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Another option that was not considered until it was too late, but should have been constructed in the mid 60's when the question of weather or not the war could be won had become apparent, and could have spared a good many years of fighting and prevented the refugee problem in 1975. Fortify a land perimeter around the city of Saigon going out 100 miles or so to provide enough farmland to support the new city state of Saigon. Minefields, baracades, trenches and walls all along the border, build a military air base near the city to provide the air power necessary to stop any breach of the border.
That was the biggest problem in Vietnam, too much territory to defend, but if you cut it down to a 1000 square mile area and do it before the American public becomes so war weary they wanted to bail out on President Fords support plan, then you have something you can defend, something the American public might support over the long term. Look at what Israel was able to do with air power, let the planes carry the load, and you don't need a large army to defend.
Another option that was not considered until it was too late, but should have been constructed in the mid 60's when the question of weather or not the war could be won had become apparent, and could have spared a good many years of fighting and prevented the refugee problem in 1975. Fortify a land perimeter around the city of Saigon going out 100 miles or so to provide enough farmland to support the new city state of Saigon. Minefields, baracades, trenches and walls all along the border, build a military air base near the city to provide the air power necessary to stop any breach of the border.
That was the biggest problem in Vietnam, too much territory to defend, but if you cut it down to a 1000 square mile area and do it before the American public becomes so war weary they wanted to bail out on President Fords support plan, then you have something you can defend, something the American public might support over the long term. Look at what Israel was able to do with air power, let the planes carry the load, and you don't need a large army to defend.
So... in order to save Vietnam from the communists, effective surrendering the other 66,000 square miles of South Vietnam would have been the ticket?
And... you think telegraphing this surrender - and how could it be otherwise, considering the prodigious logistical nightmare of creating a bamboo curtain hundreds of miles long - wouldn't have instantly creating a massive refugee influx into Saigon? How is that, carving a small city-state surrounded on three sides by a Soviet client state (and one that is not going to stop attempting reunification by all means necessary) strategically better for the United States than what we did? Or just not bothering with it all in the first place?
Also, in order to secure Saigon with ocean access (the city is a port, but it's inland a ways) you're going to need to make sure this weird Saigon Perimeter idea includes sufficient land on either side of that waterway to provide for security. This is all very populated land - you're looking at a population of well over three million people. And there is no way that your 1000 square miles can come anywhere close to supporting that many people, even were not a substantial portion of it urban (and don't forget your air base - those things tend to have very large footprints).
That would have given the communists control of the whole country from that point on. In the year leading up to the vote referendum orchestrated by Diem in 1955, it was decided to leave the communists off the ballot and have a partitioned government. In 1954/1955 there was an ongoing push to relocate anti communist people to the south, and those loyal to the communists to move north. The north was more heavily populated than the south, and any election in northern precincts would be rigged in favor of the communists because they would control those precincts. Obviously Diem's vote referendum was also rigged, and that was a dumb move because Diem's popularity was solid enough that he could have won honestly and carried at least 60% of the vote without the fraud and slander of Bảo Äại, the weak elderly emperor running against Diem. The French were still around in that year, and they hated Diem and worked to promote the old emperor just to get revenge on Diem.
I don't fault the US for supporting Diem at that time for the above reasons, after all, we were trying to fight communism, not promote it with an election stacked in the favor of the communists. The situation was somewhat similar to Mossadegh in Iran needing to be removed to keep the communists from taking over Iran. Castro should have been removed from Cuba as well, but Kennedy was too soft to carry out the Eisenhower invasion plans.
They agreed to elections, and backed out when it became apparent that they would lose. Is that your idea of how a democracy is supposed to function?
Diem was never as popular among his supporters as Ho was with his. Diem was a Catholic in a majority Buddhist nation.
Years back, someone asked Cecil Adams what would have happened if we'd taken the insane amount spent on the war and just given it to the Vietnamese as a bribe or inducement to reject Communism.
He started by saying "Best damn question I've had in months" and went on to figure that we could have paid each and every Vietnamese citizen the considerable amount of $5,000 each... and it probably would have worked.
That would not have worked at all, Vietnamese citizens didn't have any power on either side. They were pawns in all this while as oligarchy on both sides were making the decisions. The north, Ho Chi Minh and his associates, were fighting for an ideology. You don't "buy-out" an ideology. And if the Vietnamese citizens swayed sides due to this money, it would just have been more that the North would have had to execute or send to "re-education camps".
