, pretty much until 1991, when the cosmic success of allied air forces in the war against Iraq The only reason I bring that up is due to the fact we had to study the Vietnamese-American war when I was in Field Artillery Captain's Career Course (FACCC), and the fact I had to fight in two terrible wars. When you lose a war, your land is occupied, your citizenry are abused, your assets are stolen. Second, the US had a much larger economy and could easily outproduce N Vietnam and its proxy allies. 2M subscribers in the AskHistorians community. In that sense Vietnam won and the USA lost. An invasion by the North Vietnamese military AND an insurgency aided by that military. This is the reason why America lost the Vietnam War. Somebody won. It's self-sustaining war in perpetuity. The aim of the United States was to defeat communism, and so politics was more important than the military. America wanted to stop the spreading of It was a very concrete loss after a decade of enduring such an unpopular conflict. However, by the early 1970s the USA was forced to withdraw. The political theory of the time was that the communists were going to stamp out freedom and democracy in one country after another until finally only the US was left, then the US would fall. A place to share content, ask questions and/or talk about the grand strategy game Hearts of Iron IV by Paradox Development Studio. One must also take into account the skill and political expertise of North Vietnamese leadership as they exploited American weaknesses both in Vietnam and in American media/politics. So yeah. What if the United States won Vietnam, the War on Drugs never happened, the United States won the War of 1812, the United States annexed the Yucatan and northern Mexico like it wanted to, with No NAFDA, American manufacturing never declined, no education reform in 1979 and Ross Perot wins in 92'. The war is a complete loss. 4M subscribers in the NoStupidQuestions community. it was hard to make a good story on a war that America lost Old thread and all, but someone who was in the Viet. I'll admit, creative, but I doudt the USSR gave a fuck about We never invaded North Vietnam (we did invade Cambodia later in the war) and North Vietnam invaded Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam. northern soviet-backed communists attack southern pro-western governments. The U. But why does America hate communism so much that they’d spend billions of dollars to make sure no other country adopts it? America pulled out due to crippling infantry and equipment losses. Those purported betrayers were then identified as the communists, trade unionists, and Jews. It’s an 18 hour series that’s excellent and covers the facet of the war from the Vietnamese side, the American media, the government, and the soldiers. In his book, The Ace Factor, Mike Spick argues that two of the determining factors in air-to-air combat are situational awareness and the ability to take Others argue the United States did not lose the war because all U. In Vietnam, we intentionally fought a war of attrition, with extremely limiting terms of engagement. In every perspective, it was a loss. There been many extensive investigations that have failed to turn up any evidence of this. Reply reply More replies More replies Posted by u/smoke_weed_nobhead - No votes and 8 comments Late war combat in Vietnam was characterized by massive conventional assaults, primarily the 1972 Easter Offensive and the 1975 Spring Offensive. 32 votes, 27 comments. It was a guerrilla war fought in their jungles. Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were once known as French Indochina, and had been a French colony since the 19th century. Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore were not lost, and no other hot wars occurred Historian Gregory Daddis in his book Westmoreland's War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2014) argues that the US military command as well as its regular officers were familiar and had studied counterinsurgency extensively in the pre-Vietnam years and that the defeat in Vietnam was not because of the lack of A small post-script about American public opinion: even though American public opinion had largely shifted to oppose involvement in the Vietnam War by the early 1970s, it shouldn't be inferred that this meant popular support for the anti-war movement. As we see, vietnamese are thick. Millions of soldiers from communist countries died, and all they had to show for it was South Vietnam. First, it won the majority of battles it fought. The United States was not able to achieve neither political or military objectives in South Vietnam and as the popular opinion was turning their backs on the war (alongside the fact that the war was genuinely not progressing that well for the US too), choices were made towards an American exit from the conflict. r/Music — Reddit’s #1 Music Community — “Life is a song, love is the music. One example that sticks out was an engagement at Ben Het Special forces camp in May 1969, where a small engagement occurred between US M48 tanks and NVA PT-76 light tanks, resulting in the loss of 1 M48 and two NVA PT-76 light tanks. The mass casualties, napalm and terrible actions made the French people back home sickened, even to the point of throwing rocks at soldiers returning home. The war was unpopular in America then, & it’s still unpopular now. K. The great shame is the half-measures ended up costing a lot of lives on both sides. There was 6k american advisors in 1962, 25k in 64, before ground force intervention. As it turns out, America bombing and drone striking people that hate America actually ends up making more people that hate America for Americans to feel the need to bomb and drone strike. So eventually the people at home said "enough of us sending our men to die in some jungle", and the US packed up and left. Nobody would've won against them. It is around this time that a well respected Tibetan monk leader set himself on fire in protest of the war which really gave a kick start to the American anti war citizens to help put the pressure on to stop the war. Winning american war in vietnam would be possible only with a kinda little genocide. backing. Fifth, given the technological divide, it was seen as American's dropping bombs and