Did the US start Vietnam?

[HydrogenBond]

Part of the problem with the Vietnam war was US would not allow itself to directly hit the supply lines coming into Vietnam via adjacent countries. This had to done clandestinely and therefore with marginal impact. It was like feuding with your neighbor, with him using another neighbor's yard to bring in his annoying pick flamingos. The wife says, don't mess with the second neighbor's property, since the feud is not with him. You are required to sit and wait, as you see the feuding neighbor using the neighbors yard. Only when he gets back on his own property are you allowed to take any action. So even if you have the neighbors driveway covered the pink flamingos appear. Everyone saw that and many tried to sway the policy but to no avail. America was never good at Imperialism, since they tend to shoot their own foot.

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by HydrogenBond

Part of the problem with the Vietnam war was US would not allow itself to directly hit the supply lines coming into Vietnam via adjacent countries. This had to done clandestinely and therefore with marginal impact.

This claim, though a common one among American soldiers and civilians both during the time of the Vietnam war and in the present day, isn’t historically correct.

As described in many histories, and summarized in this wikipedia article, the US engaged in vigorous bombing campaigns to disrupt movement of war materials and personnel southward through neighboring countries, and even US troop movement into Cambodia (though not Laos, which officially welcomed only South Vietnamese soldiers and small numbers of US advisors to enter it territory).

The failure of these substantial bombing campaigns (over 7 million tons dropped in Vietnam and neighboring countries, over 3 times the amount dropped by the US in WWII – source Vietnam War Timeline : Vietnam War Statistics, although this site is not unbiased in many of the opinions stated there) to effectively interdict NVA movement to the south was then and remains believed to be due several factors, including to the ability of the Vietnamese to use many poor-quality roads and trails, while rapidly repairing bomb-damaged higher quality roads, lack or reliance on rail transportation, extensive use of underground bunkers, and the refusal to cede total air superiority to the US.

[Freddy]

The North Vietnamese were able to keep supplies moving down the Ho Chi Minh Trail throughout the war. From the link:

"From the air the Ho Chi Minh Trail was impossible to identify and although the United States Air Force tried to destroy this vital supply line by heavy bombing, they were unable to stop the constant flow of men and supplies. The main danger to the people who travelled on the Ho Chi Minh Trail was not American bombs but diseases like malaria. In the early days, as many as 10 per cent of the porters travelling down the trail died of disease."

Ho Chi Minh Trial

[satsumajin]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

should the US have dropped the bomb, Oh yes, should have waited a year, Oh no!

When my family and I lived in Japan — quite near to Hiroshima, which we visited often — numerous local people we got to know (including a woman marked by burn scars from the bomb) went out of their way to express not only thankfulness that the war ended when it did but also the view that if atomic bombing was what it took then that was a tragic but necessary price — necessitated above all by the stubborn refusal of the Japanese military to face the reality of defeat and by the grip they had on political decision-making (even to the extent of an attempted coup to prevent the Emperor's surrender broadcast).

One example: One of our friends was the son of a man who had been recruited (or brainwashed, or dragooned) into becoming a kamikaze pilot — the war ended just before he was scheduled to fly off to his death, so our friend still had a father after the war.

Getting back to the relationship between the Pacific War and the Vietnam War: one fairly obvious link is that, whatever atrocities they also committed, the Japanese showed colonized Asiatic peoples that their one-time European masters could be defeated, and thereby strengthened the aspirations of colonized peoples for independence. The Vietnam war developed because of French insistence on trying to regain their pre-war colonial hold over "French Indo-China" — in contrast with the Dutch who albeit reluctantly withdrew from the "Dutch East Indies".

Arguably, if the Pacific War had gone on longer, the anti-Japanese forces led by Ho Chi Minh and Giap (and supported by the US) might have become so strong that the French would have been either deterred from attempting to regain the ascendant militarily, or would have been driven to defeat much earlier than 1954 — and perhaps even before the start of the Korean War, without which the US leadership might not have seen any necessity to take over from where the colonial French had failed.

Another dimension to this is that if the war against Japan had continued, not only would much of northern Japan probably have been occupied by the Red Army, but so too in all likelihood would the whole of the Korean peninsula. No divided Korea could have meant no Korean War. In turn, "no Korean War" would have allowed the US military stationed in Asia to revert even further into peacetime mode and become even more unfit for combat than were the first contingents of troops sent from occupied Japan to Korea. But this is all counterfactual speculation anyway, however interesting...

FWIW

satsumajin