Top 5 Books On JFK & Vietnam

[James DiEugenio]

OMG Gene, the USA had won the war by late 1970?

With something like 170 fragging incidents a year by then?

With the Easter Offensive on the horizon?

That is just loony.

During the Easter Offensive, Nixon and Kissinger were so desperate after its early success that this is when Nixon actually thought of using atomic weapons and bombing the dykes.  Something he said he never contemplated in his book No More Vietnams. 

According to John Newman, the latter would have killed 500,000 people.

This is what Bobby Kennedy meant when he said the idea is to turn Vietnam into a desert and call it victory.

Sheesh.

 

Edited July 26, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

How anyone could say that Diem was a right choice and a good leader, that is simply moonshine.

Diem and his family were really one of the worst choices that the CIA could have made.

Because they completely vitiated the idea that America was standing up for democracy in Vietnam.

In reality, that was the last thing Lansdale and Diem stood for. They would actually argue over how rigged the elections should be. Diem would limit how many people could talk on a street corner.

Ramparts did a famous story on this by an officer Donald Duncan who quit after serving in Vietnam.  The cover said something like "I Quit :It was all a lie".

[Michael Griffith]

22 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

OMG Gene, the USA had won the war by late 1970?

With something like 170 fragging incidents a year by then?

With the Easter Offensive on the horizon?

That is just loony.

During the Easter Offensive, Nixon and Kissinger were so desperate after its early success that this is when Nixon actually thought of using atomic weapons and bombing the dykes.  Something he said he never contemplated in his book No More Vietnams. 

According to John Newman, the latter would have killed 500,000 people.

This is what Bobby Kennedy meant when he said the idea is to turn Vietnam into a desert and call it victory.

Ramparts did a famous story on this by an officer Donald Duncan who quit after serving in Vietnam.  The cover said something like "I Quit: It was all a lie".

Sheesh.

"Sheesh" is right. You do nothing but repeat liberal talking points about the war. Will you ever address the evidence that supports the point that we did indeed effectively have the war won in 1970 (and 1971) in South Vietnam? Has it occurred to you that Hanoi launched the 1972 Easter Offensive as another desperate gamble, ala the disastrous Tet Offensive, precisely because the war was going so badly for them in 1970 and 1971? 

Fraggings again? 170 fraggings in 1970? That number constituted less than 1% of the American troops in South Vietnam at the time. You still have not read any source that challenges the liberal spin on fraggings, have you? Are you aware that the NVA was experiencing worse morale problems among its troops at the time? Massive desertions. Massive draft dodging. Armed uprisings in North Vietnam that the NVA had to crush. BTW, there were fraggings even during WW II (indeed, also during WW I).

Turning North Vietnam "into a desert" and calling it victory??? More far-left falsehood. Do you know anything about the 1972 Linebacker I and II bombing campaigns? No one would equate their results with turnings North Vietnam into a desert. Even Stanley Karnow was honest enough to admit that the wild North Vietnamese descriptions of the bombing damage were false. 

Yet, Linebacker II alone proved that we could have decimated North Vietnam's ability to wage war and ended the war years earlier, and at a far smaller cost in blood and treasure. In less than two weeks of bombing, we virtually shut down much of North Vietnam, exhausted Hanoi's air defenses, and drastically reduced Hanoi's ability to receive supplies and to send supplies to the south. Imagine what would have happened if we had carried out a similar bombing operation for a longer period, especially earlier in the war? As Admiral Sharp noted, North Vietnam would have been rendered impotent and prostrate in a matter of months.

As for the article about Army officer Donald Duncan, who quit after serving in Vietnam, Duncan is part of a very small minority of Vietnam veterans who have denigrated the war effort. The vast majority of Vietnam vets, when polled repeatedly, have said they view the war as honorable and are proud of their service, and a large majority of that vast majority have said they believe the war was winnable and that misguided restrictions from Washington prevented victory. But, of course, you choose to believe the small minority over the vast majority of Vietnam vets.

