Oliver Stone's New JFK Documentaries and the Vietnam War

[James DiEugenio]

Mike is so indoctrinated in this stuff, he cannot even imagine the counter argument.

There is such a thing as called off shore loading.  This is what Clifford said would happen. And this is what was done when the Haiphong harbor was mined.

As Donald Duncan mentioned, the main way the VC resupplied was through Sihanoukville, a port city in Cambodia, more than the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

And if the Xmas bombing was so effective, why does Larry Berman write in his book--which Mike has read-- that Le Duc Tho still did not want to come back to negotiate ---even after 2500 innocent civilians were killed.

Nixon had to ask him to come back.  And he still would not return.  It was the Chinese who convinced him to do so.  Nixon flat out lied about this.  Par for the course for him.

By ignoring what Duncan wrote, and what Greg wrote, we can assume that Mike condones all of it.  He has become this Board's Machiavelli.

[Michael Griffith]

Now let’s get some facts straight about the Tet Offensive. Tet provides us with perhaps the best example of (1) the news media’s misleading and distorted reporting on the war, and (2) the equally misleading and distorted version of the war given by liberal scholars.

Imagine how ludicrous it would have been if, four days after the desperate German gamble of the Battle of the Bulge ended, Walter Cronkite and other liberals had declared that the war in Europe was a stalemate and was unwinnable. Imagine if they had lamented, “What’s going on? We thought we were winning the war. How could the Germans have mounted such a powerful offensive if we are winning the war? Surely our government has been lying to us about the war.”

The Tet Offensive was a desperate gamble that was done because Hanoi realized they had to abandon their prolonged-war strategy and go for a decisive victory to end the war. Why? Because the NVA and VC were suffering increasing casualties and because LBJ had finally lifted enough of the air-power restrictions that, by the spring of 1967, our bombing was destroying more war material than Hanoi could replace (Leonard Scruggs, Lessons from the Vietnam War, pp. 85-90). Vietnam War scholar Leonard Scruggs:

By mid-1967 the NVA’s escalating casualties and tightening logistical circumstances convinced the leaders of North Vietnam that they could not sustain a protracted war against the U.S. Time, they thought, was no longer on their side. They decided to abandon their protracted-war strategy and go for a swift and decisive victory that would quickly collapse the government in Saigon and result in a humiliating U.S. withdrawal. (Lessons from the Vietnam War, p. 90)

Historian Arthur Hermann:

By the end of 1967, the Communist cause in the Vietnam War was in deep trouble. The build-up of American forces — nearly half a million men were deployed in Vietnam by December — had put the Vietcong on the defensive and led to bloody repulses of the North Vietnamese army (NVA), which had started intervening on the battlefield to ease the pressure on its Vietcong allies.

Hanoi’s decision to launch the Tet offensive was born of desperation. It was an effort to seize the northern provinces of South Vietnam with conventional troops while triggering an urban uprising by the Vietcong that would distract the Americans — and, some still hoped, revive the fading hopes of the Communists. The offensive itself began on January 30, with attacks on American targets in Saigon and other Vietnamese cities, and ended a little more than a month later when Marines crushed the last pockets of resistance in the northern city of Hue.

It not only destroyed the Vietcong as an effective political and military force, it also, together with the siege of Khe Sanh, crippled the NVA, which lost 20 percent of its forces in the South and suffered 33,000 men killed in action, all for no gain. (“The Tet Offensive Revisited: Media’s Big Lie,” Hudson Institute, January 30, 2018, https://www.hudson.org/research/14134-the-tet-offensive-revisited-media-s-big-lie)

The after-action report of the U.S. Army II Field Force gives us a good idea of some of the developments that led Hanoi to conclude that they had to gamble on a major offensive to win the war quickly:

By November 1967 the operations of II FFORCEV and III Corps within III CTZ had succeeded in driving the bulk of the VC/NVA main forces away from the more heavily populated areas into the sparsely settled border regions. A captured document showed that the VC in MRIV - the region around Saigon - had suffered three times the losses in 1967 as in 1966.

