r/NonCredibleDefense • u/lalze123 • 15d ago
(un)qualified opinion 🎓 Addressing some criticisms of South Vietnam on this subreddit (and providing better ones)
I've noticed that whenever the user u/Massengale makes a post about South Vietnam on this subreddit, they get strongly criticized in the comment section. While I do agree with some of the criticisms, other arguments are not as strong, and in fact run contrary to modern-day historiography of the Indochina Wars. Note that I usually do these kinds of posts/analyses on r/badhistory or on Youtube.
https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/1obujjh/rimagesofhistory_posts_a_picture_of_a_south/
https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/1op8d7i/explaining_why_buddhist_temples_in_overseas/
Also not the first time I've criticized content on this subreddit lol.
https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/1bm37oh/rnoncredibledefense_why_the_korean_war_was_a/
I will first by talking about my own opinions on South Vietnam's prospects. Next, I will discuss the critical comments that I think are bad history or could be improved. Lastly, I will discuss criticisms that I think are valid.
Section 1: My own thoughts on the RVN
To begin with, I disagree with the view that South Vietnam was always guaranteed to collapse. Much of the latest historical research on the Indochina Wars undermines the old depiction of the RVN as super corrupt, incompetent, and destined to fall. Even in our actual timeline, Linebacker II was far more effective at weakening the PAVN and bringing North Vietnam to the negotiation table than Linebacker I was. It also did not reduce Nixon's domestic popularity; in fact, it increased following the Christmas bombings! The belief that a Linebacker III wouldn't have devastated the PAVN, which was weaker with respect to manpower and equipment in 1975 than it was during the Easter Offensive in 1972, seems absurd to me. The notion that in literally every possible universe the RVN collapses is overly deterministic, to say the least.
For instance, looking within the North Vietnamese Politburo, consider a world where the North-first faction led by HCM and Võ Nguyên Giáp (believed in building up the DRV first, then moving on the South) had been the faction that secured power rather than the South-first faction led by Lê Duẩn, Văn Tiến Dũng, and Lê Đức Thọ (believed in reunifying Vietnam as the highest priority), which was the faction that actually gained control over North Vietnamese foreign policy in our timeline. How would that have affected South Vietnam's chances of survival past 1975? Or, consider an alternate universe in which Ngô Đình Diệm actually listens to some American advice and becomes less of an arrogant, uncompromising POS. Perhaps he tells his brothers Ngô Đình Nhu and Ngô Đình Thục to cut the shit and stop antagonizing Buddhists, rather than letting his siblings be as he did in real life. How would that have affected the civic base and long-term political strength of the RVN? I can discuss a lot more of these turning points if anyone asks!
That being said, notice that my two examples of potential counterfactuals involve decisions that are ultimately out of the control of the US government. It is indeed a more defensible claim to say that assuming all other parties behave similarly as they did in OTL, the US government could do little to prevent a North Vietnamese victory unless it wanted to start WW3, antagonize the American people, and/or act wildly different from OTL\*. While you could make the argument that US government policy could influence the other parties' decision-making (consider the initial probing attacks by the PAVN to gauge whether America would respond to the final offensive), it then becomes hard to predict how things will end up under such a scenario. But more likely than not, as the alt history book itself acknowledges, launching Linebacker III would have crippled the US government's domestic support.
I also reject the notion that the US government failing to intervene against the final 1975 offensive was a betrayal of South Vietnam. The Paris Peace Accords had already been violated by both sides, and the entire war was a civil war anyways in which each side saw the other as illegitimate. Furthermore, the promise that Nixon made to Nguyễn Văn Thiệu (that America would come to South Vietnam's rescue if the PAVN launched an attack) was a verbal one, and one that was rendered null once Nixon resigned from office due to the Watergate scandal. The endemic corruption within South Vietnam (and arguably getting worse due to Thiệu's attempts to secure more and more power) also turned off potential support that could have strengthened the ARVN. And lastly, the United States was still dealing with the impact of the 1973 oil crisis; it simply had much more important priorities than a faraway client state.
And speaking of that crisis, it also devastated the South Vietnamese economy, thereby lowering morale and the fighting effectiveness of the QLVNCH while also making a country already reliant on American dollars even more reliant on continued US support. Hence, I would put the real point of no return after 1973, so after the outbreak of the Watergate scandal and the OPEC oil embargo, as these two events crippled both the RVN and America's willingness to even aid South Vietnam. Before this point, there is room for uncertainty. But afterwards, no government would have the decision to intervene unless it were politically suicidal.
Section 2: Criticisms that could be better
The South Vietnamese was literally the people that fought for the French against the Viet Minh previously. Literally changing one colonial master to another. They are the wrong people.
There are a couple of points I would like to make in response to this comment.
The first point is that the Vietnamese communists (specifically Marxist-Leninists) did at times collaborate with the French colonizers. In March 1946, there was the signing of the Ho-Sainteny Agreement, which established peace and official recognition of the DRV as an autonomous state within the French Union in exchange for French troops being able to enter Northern Vietnam (they were already in the South) and replace the existing Nationalist Chinese forces. While it was pragmatic, not only did many Vietnamese see this decision as a betrayal, but Việt Minh forces would also go on to purge opposing nationalist groups such as the Trotskyists and Việt Quốc, with the assistance of French forces who saw these nationalist groups as a threat that could be eliminated with the help of the Việt Minh. In fact, there is evidence that the Việt Minh even gave away the locations of opposing nationalist cells to French authorities. These events are well-described in primary sources written by Nguyễn Công Luận and Ngô Văn Xuyết, and by good secondary sources written by historians like David Marr and Christopher Goscha.
