Wars and Conflicts聽 permalink
Vietnam - a bright shining lie
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Message 1.聽
Posted by stalti (U14278018) on Wednesday, 27th April 2011
on a right wing website i read this statement<BR /><BR />"The Vietnam war was not lost on the battlefield, where not one single American unit ever lost one single battle."<BR /><BR />is that true ??<BR />in 1969 they lost 1200 dead - 1000 per month - 250 per week - <BR /><BR />surely not all booby traps - what was the biggest unit loss then - obviously la drang was a big one but where else ??<BR /><BR />for reference website is" <LINK href="http://www.thinking-catholic-strategic-center.com/vietnam-war.html"">http://www.thinking-catholic-strategic-center.com/vietnam-war.html"</LINK><BR /><BR />st
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Message 2
Posted by stalti (U14278018) on Wednesday, 27th April 2011
sorry that is a mess - forgot how to do the quotes es - doooohhhhhh
st -
Message 3
Posted by cloudyj (U1773646) on Wednesday, 27th April 2011
"The Vietnam war was not lost on the battlefield, where not one single American unit ever lost one single battle."聽
"Didn't lose a single battle" may be an exaggeration, but by and large the sentiment is true. The Americans had a very good combat record in Vietnam. Which is as expected with such a large disparity in equipment.
The real problem was the inept South vietnamese leadership and difficulty in controlling large swathes off rural areas. And of course opposition to war at home.
in 1969 they lost 1200 dead - 1000 per month - 250 per week聽
I guess that's 12,000 dead? Still, quite low for the numbers involved over a year. And certainly not an indication of defeat on the battlefield (though it was seen as that in the news) - Napoleon's victory at Wagram killed about 10,000 of the winning allies. -
Message 4
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 27th April 2011
stalti
Unforunately it seems the Americans at war have tended in the past not to count the cost in human lives quite as other people might do..
Hence, in so far as the US military every defined a battle with clear battle objectives (sometimes perhaps "goalposts" that could be moved) the amount of American lives lost would not detract from claiming the battle won.. or at least not lost. Curtis Le May famously said that if there was a Nuclear Holocaust victory would be all Communists killed and two Capitalists to be a new Adam and Eve.
In fact one might argue that as the US is a Republican Democracy the chances of claiming victory probably go up with the number of the dead. Electors do not like expensive failures.
The American Civil War may (according to my recent reading of Niall Ferguson's Collosus) still hold the record for the % of combatants killed.or injured... And Field Marshall Montgomery in his Memoirs mentions how after D-Day the US commanders could not understand his desire to keep British casualties to a minimum.
A cynic might suggest that the more recent US concern with "body-bags" is not unrelated to the incredible cost there now is in putting "yanks" into the battle-field: for almost certainly the death in combat of a current US combatant jeopardises very expensive kit.
But- to be fair to the USA- the men who got thrown into that combat got a very raw deal for many years...
Vietnam veterans were associated with US failure of either policy or strategy, and, though the main causes of that were not with the men sent to take on the task, there was a tendency to associate the US forces with things like the Mi Lai attrocity, drug taking, violent abuse of civilians and the Vietcong etc..
I believe that this has been a really dark scar on the "soul of the USA", if we can call it that: and- now that British and US forces are fighting not totally dissimilar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan- there is perhaps a greater awareness (perhaps in the UK more than the USA?) that the forces in the field are more than "pawns in the game". But they are tasked with serving..
Forces life is still "There's not to reason why. There's but to do and die".. But in previous ages the "warrior" was honoured.
Cass -
Message 5
Posted by cloudyj (U1773646) on Thursday, 28th April 2011
Unforunately it seems the Americans at war have tended in the past not to count the cost in human lives quite as other people might do.. 聽
When you say "other people" do you mean British? I can't believe there are only two ways a country views casualties: the American way and the way used by everybody else in the world as your post suggests. True, in the Frist World War, the US army looked at the phenomenal numbers of allied casualties and concluded the latest allied tactics were wrong and then insisted on devising their own. But is it wrong to want to reduce your own casualties rather than make the callous decision to accept high losses so long as you can kill more of your opponent?
Hence, in so far as the US military every defined a battle with clear battle objectives (sometimes perhaps "goalposts" that could be moved) the amount of American lives lost would not detract from claiming the battle won.. or at least not lost. 聽
That sounds exactly like every other military. The numbers of allied dead at the Somme didn't stop Britain proclaiming a victory. The goalposts were certainly moved to allow the allies to claim a victory.
The American Civil War may (according to my recent reading of Niall Ferguson's Collosus) still hold the record for the % of combatants killed.or injured聽
As in most civil wars, hardly something uniquely American. The greatest percentage loss of English life in war was during the English civil war. In Germany the Thirty Years War (in many ways a civil war with vast foreign intervention) killed a higher proportion too. China's Taiping rebellion killed as many Chinese as the Second World War.
And Field Marshall Montgomery in his Memoirs mentions how after D-Day the US commanders could not understand his desire to keep British casualties to a minimum.聽
Monty's memoirs are intensely political and are especially critical of Americans partly because he was passed over for Eisenhower's job. To be fair to him, Monty was very concious of casualties (as shown by the affection of those who served under him), but he was unusual in that respect even in the British Army.
A cynic might suggest that the more recent US concern with "body-bags" is not unrelated to the incredible cost there now is in putting "yanks" into the battle-field: for almost certainly the death in combat of a current US combatant jeopardises very expensive kit.聽
That would be an impressive cynic who concluded that US administrations put small financial costs ahead of enormous political costs.
Vietnam veterans were associated with US failure of either policy or strategy, and, though the main causes of that were not with the men sent to take on the task, there was a tendency to associate the US forces with things like the Mi Lai attrocity, drug taking, violent abuse of civilians and the Vietcong etc..聽
Completely agree. I wonder whether that's why many had so much difficulty in settling back into civilian life? Not only had the war been lost, the anti-war lobby had demonised the US soldiers too. WW2 veterans could always console themselves of fighting for a cause acceptred by alomst everybody as a moral cause. -
Message 6
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 28th April 2011
cloudyj
Thank you for your reply..
(a) No. I was not thinking just of the British.. There seem to me to be British people who are also quite prepared to see fighting, killing and dying rather differently to me or to many people like Dick Sheppard, or Mahatma Gandhi. Of course as the son of an Anglican Bishop Montgomery chose an interesting profession, but the British military has long experience of recruiting amongt the martial populations of Scotland and Ireland.
But rather like the British in the First World War one has to wonder just what relevant experience of large-scale land war either the USA had had within living memory.. The British had struggled to defeat the Boers, and Kitchener's reputation had been based upon wars against people who could still be defeated by cavalry charges- like the one that Winston Churchill took part in.
(b) Moving the goalposts is as you say a very common- and often quite responsible- policy adopted by all kinds of people trying to lead others who place their lives in their hands.. "Any port in a storm".
(c) I was quoting Niall Ferguson about how the Civil War casualties "rate".. But the in the cases that you mention- Germany and the Thirty Years War and the Taiping Rebellion- the death toll was greatly increased by Civilian casualties. In the rebellion of course the rebels were not an army, and I will not repeat things that I wrote on the Culloden thread about "war crimes".
But I would join the Chinese and Japanese in my general statement about attitudes to casualties. It was a point made to me in the late Fifties by an ex-GI who had been in Korea, and has been reinforced by subsequent reading.. I was astonished at Kate Adie's broadcast about Tienneman Square, when she asked who would have imagined that the Chinese army would do such a thing.. "Anyone who has studied any Chinese history" was my answer.