All you do is repeat timeworn liberal talking points about the war, and you refuse to read anything that refutes those talking points, not even by non-revisionist historians such as Lien-Hang Nguyen, Max Hastings, Harry Rothmann, and Michael Lind, much less the works of scholars who defend the war, such as Moyar, Kort, Sorley, Veith, Davidson, Turner,  Robbins, Hunt, Palmer, Scruggs, Ross, Jennings, Weiner, etc., etc.

Edited July 27, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[James DiEugenio]

The incredibly brave Donald Duncan.

 

https://beyondthc.com/don-duncan-in-ramparts/

[James DiEugenio]

Here is the cover with him on it.

before Tet, this may have been the most potent attack on the whole Vietnam effort.

http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=6379

 

[Michael Griffith]

It turns out that Bobby Kennedy's 4/30/1964 oral history interview was not the last time he expressed opposition to pulling out of Vietnam, nor was it the last time he voiced support for the war effort.

Regarding America’s commitment to South Vietnam, Bobby said in early 1965, “I’m in favor of keeping that commitment and taking whatever steps are necessary.” (New York Times, February 24, 1965)

On May 15, 1967, in a joint television appearance on CBS with then-Governor Ronald Reagan, Bobby was confronted by a radicalized student who declared, “I believe the war in Vietnam is illegal, immoral, politically unjustifiable, and economically motivated.” Bobby disagreed:

          I don’t agree with that. I have some reservations as I’ve stated them before about some aspects of the war, but I think that the United States is making every effort to try to make it possible for the people of South Vietnam to determine their own destiny . . . The fact is that the insurgency against—that’s taking place in South Vietnam is being supported by North Vietnam. If both of us withdraw and let the people of South Vietnam determine and decide what they want . . . that’s all we’re interested in, that’s all we’re interested in accomplishing. (VIDEO LINK)

As late as March 1968, just three months before his death, although by then he supported a halt to American bombing in Vietnam and was advocating negotiations with the Viet Cong, Bobby opposed a unilateral withdrawal and called the idea "unacceptable":

          I do not want, and I do believe that most Americans do not want, to sell out America's interest to simply withdraw - to raise the white flag of surrender in Vietnam - that would be unacceptable to us as a people, and unacceptable to us as a country. (https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-family/robert-f-kennedy/robert-f-kennedy-speeches/remarks-at-the-university-of-kansas-march-18-1968)

Many in the anti-war movement were not happy with such comments. Indeed, when Bobby appeared the following month at the University of San Francisco, anti-war students shouted him down, calling him a "fascist pig" and yelling "victory for the Viet Cong" (David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, p. 358). (It is too bad we could not have grabbed those brainwashed students and dropped them into a village that had recently been freed from Viet Cong control to let them see firsthand what the Viet Cong were all about.)

It is crucial to note that RFK never, ever, ever claimed that JFK told him he was going to abandon South Vietnam after the election. Even when Bobby became strident in his criticism of LBJ's handling of the war, he never claimed that JFK intended to pull the plug on the war effort after the election. Nor did any of JFK's aides who served under LBJ ever make any such claim in any White House meeting--no such claim is heard on the LBJ White House tapes, nor is such a claim found in any of the meeting minutes or memos or even in any diaries composed during that period.

Finally, as for Jim's attacks on Diem, they are a repetition of attacks he has made several times, and that I have answered several times, in this forum. Clearly, he has not read any of the sources that I have recommended to get the other side of the story on Diem, such as Canadian historian Dr. Geoffrey Shaw's book The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem. It is not "moonshine" to argue that Diem was a good, effective leader, especially when compared to Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan or to Malaya's leaders during the successful British counterinsurgency effort in Malaya from 1948-1960. Jim never, ever talks about the brutal repression imposed by Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan, repression that far exceeded anything Diem imposed. 

Edited July 28, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Gene Kelly]

On 7/27/2023 at 9:15 AM, Michael Griffith said:

 

As for the article about Army officer Donald Duncan, who quit after serving in Vietnam, Duncan is part of a very small minority of Vietnam veterans who have denigrated the war effort. The vast majority of Vietnam vets, when polled repeatedly, have said they view the war as honorable and are proud of their service, and a large majority of that vast majority have said they believe the war was winnable and that misguided restrictions from Washington prevented victory. But, of course, you choose to believe the small minority over the vast majority of Vietnam vets.