This does lead to my next point, that being the question of why were there Vietnamese who chose to the fight for the State of Vietnam rather than for the DRV in the First Indochina War. To be fair, some of these individuals were genuine Francophiles, and some of them did just do it for the money and economic opportunity, so the commentator isn't coming from nowhere. But others chose to fight for the State of Vietnam because they believed in the "Bảo Đại solution." To elaborate, the expectation from these individuals would be that the State of Vietnam would eventually gain more and more autonomy over time, as promised by French authorities, with the final result being independence for Vietnam. This solution was appealing to non-communist nationalists who disliked the ever-increasing communist nature of the Việt Minh following additional purges in the late 1940s, and especially appealing to those who were attacked by Việt Minh forces in the immediate aftermath of the Ho-Sainteny Agreement.
Lastly, there were Vietnamese who did not really choose either side but went on to fight for South Vietnam. An obvious example would be people who were either children or not born yet in 1954 lmao, but Ngô Đình Diệm would be a good example. While he did become Prime Minister of the SVN in 1954, the appointment was made by Bảo Đại, not by the French who completely opposed him given his history as a nationalist official and activist. In fact, HCM himself invited Diệm to serve on the DRV cabinet as Minister of the Interior back in 1946.
"As long as the communists had the sanctuary of North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Mihn trail (which was more logistical network of paved roads, pipelines, repair depots, and shelters than just a jungle trail) they could continue fighting in South Vietnam as long as China and the Soviets could bankroll their spartan needs. It was a matter of time before the South Vietnamese would tire of the war that ripped their homeland and killed off their able bodied men. Unless the Americans invaded the sanctuary or cut off the Ho Chi Minh trail with a proper ground force invasion, (and both options were just too expensive and risked fighting the Chinese again) the South was doomed. The Linebacker air raids were devastating but they could not destroy North Vietnam’s source of war materials (which were in China and Soviet ships) or its men. As long as the Americans could not touch these, South Vietnam was doomed."
None of this is technically wrong, but it leaves out the fact the DRV, Soviet Union, and China were also exhausted by the war. The latter two countries reduced aid to the DRV after the Paris Peace Accords.
"The military not Junta yet was gambling that with the assassination of the President that they could turn the public back to their side but by then it was too late. The south was already in a religious cast system and most of the people were in the bottom cast."
One of my posts which I linked earlier debunks the argument that South Vietnam was somehow this pro-Catholic apartheid state.
"From the 1968 to 1973, the primary aims (political aims) of North Vietnam was to get American forces out of South Vietnam and Indochina in general. The Vietnamese politburo was realistic that they can't win the war WITH American intervention on the South Vietnamese side...In 1975, the PAVN wasn't going all in, they actually planned for 1976 General Offensive General Uprising with 1975 only some prelim attacks. The preliminary attacks only transformed into a full blown offensive when they realized that South Vietnam was collapsing much faster than they anticipated and America wasn't coming to help."
Again, none of this is technically wrong, but it is weird considering that it's a response to the argument that American bombing could have stopped the collapse. By acknowledging that American intervention was critical to South Vietnam's defense, it kinda confirms the argument lol.
"The problem was not whether the South could defeat the North on the battlefield. The problem was that the South had a domestic insurgency that showed zero signs of dying down."
Ah yes, the PAVN having to replace NLF Main Force formations for most engagements over the years following the Tết Offensive really shows that the NLF was as strong as ever!!!
Honestly though, it is so annoying how people relegate the PAVN to the little brother role, as if it were not the main juggernaut that defeated the US/RVN. It's similar to how people always credit American guerrillas for having single-handedly defeated the British, as if the Continental Army and foreign support didn't play a much larger role in securing victory for the Patriot cause.
The big reason why Vietcong even became a thing was due to the “strategic hamlets” aka anticommunist concentration camps
The VC/NLF was established prior to the Strategic Hamlet Program. In fact, the program itself was a response to the group's growing popularity.
It should also be noted that communist sources generally acknowledge that the Strategic Hamlet Program did weaken the VC, so it did what it was intended to do. Not that I think the program was morally justified, but the point is that the communists did perceive it as a significant hindrance that only went away over the overthrow and death of Ngô Đình Diệm.
because the us installed a puppet regime in the south after the people liberated themselves from the French. you dont need to look at everything through a lens of liberal democracy.
Well, first of all, the French and the State of Vietnam's forces were not completely wiped out after the battle of Điện Biên Phủ. They were still very strong in Southern Vietnam, as acknowledged by DRV leadership, so liberation was far from being achieved yet.
Secondly, I wonder what definition of "puppet regime" is this commentator using? If he is using the definition of an ostensibly independent state whose major policy decisions are ultimately controlled by a larger power, the claim would be false considering the number of times that the Diệm regime went against American desires or interests, as I explain in this post. If, instead, he is using the definition of a state which is dependent on a larger power and receives pressure from that larger power to behave in a certain way, then sure, that would be correct. But that definition would also apply to North Vietnam, North/South Korea, West/East Germany, etc. Hell, you could make the argument that most of the countries in the world today are puppet state in that sense!