The threat in Gia Dinh Province surrounding Saigon was reduced to the point that the 199th Lt Inf Bde was able to phase out Op FAIRFAX, and to move into War Zone D, leaving to the 5th ARVN Ranger Group primary tactical responsibility for the security of the Capital Military District.

The VC were in serious straits in Phouc Tuy and Long Khanh Province where allied pressure had broken down their supply system. The VC in western Hau Nghia Province had been reduced to the point that the 25th US Div was able to shift its brigade forces to operations northwest of Cu Chi; while the 25th ARVN Div continued pacifying Hau Nghia.

The 1st Inf Div had been successful in opening and holding open Highway 13 to Quan Loi, splitting War Zone C from D, as well as facilitating civil and military movement north of Saigon. v/ The 9th Inf Div had commenced clearing Highway 1 from Saigon to the II-III Corps boundary turning it over progressively to the 18th ARVN Div.

The 9th Div was also able to draw down on forces in the northeastern portion of its TAOI while concentrating on expanding Mobile Riverine Force operations in IV CTZ in the Delta.

The Revolutionary Development program was accelerating. Public administration training was underway in all Provinces. Economic activity was improving, partly as a result of the opening of many road LOCs particularly in Hau Nghia and Binh Duong Province.

There was ample evidence that . . . the VC political infrastructure was losing its influence over key sectors of the population. (TET Offensive II Field Force Vietnam After Action Report, Defense Technical Information Center, 1 March 1968, pp. 1-2, https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA534568/mode/1up)

The Tet Offensive gamble ended up being a botched operation that incurred staggering losses. Several North Vietnamese sources describe those enormous losses. The offensive started badly when, due to confusion in the chains of command, some NVA and VC units attacked prematurely, squandering the element of surprise against most targets. The NVA/VC failed to take most of their objectives, and in a matter of hours or days they lost most of the objectives that they did take. Only in Hue and in a sector of Saigon did they manage to hold on for about four weeks, before being mauled by ARVN and American forces. Much to the Communists’ surprise, many ARVN units fought well, and very few South Vietnamese welcomed the NVA as liberators. And, NVA and VC atrocities during the offensive caused most South Vietnamese to more strongly support the Saigon government.

However, this is not the story that the American people were told by the news media. In his massive study Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington (Yale University Press, 1978, abridged edition), Vietnam War correspondent Peter Braestrup documents the countless erroneous, misleading reports that journalists and major news outlets gave about Tet. For example, Braestrup notes that the news media reported that VC fighters had occupied the first few floors of the American Embassy in Saigon, when in fact they never got inside the building and were killed in the embassy compound within six hours. Some reporters in Vietnam did file accurate reports on Tet, but the major news outlets in the U.S. ignored them.

Uwe Simeon-Netto, who witnessed Tet as the Far East correspondent for the German newspaper group Axel Springer, sheds light on the subject:

Forty years ago today, I witnessed the start of the most perplexing development in the 20th century – America's self-betrayal during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.

The reason why I have never ceased wrestling with this event is this: On the one hand, Tet ended in a clear military victory for the United States and its South Vietnamese allies, who killed 45,000 communist soldiers and destroyed their infrastructure.

On the other hand, the major U.S. media persuaded Americans that Tet was a huge setback for their country. . . .

At 3 a.m. on Jan. 31, I stood opposite the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, watching a fierce firefight between Marines and Viet Cong attackers. . . .

Some days later, I was in the company of Marines fighting their way into communist-occupied Hué, Vietnam's former imperial capital. We found its streets strewn with the corpses of hundreds of women, children and old men, all shot execution-style by North Vietnamese invaders.

I made my way to Hué's university apartments to obtain news about friends of mine, German professors at the medical school. I learned that their names had been on lists containing some 1,800 Hué residents singled out for liquidation. . . .