 

Michael

I don't think Duncan was part of a "very small minority" of veterans. I'd recommend that you read the 2017 paper "A Divided Front: Military Dissent During the Vietnam War" by Kaylyn L. Sawyer of Gettysburg College. ABelow are some excerpts from her summary:

The turmoil in social and economic spheres during the 1960s combined with contradictions about America’s role in Vietnam and realization of the government’s deception regarding the nature and progress of the war itself fueled the largest movement of servicemen and veteran dissent in this nation’s history.

This incidence of brutality at My Lai led the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to conduct the Winter Soldier Investigation, a hearing on war crimes, in 1971. Their goal was to prove that “the use of terror and mass destruction tactics against Vietnam’s civilian population was a pervasive phenomenon directly resulting from U.S. war policy.” Operation Speedy Express and the My Lai Massacre exposed the brutality of tactics, the failure of leadership, and the utter immorality of the body count strategy that could no longer be overlooked. Men serving in the Armed Forces, by this time, had seen enough hypocrisy, deception, and immorality in their leadership to justify dissent and outright disobedience. Over in Vietnam, soldiers saw clear evidence that the United States was neither supporting democracy nor the will of the South Vietnamese people.

Here is the link ... https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1177&context=ghj

Another reference is "GI Resistance: Soldiers and Veterans Against the War," Vietnam Generation: Vol. 2 : No. 1 , Article 1. Available at: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/vietnamgeneration/vol2

Gene

[Michael Griffith]

2 hours ago, Gene Kelly said:

Michael

I don't think Duncan was part of a "very small minority" of veterans. I'd recommend that you read the 2017 paper "A Divided Front: Military Dissent During the Vietnam War" by Kaylyn L. Sawyer of Gettysburg College. ABelow are some excerpts from her summary:

The turmoil in social and economic spheres during the 1960s combined with contradictions about America’s role in Vietnam and realization of the government’s deception regarding the nature and progress of the war itself fueled the largest movement of servicemen and veteran dissent in this nation’s history.

This incidence of brutality at My Lai led the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to conduct the Winter Soldier Investigation, a hearing on war crimes, in 1971. Their goal was to prove that “the use of terror and mass destruction tactics against Vietnam’s civilian population was a pervasive phenomenon directly resulting from U.S. war policy.” Operation Speedy Express and the My Lai Massacre exposed the brutality of tactics, the failure of leadership, and the utter immorality of the body count strategy that could no longer be overlooked. Men serving in the Armed Forces, by this time, had seen enough hypocrisy, deception, and immorality in their leadership to justify dissent and outright disobedience. Over in Vietnam, soldiers saw clear evidence that the United States was neither supporting democracy nor the will of the South Vietnamese people.

Here is the link ... https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1177&context=ghj

Another reference is "GI Resistance: Soldiers and Veterans Against the War," Vietnam Generation: Vol. 2 : No. 1 , Article 1. Available at: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/vietnamgeneration/vol2

Gene

Ms. Sawyer's propaganda piece notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is that every survey done among Vietnam Veterans has consistently found that the vast majority are proud of their service and view the war as honorable, and that a large majority of that vast majority believe the war could have been won had it not been for interference from Washington. 

I guess it depends partly on how one defines "small minority." The above-mentioned surveys found that 82-90 percent of the Vietnam vets surveyed viewed their service as honorable, and about 78 percent said the war was winnable but Washington-imposed restrictions prevented victory. B. G. Burkett examined this issue in great detail in his book Stolen Valor.

Edited July 28, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[James DiEugenio]

The Duncan article was one of the first that was given high visibility and it was symptomatic of a rising tide of dissatisfaction with both the tactics and strategy and the general concept behind the war effort. It culminated with the Winter Soldier demonstration which the Nixon administration went to war with.