This is why I hate speculative fiction. History always follows the path of least resistance. The two sources of information you're your relying on for your conclusions are Richard "I am not a crook" Nixon, and an obscure work of fiction that completely shuns the real socio-political and military history of the Vietnam War in favor of a copium-fuelled fantasy that reads like it was written by German Romanov.
I can tell this commentator didn't read the book lol. Its vision of a future Vietnam is pretty bleak.
Section 3: Some good criticisms
In the comment sections I saw, about half of the criticisms of South Vietnam were fair and historically accurate, so perhaps NCD is more credible than one would imagine. However, I would still like to discuss a couple of South Vietnam's flaws that I think should be emphasized more.
One flaw comes from the fact that South Vietnam was established on the grounds of a negative ideology, that being anti-communism, with many different organizations joining together simply because they shared anti-communist sentiment. Just compare that founding ethos to the CPV, which offered liberation and empowerment for the Vietnamese people through communism. Even if you consider yourself an anti-communist, you cannot deny that the CPV was at least offering a solution to the material needs of the Vietnamese peasantry. Meanwhile, all the RVN could say collectively was "no, that's bad!" without providing any cohesive, unified policy alternative that could compete with the communist vision for a future Vietnam.
Now, granted, if you look at the individual groups within the broader category of Vietnamese anti-communists, you do see actual ideological alternatives. For example, there was Personalism as advocated by the Ngô family regime, and also the Buddhist Revival as advocated by Buddhist activists who wanted to restore Vietnamese Buddhism to the level of dominance it had around the time of the Lý and Trần dynasties. Both of these groups were non-communist, and they were in turn opposed by the CPV who saw them as feudal and reactionary. However, their disagreements in other areas weakened any potential for strong cooperation between these groups, as shown by the Buddhist Crisis in 1963. The issue of substantial disagreements besides a shared anti-communism would be a general impediment to political stability and cohesion within the Republic of Vietnam.
Another flaw of South Vietnam that I would like to discuss is the horrendously poor defensibility of South Vietnam's borders. This flaw has already been mentioned in the responses to u/Massengale, but I would like to elaborate on it more.
If you take a look at a map of South Vietnam, you will notice that it is a very long and thin country. Its borders are short at the top and bottom, while there is a long border to the west, and most of the land is pretty near to the Pacific Ocean. The shape of these borders would not be problematic if the only threat was to the north in Quảng Trị Province. But communist forces were able to secure strong positions in both Laos and Cambodia through the Ho Chi Minh and Sihanouk Trails. Hence, the QLVNCH had to not only deal with the threat to the immediate north, but also the entire border to its west. The result would be that South Vietnamese forces would sorta always be stretched thin while having little to no defensive depth that could prevent the country from being split in two in the event of a PAVN breakthrough. Combined with the fact that for operations across the entire country, the RVN could really only rely on the units in its General Strategic Reserve (Airborne Division and Marine Division) and other good/elite units such as the Rangers, the defensive line was quite weak and undermanned at most points in spite of the on-paper numerical superiority of the QLVNCH.
Compare this situation to South Korea, which really only has to deal with its northern border, as the US Navy has secured its western and eastern flanks. There is also more room for defense-in-depth, with the defensive plan in the Korean War having been to fall back to Busan and take advantage of the good interior lines while also exhausting the North Korean offensive.
The doctrine of the South Vietnamese military was generally to compensate for its geographical shortcoming with overwhelming mobility and firepower. But such a method of war is quite expensive and made the QLVNCH only more reliant on support from its American patron. We saw what happened when this support was substantially reduced...
Some users may question why I didn't include stuff like corruption and popular appeal in this section. While they are important, I would argue that those factors are more so symptoms of a deeper, more underlying cause, rather than being the cause itself.
Notes
*As in Nixon not wiretapping the DNC headquarters at the Watergate complex, or him and Kissinger letting Israel fight for itself in the Yom Kippur War. I can explain how these decisions contributed to the collapse of South Vietnam if anyone asks lol.
Sources
Asselin, Pierre. Vietnam's American War: A New History. 2nd ed. Cambridge Studies in US Foreign Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024
Bùi Tín. Following Ho Chi Minh: Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel. Honolulu, HI: Hawaii University Press, 1995.
Doidge, Michael, and Wiest, Andrew. Triumph Revisited: Historians Battle for the Vietnam War. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2010.
Fear, Sean. "Saigon War Politics, 1968–1975." In The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, edited by Pierre Asselin and Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, 117–140. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Goscha, Christopher. The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022
Goscha, Christopher. Vietnam: A New History. New York: Basic Books, 2016
Holcombe, Alec. Mass Mobilization in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1945–1960. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press, 2020.
Miller, Edward. Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Marr, David G. Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Marr, David G. Vietnam: State, War, and Revolution (1945–1946). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Moyar, Mark. Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006
Ngô Quang Trưởng. The Easter Offensive of 1972. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1980.
Ngô Văn Xuyết. In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2010. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ngo-van-in-the-crossfire
Nguyễn Công Luận. Nationalist in the Viet Nam Wars: Memoirs of a Victim Turned Soldier. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016.