Then, enormous mass graves of women and children were found. Most had been clubbed to death, some buried alive; you could tell from the beautifully manicured hands of women who had tried to claw out of their burial place.

As we stood at one such site, correspondent Peter Braestrup asked an American T.V. cameraman, "Why don't you film this?" He answered, "I am not here to spread anti-communist propaganda."

Many reporters accompanying U.S. and South Vietnamese forces realized and reported that the fortunes of war and the public mood had changed in their favor, principally because of the war crimes committed by the communists, especially in Hue, where 6,000-10,000 residents were slaughtered.

But the major media gave the Tet story an entirely different spin. (“The Tet Offensive and the Media,” Vietnamese and American Veterans of the Vietnam War, http://www.vietamericanvets.com/Page-Records-TetOffensive.htm).

David Henard, a former Army chopper pilot who served in South Vietnam during Tet:

Terrified reporters crouched behind the cover of the high wall that surrounded the embassy compound. . . . They nonetheless filed colorful, wildly inaccurate, and totally fabricated stories, claiming that the Vietcong had occupied the first five floors of the American Embassy. This claim was made despite the fact that the Vietcong failed to even enter the building. They reported too quickly before they had the facts and misled the American public. (Victory Stolen, LitFire Publishing, 2018 edition, pp. 110-111)

We now know that General Giap strongly opposed launching the Tet Offensive, fearing that if the NVA and VC left their safe areas in large numbers, they would be decimated. But Giap was overruled by the fanatics in the Politburo who truly believed that ARVN would quickly crumble and that most South Vietnamese would embrace the invaders as liberators. When Tet ended up being a horrendous military disaster, Giap was so upset that he left North Vietnam for a while.

Hanoi’s leaders were so shocked by the scale of the defeat that they considered halting the war effort for a few years (Scruggs, Lessons from the Vietnam War, p. 101; Dave Palmer, Summons of the Trumpet, Presidio Press, 1978, pp. 208-210)—and they may well have done so if they had not realized that the American news media was turning their severe defeat into a shocking political victory.

Liberal scholars usually understate the degree of decimation that the NVA and the VC suffered in the Tet Offensive, and they describe Tet as a “monumental intelligence failure.”

“Monumental intelligence failure”? Westmoreland, his staff, and senior field commanders concluded from U.S. intelligence and field reports that the Communists were going to carry out a major assault around the time of the Tet holiday. However, they believed the attack would come after the holiday, and they underestimated the scale of the assault because they did not believe the NVA and the VC would be foolish enough to come out in large numbers far from their sanctuaries. We had always wanted them to do this, but they had not obliged.

Westmoreland and his staff believed the attack would come some time after the Tet holiday because Hanoi had announced weeks earlier that they would once again honor the usual Tet ceasefire. The Communists had made similar Tet ceasefire announcements in the past and had always refrained from any major military actions during Tet, so we assumed they would do the same thing this time.

So, yes, Tet was an intelligence failure, but not in the usual sense of the term. In the weeks before Tet, Westmoreland informed numerous officials, and even some journalists, that he believed a major NVA/VC attack would soon occur. He was so convinced of this that, two weeks before Tet began, he wisely moved 15 battalions from outlying areas to positions near Saigon, a move that proved crucial during the offensive.

If our news media had covered Tet with honesty, balance, and perspective, they would have reported that the offensive was an enormous blunder by North Vietnam and a resounding victory for America. The Tet Offensive was only a “political victory” for North Vietnam because our news media made it into one. The 11th Armored Cavalry Vietnam veterans’ website sums up the situation well:

The 1968 Tet offensive was a total and complete military disaster for the North Vietnamese Communists no matter how you look at it. If you measure victory by territory gained or enemy killed, the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong failed dismally in their attacks.

The NVA and VC had counted on a "People's Uprising" to carry them to victory; however, there was no such uprising. The NVA and VC did exactly what the American military wanted them to do. They massed in large formations that were incredibly vulnerable to the awesome fire support the U.S. military was able to bring to bear on them in a coordinated and devastating manner.

