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When one studies the Vietnam War -- leaving for a moment the very controversial motivations for the war -- it's interesting to see how far it differs from pop culture narratives (i.e. movies and videogames).

One surprising thing, for example, is how much the VC and later PAVN controlled the initiative. With a few exceptions (which Hollywood tends to highlight) the initiative, when to engage and how, was Vietnamese, not American. No surprise they won.

Another remarkable thing is how well the Vietnamese air force did against the Americans. They even had fighter aces and scored a lot of air-to-air kills!

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The U.S. would airdrop soldiers and artillery into an area. If the VC wanted to engage, they attacked. If they didn't want to engage, they ran away and came back when U.S. soldiers were eventually air-lifted out. The VC knew that U.S. forces were highly unlikely to move out of range of their support artillery, so they only had to retreat that far. It was argued that this was how things had to be done because the jungle was too difficult to move around in on the ground, but this tactic made it extremely hard for U.S. forces to gain initiative.

> Another remarkable thing is how well the Vietnamese air force did against the Americans. They even had fighter aces and scored a lot of air-to-air kills!

It wasn't until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990's that American aircraft became irrefutably better than Soviet aircraft, and a lot of that was better systems rather than better the aircraft themselves.

During the Korean war, the Mig15 dominated until the US sent their new F-86 Sabre fighter. The US Airforce claimed a 10:1 kill ratio of F-86 vs Mig15, but in reality it was more like 2:1:

> More recent research by Dorr, Lake and Thompson however has claimed the actual F-86 v MiG-15 kill ratio is closer to 2 to 1.[365] A recent RAND report[366] made reference to "recent scholarship" of F-86 v MiG-15 combat over Korea and concluded that the actual kill:loss ratio for the F-86 was 1.8 to 1 overall, and likely closer to 1.3 to 1 against MiGs flown by Soviet pilots[1]

During the Vietnam war the Mig17 was much better than the F105 fighter bomber. The Mig21 was probably the equal of the F4 Phantom, but the North Vietnamese got ambushed by F4s when they were expecting F105s and lost a lot of their airforce.

Outside Vietnam, most US vs Soviet aircraft fighting was in the various Israeli/Arab wars. But the Israelis were just much better trained pilots as their kill ratio in anything from Mirages to F16s shows.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#Aerial_warfare

I’m not an expert but have read a half dozen or so books about the war. The NV army was far more disciplined than the US or SV army, for one thing. For another, they had a brilliant strategist for a general (Giáp), while US strategy was being devised by, frankly, an incompetent general and Secretary of Defense. Also, the CIA supplied terrible intelligence.

Giap had been pushed aside by the time the US had any substantial number of US troops on the ground (~1965). He was briefly pulled back in in the early 1970's, but otherwise the strategy was driven by Le Duan at that point.

But suffice to say, the US lost because it took a "limited war" approach, while the North Vietnam were committed to "total war".

I agree with this comment. The Americans would try to win over the populace by giving away rice and other supplies, but the NV would simply destroy collaborators’ villages and murder their families. Bribes are nice, but extortion is much more effective.

A bit simplistic. North Vietnamese we’re after all.. Vietnamese. It was natural for many in the south to support fellow countrymen against foreign invasion. It was first the Chinese, then the French and now the Americans. They were just done having foreign power take over their country.

And don’t tell me the Americans didn’t do a lot of those things you just named. Wasn’t just “rice”.

um yeah cough "Mỹ Lai" cough

God, the Wikipedia page on this is absolutely horrifying:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BB%B9_Lai_massacre

I gather Colin Powell got his boost from covering up My Lai.

If anyone is interested, I'd highly recommend the book "Hanoi's War" by Lien-Hang Nguyen. She covers the war from the North Vietnamese side and got access to a lot of internal documents and interviewed the people involved.

Maybe not surprisingly, the war was just as messy on the other side. Lots of internal dissent and power struggles over how it should be run. Giap and Ho Chi Minh (prior to his death) were much more on the "slow and steady" approach, open to negotiation, while Le Duan pushed the "go for broke" approach. Le Duan eventually won that argument.

Giap did not believe the Tet Offensive was the right approach. In the run up to Tet '68, Giap was conveniently in Eastern Europe for "medical care" while his staff was jailed. Ho Chi Minh had already been relegated to a figure head at that point and didn't have much political power (he was also quite ill by then).

All of what you said is true.

This makes it doubly baffling about how the US approached the conflict. Instead of siding with a then amenable Ho Chi Minh, which would have made Vietnam if not an ally of the West, at least not totally hostile, they sided with the colonial power (the French) and against the national liberation movement. They even supported a dictator in the South that was so bad and unlikable, they later had to green light his assassination. And the ones that followed were inept and corrupt.

There was just no way the US, siding with colonialism and conducting a war whose major success metric was body count (i.e. kill them all and pray they are all commies) would have been able to win that war. Short of totally wasting the whole of Vietnam, North and South, in which case they would have lost in the court of world opinion.

The US was an apartheid ethnostate so it's probably not that surprising that it sided with French colonists to restore their property rights as a matter of principle rather than pragmatic, geo-strategic consideration.

Also, if you consider the Chinese response to these wars where the US was restoring the colonial system in a recently liberated Asia after the fall of Japan, it had desirable outcomes. China stifled it's economic growth by moving it's economic/industrial base deep into it's interior[0], since it felt that the cities on the coast were vulnerable to naval attacks, and areas near the borders of korea and vietnam would be vulnerable to US ground attack. This probably set back the Chinese economy severely, for decades.