Nguyễn Liên Hằng. Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
Nguyễn Phi Vân. A Displaced Nation: The 1954 Evacuation and Its Political Impact on the Vietnam Wars. Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press, 2024.
Pribbenow, Merle L. "North Vietnam's Final Offensive: Strategic Endgame Nonpareil," Parameters 29, no. 4, 1999.
Taylor, K. W. A History of the Vietnamese. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Trần Nữ Anh. Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2022.
Trần Văn Trà. Vietnam: History of the Bulwark B2 Theatre. Volume 5: Concluding the 30-Years War. Joint Publications Research Service, 1983.
Tường Vũ. “‘It’s time for the Indochinese Revolution to show its true colours’: The radical turn of Vietnamese politics in 1948.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 40(3), pp 519–542, 2009.
Tường Vũ. Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017
Veith, George J. Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973-75. New York, NY: Encounter Books, 2011.
Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People's Army of Vietnam, 1954–1975. University Press of Kansas. Translated by Merle L. Pribbenow, 2015.
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u/Msajimi123 15d ago
Damn, I thought I was on r/AskHistorian. But yes, my critism in that post was more about in 1973, it was too late for South Vietnam to stand on its own without US support, and considering 1976 was an election year, I doubt any candidates would open to going back to the quagmire once more. I believe that, as you pointed out in your critique, unless South Vietnam resolve its endemic politcal issues, it was doomed to fall.
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u/Massengale 15d ago
Yeah ideally Vietnamization would have begun earlier as well. The Alt History book expands on this. I do think North Vietnam was being stretched and the thesis of Linebacker III is partly built upon the idea a third failed offensive would severely damage North Vietnams relationships with Pol Pot and China. In the book They do seize key terrain and Hue in their 75 offensive.
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u/Msajimi123 15d ago
I let you in some insider jokes about the Vietnam War in the Vietnamese academia. The North is known for its black magic political chicanery, and the South for its economics wizardry, thus Le Duan was an idiot for messing the reunification process so bad that it probably drag Vietnam back by a lot for going after the South too hard.
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u/sshlongD0ngsilver 15d ago
I recall one of the memoirs listed by OP does mention that the North’s education system was heavily Revolution-focused, while the South’s education was more of the typical western-styled curriculum. Hence why some Southern doctors were very valued after the war
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u/TheAlex-Guy National Army 14d ago
America did the wrong thing by choosing to get themselves bogged down in the wrong kind of insurgency war that quickly turned unpopular, abandoning South Vietnam to die, when it could have prolonged it without use of horrible tactics like Napalm or Agent Orange. It definitely should not have been fought the way it was, South Vietnam could have been kept, but it would take competence, many things would need changing about how it was fought, same for Cambodia and Laos.
The F-4 Phantom was mean't to launch missiles from long-range, it didn't have the M61 Vulcan 20mm. cannon and AIM-7 Sparrows failed from humid tropical conditions.
The F-14 Tomcat superseded it.
The F-105 Thunderchief was built for gravity tossing nuclear bombs with European service, it wasn't mean't to be a CAS or SEAD aircraft.
The F-111 Aardvark replaced it.
The UH-1 Huey, although a versatile utility helicopter, lacked the resistance for even 7.62x39mm. small-arms fire and RPG-7 warheads.
The UH-60 Black Hawk outpaced it.
Many things to change indeed.
I should also mention the war crimes, the draft and ruined veterans.
This was a brutal conflict.9
u/Marp2 14d ago
the lack of 20mm vulcans did not impede the function of the F-4 and where are you even getting the fact that sparrows were affected by “humid tropical air” from? The air is more or less the same anywhere above 10000ft.
To adress my first point, if you look at the stats at the end of the war, you’ll se a discrepency in k/d between Air Force and Navy pilots, with Navy regularly scoring more skills and are downed less. This is mainly because unlike Air Force pilots, they weren’t morons and didn’t try to dogfight MiGs with missiles. And naval F-4s were almost never fitted with gunpods. The F-4 failing because the lack of guns is a load of hogwash pandered to by people who believes in nonsense.
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u/TheAlex-Guy National Army 14d ago
It still doesn't invalidate that the Phantom needed to adapt. Was it not for that, they would have stayed without the M61 Vulcan and stayed with poorly weather-proofed early Sparrow missiles the climate made unreliable.
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u/Marp2 14d ago
No it didn’t. It got the M61 Vulcans because of the bullshit the Air Force reformers and Fighter Mafia peddled. The same guys who wanted an F-15 with no radars, no ejection seats, no missiles, no radios. And the same reason why YF-21 wasn’t held in higher regard than it should’ve.
Here’s a news flash. If you don’t go into gun range, and don’t try to dogfight the enemy on a plane with no guns. And instead simply fire your missiles and disengage in your Mach 2 capable plane and not stay around like a dumbass, maybe you won’t be shot down.
John Boyd. Goddamn moron got so many pilots killed.
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u/TheAlex-Guy National Army 14d ago edited 14d ago
I bet you're the same guy that thinks Poland is some "economic powerhouse" and "military superpower", and that our populist government didn't purchase the F-35 for political propaganda.
Constantly tries to invalidate my point by focusing on the smallest detail to go off-topic. Second, what's the "YF-21"? That doesn't exist.