The NVA and VC attacked only ARVN installations with the exception of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Despite reports to the contrary by all major television news networks and the print media, the VC sapper team never entered the Embassy’s chancery building and all 15 VC were dead within 6 hours of the attack.

In the first week of the attack, the NVA/VC lost 32,204 confirmed killed, and 5,803 captured. U.S. losses were 1,015 KHA, while ARVN losses were 2,819 killed.

Casualties among the people whom the NVA/VC claimed to be "liberating" were in excess of 7,000, with an additional 5,000 tortured and murdered by the NVA/VC in Hue and elsewhere. In Hue alone, allied forces discovered over 2,800 burial sites containing the mutilated bodies of local Vietnamese teachers, doctors, and political leaders.

Only the news media seemed to believe that in some way the Communists had achieved a "victory.” To put this in perspective, the news media would have reported the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler's last-ditch attempt to stop the Allied forces in Europe, as a "disaster" for the Allies. They would have said that "despite Allied efforts, the enemy still has the means to mount a major offensive, and therefore the war in Europe is unwinnable." Sound goofy? Well, that is exactly what Walter Cronkite said on national TV after the 1968 Tet Offensive. (“Myth: The Tet Offensive Was a Communist Victory,” https://11thcavnam.com/education/myth_the_tet_offensive_was_a_com.htm)

Edited October 8, 2022 by Michael Griffith

[James DiEugenio]

After reading Mike, the question becomes: 

Why did Hanoi even fight the war at all against the USA?  Because according to his sources they were getting the crap kicked out of them all the time and everywhere. The reason they won was because the American media completely misreported everything happening over there.

1. Diem was really an excellent leader for Saigon.

2. The VIet Cong were not that numerous at all.

3. Tet was a disaster for the north, and a great victory for the USA

4. Ap Bac really was not that bad.

5. We needed more bombing, not less, and Hanoi would have come crying to the conference table.

6.  We also needed more writers like Peter Braestrup to tell the truth about Vietnam.

7. Tet was the military equivalent of the Battle of the Bulge.

 

Am I the only one who thinks this is really kind of Alice in Wonderland stuff?  Sort of like Gunther Lewy and Norman Podhoretz on steroids?

 

 

Edited October 8, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

The problem for America and Tet was simple.  Westmoreland wanted to reduce the true strength of the VC in the south for political purposes.  This was proven at the trial between CBS and Westmoreland.

Sam Adams of the CIA, thought that Westy and MACV were lying when they put the strength of the VC at about 120,000.  He thought it was more than twice that. (Edwin Moise, The Myths of Tet, p. 34). And in late 1966 he set out to prove this by using the official documents of MACV, vs his estimates and then finding captured enemy documents.

It turned out that Adams himself had underestimated the true strength of the VC, which he set at 250,000.   For in a rare secret visit to the south, Le Duc Tho had left behind papers in which Hanoi had estimated the true VC strength to be 330,000. (ibid, p. 36)

So the problem was this: if the MACV figures were correct, 120,000, and there were about 420,000 American troops in theater, why did Westmoreland request more troops; another 50,000?  In fact, Westmoreland's ultimate ambition was to have a force of 675,000 men! (ibid, p. 37). It was going to take that many men to defeat 120,000 VC?  Does not say very much about the American troops there, does it?

The obvious answer is that MACV was either lying or they were just wrong. Even Adams was a little wrong.  The size of the VC network and its support group was about three times larger than what Westy was saying it was. 

Now recall, Adams is discovering this stuff in the spring of 1967.

Edited October 8, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

In April of 1967, Westy visited Washington and met with LBJ.  He told the president that the total strength of the VC and North Vietnamese regulars in the south was 285,000 men. (Moise, p. 37). Which was utterly wrong.  Because, in reality, there were more VC alone than that.

But based on this false figure, Westy said the USA was now winning the war, since they were eliminating more of the enemy than the VC could recruit or Hanoi could bring south.