And btw, let us not forget Ramparts and how gutsy they were to print that article early.  That brilliant magazine was the best there was post war in the USA. They supported the JFK case and Jim Garrison.  As well as being against the war.

Please read to recall how fantastic they were.

https://www.kennedysandking.com/articles/warren-hinckle-and-the-glory-that-was-ramparts

Edited July 29, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Michael Griffith]

2 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

Ms. Sawyer's propaganda piece notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is that every survey done among Vietnam Veterans has consistently found that the vast majority are proud of their service and view the war as honorable, and that a large majority of that vast majority believe the war could have been won had it not been for interference from Washington. 

I guess it depends partly on how one defines "small minority." The above-mentioned surveys found that 80-90 percent of the Vietnam vets surveyed viewed their service as honorable, and about 70 percent said the war was winnable but Washington-imposed restrictions prevented victory. B. G. Burkett examined this issue in great detail in his book Stolen Valor.

I should add that I have an advantage here: I joined the U.S. Army in 1982 and thus had the chance to meet dozens of Vietnam veterans. I'd say 1/3 of the E-6-to-E-9 NCOs and O-4-to-O-6 officers I worked with from 1982 to about 1994 were Vietnam vets. Nearly all of them were proud of their service in Vietnam and felt the war was honorable and worthwhile. Many of them had firsthand experiences with the insane restrictions that were placed on our air and ground operations during the war. 

Some helpful facts from Dr. K. G. Sears' essay "Vietnam: Looking Back -- At the Facts":

          Only about 5,000 men assigned to Vietnam deserted and just 249 of those deserted while in Vietnam. During WW II, in the European Theater alone, over 20,000 US Military men were convicted of desertion and, on a comparable percentage basis, the overall WW II desertion rate was 55 percent higher than in Vietnam.

          Only 25 percent of the US Military who served in Vietnam were draftees. During WW II, 66 percent of the troops were draftees. The Vietnam force contained three times as many college graduates as did the WW II force. The average education level of the enlisted man in Vietnam was 13 years, equivalent to one year of college. Of those who enlisted, 79 percent had high school diplomas. This at a time when only 65% of the military age males in the general American population were high school graduates.

           The charge that the “poor” died in disproportionate numbers is also a myth. An MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) study of Vietnam death rates, conducted by Professor Arnold Barnett, revealed that servicemen from the richest 10 percent of the nation's communities had the same distribution of deaths as the rest of the nation. In fact his study showed that the death rate in the upper income communities of Beverly Hills, Belmont, Chevy Chase, and Great Neck exceeded the national average in three of the four, and, when the four were added together and averaged, that number also exceeded the national average.

Vietnam: Looking Back – At The Facts – CherriesWriter – Vietnam War website

Edited July 28, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Michael Griffith]

On 7/26/2023 at 3:05 PM, James DiEugenio said:

During the Easter Offensive, Nixon and Kissinger were so desperate after its early success that this is when Nixon actually thought of using atomic weapons and bombing the dykes.  Something he said he never contemplated in his book No More Vietnams. 

According to John Newman, the latter would have killed 500,000 people.

Oh, boy. The dikes. The Red River dikes. Once again you prove that you have merely dabbled in Vietnam War research, and that your dabbling has been mostly in left-wing sources. Also, you keep telling me that Newman is a conservative, yet you keep quoting/citing him making leftist arguments about the war.

I present the following facts in response to your comments:

-- The Easter Offensive enjoyed early success because the North Vietnamese army (NVA) came across the DMZ, something they had never done before. The North Vietnamese sources alone confirm that the offensive’s early success was short-lived, and that soon the NVA suffered horrendous losses and were pushed out of most of the territory they had initially seized. They NVA lost more military equipment in the Easter Offensive than they lost in all three of the 1968 Tet offensives combined. 

-- As early as 1966, none other than McNamara devotee John McNaughton proposed bombing not only the Red River dikes but the Red River dams because doing so would flood the rice fields and cripple the Hanoi regime’s food production.