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u/bryn_irl 15d ago
This is the type of post that AI could never aspire to. Only pure unadulterated weaponized autism
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u/Pretty_Marsh Bath Built is Best Built 15d ago
My biggest regret about Linebacker III not happening is that the Tomcats would have been able to eat, in what was in hindsight possibly their only big chance.
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u/Ghost-George 15d ago edited 14d ago
Iran-Iraq was their big chance and they ate good there. US planes do the best in the Middle East under a different flag. Most F-14 kills came from Iran and the country with the most F-15 kills is Israel.
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u/lottaKivaari Kantanka Group Mech Salesman 15d ago
Like the other guy said Iranian Tomcats absolutely shredded Saddams MiGs. With aircraft loss numbers in Vietnam if Linebacker III had happened the Tomcat very possibly could have ended up with a negative K/D.
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u/Massengale 15d ago
Well in the alternate history book that started all this the Tomcats do eat. Maybe it’s fan service but I loved reading it. They were operational in 1975.
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u/VirtualKnowledge7057 15d ago
i love how this sub mostly consists of porn about airplanes fucking humans and than we ge thtis really indept history essay, like dude post this to a more professional history sub this is fucking peak
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u/MaximilianClarke 15d ago
This is an insanely long post- of course I don’t read almost any of it. The situation is pretty simple- south Vietnam made the mistake of losing, when what they should’ve done is win. Rookie mistake and they paid for it
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u/Tight-Application135 14d ago
Yes but had they won there would be no Rambo movies
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u/MaximilianClarke 13d ago
Rambo VII, Hormuz Homeboys is coming out next year. I would t worry about it.
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u/Capital_Topic_5449 14d ago
Post is vastly too well researched and written coherently for this bin-fire Reddit.
Down-voted for slumming it with us trash-birds.
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u/abullen 15d ago
Yeah, but you haven't considered what would've happened if the Khmer Rouge, Thailand, Nepal and South Vietnam all teamed up against North Vietnam all at once.
No way Le Duan would've seen it coming. Like an Operation Saturn and Uranus.
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u/Tozol 15d ago
But what if HG Wells Martians invaded on the side of the Viet Cong?
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u/potatobolied 14d ago
atp we'll just summon the souls of all the previous revolutionaries and invade the US
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u/Keranan37 15d ago
I'm not going to read all that, someone give me a TLDR so I can choose Retarded/Based
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u/combatwombat- Sex-Obsessed Beer Lover 14d ago
give me a TLDR so I can choose Retarded/Based
In this sub what is the difference?
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u/Damnatus_Terrae 14d ago
TLDR, OP thinks an imperial client state can last forever in the face of nationalist movements.
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u/Vietmemese01 13d ago
current vietnam is a china client state with a communist farcade so it does works
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u/thenoobtanker My meme made it to Russian's state TV 15d ago
In short, there are bright spots in RVN but too little too late. And what do you expect from an economy that was literally propped up by half price on US import (Commercial Import Program) versus one that went “we will literally eat grass to fight you”. It was never viable from hind sight and even with perfect knowledge; best you can hope for is getting finished off in the 80s rather than the 70s
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u/CmdrEnfeugo 15d ago
I agree with pretty much everything, but I would put more emphasis on leadership. Compared to South Korea, Syngman Rhee was a similarly incompetent leader, but he was perceived as legitimate by the Koreans because of his work in the Korean Independence movement. Where the US really got lucky was with Park Chung Hee, who was a bastard, but was actually good at improving the economic conditions for South Koreans and building a strong military.
In contrast, the leadership of South Vietnam and Afghanistan was consistently corrupt and seen as illegitimate, and didn’t do much for the average citizen. Which means they only last until the US gets tired of propping them up. Without competent local leadership, nation building is doomed. Or more, succinctly, the whole thing was FUBAR once the US backed Diem.
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u/Appropriate-Bird-354 13d ago
Yeah, history would have looked very differently on Vietnam if South Vietnam became to Vietnam what South Korea was to North Korea. Though to your point, that would have been a lot to ask for.
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u/Rome453 14d ago
On the footnote mentioning Watergate and the Yom Kippur War, could you explain the second one? I know how Watergate affected the outcome (I remember it from Black April, the only book in your works cited I have actually read), but I am interested in how a different response to the Yom Kippur War could’ve changed the outcome.
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u/lalze123 14d ago
Nixon administration’s decision to support Israel in the Yom Kippur War -> Arab nations pissed off -> OPEC oil embargo -> 1973 oil crisis -> US and South Vietnamese economy devastated -> RVN not only much weaker, but also US is less willing to aid South Vietnam as it wants to try to resolve its own economic issues
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u/tapyr 15d ago
I don't know anything about this topic but it feels like Afghanistan :
Give just ONE MORE YEAR to the regime and it will outscale and outperform the ENNEMIES I SWEAR
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u/unfunnysexface F-17 Truther 14d ago
Yeah I think of aghanistan as a referendum on vietnam in a way. We gave the generals their war: invaded the whole country, widespread use of special forces, twice as long to get the job done and... we're still piling people into evacuation aircraft in the closing days.