(d) I do not think that "cynics" can be impressive because by definition they believe in reducing the stature of human beings.. and I do try to resist cynical thoughts.. But sometimes it is hard for me when I look at the US in their role as World Leaders - "for the lack of anything better".
(e) I am glad that we agree on the pain of the Vietnam Veterans.. I am afraid that from my distance the USA looks very much like a success culture in which- whatever pious things people mouth- it is the winning not the taking part that counts.
But sometimes you have to realise that your goal-posts were in the wrong place.. A girl once told me "You have to aim for the stars to reach the moon".. A recent Radio 4 piece looked at American dreams now that man has been to the Moon, and the last Shuttle flights have been taking place.. A time to look for new "goal-posts".
I am currently half-way through a reading a book on "The Puritan Way of Death" which brings out that strong Puritan tradition that prioritised the role of the life of the individual on Earth as purely secondary to the life of the individual as potentially one of the chosen "elect" of God. Unlike M.L. King's "Promised Land" it was not a Heaven for "we as a people".
Cass -
Message 7
Posted by Allan D (U1791739) on Thursday, 28th April 2011
Sir Martin Gilbert points out in his "History of the 20th Century" that more Americans were killed on US highways in each of the years from 1965-73 than the number of US troops killed in Vietnam during the whole of that period yet the death toll (which still continues) does not appear to have affected theAmerican love affair with the motor car.
The fact is that the North Vietnamese were only able to claim a military victory and unify Vietnam by force after US forces had been withdrawn and North Vietnam broke the terms of the peace agreement it had signed aided by a US Congress which remained deaf to President Ford's pleas to supply the embattled South Vietnamese forces. -
Message 8
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 28th April 2011
Allan D
It is a fair point- and one that I frequently made to pupils as a history teacher teaching about the shocking things that people just learned to live with in past ages- just as most people buy into the motor car culture.. Truly Aldous Huxley had insight in making the Model T the catalyst for his Brave New World- with Ts where one might expect to see crosses.
But surely the American Dream- already powerfully being promulgated by Hollywood- was encapsulated in those "Happy Endings" when the happy couple drove off into the sunset. After the war the motor car became part of the teenage American Dream.. as Arthur Miller noted when he went back to his "alma mater" during McCarthyism hoping to find the campus life of his own early Thirties.. There was no campus life or debate about the eternal issues of human life and contemporary politics any more.. The students just drove in for lectures, and away again. The library was empty.
Surely US international adventures have not really been based upon Dreams but upon Nightmares-- as was the period when "Little Englanders" lost the argument and Britain also accepted the need to take up "The White Man's Burden". This is very much the burden of Niall Ferguson's book.
Once Vietnam really turned into a nightmare that viciously divided the US public a negotiated way out was almost inevitable.. [ There is still some comment that-in a country with no Welfare State- the military offers one of the seemingly best routes up for America's racial minorities, a point that was taken up in his understated way (in words) by Jimi Hendrix.. Back in the Sixties the right of African-Americans to fight and die for a country that refused them equal status and respect picked up a momentum that had begun to swell when black people servicemen came back from Europe where in part the fight had been against racism.]
Cass -
Message 9
Posted by hotmousemat (U2388917) on Thursday, 28th April 2011
The Vietnam war was not lost on the battlefield聽
But it wasn't won on the battlefield either, the reason being that Vietnam wasn't a problem where applying military force was an appropriate tool.
It was a very marginal decision for the USA whether to get involved at all. Once they did, they had to invent some good reasons to justify themselves. When things started to go wrong, they had to invent even better reasons - and they thought up such good reasons that they could no longer climb down even though their strategy was obviously doing more harm than good. Nor could the military bear the humiliation of admitting they had got it wrong.
The moral is that neither the military nor your own publicity machine should be allowed to take control of policy...both particular problems for the USA. -
Message 10
Posted by Seamus an Chaca (U14844281) on Thursday, 28th April 2011
I wouldn't believe any "right-wing" website about anything, they're usually idiotic, anal and wildly inaccurate bozo's who inflate everything they perceive as relevant, but hide contradictory facts?
Anyway, I thought that the US had over 40,000 deaths and 305,000 wounded?
Acc. to this link, America's most decorated officer of that war, Col. David Hackworth, in his book "About Face", disputes the 'fact' that the US never lost a battle.
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Message 11
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 28th April 2011
hothousemat
I would assert that the problem is even deeper..
In spite of Marxist concepts of the withering away of the State, during the Cold War two superstates were trying to spread by various means the idea that States are capable of delivering "the Good Life"...
The State, however, is by its very Nature the "nasty beast" that Societies create in the hope that it will protect them from even nastier ones- at home and abroad..
The First World War had dented the dwindling belief in great Imperial beasts and people had hoped that with a multiplicity of small States based upon "self-determination"- for Europeans in the first instance- a more stable and peaceful world would be produced. The result was economic World Chaos, and by 1940 the UK government were worried that Hitler might offer Nazi-Europe a customs union under German management.
During the war the Western Allies worked on ideas for the Future management of the World Economy uniting "political democracies". But in the post-war world the USSR offered its own very different system based theoretically upon "economic democracy" , which often in practice meant dictatorship by Communist Parties or their leaders.
Too many people have made the battered child mistake of believing that allying themselves to a strong man would make them strong, only to end up as the equivalent of "battered wives" the principle victims of the strong man that they hitched up with.
Cass -
Message 12
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 28th April 2011
Just speculating- but something in my brain has suggested that the "Vietnam generation" suffered a double tragedy in the eyes of the American public.
The Sixties generation were divided about the war, but less so about the implications of "Sex, drugs and rock and roll".. And this too ended in tears.
About twenty years ago a class of girls in our single-sex school gave me a present for helping them out somehow on a charity effort, and I think it was our pupil who was a Buddhist Nun during the school holidays who handed me a present in thanks.
I have the book here. It is called "Borrowed Time" and its author was Paul Monette, novelist and Hollywood scriptwriter.
The book was the first personal memoir to be published giving a full account of the development of AIDS, as Paul (born 1945) came to terms with the impact of the disease on his partner from the mid 1970's Roger Horwitz,, and Paul's long fight to put off what was then inevitable..
He ends the book with the Medical Centre phoning at 6 am to announce the death of Roger Horwitz at 5.42am. Paul went back to Roger's bed in Roger's bedroom in the Horwitz house. "Putting off as long as I could the desolate waking to life alone- this calamity that is all mine, that will not end till I do".
Of course AIDS was not limited to the gay community. It assumed the proportions of a modern plague: but I just get this gut feeling that Vietnam vets who had served in a still exclusively male "Band of Brothers" would have felt a sense of comradeship with former comrades of whatever sexual orientation hit with this second disaster.
There were no doubt some in the fundamentalist tradition of American Puritanism ( as was the case with some Islamic preachers) who saw AIDS as a "punishment from God."for promiscuity and abomination. Rock Hudson shrinking the American Dream before their very eyes.. But the veterans had seen reality..
Lest we forget...
But life goes on.. And Vietnam is a favourite tourist destination for US veterans who can laugh and joke (apparently) with the Vietnamese guides, who make a living out of conducted tours of the "underground cities", which enabled the Vietcong to operate right under their nose, or more accurately their feet. And AIDS is no longer such a death sentence.
Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis.