-- The Red River dikes were perfectly valid military targets because the NVA put SAM batteries, anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) batteries, and anti-aircraft radar units on top of the dikes. Toward the end of the Korean War, the bombing of North Korean dams in 1953 was a key factor in compelling the North Koreans to agree to a ceasefire.

-- Hanoi’s thugs were so consumed with waging war against South Vietnam that they failed to properly maintain the Red River dikes. This came back to haunt them in 1971.

-- Partly as a result of the Hanoi regime’s failure to adequately maintain the Red River dikes, and partly as a result of placing heavy SAM batteries, AAA guns, and anti-aircraft radar units on the dikes, four major breaches occurred in the dikes during the massive flooding caused by unusually heavy rains in August 1971. One of the breaches was 30 miles wide, while another was one-half-mile wide. These breaches flooded huge areas of rice fields in the Red River Delta, inundating about 1.1 million acres of rice fields. The flooding did not subside until October.

-- NVA SAMs that missed their targets frequently ended up exploding near or on the dikes, causing at least some of the damage that the Hanoi regime blamed on U.S. aircraft.

-- The NVA also positioned logistical assets, including roads and rail lines, near the dikes, as well as SAM and AAA batteries. On a few occasions, American bombs intended for those targets accidentally struck on or near the dikes, but these errant bombs caused only minor damage to the dikes.

-- It is highly unlikely that 500,000 people would have died if we had bombed the Red River dikes. When heavy flooding caused four major breaches in the dikes in August 1971, the death toll was estimated at 100,000. And, it bears repeating that the dikes were valid military targets because the NVA placed SAM and AAA batteries and anti-air radar units on them and near them.

-- The Hanoi regime spread the lie that American aircraft bombed the Red River dikes. The Communists gave gullible Western journalists tours of the same damaged dike for several years, and the journalists dutifully reported this alleged “war crime.” This lie was debunked soon after it was spread, but anti-war activists continued to repeat it for years.

The issue of the Red River dikes is discussed in some detail in military historian W. Hays Parks’ classic article “Linebacker and the Law of War,” Air University Review, 34:2 (January-February 1983), pp. 2-30.

Other good sources on the issue include the following:

NORTH VIETNAM: THE DIKE BOMBING ISSUE (Cia.Gov)

To Hanoi and Back (defense.gov)

Edited July 29, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[James DiEugenio]

And let us not forget what Neil Sheehan did to Mark Lane.

https://www.kennedysandking.com/obituaries/neil-sheehan-in-retrospect

Edited July 29, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Michael Griffith]

2 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

And let us not forget what Neil Sheehan did to Mark Lane.

https://www.kennedysandking.com/obituaries/neil-sheehan-in-retrospect

Mark Lane disgraced himself by his conduct as Liberty Lobby's lawyer in Liberty Lobby's bogus libel suits against the Wall Street Journal and National Review (LINK).

It is curious that nearly all anti-war liberals regard Neil Sheehan as a courageous opponent of the Vietnam War, but you are so far on the fringe edge of the far left that you view him as a sellout. 

Your 2021 article on Sheehan is literally loaded with errors, distortions, and omissions. I cite just one discrediting, inexcusable example:

          Neither Harkins nor Winterbottom was unaware of the true situation on the ground. In fact, as Newman shows in his book, Winterbottom would simply create Viet Cong fatalities out of assumptions he made. Harkins understood this and went along with it. (Newman, p. 224) The idea was to control the intelligence out of Saigon in order to bamboozle Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. (Newman, p. 225)

You wrote this in 2021, years after numerous books had documented the fact that North Vietnamese sources alone, not to mention numerous other sources, confirm that the war was going well in 1962 and 1963. The fact that Newman did not address this information does not reflect well on his research. Here is just some of that information regarding the progress made in 1962:

          The foreign press, despite its hostility to Diem and its skepticism about official claims of progress, took note of the military progress. Trustworthy American sources, Bigart reported in April [1962], had concluded that “the erosion of the Government’s authority had been slowed if not halted by aggressive action by the Vietnamese Army.”[441]

          Newsweek, one of the publications most hostile to Diem, reported later that month that its correspondents had traveled all across South Vietnam to interview American military personnel and had found that these advisers believed South Vietnamese forces were “gradually turning the tide of war against the Communist guerrillas.” For instance, one senior American adviser had remarked, “Today we can usually expect a village hit by a surprise attack to fight, where previously the defenders would surrender or flee.”[442] By mid-year, the government had staunched the deterioration of the military situation. . . .