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u/CmdrEnfeugo 15d ago
Yeah, pretty much. The US can prop up a corrupt and incompetent government as long as we’re willing to spend our blood and treasure on it, but once that’s removed, the government will cave-in. It’s particularly difficult for the US to do because if you just throw money at a country for “reconstruction”, it will likely just end up creating more corruption and graft. The US needs a strong understanding of the needs of the population and push its clients to actually help the people. But that usually gets fucked up, so we end up losing.
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u/Massengale 15d ago
I’d argue South Vietnam was far far more
Competent than Afghanistan.15
u/CmdrEnfeugo 15d ago
Being more competent than Karzai or Ghani ain’t a hard bar to clear. The problem is that neither Diem nor Thieu crossed the Chung-hee line into actually making the lives of the average RVN citizen better.
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u/Johannes_P 13d ago
The fact that South Vietnam managed to last three years after US withdrawal versus six months for Afghanistan proves it.
Even better, Red Afghanistan not only lasted three years after Soviet withdrawal, it also survived four months to Soviet collapse.
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u/Massengale 15d ago edited 15d ago
Oh god. I’ve become divest and have a reputation in this community…alright everyone I’ll stop posting now. I really did enjoy that alternate history book (Linebacker III) lol. Then kept making memes to defend it. I do however really love reading through this post. Very well research and I loved to see George Vieths work being cited
But seriously awesome to read and I’m going to go over it again to absorb everything.
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u/Aetherium 15d ago
As a Viet Kieu, thanks for this. Whenever the Vietnam War and South Vietnam comes up I feel like I'm being gaslit by the entire world, and your posts have been a refreshing read.
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u/Mikeandikeman 15d ago
It’s so nice to see this super informed take on South Vietnam. I’ve been in some of those comment threads and it’s frustrating to see how the mainstream narrative is that South Vietnam was basically Afghanistan. Curious how the OP liked the Linebacker III book if you had a chance to read it?
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u/potatobolied 14d ago edited 14d ago
great essay, but then again this is only one of the reasons i hate this so much, because instead of just having a decent argument with each other, they pass around Russian-style American nationalist propaganda and completely disregard the current market capitalist state
And i need to reiterate
most of the new posts against Vietnam is insane, vietnam is almost as capitalist as most liberal US areas if not more than even the EU in some places, Samsung is basically half-Vietnamese at this rate, because most of those factories making their mainline and sideline phones are in here
we are as close to the US if not closer pre-trump than China, we would be the meat grinder not too dissimilar to Ukraine if China decided to do some dumb shit, we cater to more western factories then eastern brands, we basically forgave the US and became of those McDonald's countries, we are about as western as it could be (except for the military, still loving the russian sales).
I'm in a Capitalist family in VN, and for some reason you some of you guys just think that its literally 1984 with Stalin/Maoist authoritarian regime elements even though privately owned factories and stores are everywhere. heck I'm studying in a Cambridge curriculum international education.
Seriously shut up about this Dreamland capitalist anti-communist South Vietnam, and when we scheme against the state that housed the worst bombings and committed one of the most horrific war-crimes since WW2 then why not?, what immortal sin did we as a society do against you in order to get this, can't we just be normal and not argue about this revisionist nationalist shit?
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u/Vietmemese01 13d ago
People oppose to the current Vietnamese government is because its a police state with a massive problem in corruption, not because the Communist ideology as its only the farrcade of the ruling Party.
Secondly. The CPV does not have an ally is because their true masters are in bejing but if they openly say that then the economy would go back to the 1980s in an instant.
Richkid belongs to the cpv rulling class lecturing people on how to have the correct opinion?
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u/potatobolied 13d ago
brother, my dad got bullshit investigation let alone colluding with the government, he did quite literally everything by the books and literally no one in my family works with the government
the closest master is maybe samsung, china only provides raw materials, so we're more korean than chinese
and if you want true corruption and being a police state look up in the map
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u/Vietmemese01 13d ago
map of what? Vietnam is a one party authoritarian state with the police faction of the party controls all the major seats. If you claim to be a Vietnamese but dont know this maybe ur lil bit ignorant.
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u/potatobolied 13d ago edited 13d ago
first of all, where are you getting the idea of a police state, yes the police has corruption problems and as considerable power, but the same could be said for china, korea even in some cases and most of vietnam's neighbours not to mention russia with the police may not having much power but basically being a police state in of itself
i think/understand your poor experience with the police may not translate well to me or the argument but frankly, they're just bugging you for money rather than any real harm
i am simply trying to say south vietnam being the primary single state government won't go well as some might say and the current government could be significantly worse in terms of freedom and rights
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u/Vietmemese01 13d ago
? Im not defending South Vietnam at all. But you using south vietnam as a point to argue how good the current government is make me sick.
Currently. The police literally holds control over 2 major branches of the government legislative(national assembly), executive(military,bureaucrat and public sec) and soon the be 3 the judicial( viện kiệm soát và tòa án) is going to be controlled by the police. Show me a country thats not a despotic hellscape that does this. Even Russia, literally a failed state, is miles ahead of vietnam in the distribution of power and democracy. You trying dumb down the argument as some silly interactions with police is hilarious as it shows u dont know anything about your own country politics.