Cass -
Message 13
Posted by stuart (U1648283) on Thursday, 28th April 2011
"The Vietnam war was not lost on the battlefield, where not one single American unit ever lost one single battle." 聽
Vietnam was 'lost' because the USA failed to intervene in such a way as to preserve the rule of their 'client state'. Unlike Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, the Lebanon in 1958, the Dominican Republic 1965, Indonesia in 1965, Congo in 1965, Chile in 1973 etc., the US 'intervention', despite in this case amounting to committing half a million troops and dropping more bombs than one could imagine, did not yield the desired result- similarly the invasion of Cuba in 1961 failed. In the case of Vietnam, the spending on the war (which extended into Cambodia with further devastasting consequences) created such enormous economic difficulties (inflation, dollar devluation) as to force a political retreat and a move to detente- even making friends with communist China. The US came up against the limitations of its power. It was not always the case that minimal forms of intervention could work in favour of the US, and in the case of Vietnam, the deployment of massive resources could not shift the popular will. -
Message 14
Posted by stalti (U14278018) on Thursday, 28th April 2011
cloudyj
bless u - u turned my post from the rosetta stone to english lol
seamus - what a site thanx many
i didnt know if the quote was correct - but for an army losing every single battle and armed only with ak47s and hand held rockets - using mass attacks using their bodies as armour - to kill 250 us troops each week in a losing war took some doing
apparently 85% of their casualties were from artillery, helicopter, or air attacks after withdrawing from their original assault
what would have happened if
1 the vietcong had air support
2 the us didnt
when the vietnam war was at its peak i was a right wing schoolboy revelling in the body counts - since then i have read more and now feel the disgust i should have then
i have recently read a book which is the finest explanation i have read
"VIETNAM - christian g appy"
try it
st -
Message 15
Posted by arty macclench (U14332487) on Friday, 29th April 2011
Cass=
鈥淔ield Marshall Montgomery in his Memoirs mentions how after D-Day the US commanders could not understand his desire to keep British casualties to a minimum.鈥
Although there had been costly fighting in the Pacific, the American generals had not experienced mass casualties of 1914-18 as had those British generals who had been junior officers in WW1 and who were reluctant to waste soldiers鈥 lives in the same way in WW2. Montgomery himself was nearly buried alive having been given up for dead. However, there was an argument that gambling with mens鈥 lives in June-August 1944 would have saved more from dying later when the job had to be done all over again.
Some bright shining sweeping generalisations here
鈥淭here seem to me to be British people who are also quite prepared to see fighting, killing and dying ... but the British military has long experience of recruiting amongst the martial populations of Scotland and Ireland.鈥
It was English, and Irish and Scots, generals who were sanguine about expending lives of so-called martial Scots and Irish. As well as of Welshmen. And English. 鈥淪cum of the earth.鈥 (Wellington) 鈥淎nd no mischief if they fall.鈥 (Wolfe)
鈥淥ne has to wonder just what relevant experience of large-scale land war either the USA had had within living memory..鈥
-Well, if you mean in WW1- there was the American Civil War, for a start. There were still veterans alive in their sixties and seventies in 1918.
鈥淜itchener's reputation had been based upon wars against people who could still be defeated by cavalry charges- like the one that Winston Churchill took part in.鈥
The 鈥榗harge鈥 of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman defeated nobody. It was a costly mistake where disaster was only narrowly averted. The battle was won with machine guns and breechloading artillery. Not that many lessons were learnt from either of those facts.
鈥渢he period when "Little Englanders" lost the argument and Britain also accepted the need to take up "The White Man's Burden".鈥
Eh? What Little Englanders? When?
Stalti=
鈥淎n army losing every single battle and armed only with ak47s and hand held rockets鈥.
Not so. (You left out satchel charges) In the big battles in the Highlands and along the DMZ, which caused the heaviest US casualties, the Vietnamese had heavy artillery. What they lacked was airpower. -
Message 16
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 29th April 2011
arty macclench
(a) "gambling men's lives"-- exactlly.. I do not think that Montgomery was very willing to take such gambles-- But I remember with some horror US comment on the risks that had been taken with the Nuclear Holocaust that it had all been rather like a game of poker.. And the US were better at it than the USSR.
(b) Were the English, Irish and Scots not counted as "British"? I did not think that the Welsh supplied the same numbers as the other two- not just because Wales has a smaller population, but because of the special dispensation accorded to Welsh volunteers in the First World War who did not meet the required height.. and proved a point as the "Bantams".. The special nature of the war on the Western Front also resulted in the recruitment of miners in order to mine.
(c) The question is just what one thinks of as "relevant experience"..It was perhaps the tragedy of the IWW that so many commanders on our side did think that the American Civil War was a relevant experience.. and that war had inevitably to lead to the tragic scenes described by Emerson (?) in his poem "The wound dresser".
In fact by the 1870's it is very obvious from J.R. Green's "Short History of the English People" that the Prussian/German experience and that of the American Civil War was fostering what Mathew Arnold called the "Anglo-Saxon Contagion" with the use of the kind of "ring of steel" used by German Imperialists in Africa and the US cavalry at Wounded Knee being projected back into England's "Teutonic roots"... The mass slaughter of the native British he describes through a merciless "ring of steel" as the Anglo-Saxon Teutons came in search of "living space" was seen as part of the English heritage that needed to be rekindled.
[This point was made most forcibly by Charles Kingsley Professor of Modern History at Cambridge- along with everything else- in the early pages of his novel "Herewarde the Wake. The Last Englishman".. Like his friend Thomas Carlyle Kingsley's view of the decline of the English through centuries of living in relative safety on their sceptred isle was proto-Nazi.]
(d) This was the period- and these were the arguments- that took power away from the trend of British policy for previous decades that had all been aimed at producing a small State and a healthy Society and Economy, inspired among others by Cobden and Bright's interpretation of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" arguments- that were inspired by the way that Government intervention in trade produced trade wars-- including the American War of Independence.
(e) I did not say that the charge that Churchill took part in did defeat anyone. I merely quoted that as an example of the way that such tactics could still be seen as credible.. One might say that T.E. Lawrence showed that this was still the case in the right place in the IWW, but then by his account he knew nothing more about war than what he had learned in books- notable Clausewitz.
Cass -
Message 17
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Saturday, 30th April 2011
In his 1967 study of Cobden and Bright Donald Read tried to bring out the greater vision of Cobden, and concluded :
"In an important sense the world of the 1960's is continuing from the point where Cobden hopefully left the world of the 1860's a century ago."
I think that Read must have had in mind the popular groundswell of The Sixties that produced the "year of Revolution" 1968 and Woodstock in 1969.. The hopeful world was put on hold by the Opec Oil Crisis.. It re-emerged a couple of decades later in the fall of communism, and has emerged a couple of decades later in the Arab world.. which perhaps makes Cobden as relevant now as he was in the Sixties.
Read says that- "He doubted the constructive potential of government in any form... Cobden was right to look outside mere formal organization in his search for world peace and prosperity. An external force has now (1967) kept the world free from major war for over twenty years. This force is the fear of nuclear destruction.."
He notes that "Under cover of the nuclear balance of power Europe has moved towards internal free trade within the EEC.. The spirit of the EEC is exclusive, as Britain has found, rather than world-inclusive as Cobden would have wished."
"He was an internationalist and a democrat who has stood out as an inspiration not only for his own time but for future time, including our own. The era of high protection, extreme nationalism and rampant militarism, which began after his death (1865), and which culminated in two global wars, is now seen as a disastrous interlude."
Cass -
Message 18
Posted by Mutatis_Mutandis (U8620894) on Saturday, 30th April 2011
Not so. (You left out satchel charges) In the big battles in the Highlands and along the DMZ, which caused the heaviest US casualties, the Vietnamese had heavy artillery. What they lacked was airpower.聽
Perhaps. The North did have a small air force, which in many ways was surprisingly effective, and of course it developed a sophisticated anti-air defense system on Soviet lines. They did not have a tactical or strategic attack capability, but one can question whether that would have been a useful investment for them. A major advantage of ground-based air defenses was that were easier to hide and cheaper to replace.