          Helicopters allowed government soldiers to reach the enemy’s mountain and jungle strongholds in fifteen minutes, whereas in the past the troops had needed to march for three days or more to get there. . . .  One Communist account noted, “It became difficult for our cadre to move around during daylight because the helicopters could see our people walking from a considerable distance away. Just a few helicopters were enough to surround a target and to make a surprise landing of assault troops to capture or kill our cadre and troops in any terrain, and especially in open fields.”[443]. . . .

          The South Vietnamese President more often cashiered bad leaders and directed his division commanders and provincial chiefs to take the war to the enemy.

          The third factor [behind the improved situation] was the improvement of leadership in the South Vietnamese armed forces and provincial administrations. The year 1962 saw the coming of age of many young South Vietnamese men cultivated by Diem after 1954 in his efforts to replace the colonial-era officials with dedicated nationalists. . . .

          Rufus Phillips, a very able protégé of Lansdale, discovered a remarkable improvement in the quality of local officials during an extensive tour of the countryside in mid-1962. (Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 154-155)

          At an early stage in the development of the strategic hamlet program, Theodore Heavner, a Vietnamese-speaking State Department official who examined the strategic hamlets in considerable depth, commented, “One of the brighter aspects of the program at the moment appears to be the remarkable effort to send good cadre into the hamlets to get the program in motion.”[448]. . . .

          In the absence of American pressure, Diem enacted a string of American-backed reforms. . . . He purged officials guilty of abuses, created an organization for investigating complaints, and set up aid programs for disabled veterans and war widows and orphans. Conscription of educated men into the officer corps commenced, while low-ranking soldiers received pay raises. . . .

          In Hanoi, the improvement in Diem’s war effort convinced the Communist Party leadership, by mid-1962, that the war was going to be long and difficult. The Vietnamese Communist Party now had no chance of attaining a rapid victory without a massive, overt infusion of North Vietnamese troops. . . . (Triumph Forsaken, pp. 158, 160) 

          Harkins’s enemies in the press corps were to accuse him of spending little time in the field and relying solely on statistical reports for information. The journalist and author Neil Sheehan later claimed that “General Paul D. Harkins and his staff sat in their air-conditioned offices in Saigon and waxed optimistic on the same kind of supposedly impressive statistics the French had comforted themselves with during the First Indochina War.”[469]

          In actuality, as those who worked with him would attest, Harkins spent a great portion of time in the field. “He lived a Spartan military life in Saigon, traveling almost daily around the country in small planes to keep in touch with the war,” noted John Mecklin, the embassy counseler for public affairs.[470] At dusty district headquarters and remote mountain militia posts, Harkins sought firsthand information on the war from South Vietnamese and American officers, and then afterwards obtained independent appraisals to make sure the officers in the field knew their stuff and were not sugarcoating anything for the boss.[471]. . . . 

          South Vietnam’s armed forces were to make even greater progress in the second half of 1962 than in the first. Weak commanders were replaced with aggressive young men from the new generation of leaders. Government units hit the Viet Cong hard in VC-held areas and at night. . . .

          Using American equipment and relying upon American advice, the South Vietnamese made tremendous advances in the conduct of air and armor operations. . . .

          A Communist historical account of 1962 noted, “Our people’s war forces were unable to stop the enemy’s helicopter-borne and armored personnel carrier assaults, and so our three spearheads [military, political, military proselytizing] became confused and hesitant, and our losses increased. . . . Many units were forced to disperse.”[477] In the latter part of the summer, the number of government victories soared, and the government reasserted its control over many areas that had fallen into Viet Cong hands over the past two and a half years. After repeated maulings of large Viet Cong units, the Communists cut back severely on large-unit operations, making it more difficult for them to overwhelm government units and strategic hamlets. . . .