Edit: And, of course, you could argue that "kill them all" would be a successful dissuasion to prevent other states from declaring independence. eg. Indonesia and Philipines. Though I guess the effect on them was probably mixed(?) You have to consider that Korea is still partitioned, and South Korea is still a vassal state and military outpost of the US. Although the US was unable to achieve that outcome in Vietnam, it was not an unreasonable goal at the outset.

[0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Front_(China)

Wait what? Indonesia and the Philippines both became independent immediately after WW2, long before the Vietnam War.

The "domino theory" was definitely in play, but that was about fear of Communist takeover in already-independent countries.

Only if you believe that the domestic population are a foreign entity who commit an "internal aggression" when they fight against a foreign armed and supported military dictatorship simply by dint of being "communist" (even when they are not).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suharto

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Marcos

Another interpretation is that that is a tired old canard which maintains a life-beyond-death as a necessary illusion which assists the beholder in doing their patriotic duty: maintaining a positive view of the foreign policy of their own nation.

Edit: but yes, my original response was sloppily worded. I didn't mean "declare independence", but rather, "actually achieve independence", my bad.

Keep in mind at this point France was a new nuclear power and I wouldn't be surprised if that played a huge role on how policy was crafted.

Do you think the war would have ended differently if the US took the fight into North Vietnam?

The Vietnamese benefited from three things in air combat:

1. Russian advisors and pilots. 2. The US generally required visual ID, which limited the benefits of their air to air missiles. 3. Lack of guns on many US fighters. The US faith in missile technology (which was premature), led to many instances of MIGs surviving where just a few years later they would be shot down.

Both the USN and the USAF were woefully underprepared for air to air combat in Vietnam, but once they got solved some of the equipment issues, and refined their tactics (especially the USN with TOPGUN), they began to dominate these engagements.

I know that's the story, and there's truth in it, but I also find it's an attempt to diminish the skill of the genuine fighter pilots they had.

If I had to risk an opinion, I think it's because it's a memory of a painful defeat for the US -- a militaristic nation with pride in its war history -- and so explanations are devised to diminish the skill of the Vietnamese and to explain away the defeat due to external reasons ("the politicians abandoned us", "the public didn't support us", "the Vietnamese were treacherous and didn't fight fair", "our leaders didn't let us use every weapon at our disposal", "the Vietnamese had help from China and the USSR").

That the Vietnamese fought genuinely better than the US isn't an acceptable explanation, which is why it's remarkable that upon study of the war, this is the fact that emerges.

It's usually not a good idea to ascribe motives online...

The fact is that the US military outfought both the Viet Cong and the NVA in most battles. The famed Tet Offensive wiped out the VC, and it wasn't until the US had basically cut off all military support in 1975 that the NVA was able to successfully invade the South.

This is what you would expect when you compare the size and scope of each countries military. It doesn't denigrate anything the Vietnamese people accomplished in their fight for a unified, independent country.

The Vietnamese were a hardy, tough opponent, that demonstrated incredible creativity and ingenuity in fighting a much wealthier foe. In small unit battles, they were as good as any US troops.

US troops also fought well, contrary to the stereotype of drug addled draftees who fragged their officers while committing war crimes.

Acknowledging the things that benefitted each side isn't trying to diminish the skills they exhibited. It's simply acknowledging the battlefield they fought on, and all of its constraints. The VPAF had both constraints and advantages as they fought a much better equipped foe.

http://acepilots.com/vietnam/viet_aces.html

>One surprising thing, for example, is how much the VC and later PAVN controlled the initiative.

That's how a lot of defensive wars go. The US was not strategically attempting to be on the offensive.

>With a few exceptions (which Hollywood tends to highlight) the initiative, when to engage and how, was Vietnamese, not American.

Even this is somewhat revisionist. At the end of the war the US was overwhelmingly leading in engagements and pushed the VC out of huge swaths. The VC were so decisively beaten back that they ceased to be an effective fighting force, almost disbanding entirely.

>No surprise they won.

Except they lost essentially all the battles.

The Vietnam War is a war where the US won almost every single tactical engagement, but lost the over all strategic war. Very few wars in history end that way.

>Another remarkable thing is how well the Vietnamese air force did against the Americans.

Initially. At the end, the US airspace was essentially unobstructed.

Seems a bit denialist. The VC effectively ended after Tet (which was a military blunder, but a propaganda triumph), but the PAVN took up the fight in their stead.

If you never have the initiative, defensive or offensive, it's hard for the war to go your way. You're essentially letting the enemy dictate the terms of most engagements.

The Vietnamese didn't "lose all the battles". Aside for effectively winning the most important battle, i.e. the battle for Vietnam, they also didn't lose many of the battles they picked. The US wanted pitched battles where its army fared better, but with few exceptions they were denied them. Was it unfair? I don't think so: there's no fairness in war, and it's stupid to meet the enemy where he is strongest, and wise to meet him where he's at his worst. Which is what the Vietnamese did.

Body count? Sure, Vietnam lost there. No surprise, the US was essentially out to kill as many Vietnamese as they could -- the only metric they could muster -- and there's no denying they were good at killing them. Unfortunately, short of killing them all and leaving not one single soul in Vietnam, that wasn't the way to win.

I don't think it was possible for the US to win; they were just one grain of sand in Vietnam's long struggle against foreign invaders.

The "won all the battles but lost the war" narrative is a mistaken claim by the US, which can mostly be explained by the lost face and the painful and almost unprecedented defeat they suffered.

> Initially. At the end, the US airspace was essentially unobstructed.

No such thing as "US airspace" in Vietnam, but I get what you tried to say. It doesn't matter if after years of war the USAF gained dominance over Vietnam's skies: the popular narrative ignores how well the Vietnamese did in the air war against the US, that they had fighter aces and scored many kills. A remarkable feat against the world's largest military power.

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