The problem for US forces, and especially the air force, was how to respond to asymmetric warfare of a type they had never trained or equipped for. Few events illustrate the problem better than the brief use of F-102 interceptor jets, designed and built to protect the continental USA against a Soviet nuclear attack, to hunt VC campfires with their sophisticated infra-red sensors and guided missiles... The mismatch between the available tools and the tasks that had to be accomplished forced the USAF to brush off WWII equipment and invent new tactics. Even so the cost of destroying a supply truck from the air tended to vastly exceed the cost of manufacturing it.
In another notorious incident, Vietcong forces managed to position mortars within a few hundred meters of Bien Hoa airbase, destroyed half a dozen combat aircraft that were parked in neat but highly vulnerable rows, and slipped away unhindered. The embarassment wasn't reduced in any way by the fact that the vulnerability of the base to this type of attack had repeatedly been pointed out. (Echoes of Pearl Harbor.)
The military historian Martin Van Creveld has pointed out the absurdity of Anerican command arrangements in Vietnam, inspired as they were by the desire of politicians in Washington to keep tight control over a politically troublesome conflict. This created a requirement to collect and channel massive amounts of information up the command chain, and return a flood of detailed orders, which could not be met with the available technology. As a result, control of operations fell into the hands of "everybody and nobody". (I work for an US-owned multinational corporation, and I see this "system" in action every day.) This did a lot to negate the biggest asset of the air force, its ability to intervene quickly.
There is some irony in it -- Western observers have frequently criticised the rigidity and centralised nature of Soviet-inspired military tactics. In Vietnam the USA demonstrated that it could be just as inflexible. But if the North had had a bigger air force, it probably still would have stuck to Soviet air combat doctrines (for which most of its equipment would have been designed), doing little for its potential effectiveness. -
Message 19
Posted by White Camry (U2321601) on Tuesday, 3rd May 2011
hotmousemat:
The moral is that neither the military nor your own publicity machine should be allowed to take control of policy...both particular problems for the USA. 聽
Assuming, of course, there's a policy to take control. It's always seemed to me that the US had no policy in SE Asia except a) "not lose" because that (so it seemed) would encourage budding Communist movements elsewhere, and b) "not win" because that would be too expensive, just when the economy back home was hitting high gear.
Something had to give. -
Message 20
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 3rd May 2011
WhiteCamry
I think that to some degree what you have said applies to the whole thrust of "establishment history" since 1945...
The Second World War was fought as a defensive war, and so was the Cold War.. The Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine more or less made this clear..
The problems of the first half of the century had created a hunger for fundamental change based upon the hopes and aspirations presented during the second half of the Nineteenth Century that had finally percolated down to the masses, who were thus very vulnerable to populist politics, and to unstable and potentially chaotic economic forces.
By the end of the war there was a realisation that wealth and power would need to be harnessed infuture in order to control these unstable forces and produce a managed reality- whether based upon Capitalism or Communism.
It was a situation in which there grew to be an obsession with "road maps"- rather like those TV interviews in which the interviewee was told the questions in advance..
Life is just not like that.. Hence the shock on the faces of the Whitehouse crew as they watched real life real time as the events that they had set in train actually played out.
Cass -
Message 21
Posted by White Camry (U2321601) on Wednesday, 4th May 2011
Cass,
The Second World War was fought as a defensive war ...聽
Well, I was certainly fooled. Here I was, thinking it was fought and won as an offensive war. -
Message 22
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 4th May 2011
White Camry
It was seen at the time as a classic war fought in the English tradition since the time at least of King Alfred.. Last ditch defence against the invading aggressor then a break out, localised victory followed by the gradual over-running of the lands of the aggressors and the imposition of Christian Civilization- and Anglo-Saxon supremacy.
This time of course the Anglo-Saxon superpower was vital- but it only became a combatant after the attack at Pearl Harbour, which was the start of a Japanese attempt to conquer a "Co-prosperity sphere" like the Nazi one.
Cass -
Message 23
Posted by TrailApe (U1701496) on Thursday, 5th May 2011
Hello All.
I think WhiteCamry hit the nail well and truly on the head when he highlights the lack of policy in the US鈥檚 intervention in SE Asia as a major factor in their ultimate failure to keep S Vietnam out of the Domino Theory.
There were none 鈥 or at least none that I鈥檓 aware of 鈥 overall military goals and despite the fact that in most cases the US military defeated the VC or NVA when they went head to head, they were on a hiding to nothing until they implemented an underlying military strategy. As mentioned previously, this war was characterised by a level of political control that even interfered with the daily selecting of targets on bombing lists. Once high level politicians become embedded in the minutia of the campaign, the whole cause goes to a bag of rat droppings. Luckily in 1939-45 we had Alan Brooke to head off much of Winnie鈥檚 mad schemes and explain military necessities, I don鈥檛 think the US had the same equivalent.
With regards to winning every battle, I鈥檓 sure there were a few small unit actions in which patrols were ambushed and suffered severe casualties that effected their mission objective, but given the mobility of the US forces, these were invariably rapidly reinforced and the NVA/VC driven off. Historically the participant who holds control of the battlefield is deemed the victor, so US 1 Bad Hats 0. However, given the fact that the US troops were not fighting to hold ground (apart from around their firebases) they might wonder if these victories where a tad pyrrhic.
Not having had the role of 鈥楶oliceman of the World鈥 prior to the Cold War period, the US did鈥檔t have the history of fighting low intensity brushfire operations all over the place, where in many circumstances, force retention 鈥 i.e. not getting the whole company/battalion/brigade wiped out in the first battle 鈥 is as important as winning. Often our scattered forces in Days of Empire, would take the field with the intention of not getting destroyed and holding the ring until the RN hove to and brought in the necessary forces to properly finish the job. We often say that we will always lose the first battle but ultimately will win the war.
The US are not saddled with this historic view of operations, and from what I can gather, they believe the best way to reduce casualties in the long run is to go in with extreme force and keep this high tempo up throughout the operations 鈥 hence the (alleged) apparent willingness to take casualties. I鈥檒l accept that there were a few instances of apparently wasteful loss of life, the Hurtgen Forest and the assault on the Rapido River are two examples of extremely high US casualties, however they are both examples of bad Generalship and were the exception rather than the rule.
As for the Expensive Kit vs. the Life of a Squaddie, my personal perspective is that the US will rather expend money than blood and most of their personal kit and crew served equipment reflect this. Look at the M1 tank 鈥 millions of dollars spend on ensuring crew survivability rather than just solely equipment survivability.
British military has long experience of recruiting amongst the martial populations of Scotland and Ireland.聽
Not sure of what the point is here 鈥 are you suggesting that the 鈥楤ritish Army鈥 did not recruit from the English and Welsh also 鈥 or perhaps they were not 鈥榤artial鈥? I鈥檒l accept that around the 1840鈥檚 and 1850鈥檚, the period of the potato famines, there will be a surplus of Irish and Scottish males of weapon bearing ages available, but apart from this period, this Irish/Scottish making up the British Army does not hold true. Now the following stats may not be 100% accurate as I鈥檝e pulled them from Wiki and they are based on Regiments, not Battalions but in 1881 68% of the Regiments in the BA were English, in WW1 same figure and in WW2 72% were English. Now it鈥檚 true that the 鈥楲oyal North Lancashire Regiment鈥 or the 鈥楽outh Staffordshire Regiment鈥 may have had a few Irish or Scots in it, but it鈥檚 unlikely that these English Regiments were stocked to the gills with Scots and Irish. Take Waterloo 鈥 synonymous with kilted Highlanders, however of the infantry battalions there 62% were English - the 1st battalion of the 28th (North Gloucester) Foot and the 1st Battalion of the 32nd (Cornwall) Foot somehow just don鈥檛 seem to be as 鈥榮exy鈥 as the Cameron Highlanders and the Royal Scots when it comes to making remakes of the action..