          Optimism surged within the Diem government, invigorating the people responsible for executing the war, and similar changes could be seen in the attitudes of the South Vietnamese populace and American advisers and officials. As the summer came to a close, Ambassador Nolting’s deputy William Truehart exclaimed that he was “tremendously encouraged” by progress in the military realm that was “little short of sensational.”[478] Even South Vietnamese intellectuals and discontented politicians were impressed, with the result that Saigon witnessed less grumbling and plotting against Diem. (Triumph Forsaken, pp. 165, 168-169) 

          South Vietnamese leaders continued to launch aggressive military operations in areas dominated by the Viet Cong after October 5, including some operations that penetrated areas of the central highlands where government troops had not ventured since 1960. South Vietnamese soldiers were still out in the rice paddies and jungles tracking down the enemy and disrupting their activities with the same determination, and they were still running into ambushes and dying quietly in suffocating heat.

          Following the loss of the Rangers, weekly South Vietnamese casualty and weapon losses actually increased, a development the American embassy attributed to the “increasing aggressiveness of [government] units in small actions.”[506] At just this time, government forces started capturing more weapons from the enemy than they lost – during October and November 1962, Diem’s troops captured 860 Viet Cong weapons while losing 736 of their own.[507] These figures were a sure indicator that government forces were fighting not only aggressively but also effectively – of all the war’s statistical indicators, weapon losses were among the most reliable, since the South Vietnamese could not misrepresent them to the Americans as they could other statistics. . . .

          Other American journalists who visited Vietnam in late 1962 came away with the same general impressions as Tregaskis. Touring Vietnam for Newsweek after Sully’s removal, Kenneth Crawford wrote, “In the opinion of Diem’s responsible American advisers, his strategy is right and he has made a promising start.” Crawford also noted, “Missionaries scattered through the country report that the Communists are in fact complaining about lack of support.”[512]

          Writing in The Saturday Evening Post in late November, Harold Martin concluded that the huge American investment of men and materiel had begun paying dividends in recent months.[513] Time commented that the war in South Vietnam “looks far more hopeful than it did a year ago,” and “U. S. advisers are confident that the Viet Cong now have virtually no hope of achieving their goal of setting up a separate Communist-ruled puppet state in South Viet Nam.”[514] Most remarkably, the reporting from the Saigon correspondents themselves in late 1962 confirmed that the South Vietnamese Vietnamese government had not cut back on aggressive military operations and that the South Vietnamese armed forces were fighting well. (Triumph Forsaken, pp. 177, 179)

          Much other evidence shows that Diem’s war effort did not falter between October and December 1962. In some areas, especially those distant from Saigon, American military advisers witnessed successful operations during this period that entirely escaped the attention of the press corps. Among the most noteworthy was a series of joint air-ground assaults in Ⅲ Corps near the Cambodian border. . . .

          Theodore Heavner, following a visit to Vietnam from October 18 to November 26, noted that American advisers “say that the GVN forces are doing more and better night work,” with the result that “the night no longer belongs only to the VC.” The South Vietnamese armed forces were performing much better on the whole, he noted. . . .

          Most compelling of all, the Communists themselves acknowledged that the Diem government was attacking the Viet Cong energetically and adeptly during the last months of 1962. Meeting on December 6, the North Vietnamese Politburo remarked, “The enemy is using his military superiority to expand the war in a determined effort to annihilate our forces.” It conceded that “our armed forces are still weak,” and that if the Communists continued the armed struggle at the present level, they would be unable to maintain the movement in the South.[529]

          One official Communist history noted that South Vietnamese government leaders “obstinately continued to strengthen their forces and wage an increasingly fierce ‘special war’ against our people in the South” through the end of 1962.[530] A Communist document concerning the upper delta – the 7th Division’s own area of operations – in late 1962 acknowledged that “the enemy succeeded in mopping up our weak areas, repressing the people’s political movement, expelling our forces, and activating strategic hamlets. The enemy then employed concentrated Civil Guard, Self-Defense Corps, and Ranger units to attack liberated areas.”[531]