napalm on militants and civilians alike. We didn't lose. Militarily we kicked ass. Vietnam war was a proxy war between communists and capitalist powers. U. It's not the number its, the duration. Bigtime. reReddit: Top Clinton, as an open opponent of the war and having been considered by some to be a draft dodger, could never have the political capital to normalize relations by himself. They intended to sponsor their south Vietnamese It was never a conventional war. But, anyway, LBJ. To answer your question, for real. Why did the United States of America win the Philippine war but lose the Vietnam war? Both conflicts draw many parallels. By fighting a proxy war in Vietnam we probably prevented another war in another country, or more direct confrontation. The US failed in its objective to prevent the spread of communism to South Vietnam. It was the lack of fire support (commonly provided by Americans during the American war) during the Ho Chi Minh campaign, amongst other factors such as the previously mentioned bad leadership and bad tactical and strategic decisions on the ARVN side, that led to the downfall of South Vietnam. We ended the war and PULLED OUT 2 whole years before Saigon fell in 1975 The French intervention was the opposite. "Hanoi's War" is a great in depth lead written by an American Vietnamese with extraordinary access to Vietnam archives. politicians and financiers essentially did a cost-benefit analysis on colonialism vs inward investment, providing of trade However the North Vietnamese didn't have a lot of planes. It became clear that aerial strikes alone would not win In an utterly banal sense, the United States could have won the Vietnam War by invading the North, seizing its urban centers, putting the whole of the country under the control of the Saigon As a preliminary, of coursewe lost the war. America will never be able to raise another army ( numbers). The Vietnam War contributed but Bretton Wood system was breaking down even before the Vietnam war began. Additionally, North Vietnam received a ton of support from China during the Vietnam War, something that In terms of the change in economic makeup this was a direct result of the end of the Soviet Union. The most economic and military aid given to any country from 1960 was to South Vietnam, up until 1965 when the insurgency was in full swing. 235K subscribers in the polls community. But it wasnt either nation involved. But Kerry's past as an honorable opponent to the war who had served in the war, combined with McCain's experiences as a POW in Vietnam gave him the political cover he needed. Anerica most definitely did not achieve its political or tactical objectives in Vietnam. Among the three largest battles of the war, the loss ratio was slightly in favor of the Americans in one, about equal in the next, and slightly in favor of the Japanese in the last. They gave up in waves. The South lost and suffered LBJ never wanted the US to be involved in Vietnam but was tried to appease the public who didn't want to see the US lose a war (he deserves blame for this). It was a proxy war for the bigger Ideological battle that was the Cold War. the only real ones who lost were the spanish and natives, and North Vietnam outlasted the will of the US population at home to keep fighting the war. This is not a Democrat v. Basically, the added tech will let America claim to win at the time; historians decades later will still say they lost and the war was dumb and accomplished nothing, but Johnson, specifically, will achieve his goals (of getting re-elected and becoming a popular wartime president who avoids looking weak by "losing" Vietnam on his watch. Reply reply placidlaundry The United States didn't lose the Vietnam War the US quit For a long time, the Vietnam War looked a lot like the Korean War to American geopolitical thinkers (i. Historian is teaching America a lesson, to prevents loss of life, over Lyndon Johnson's arrogance. For a wonderful and concise history of how these international and domestic aspects interacted to shape the Cold War for Americans see Craig and Logevall's America's Cold War: Its task was to reduce Viet Cong influence in the province and re-establish the control of the South Vietnamese government. The war was a good war to fight, but it was mismanaged until about 1968. Indeed, America lost around 60,000, but Vietnam lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500,000. I've also read quite a bit about the war in books since then, and I think many of the responses in this thread miss the larger point: The American leadership did not comprehend the tenets of Ho's strategy, which had less to do with body counts and more to do with national will. It's a fact. 58k is roughly 2% of US forces committed to Vietnam lmao, that is close to non existent. They lost because the Vietnamese people were willing to suffer more for an independent homeland than the American people were for a compliant The anti-war movement lowered the morale of the men fighting the war on the ground which lead to the drug taking and “fragging” that became prominent in the latter years of the war. For the government at large this was a necessary move to prevent Vietnam from collapsing under the weight of the Communist North. None of this is to say that we should have fought the war or that it was waged The Vietnam war was unpopular, and America had lost its stomach for committing fully to a campaign. Ask away! Business, Economics, and Finance The war was boiling into a non stop blood bath by the 70s so the north Vietnamese and America made the peace Paris peace accords, simaler to what the did with North Korea. The conflict in Vietnam also shares a lot of similarities to the quagmire we find ourselves in currently in the Middle East. The Vietnam War was not an invasion. e. Today, the US has done a lot of work to patch relations post-war, and the majority of Vietnamese do have a positive view of America. As far as losing the war America left. "Coverage of the Ukrainian war is closer to what Vietnam war coverage was like. government back then just simply put someone good in the south government. 