Little Englanders聽
What does this mean?
The mass slaughter of the native British he describes through a merciless "ring of steel" as the Anglo-Saxon Teutons came in search of "living space" was seen as part of the English heritage that needed to be rekindled聽
I thought that the Slaughtering Germanic Tribes massacre of the defenceless Celts (Martial or otherwise) had been thoroughly debunked? Charles Kingsley departed this life in 1875, so I鈥檓 not sure how his fictional works have any bearing on this matter.
It was seen at the time as a classic war fought in the English tradition since the time at least of King Alfred聽
By whom?
This time of course the Anglo-Saxon superpower was vital- but it only became a combatant after the attack at Pearl Harbour, which was the start of a Japanese attempt to conquer a "Co-prosperity sphere" like the Nazi one. 聽
To say nothing of the Mongol Hordes of the East, and to say that Pearl Harbor (it is an American place name after all) was the start of the Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere is way off a by a few years, the annexation of Taiwan 1895 could be seen as the start of the trend and and Second Sino-Japanese War kicked off in 1937, so the Japanese were trying to co-prosper people well before Pearl. -
Message 24
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 5th May 2011
TrailApe
(a) I think you will find that I referred to this assertion made by Niall Ferguson in his study that made many of the points that you have made here about just what the USA could learn from the British role as "Global policeman".. As for % one would have to look at the proportionality of the various regions, and also just what "English" meant.. T.E. Lawrence always refers to himself as an Englishman, though his father was Irish, his mother Scottish and he was born in Wales.. It was a time when people with roots outside of England were proud to claim "Englishness"-- and I have no problem with that- always in the hope that they will eventually discover the benefits of "English Peace".
(b) I am using the term "Little Englanders" a little more generally than when the term really came to the fore in debate, which was at the time when the pursuit of national power both through Jingoistic Imperialism and then seeking allies in a Europe of Great Powers.. From Tudor times England had been fighting to preserve its independence from European domination-real or potential- and up to the late 1860's the fact that by growing from England into GB it had been possible to demonstrate the "power in the small to overthrow the mighty".. Hence there was support for Liberalism and progressive politics that was possible in small countries- as England had been, and as the new countries that British policy encouraged- like Belgium, Greece, and the Latin American republics.. The Crimean War was fought in order that the collapse of the Ottoman Turkish Empire could be "managed" and not just provide for a new horde from the steppes of Russia to create a huge new power.
(c) The Crimea however followed by the US Civil War, and the growth of a new militaristic German Empire changed the whole climate of Mid-Victorian confidence. And this was when the whole idea of the Anglo-Saxon people being Teutons too and quite capable of massacring in the interests of survival came into vogue. Previously history had been all about kings, courts and government, but the USA, Germany and Russia built up this whole idea of the State as the vehicle by which the energy of a whole "folk" could be harnesses in the Darwinian Struggle for Survival.
(D) As for the classic war- I would refer you to Churchill's speeches. Nothing has better summed up or expressed the idea of the Anglo-Saxon last ditch defence.. "We will never surrender". That goes right back to the Anglo_Saxon Chronicle and the way that a battlefield was always referred to as "the place of slaughter".. The Anglo-Saxon combatant could never surrender, but must die on the "place of slaughter".. Only the King or leader could end it.
Cass -
Message 25
Posted by hotmousemat (U2388917) on Thursday, 5th May 2011
Assuming, of course, there's a policy to take control. It's always seemed to me that the US had no policy in SE Asia except a) "not lose" because that (so it seemed) would encourage budding Communist movements elsewhere, and b) "not win" because that would be too expensive, just when the economy back home was hitting high gear.聽
Regarding Vietnam, at the conference (Geneva) ending the French involvement, the USA could have recognised the division of Vietnam into two states and guaranteed this along with the Soviet Union and China, as was effectively the case with Korea.
If they didn't have a two state solution, then who was the true government of Vietnam? Any free combined vote would have gone the north's way. And any free vote in the south would have produced a government that would have come to terms with the north. So they were stuck with supporting southern governments which had neither international guarantees nor a domestic popular mandate. Governments that were inevitably going to be corrupt and unpopular, since they depended on pleasing a foreign power rather than their own people.
But the point is that plenty of Americans saw this coming and argued that if they had to 'make a stand' this was not the ground on which to do it. But once they had started to put resources in, the situation developed its own unstoppable momentum. -
Message 26
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 5th May 2011
Regarding recruitment to the British Army, if I were not merely quoting Niall Ferguson, or Feargus O'Connor who referred to the "warlike" Scots and Irish (having had an uncle who was one of Napoleon's Generals), I might go back to what Charles Kingsley wrote in "Herewarde the Wake. The Last Englishman" at that crucial time of national re-evaluation and revival in a new age of even greater militarism in the 1860's and 1870's.
Of course there is a chicken and egg situation about academic history, and someone like Kingsley was almost inevitably going to be appointed Cambridge Professor of Modern History, when the subject was just being started at academic level and no-one had yet gone through an academic course in history.
So Kingsley saw England on the eve of the Norman Conquest as having been ruined by prosperity so that there were hardly any Englishmen in the formerly formidable "Wessex" region worthy of their ancestors.
But the situation by the 1860's was even worse. Eight hundred years before daily life was a struggle and those not fit to survive were eliminated from the breeding stock. So the "average" Englishman of the 1860's would have been one of them.
And the fault lay in the fact that the Lowland regions (especially the Southern half of England) were the most quickly tamed and brought under cultivation. So people became peaceable and lazy.
Most of the rest of Britain was peopled not by these "Lowanders" with the strength of Lions but the quiet temperament of oxen, but by " Highlanders"> And Highlanders are wild and untamed, and were much more "up for the fight" of the present.
I was quite surprised to find such a strong sense of regionalism still in that period. But there is some logic..
As a great enthusiast of English rugby it does appear that certainly the kind of English forwards who are expected to first of all "win the battle up front" seem to come predominantly from the West Country, the North Midland and regions further North, and modern genetics would appear to suggest that there are particularities of for example Viking genes that predispose character towards those attributes that Kingsley described.
From what I have seen the British Army knows its fruitful recruiting grounds within Engand, the UK and the wider world.
There is apparently a programme on TV this week-end showing just how few Englishmen and Brits were in Nelson's fleet at Trafalgar.
Cass -
Message 27
Posted by TrailApe (U1701496) on Friday, 6th May 2011
Casserolean,
Thanks for replying to my earlier post, but I鈥檓 still not quite sure what Kingsley and Ferguson has to do with the US performance 鈥 militarily and politically 鈥 in SE Asia.
As for the opinions of those writers whom you have brought to our attention 鈥 are you agreeing with them and that the traditional line that divides Lowland Britain with Highland Britain (Bristol Channel to the Humber I think it is) is also a divider between the Meek and the Bolshie?
I can understand that stance emanating from a 19th Century mind, but I cannot believe a person who has the benefit of hindsight and the resources available to us at the minute even touching this emotive romantic claptrap.