          Similar descriptions appeared in a Communist history of Military Region 6, which encompassed six coastal and highland provinces in central South Vietnam.[532] According to these Communist histories, South Vietnam’s regulars as well as its irregulars caused great harm to the Viet Cong in this period, a strong indication that the South Vietnamese Army was becoming more proficient in counterinsurgency operations.[533] The latter part of 1962 also witnessed major advances in the implementation of the strategic hamlet program.[534] A good illustration of the progress came from a Communist report on two villages where the government had built strategic hamlets during the fall. . . .

          Communist sources show that the strategic hamlet program, despite the relatively limited number of hamlets completed, was already having a substantial effect on the war in much of South Vietnam before the year ended. One of Hanoi’s postwar histories credited the Diem government with reducing the Viet Cong’s “liberated areas” in Cochinchina, the southern third of Vietnam, by the end of 1962 through the creation of 2,000 strategic hamlets.[538] As the hamlets sprouted up across the country, Hanoi ordered the Viet Cong to set the destruction of the strategic hamlets as their top priority. The Viet Cong, however, were not capable of annihilating the new hamlets, not even in the Mekong Delta, where the program was making the least headway and was most vulnerable.

          The Communist history of the upper Mekong Delta noted that when the Viet Cong tore down the strategic hamlet fences and guard posts, “the enemy would just force the people to rebuild them, this time even stronger, and would tighten his defensive alert procedures, tighten his controls on the population, and aggressively hunt down our guerrilla organization inside the hamlet to suppress it, making it more difficult for us to conduct our operations. . . . When we destroyed a strategic hamlet they usually rebuilt it and then built even more.”[539] The official Communist history of the southern Mekong Delta region stated, “We expended tremendous efforts in the program to destroy strategic hamlets but in fact accomplished very little.”[540] (Triumph Forsaken, pp. 181-183)

[Tom Gram]

10 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

-- It is highly unlikely that 500,000 people would have died if we had bombed the Red River dikes. When heavy flooding caused four major breaches in the dikes in August 1971, the death toll was estimated at 100,000. And, it bears repeating that the dikes were valid military targets because the NVA placed SAM and AAA batteries and anti-air radar units on them and near them.

 

This type of thing is where the pro-war revisionists really get nutty.

In 1971, 100,000 people died from breaches in the dikes due to flooding, from rain. Now let’s think, what would have happened if the US bombed the dikes to hell in ‘68? As an absolute minimum, it seems safe to assume at least 100,000 dead. 

That’s roughly equivalent to the number of people who died in the first few days of Hiroshima. Mike is completely against the dropping of the A-bomb on Japan, but the dikes in Vietnam were a “valid military target” in his mind because the North Vietnamese thought it might be a good idea to set up air defenses on critical infrastructure that an obscene number of civilians depended on for their lives. 

Is questioning the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the name of fighting communism really a “left wing argument”? This type of thing is why the vast majority of historians and Vietnam experts totally reject the revisionist view of the war. 

This seems like a good moment to quote Mark Atwood Lawrence again: 

“The problem with surging revisionism is that just about every academic expert on the war disagrees. So profound were the deficiencies of America’s allies in South Vietnam and so vast was Chinese and Soviet support for the communist war effort, runs this argument, that nothing the United States could have done would have altered the war’s outcome short of absurd methods such as open-ended military occupation of South Vietnam or the total destruction of North Vietnam.”

“The problem with that view is that younger academics, relatively free from the antiwar sensibilities of the older generation and benefiting from unprecedented access to source material, are consistently reinforcing the old view in a remarkable body of new work about the war: No decision the United States could have made would have brought victory in Vietnam at a sensible cost.”

Edited July 29, 2023 by Tom Gram

[James DiEugenio]

Even Kissinger said that 200,000 people would have died if the dykes were bombed.

John Newman, a high level intelligence analyst, said that was wrong.

More like 500,000.  

Edited July 30, 2023 by James DiEugenio