This was truly one of the most preposterous intelligence briefings one could imagine. And it set the stage for 1.) Johnson's political fall, and 2.) The shock effect of the size and scope of Tet.

It later came out that Westy got this info from intel chief General Joe McChristian.  The intel general later said that he had been pressured to give this report, but he himself did not believe it.  In fact, he thought that what Westy was talking about, his so called "crossover point", could not be attained anytime in the near future.

What this reveals is that what Douglas MacArthur told Kennedy back in 1961 was accurate.  He told JFK that unless he was willing to place a million men in combat in Indochina, that it was simply stupid to directly intervene in that theater. Therefore, he should avoid it at all costs.  So whenever someone would suggest direct American intervention in Vietnam, Kennedy would say, go talk to MacArthur and tell me what he says.

 

Edited October 8, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

When Sam Adams served as a consultant to CBS on their 1982 show The Uncounted Enemy, this was the message he brought to bear.  That Westmoreland was totally unprepared for the Tet offensive because he had greatly underestimated the strength and scope of the VC in the south.  In fact, in May of 1967 Westy did not even want to accept a figure of 87,000 for VC strength in the south! (Moise, p. 41). When Le Duc Tho's evidence was that it was at least three times that amount.

MACV also seriously underestimated the number of personnel the VC could recruit in a month. (Moise, p.52) People like Ellsworth Bunker, Bob Komer and Walt Rostow argued  for the deceptively low figures  at the White House.  Their figures were utterly ridiculous. As Adams said, if they were accurate then the number of VC in the DMZ killed in 1967 would be more than the number that were there. (Moise,p. 53) In other words, the politics of the situation had gotten out of control, as one would expect with someone like Rostow involved.

In July, Westy appeared with LBJ and said, the idea the war was stalemated was complete fiction. He then said he was winning the war but needed more me to win it faster. (ibid, p. 55). In August, another press conference by the Pentagon said the same thing.  But Adams was making progress with his real figures behind the scenes.  And he was forcing upward revisions at the Pentagon. But this did not matter to the WH.  For political effect, they wanted more optimism out of Saigon.  And it was coming up on an election year. In November of 1967 Westy came to DC again and complied. (ibid, p. 96) He told the Press Club that the communists were losing the war. That the VC strength had peaked in late summer of 1966, and one military guy said the VC had been defeated all the way from Da Nang downward.

This is what helped bury both Westy and LBJ when Tet exploded onto the front pages and on TV screens.  The first wave of Tet only included 80,000 men.  But it hit in about 90-100 cities throughout the south. The fact that there were two follow ups in 1967, and one in 1968 shows just how many were in the VC ranks, and Le Duc Tho's estimates were correct. The war was a stalemate as Cronkite said.  The real numbers were that Hanoi had over 400,000 men in the south between the VC and regular troops. in other words, about as many as Westy already had.

The comparison of Tet with the Battle of the Bulge is, i mean whew. World War II was a conventional war fought with infantry, armor and air in the open.  The Battle of the Bulge was Hitler's last gasp to stop or slow down the allied campaign in the west.  Why there?  Because Hitler had no hope on the eastern front.  Zhukov and the Russians had pretty much wrecked the Wehrmacht at the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk: the first was the biggest infantry battle in history and the second the biggest tank battle. So when this last German offensive failed, that was it. It was simply a matter of who would be first into Berlin. That was not the case here.  As I noted, Hanoi only used about 1/3 or less of their total guerilla strength in the first wave. Thus, they were able to stage later mini Tets.  And the war went on for years, both conventional and guerilla. 

There is a difference between a revision and a rewrite.

 

Edited October 8, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[W. Niederhut]

Wow.  James DiEugenio really knows Vietnam War history.

And having Michael Griffith serve as a Devil's advocate for the Vietnam War Rambos has served a useful pedagogical purpose.

I think it was Nietzsche who once said that he had learned more from his (intellectual) enemies/adversaries than from his friends.