Anyway, I鈥檓 not versed in the writings of these gentlemen that you allude to however if there is one thing I鈥檓 quite comfortable with is Rugby Union, and your assertion that
English forwards who are expected to first of all "win the battle up front" seem to come predominantly from the West Country, the North Midland and regions further North,聽
Is totally without substance 鈥 of the 11 forwards selected for the EPS prior to this years Six Nations, six of them were born in the SE, two in the Midlands, one in the NE and two abroad. I know additional players were picked due to injury, but the main trend is that the majority of the English forwards in the current team are NOT selected from the West Country, North Midlands and 鈥榬egions further north鈥 .
From what I have seen the British Army knows its fruitful recruiting grounds within Engand, the UK and the wider world.聽
What does this mean 鈥 are you still saying the British Army is made of Irish, Scots and Irish/Scottish people born in Wales with a penchant for the Desert claiming they are English?
There is apparently a programme on TV this week-end showing just how few Englishmen and Brits were in Nelson's fleet at Trafalgar聽
Which has nothing to do with the British Army, US Army or even Fred Karno鈥檚 Army -
Message 28
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 6th May 2011
TrailApe
Thankyou for your post
re Kingsley's opinions-
I was reminded of this popular theory of the superiority of the Highlanders- especially the Scots- yesterday evening when I watched a documentary about the lighthouse-building Stevensons, whose genius in design, accompanied by the incredible exploits of the workers that they hired and supervised did emphasise the Scottish superiority in marine engineering-and (as one female author who has conducted a study) just showed that the Scots were just generally superior to the English.. A point that was made by the MP historian T.B. Macaulay in a speech in parliament in 1847.
The aforesaid author also said that their lighthouses showed the growing ability of humankind to "tame Nature". Another Kingsley idea.
And this is the worrying bit.. because this idea that Humankind, in becoming more powerful through a particular kind of Civilization, was increasingly able to tame Nature became quite an obsession, throughout the whole era of the "history of Progress" which spilled over into the post-war world when finally science and technology (in all their forms) were supposed to create a new, managed and stable world order in the Fifties and Sixties.
As an English lowlander I know that Kingsley was wrong in his analysis.. as was the French guide to Great Britain written in the 1970's which similarly singled out Lowland England as being a place of a very different character to the rest of England.
This French author saw "we" Lowlanders in very similar terms to Charles Kingsley. Far too quiet and subdued, compared to other parts of the country where French people will find themselves much more at home than in the South. This South, where surely everyone is badly repressed and life is only possible because the population take tranquilisers and sleeping pills. This was not a region that can understand individualistic "crimes of passion". These English of the "stiff-upper lip" and self-control, who just refuse to give in to their passions and emotions.
But a thousand years ago- according to the historian Dorothy Whitelock- these Lowland regions- on converting to Christianity- accepted to live peacefully by the oficial law of the land, and give up the traditions of revenge and blood feud.
Those traditions continued in the lands of the Danelaw and similar Northern settlement: and seem to be perpetuated through the great football rivalries- that of course do include those in a London that has been a magnet for inward migration for centuries.
But learning to have power and control over oneself is the beginning of all really effective collective power. So Kingsley was partly right in thinking that the Lowlanders were more "tame". But it was not Nature that they changed, but their own wildness, so that they might better live in harmony with one another and with a "Mother Nature", who was no tamed domestic, slave or machine, but the fount of all life, as those of us who work the land as our forefathers did know experientially.
This lowland English growth was accompanied by ideas, which were freely expressed in Tudor England, that everyone should be working for the general Commonweal.
It was the wealth generated by a thousand years of these practices of "English Peace" that helped to finance the "heroic" exploits of great individualists during the Industrial Revolution, whose ideas of learning and manipulating the very secrets of life were exposed by May Shelley in Frankenstein.
Then concepts of Commonweal gave way to individualism and the seductions of what Kenneth Clark called "Heroic Materialism"..and he chose to illustrate this new phase of Civilisation with New York. Look what overwhelming force can achieve as "man" covers over Nature with demonstrations of his own pride!
Cass
PS. My rugby observations were upon more historical times when top level rugby was not limited to professionals, and the Divisional Championship was the basis of National Selection. .. As modern rugby players are mercenaries- this might well also impact upon the roots of the people who end up playing for England. -
Message 29
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 6th May 2011
Following my previous post I happened to look at an item on the News site which asks why certain schools produce clusters of "celebrities" - the modern indication of success.
And it was interesting to see that the schools were in Ayrshire, Cumbria, Liverpool, Belfast and London.. It is not clear clear just by what process these particular individuals and the schools they attended were selected... But it might possibly reflect that more often than not a certain single-mindedness and individual drive are requisites for more than "Big Brother"/ reality TV celebrity.
And one might wonder whether this personal sense of mission was not often a powerful element in the motivations of the Founding Fathers of whom the USA is so proud. These seem to have been of various kinds, but the "hard core" pioneers were "Separatists" in spirit if not all in name..
Thomas Cranmer had brilliantly crafted the liturgy of an Anglican Church that could embrace all Christians of goodwill, anxious to continue the English tradition of Commonweal and create the possibility that all could worship together- interpreting Cranmer's words according to their personal understanding.
For many "Puritans" this was not good enough. They could not worship alongside people who might understand Christianity in a way that they personally found abhorrent, and moreover they insisted that the words and the conduct of worship should reflected only their truth. Only then perhaps could they hope to show that they were the "elect of God"- a new chosen people.
Bob Dylan wrote how this impacted on US History in "With God on our side".
By this time the heroic history of the USA and its "Manifest Destiny" in which the successes of its wealth and power were taken as obvious signs of God's favour was well-versed.
But by the time of Vietnam John Steinbeck was writing about the loss of heroes and the great leaders of the past who shone a beacon over the Present and the Future. It was a muddied, sickly and confused age. He correspended with Jackie Kennedy, who seems to have hoped that this great writer would write the life of her dead husband JFK in those heroic terms.
Steinbeck declined but wrote in many letters how from his childhood his imagination had been caught up in Mallory's "Morte d'Arthur", and how he longed to write something that would bring back that schoolboyish idea of Chivalrous Knights riding about the country fighting and killing with the blessing of God. .. Hollywood and then TV film studios have done it for years.
The team that went in to "get" Bin Laden were no doubt proud to live up to this tradition, going right into "the Dragon's lair".
Cass -
Message 30
Posted by GrandFalconRailroad (U14802912) on Monday, 23rd May 2011
I've always thought the two greatest tradgedies of the the Vietnam War aside the damage to the people of Vietnam itself were that the US spent so much money fighting the dammed war from 1960-1972 ('75 if you include aid until the final invasion of RVN) that it couldn't afford to regenerate it's own economy and socio-economic infrastructure during the 1970's and early80's and you've only got to watch movies showing the state of the US urban environment to realise just how much damage that caused.
The United States could have won the war by beginning to bomb NVN in 1963 and just keep on bombing it until there was nothing left - non-nuclear of course - as Linebacker I & II did more harm to NVN in weeks than the rest of the war did in years. -
Message 31
Posted by Vizzer aka U_numbers (U2011621) on Monday, 23rd May 2011
I am using the term "Little Englanders" a little more generally than when the term really came to the fore in debate, which was at the time when the pursuit of national power both through Jingoistic Imperialism and then seeking allies in a Europe of Great Powers.. From Tudor times England had been fighting to preserve its independence from European domination-real or potential- and up to the late 1860's the fact that by growing from England into GB it had been possible to demonstrate the "power in the small to overthrow the mighty".. Hence there was support for Liberalism and progressive politics that was possible in small countries- as England had been, and as the new countries that British policy encouraged- like Belgium, Greece, and the Latin American republics.聽
To try to re-brand 'Great British Imperialism' as 'Little Englandism' is a remarkble feat - but it doesn't work.