Actually, we did try this. Johnson offered the north funding for a massive TVA-like project in 1965, basically a system of hydroelectric damns that would give energy and prosperity to the people, to the north if they would have ceased hostilities. Ho Chi Minh refused it - prosperity for his citizens was not part of his ideology.
Probably not. It was a theoretical question of the type Unca Cece is good at.
For one thing, should a time-traveler go back and suggest it ca. 1956 or 1960, they would have been laughed at. There was no way the war was going to take more than a few years or involve more than a few thousand US advisers... so what's this $150 billion crap, space-man?
The U.S got involved in Vietnam to stop the spread of Communism in South East Asia. How could the U.S had done this without sending U.S troops there to fight North Vietnam? What were some non war alternatives to stopping the spread of Communism over there?
Some other ideology besides communism would have had to have been the driving force that got rid of the colonial powers. Then maybe the anticommunist would have been on the right side
So... in order to save Vietnam from the communists, effective surrendering the other 66,000 square miles of South Vietnam would have been the ticket?
And... you think telegraphing this surrender - and how could it be otherwise, considering the prodigious logistical nightmare of creating a bamboo curtain hundreds of miles long - wouldn't have instantly creating a massive refugee influx into Saigon? How is that, carving a small city-state surrounded on three sides by a Soviet client state (and one that is not going to stop attempting reunification by all means necessary) strategically better for the United States than what we did? Or just not bothering with it all in the first place?
Also, in order to secure Saigon with ocean access (the city is a port, but it's inland a ways) you're going to need to make sure this weird Saigon Perimeter idea includes sufficient land on either side of that waterway to provide for security. This is all very populated land - you're looking at a population of well over three million people. And there is no way that your 1000 square miles can come anywhere close to supporting that many people, even were not a substantial portion of it urban (and don't forget your air base - those things tend to have very large footprints).
This is all just magical thinking.
Was forming the state of Israel magical thinking? What's so hard about the concept, a smaller land area is much easier to defend than a large land area, and we had control of the whole of South Vietnam for a long time. Not claiming to be a military tactician or knowing the lay of the land enough to tell you where the new borders should go to maximize the defense of Saigon. Just saying, my downsize plan checks all the boxes, and provides a strategic location for a US military/naval/air base which may have helped check the rising power of China in the region, becoming the replacement of our base in Philippines, and to protect against the North Vietnamese. It leaves the capitalists and President Thieu a refuge to build a thriving economy, perhaps even a prosperous one like Singapore. It gives us something to show for our efforts, allows the returning GI's to feel like it wasn't all a waste, and certainly provides a much more honorable end to the conflict than the fall of Saigon. What does it cost to keep the dmz border between North and South Korea maintained?
You may not know the Dutch Netherlands are a leading food export nation, and they do it on 16K square miles with a population of 17 million, and have a very short growing season.
You may not know the Dutch Netherlands are a leading food export nation, and they do it on 16K square miles with a population of 17 million, and have a very short growing season.
Off topic, but reality check time: The Netherlands are a top food EXPORTER because they are a top food IMPORTER. Yeah lots of articles make them out to be this agricultural wonderland, notice they always quote food exports, not food production. They are very innovative in agriculture yeah but really, what the Dutch are good at is global trade and making money, they have been doing this for centuries. They buy low from food producing countries and sell on the open market.
I'm no historian, especially on the war in Vietnam. But I do have concern that what that war taught the world, is that the best way to beat the U.S. is by turning the population against itself (as happened primarily on college campuses in the end years of the war (and I've got a suspicion that strife was based more on the hatred for the draft than it was for the war itself).
I recall reading that the bombing of Hanoi and mining of harbors in the North had brought the leadership back to the bargaining table, and were it not for the political strife in the U.S., terms could have been achieved that would have been
much more beneficial to South Vietnam (even if they would have ended up with a border as has existed between the Koreas for the past sixty-five or so years). As it happened, we pretty much abandoned the South and said "We no longer choose to play". Cambodia and Laos also paid a heavy price for that decision.
This is timely because of the internal strife we are facing today. Heck, if you can start a civil war that will leave your enemy in tatters, that's much better than having to invade yourself. Lucky for us China was not looking outward in 1863. Not so lucky for us in 2020.
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