Edited October 9, 2022 by W. Niederhut

[James DiEugenio]

LOL. 

Thanks William.

The reason I got so interested in this was when I discovered the depth of the lie: that  LBJ was continuing Kennedy's policy in Vietnam. When I found out this was a deception, I checked it out on my own.  I discovered that this was not just a lie, but that LBJ had consciously reversed JFK's policy and then covered it up. I was really kind of shocked by that. But then when I found out that the MSM willingly went along with it, that was even worse. 

And just recall, the WC volumes were issued in November of 1964.  The first combat troops landed in Vietnam about three months later. Try and find any MSM outlet, or anyone for that matter, who connected those two events back then.

Edited October 9, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[W. Niederhut]

28 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

LOL. 

Thanks William.

The reason I got so interested in this was when I discovered the depth of the lie that  LBJ was continuing Kennedy's policy in Vietnam. When I found out this was a deception, I checked it out on my own.  I discovered that this was not just a lie, but that LBJ had consciously reversed JFK's policy and then covered it up. I was really kind of shocked by that. But then when I found out that the MSM willingly went along with it, that was even worse. 

And just recall, the WC volumes were issued in November of 1964.  The first combat troops landed in Vietnam about three months later. Try and find any MSM outlet, or anyone for that matter, who connected those two events back then.

Jim,

    Do you think LBJ was consciously striving to cover up his reversal of JFK's Vietnam policy in order to hide an obvious CIA/Joint Chiefs' motive for JFK's murder?

Edited October 9, 2022 by W. Niederhut

[James DiEugenio]

There is plentiful evidence to support that thesis.

Example 1: "Just get me elected, and I'll give you your war!."

[James DiEugenio]

Example 2: 

After reading the CIA's IG report on the plots to kill Castro, LBJ told Marvin Watson, his chief of staff, the Agency was in on the JFK hit.

Edited October 9, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

Example 3:  

In the (censored) interview with Cronkite, Johnson said, words to the effect: take a look at Oswald, a rather interesting young man.

[Cliff Varnell]

14 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

So whenever someone would suggest direct American intervention in Vietnam, Kennedy would say, go talk to MacArthur and tell me what he says.

That would have been news to the Ngo Brothers, that JFK didn't green-light direct American intervention in Vietnam.

 

[Michael Griffith]

Quote

17 hours ago, James DiEugenio said: So whenever someone would suggest direct American intervention in Vietnam, Kennedy would say, go talk to MacArthur and tell me what he says.

2 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said: That would have been news to the Ngo Brothers, that JFK didn't green-light direct American intervention in Vietnam. [photo snipped]

Jim is talking about JFK's view on sending regular combat troops to Vietnam, and I think the evidence clearly supports Jim's argument that JFK strongly opposed doing this. Now, this is not the same thing as saying that JFK categorically ruled out deploying regular ground troops (he did not), but the evidence seems very clear that he intensely desired to avoid this option. 

One of the reasons JFK ardently disliked the idea of sending regular ground troops to Vietnam was that General MacArthur had passionately advised him against doing so. I might add that Eisenhower was also adamantly opposed to doing this. 

However, we get into trouble and open ourselves to valid pushback when we go beyond the evidence and claim that JFK was absolutely, positively going to totally disengage from South Vietnam by late 1965 regardless of the situation on the ground. RFK flatly rejected such a notion in his April 1964 oral interview, as did Dean Rusk. Arthur Schlesinger and Ted Sorenson said nothing about any such intention in their 1965 memoirs. And, every single statement we have from JFK himself in the months before his death contradicts the claim.

Edited October 9, 2022 by Michael Griffith

[Cliff Varnell]

17 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

Jim is talking about JFK's view on sending regular combat troops to Vietnam, and I think the evidence clearly supports Jim's argument that JFK strongly opposed doing this.

Regime change is the far greater intervention, no?

Did MacArthur approve of what Kennedy green-lit in 'Nam?