Little Englandism is the exact opposite of Great British Imperialism and has a long and continuous history. Whether it was the grumblings in Parliament in the 13th and 14th Centuries at the tax cost of the Scottish Wars and the Hundred Years War. Or whether it was the luke-warm English participation in the Irish plantations in the 16th and 17th centuries. (The Scottish planters in Ireland, for example, were much more earnest and enduring.) Or whether it was the Englsh refusal to support Scotland in its Darien War with Spain and the subsequent widespread English opposition to the Treaty of Union. Or whether it was widespread sympathy in England for the American colonists during the War for Independence etc by the time of the Victorian Era there was a well-established tradition of Little Englandism (albeit often of the losing side in the debate on UK foreign policy).
Even at the height of the Victorian Empire the Little Englanders regularly opposed the casual jingoism of the Great British Imperialists. For example the ceding of the Ionian Islands to Greece in 1864 was the only time that the British Empire voluntarily ceded territory to a foreign country during that century. This was largely down to the influence of William Gladstone who was very much a figurehead for the Little Englanders at that time. Even Gladstone's political adversary Benjamin Disraeli (known to history as an arch-imperialist if ever there was one) had himself started his political career as a Little Englander when in 1852 he had described the British imperial territories as 'millstones around our necks'.
The Crimean War was fought in order that the collapse of the Ottoman Turkish Empire could be "managed" and not just provide for a new horde from the steppes of Russia to create a huge new power.聽
This is another bizarre interpretation. The British Empire during the Crimean War had no intention whatsoever of dismembering the Ottoman Empire. Where if the evidence for this? -
Message 32
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Monday, 23rd May 2011
Vizzer
I fail to see where we disagree..
Points that you make like:
"Little Englandism is the exact opposite of Great British Imperialism and has a long and continuous history. Whether it was the grumblings in Parliament in the 13th and 14th Centuries at the tax cost of the Scottish Wars and the Hundred Years War. "-- are very much in line with things that I have argued - not least in my "book" "English Peace" on my thread "The Roots of the Modern World".
For example you quote me : "Hence there was support for Liberalism and progressive politics that was possible in small countries- as England had been, and as the new countries that British policy encouraged- like Belgium, Greece, and the Latin American republics." Disraeli's "two nations" reality- though he saw a divide based upon wealth- was obviously much easier to tackle at a small and personal level, as -I would argue- the English had done for a thousand years or respect for the English Commonweal, concepts that seem to an Englishman to have been singularly lacking in Scotland and Ireland to anything like the same degree.
One could argue that the present state of world politics is one in which it is once again possible to hope that the kind of small state solutions that seemed possible in the middle of the Nineteenth Century might once again seem feasible. In a way this was the philosophy that Woodrow Wilson espoused when he thought of a world based upon self-determined nations operating within sound international structures.
And what you seem to often suggest on the MB is proper self-determination for all the "nations" of the British Isles.
As for the Crimean War, it was fought by Britain to stop the expansion of the Russian Empire and the acceleration of the disintegration of the Turkish Empire. Britain had participated in this in a structured way when it took a leading role in the creation of modern Greece. And it was Britain's continuing foreign policy objective in the Balkans to support a controlled process that would see the emergence of viable nation states, and not allow the political vacuum to suck in either Austro-Hungarian or Panslavist Russian Imperialism.
The argument I believe was made quite forcefully by Disraeli who saw that Britain could not just ignore "The Eastern Question".
Cass -
Message 33
Posted by arty macclench (U14332487) on Tuesday, 24th May 2011
"- this Irish/Scottish making up the British Army does not hold true. .. Now it鈥檚 true that the 鈥楲oyal North Lancashire Regiment鈥 or the 鈥楽outh Staffordshire Regiment鈥 may have had a few Irish or Scots in it, but it鈥檚 unlikely that these English Regiments were stocked to the gills with Scots and Irish. Take Waterloo ... "
Point of order from a little way back, but, yes, many English regiments in the British Army were stocked if not quite to the gills with Irishmen, then almost. And not only English but Scottish too. By Waterloo, less than half of the Black Watch were Highlanders and the other half comprised English, Irish and one West Indian. I'd quote figures but they are out of reach. In the American War of Independence, a significant number of Royal Welch Fuzileers officers and men were Irish including the literary Sgt "Lamb of the Ninth" who was allowed to choose the RWF when he escaped from captivity after Saratoga.
When county titles were allocated at the end of the AWI they had very little meaning as regiments continued to recruit, as they always had, where they could best find men. There was always a pool of Irish manpower. it was only after the reforms of 1881 that there began to be true correspondence between a regiment's title and the origin of its recruits from one district. I would say the British over the centuries have tended to prove themselves not so much martial as soldierly. -
Message 34
Posted by White Camry (U2321601) on Tuesday, 24th May 2011
GrandFalconRailroad:
The United States could have won the war by beginning to bomb NVN in 1963 and just keep on bombing it until there was nothing left - non-nuclear of course - as Linebacker I & II did more harm to NVN in weeks than the rest of the war did in years.聽
Nothing short of an all-American, corps-sized (at least!) invasion of NVN with the goal of destroying that state could have dissuaded Ho Chi Minh from his dream of doing the likewise to SVN. Air forces alone don't win wars and never will. -
Message 35
Posted by stalti (U14278018) on Friday, 27th May 2011
hi gf
" The United States could have won the war by beginning to bomb NVN in 1963 and just keep on bombing it until there was nothing left - non-nuclear of course - as Linebacker I & II did more harm to NVN in weeks than the rest of the war did in years."
yes u are probably correct - bombing the north into the stone age may well have stopped the NVA from being involved - but it may well have involved china and russia - remember korea when 300000 chinese troops hurtled over the border
so when the north is smashed - who runs this new vietnam - the usa chosen leaders - corrupt and unpopular - the same people who kept the VC campaign going ? as soon as the war is over the us wants to bail out - what happens then - the country is not ruled by populsr consensus
my view is even if the north is smashed- the people - the vc - keeps fighting - as soon as the us leaves it starts again
hello - sounds a bit like afghanistan - am i allowed to say that ??
st -
Message 36
Posted by cloudyj (U1773646) on Saturday, 28th May 2011
yes u are probably correct - bombing the north into the stone age may well have stopped the NVA from being involved - but it may well have involved china and russia - remember korea when 300000 chinese troops hurtled over the border聽
That was certainly the fear of American planners which was why the bombing campaign was kept at levels which the US military thought ineffective.
so when the north is smashed - who runs this new vietnam - the usa chosen leaders - corrupt and unpopular - the same people who kept the VC campaign going ? as soon as the war is over the us wants to bail out - what happens then - the country is not ruled by populsr consensus 聽
Ho Chi Minh. The US never intended to take over the north, nor even effect regime change there. The plan to bomb the north (which wouldn't have reduced it to the stone age even with the wished for levels of bombing) was to force the north to abandon its interference in the south.
The VC campaign was kept going by the north and after the Tet Offensive it was largely run by, and recruited from the north. Very early North Vietnamese thinking had been to avoid "northernizing" the VC for fear of killing support for the movement among those who would resent "outsiders". It was only as a matter of necessity that the north re-engaged with the VC.