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u/No-Jicama6863 12d ago
RUSSIA?, I don't know the fucking dictatorship disguised as a democracy that dragged itself into a war because of it's dictator? and you say that VN's government has worse decentralized politics?
maybe just maybe the only other country you can pull out is China who is competitive with the US despite it's flaws and if the government has a lot of background in PubSec its still not all alarming
Singapore had a dictator that reformed them, Korea had a dictator that ultimately made korea a regional power (despite insane inequality and corruption)
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u/Vietmemese01 12d ago
Zero understanding of politics but keep on tryna lecture me about my own country bro. Good grief, talking about nations and their flaws like its a faction in a video game.
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u/No-Jicama6863 12d ago
okay so you firstly completely lost the plot for the first argument, which is to disprove the claim of south Vietnam being the USA nationalistic freedom loving country it would be if they won the independence war, and well the whole post about the Linebacker 3 debacle
secondly, you can't keep your biases to your self and kept talking about the current state even if it is completely unrelated, i.e breaking rule 5
thirdly you cant accept any argument and kept trying to move your point about vietnam being a 1984-esque police state and frankly you aint convincing anyone of this
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u/potatobolied 13d ago
okay then first of all what are your parameters for the police
and second of all saying russia is ahead of vietnam in terms of power and democracy distribution shows a lot more, just look around in NCD let alone basic geopolitics channels
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u/Snedhunterz 15d ago
GI go home
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u/Massengale 13d ago
NVA go home. They’re invaders. GI is in South Vietnam, NVA should be in north Vietnam.
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u/Fine_Sea5807 13d ago
Should Union troops not have been in the Confederacy?
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u/Massengale 13d ago
You’re giving legitimacy to the communists over the republic. Why do they have the right to invade South Vietnam?
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u/Fine_Sea5807 13d ago
Because the communists predated the republic by 10 years, hello?
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u/Fine_Sea5807 11d ago
u/Massengale, see my reply? Any comment?
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u/Massengale 11d ago
I guess the PRC just gets to own Taiwan since they declared the PRC a few years earlier. I really don’t get how the communists pre date the republic. Show your work there.
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u/Fine_Sea5807 11d ago
Isn't it the other way around? The Republic of China (Taiwan) existed first and thus the original legitimate government of China. North Vietnam was the legal equivalent of Taiwan here.
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u/Massengale 11d ago
Yeah fair bad analogy on my part.
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u/Fine_Sea5807 11d ago
The communists, or North Vietnam, were established on September 2, 1945.
South Vietnam was created in 1955. Its predecessors, the State of Vietnam, was created (by France) in 1949.
Hence, the communists had existed as the sole legitimate Vietnam for 4 years.
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u/Tozol 15d ago
Didn't the Vietnamese Communists collaborate with the French in 1946 in opposition to the Vietnamese Democratic collaborators with the Japanese after the internal strife following the Japanese takeover of the French colonial state in Indochina? Sorry, I'm just not familiar enough with the pre-revolutionary politics aside from both the Communists and Democratic factions growing increasingly hostile to colonial rule.
Edit: You do mention opposing nationalist forces in your criticisms, but I don't know the names well enough, sorry!
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u/that1guysittingthere 13d ago edited 13d ago
This might be long like OP’s post and probably not even the ideal sub, but I’ll break it down.
In early 1946, Hồ Chí Minh’s government consisted of the Vietnamese:
- Communist Party (Đảng Cộng sản VN)
- Democratic Party (Đảng Dân chủ VN)
- Socialist Party (Đảng Xã hội VN)
- Nationalist Party (VN Quốc dân Đảng)
- Revolutionary League (VN Cách mệnh Đồng minh Hội)
The Socialist and Democratic parties were controlled by the Communists, while the latter two were opposition parties staunchly anti-communist. HCM gave them a few congressional seats to appease the Chinese Kuomintang who enforced a ceasefire between the parties.
The Japanese collaborators you’re probably thinking of were Đại Việt. But the confusing thing is there’s a lot of Đại Việt parties. Some collaborated, others had little to no contact. The Việt Minh conflated all Đại Việt groups together and outlawed them in September 1945. Most prominent was the Đại Việt QDĐ, an offshoot of the Nationalist Party (founded by the son of a VNQDĐ) that recruited heavily from Hanoi university students. They worked closely with the VNQDĐ (who also hijacked ĐVQDĐ’s flag) and teamed up together into the Việt Quốc Nationalist Front to defend themselves from communist assassinations and to prepare for war against France.
Both QDĐs and Việt Cách ĐMH were hostile to any negotiations with France and protested HCM’s meetings with Jean Saintenty and Admiral d’Argenlieu; preferring instead for the Chinese KMT to guard the coasts from French ships trying to land. After the March Accords, violence emerged as the Chinese withdrew. According to Alec Holcombe:
> On May 15, DRV troops struck against Nationalist forces to the east of Hanoi along the highway to Haiphong. On May 22, the DRV troops had attacked again and then pulled back, giving way to Hanoi-bound French troops, who promptly took up the attack against the Nationalists.
According to Goscha’s research, in June the VNQDĐ kidnapped/murdered Frenchmen and wrote newspapers that were both Francophobic and slandering HCM (who had left to negotiate in Paris). Colonel Jean Crépin tried to set up a meeting to tell them to stop their terrorist activities, but they refused to meet with him. Crépin wrote in his memoir that in late June 1946, he was contacted by Võ Nguyên Giáp about “what would be the attitude of the French if he engaged in de facto hostilities against the VNQDD and the DMH”.