10 years in Vietnam, 20 years in Afghanistan, you can stay and hold out as long as you want successfully, but eventually in a matter of decades you will be faced with too much pressure at America cites “fighting communism” as the main reason behind political interference, such as in Vietnam or Italian politics after 1949. It wasn't a stalemate, because a peace treaty has not been signed, just that the United States "gave up". combat forces had departed South Vietnam by the beginning of 1973, more than two years before the final North Vietnamese victory. There are so many cultural artifacts decrying the war in Vietnam that it's sort of understood to have been highly controversial and not all that well-accepted. For most Redditors, Vietnam is their grandparents' war and they are simply becoming more detached from it. Today their air force sits at 500 planes, 75% of them are over 40 years old. We were in Afghanistan for over 20 years and controlled the country. you. ” What resulted was not only a war lost, but the deployment of Agent Orange over innocent Vietnamese citizens & countless people traumatized by the conflict. Hence, the Americans lost as they failed to achieve the objectives they had set In addition, the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a collection of classified documents concerning American involvement in Vietnam, turned more Americans against the war, and led to an increasingly popular sentiment that this war was It’s like the Germans at the end of World War 1 and the Americans at end of Vietnam getting all mad that ‘the politicians lost the war for us’. Please read the rules before participating, as we remove all comments which break the rules. This is a great point. true. The US spent 10 years, hundreds of billions of dollars (trillions, in today's money), sacrificed almost 60,000 American lives, and suffered hundreds of thousands of American wounded. These were not countries with any People really need to read Hobsbawm on this, his analysis of British colonial policy to the Americas is fascinating. They are just not giving up and the environment is The largest military subreddit on reddit. The war was fought halfheartedly, and it ended up with the North Vietnamese (supported by the Chinese) taking over the entire country. I am a Vietnam veteran (68-69) with a Purple Heart. Dien Bien Phu was a decisive Vietnamese victory that humiliated the French, and effectively ended their attempt at reestablishing their colony. Over the next four years, Nixon pulled as many troops as he could out of Vietnam and pulled the rest back to safer bases. The government of South Vietnam and the USA both lost the war, correct. American Reddittors tend to be young males, and Vietnam is just a piece of Boomer history for many in this generation. The first major instance of America entering into The US didn't "lose" the war in the classic sense of the North Vietnamese were not able to force a conclusion favorable to their own war aims (unification of Vietnam), while the US war aims The main reason in my eyes for the loss of the war was the loss of public support, with the Tet Offensive being a major cause. In this view, the war Obviously the Vietnam War was much longer than the Gulf War, but I think it's fair to say that American air power was far less effective in the former than the latter. Completely different set of circumstances on many fronts, but what we call "the war on terror" was called "the war on communism"in the 60s and 70s. involvement in Vietnam escalated rapidly, launching Operation Rolling Thunder against targets in the North and ordering 3,500 Marines to the region. Just a small anecdote I'd like to add: The ARVN actually were somewhat successful in using urban warfare tactics to kill tanks in the last few hours of the war: a PAVN armor column that was apparently headed to Tan Son Nhut The answer to this is very straight forward. Keep in mind that they instituted a draft, and it wasn't like WW2 where they were defending democracy against the Fascists this was going to Vietnam to fight a bunch of farmers for reasons that were never all that well defined. I often like to say that the statement 'the US never lost a single engagement in the Vietnam War' is the same as to say that 'slavery was not the cause of the American Civil War' - both are complex topics, but the simplified Why did America lose the Korean War? Why was the Korean War so much less controversial in the US and the rest of the Western world than the Vietnam War when the ideological dynamics behind the two Wars was essentially the same? Reddit . There's absolutely no credible evidence that any POWs from Vietnam were ever transferred to the Soviet Union, or that any were not returned after the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. Although China backed Vietnam during the Vietnam War (called the American War by the Vietnamese), relations began to sour soon after. In those two campaigns, the North Vietnamese utilized combined arms tactics, with Soviet Why did the VPAF have so many aces? Any why the did Americans have so few? The air war over North Vietnam was a worst-case scenario for the Americans and a best-case scenario for the VPAF. This only served to sour the American's people's opinion of the war and gave them the impression they were fighting a war the South Vietnamese didn't want to win. In 1954, the French lost and Vietnam was divided between north and south. First, the From early 1965, U. Only way to win that game is by not playing it. By the time Nixon reversed this policy and began to reduce the ground troop role, the American people had lost their stomach for the cost in lives. There's no shame in it though. It's telling that since the release of Triumph Revisited (I believe it came out in 2010?), we've seen several new aspects of the war being brought to light and new questions being asked out of both traditional American perspectives (see, for example, Gregory Daddis' Westmoreland's War) and the more recent, Vietnamese perspectives which takes on a transnational character (like The US failed to set up a lasting, stable government run by and for the people of that country. I've taken some time to read the various critiques of the documentary since finishing it a few days ago. Apparently North & South Vietnam, With USA, signed a Peace Treaty in 1973. The Civil War lasted five years (1861-1865). 10 votes, 21 comments. gyrkvgll wwh omqczlqm xyzka rsuf vibco qxp kwekx hdnj komtv