The US hoped that a serious and sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam would remove that backing and the VC would then collapse due to its already waning support base.
my view is even if the north is smashed- the people - the vc - keeps fighting - as soon as the us leaves it starts again
hello - sounds a bit like afghanistan - am i allowed to say that ??聽
Of course you can. I'd also draw a parallel in that the VC (like the Taliban) lacked true popular support and established itself by massive violence against the local populations. And another parallel that both the VC and Taliban get very little criticism simply because they're resisting the USA. -
Message 37
Posted by stalti (U14278018) on Saturday, 28th May 2011
hi cloudyj
good points
thing is - although u say taliban and vc are against the usa - the usa in both places is a foreign invader - they werent invited to be there
in both places the usa sponsored government were/are corrupt and without popular support
TET -although a military disaster for the vc was the final straw that broke the usa camels back - after all the usa could do they carried out a major attack - even if the usa could (and should) have carried on - as soon as they left it would have started again
read a good quote - the vc would carry out an attck near a viiage - us troops would retaliate and burn the village - they would the relocate the survivors - two thirds would go to the new village and one third to the vc
and it would go on and on and on
st -
Message 38
Posted by Dai Digital (U13628545) on Friday, 10th June 2011
on and on until by some estimates 4million Vietnamese were dead.
Whatever the figures, the country was devasted, and then held in chains by sanctions as further punishment for its temerity.
And yet the sad stories are always about America, and its agonised self-recrimination and shame at losing.
That stinks. -
Message 39
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Friday, 10th June 2011
on and on until by some estimates 4million Vietnamese were dead.聽 Intricate math at work, eh? Does not quite match any meaningful stats whatsoever, though (in the war between NVA and South Vietnamese military, Vietnamese casualties on both sides hardly exceeded a million people). But of course, once NVA overran South Vietnam long after the US withdrawal, it conducted a full scale genocide with casualties in the hundreds of thousands. Bundle that with the genocide conducted by another commie celeb Pol Pot in Cambodia, and you get close to the number. Now, all you need to do is write them all off on the Yanks. It's a pity that it does not work for Mao''s China and North Korea that well, is it?
-
Message 40
Posted by stalti (U14278018) on Friday, 10th June 2011
hi Dai
agreed
there is this emotional overload about the 57000 american dead - the wall - the sad generation of vets who cant live their lives because of their 12 month tour
the vietnamese served a 25 year tour with no end but they still kept going - casualties were over 1 million - no emotional support - no flags flying - no after care - back home to villages that had been bombed to the stone age (not my quote) - but they are still the bad guys
read a fabulous book recently (cant remember the title) but it was about both sides - the vietnamese called it the american war - nuff said
st -
Message 41
Posted by stalti (U14278018) on Friday, 10th June 2011
suvorovetz
vietnamese casualties hardly exceeded 1 million - heavens above - hardly worth talking about then
Cambodia and pol pot - i think u will find that without us intervention in cambodia (neutral state) pol pot would not have happened
that sad country suffered badly - read about the plain of jars
st -
Message 42
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Friday, 10th June 2011
vietnamese casualties hardly exceeded 1 million - heavens above - hardly worth talking about then聽 Predictably missing the point. If NVA started the war, why blame the Yanks, exactly?
Cambodia and pol pot - i think u will find that without us intervention in cambodia (neutral state) pol pot would not have happened聽 Really? There was no US intervention in Cambodia to speak of? Was there any US intervention in Mao's China or the USSR that perpetuated labor camps also?
that sad country suffered badly - read about the plain of jars聽
Yes, yes, It's all the Great Satan. Proletariat of All Countries Unite! Altogether now! Let's get it right this time, eh? -
Message 43
Posted by Allan D (U1791739) on Saturday, 11th June 2011
without us intervention in cambodia (neutral state) pol pot would not have happened聽
?????
A communist insurgency had been going on in Cambodia as long as one had been going on in Vietnam. It was the fact that the NVA and Vietcong were able to use camps and depots in the Communist-contriolled areas of Cambodia that resulted in the US intervention in April 1970. Even JFK funded a secret war in Laos in the early 1960s against a Communist-led insurgency in Laos.
It was only the sudden termination of military aid to Vietnam and Cambodia by a Democrat-controlled Congress that allowed the communists to take over in both South Vietnam and Cambodia and wreak havoc on the populations there before they fell out and fought each other. -
Message 44
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Saturday, 11th June 2011
It was only the sudden termination of military aid to Vietnam and Cambodia by a Democrat-controlled Congress that allowed the communists to take over in both South Vietnam and Cambodia and wreak havoc on the populations there before they fell out and fought each other.聽
But check out the logic. Supposedly - and clearly implied by the sympathizers - the commies fought for the good of their people against the evil Yanks. Moreover, it's clearly implied here that about 4 million people were slaughtered - all because of the Yanks, of course. A simple fact checking easily establishes the fact that up to 3 million people were systematically slaughtered by victorious commies - well after the Yanks had left the region. Why? and why was it the Yanks' fault? Because the Yanks had been fighting and killed trying to protect them before leaving the region? And why then people like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky would deny that the mass slaughter committed by the commies even occured? How sick can one be to keep pushing this garbage? -
Message 45
Posted by Allan D (U1791739) on Saturday, 11th June 2011
You should have learnt by now, Suvo, that logic has never been the Left's strongpoint. It was, after all, Marx who came up with the idea of the "inherent contradiction". The words pot, kettle and black come to mind.
-
Message 46
Posted by Dai Digital (U13628545) on Wednesday, 15th June 2011
The effects of Operation Menu are only now disputed by the Back to the Woods reactionaries and Henry Kissinger.
America has the blood of millions on its hands and is in total denial about it. Which probably explains some of its current cultural and social problems. That much guilt can't be squashed down forever. -
Message 47
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Wednesday, 15th June 2011
The effects of Operation Menu are only now disputed by the Back to the Woods reactionaries and Henry Kissinger.聽
Forget Henry Kissinger. Just answer this:
was THE FIGURE of 4 MILLION casulaties meant BY YOU to be attributed to the US Airforce bombing campaign?
who systematically murdered up to 3 million people after the US forces had left the region?
That much guilt can't be squashed down forever.聽 Don't we know that. A comie and 'that much guilt'. What a joke. -
Message 48
Posted by White Camry (U2321601) on Thursday, 16th June 2011
DD,
The effects of Operation Menu are only now disputed by the Back to the Woods reactionaries and Henry Kissinger.
America has the blood of millions on its hands and is in total denial about it. Which probably explains some of its current cultural and social problems. That much guilt can't be squashed down forever.聽
If you want to party like it's 1968 then take the #4 Tardis to the corner of Haight & Ashbury. -
Message 49
Posted by Dai Digital (U13628545) on Friday, 17th June 2011
<quote>In reply to suvorovetz:
<quote>The effects of Operation Menu are only now disputed by the Back to the Woods reactionaries and Henry Kissinger.
Forget Henry Kissinger</quote>
No let's not, nor Nixon either, who planned to cause vast casualties by flooding the delta, and wanted to usehis nukes but Kissinger distracted him with a rubber duck. See the Pentagon Papers for the lengths to which the US would go.
<quote>. Just answer this:
was THE FIGURE of 4 MILLION casulaties meant BY YOU to be attributed to the US Airforce bombing campaign?</quote> You read the link, It speaks for itself.
<quote>who systematically murdered up to 3 million people after the US forces had left the region? </quote> By the Khmer Rouge ushered into power by the US bombing campaign. Without it, there would have been no Pol Pot or year zero.
-
Message 50
Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Friday, 17th June 2011
Nice touch to bring in a stalinist who had denied that communists even comitted genocide in Indo-China in the first place. I agree with WhiteCamry, there's no room for meaningful discussion with this kind of tool-kit.
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