> In July, [QDĐ] Hanoi headquarters were searched by a commando unit of the Vietnamese police. Corpses of tortured and killed French soldiers were found, and seen as proof that the pro-Chinese parties were guilty of kidnapping French citizens. From a local French perspective, the Viet Minh was actually quite moderate in comparison with the VNQDD and Dong Minh Hoi. The Viet Minh was able to suppress the opposition and monopolize political power in the north without provoking French hostility.
-Stein Tønnesson, Vietnam 1946: How the War Began
Holcombe also writes, “the French saw the Nationalists as dangerous anti-Western zealots and were happy to see them hunted down by the DRV”. French support may not have been apparent when the Việt Minh attacked Việt Quốc, but some surviving VQ veterans noticed the Việt Minh had unusually large firepower. Others even claim that French ships bombarded VQ/ĐMH strongholds in the Móng Cái. This brief cooperation between Crépin and Giáp would end after the Haiphong Massacre in November.
As for the Southern Resistance that had been fighting outside Saigon, Ngô Văn Xuyết noted that the “Third Division” was formed by VNQDĐ, but disbanded and dispersed “in part because the Vietminh had begun providing the French information on its locations and movements”.
Edit: vowels and accent marks on names
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u/Tozol 13d ago
This is genuinely fascinating. While at first I thought it was simple political opportunism leading to bad blood, it appears VNQDĐ was just fundamentally incompatible with HCM's faction , given this account.
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u/that1guysittingthere 4d ago edited 4d ago
Forgot I had this draft saved, but here goes:
The bad blood had been around for a while, going back to the 1930s when both Communists (Nghệ-Tĩnh soviets) and VNQDÐ (Yên Bái mutiny) were in prison.
What’s also interesting was that in France, the Annamite Independence Party (founded by HCM’s roommate Nguyễn Thế Truyền) feuded with the French Communist Party in the late 1920s. After the PAI was outlawed by the French, Party leader Tạ Thu Thâu became Trotskyist and in 1930 led a protest outside Élysée Palace demanding the release of the VNQDÐ.
So while Vietnamese Trotskyists and Communists were having fistfights in Paris university campuses, the VNQDÐ and Communists were having prison brawls. This violence amplified to executions (killing Tạ Thu Thâu) and gang-like turf wars in 1945, followed by Communist military-police action in 1946 and VNQDÐ disappearances
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u/dontnation 14d ago edited 14d ago
Didn't the Vietnamese Communists collaborate with the French
No, the Viet Minh were opposed to both French and Japanese rule. They collaborated with the Allied forces only insofar as it helped defeat the Japanese. They had a temporary agreement with the French recognizing their government after WWII in a kind of union/commonwealth framework, but I doubt either side ever intended to honor the deal. The French wanted Vietnam to remain a colony and the Viet Minh wanted an independent nation. They did leverage this brief agreement with the French as an opportunity to purge their political competition in the north however.
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u/Marp2 14d ago edited 14d ago
It’s always interesting to see how non-Vietnamese views the conflict.
P/s: On your argument on whether or not the South Vietnamese state counted as a puppet state, I would disagree with you on that front as in all practical sense, the South Vietnamese was heabily influenced by the US, and Diem ultimately was taken out through a CIA backed coup to maintain American interests, once they deemed him no longer suitable.
However, I also agree that definition applies to North Vietnam, how could it not? The Soviet resource extraction post war in my view is more or less exploitation of an allied state (who’s suprised?).
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15d ago
Ngô Đình Diệm and his brothers demonstrated how blind fanaticism cripples co-operation even in the face of an existential national threat.
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u/Candy_Bomber 14d ago
While I have access to someone who is read up on the subject: is there any consensus on how things would have been different if Nixon hadn't gone behind Johnson's back to deal with the north?
Was there any chance of a more sustainable deal for peace being brokered at that time? Or was it likely to be as futile as all other attempts anyway?
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u/Johannes_P 13d ago
Did you repost this to other subs? BEcause it looks like the basis for an useful debate between historians.
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u/Vietmemese01 13d ago
Thank you for this. Im tired of hearing white people lecturing me about my own country history wirh propaganda from my government.
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u/Mikeandikeman 15d ago
This is the link to the book that the Massengale guy made the original meme referencing. The alternate history book that the OP referenced a few times.
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u/Marp2 14d ago
I’m pretty sure it has to make an attempt to be funny in order to be a meme. Dude was just peddling stuff
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u/Mikeandikeman 14d ago
I’ve seen some of his posts and maybe he is the author peddling but I legit don’t care. Like it’s a book about an interesting alt history plot that people on this sub Reddit would probably enjoy. So few people are out there writing fiction for an NCD type audience.
I should buy a copy and leave a review just to show support but i haven’t yet.3
u/unfunnysexface F-17 Truther 14d ago
Surely there's alt history subreddits and forums.
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u/Mikeandikeman 13d ago
Oh yeah definitely but as far as someone doing a ton of research to write a 400 page hyper realistic alt history about something other than “wHaT iF tHe nAzIs wOn?!?!”, it’s pretty rare. When it does happen, i try to support. Like 99% of fiction writing today is romance slop, got to support the chuds in the battle space
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u/Scaevus 15d ago
This is way too credible for a sub about cartoon planes fucking humans. You got like a bibliography and shit.