Vietnam War

>>72632426
Pressure from back home, sons being killed in the thousands, commies pressuring them, just so much pressure and pressure and pressure and pressure until they thought ok no more pls

It was a proxy war between the US and Soviet Union/China. The KGB also funded most of the antiwar movement in the US.

We learned it wasn't worth it.

>>72632426
Public support of the war dropped.
We kicked Vietnamese Arse in the Tet Offensive but the coverage of the war by the media meant not many supported the war.

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we pulled out of Vietnam before the end of the war.

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>>72632561
>>72632575
>>72632576
>reiterating what I just said

So, basically, Nixon bombed the living shit out of north vietnam and got them to negotiate a cease fire, and then brought everyone home saying we'd won

The cease fire being backed with the implicit threat of America nuking vietnam. Henry Kissinger of all fucking people won the nobel peace prize for talking Nixon out of just nuking them.

Then watergate happened and Nixon couldn't afford the PR hit to back up South Vietnam as his administration fell apart. He was replaced by Gerald Ford, who wasn't psychotic enough to nuke anybody, and the south vietnamese got their shit pushed in

>>72632561
>The KGB also funded most of the antiwar movement in the US.

WTF I love KGB now!

All those leftist groups like the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, and Weather Underground? All on the Soviet payroll. Thankfully Nixon pushed their shit in.

Every answer in this thread so far is surprisingly correct.

>>72632684
>Then watergate happened and Nixon couldn't afford the PR hit to back up South Vietnam as his administration fell apart. He was replaced by Gerald Ford, who wasn't psychotic enough to nuke anybody, and the south vietnamese got their shit pushed in

You're missing a few bits. After Watergate, the Democrats swept Congress in the 1974 midterm elections. As soon as the new Congress convened in January '75, they immediately pulled all further aid to South Vietnam, against Ford's wishes, but he was outnumbered. The final NVA offensive in the spring was something of a desperation move, and it could have been stopped by just air and naval support, not even necessarily ground troops.

A functioning democracy can't go to war if the public doesn't want it.

The truth is that the US bombing campaign had been very damaging on North Vietnam and they were near exhaustion when the Paris Peace Accords were signed.

>>72632426
We killed every last Viet Cong guerilla. It was the hippies and pressure against the war that ended it prematurely.

>>72632426 (OP) #
Pressure from back home, sons being killed in the thousands, commies pressuring them, just so much pressure and pressure and pressure and pressure until they thought ok no more pls

A lot has been made of the refusal by LBJ and McNamara to invade North Vietnam, however their judgement may have been ultimately correct. The memory of the Korean War was still fresh and nobody wanted to risk another Chinese intervention, except now that China had nuclear weapons.

The strategy of slowly bleeding North Vietnam white may have ultimately been sound strategy and came very near to succeeding were it not for political events at home.

>>72632426
They underestimated the North Vietnamese, who were severely under-equipped but much more familiar with the terrain. Plus they had the support of the locals and didn't care about resorting to dirty tricks (like the Tet Offensive).

Having an advanced military doesn't mean you're guaranteed to win in guerrilla warfare.

Endless manpower and supply of gear by China and USSR through the jungle.

>>72633107
It's possible that China would have done nothing, since Mao Zedong said contradictory stuff at different times. For example, he reportedly told journalist Edgar Snow in 1965 that they had no intention of fighting to save Hanoi and that they would not engage the US military unless China itself was invaded. Other times, he said "We took on the US imperialists in Korea. There is no reason why we cannot do it again. Let them come if they wish."

Regardless of whatever Beijing would have done, the White House must have remembered that Chinese proverb about "You won't know how the tiger reacts until you pull his tail."

>>72632426
>america invades vietnam
>use it as a experiment/training area
>test various weapons including biological
>pulverize the country to shit and slaughter civilians
>after 20 years of fucking around while never being under any threat themselves finally pull out you thick cock from vietnams bloody and stretched anus
>40 years later bunch of autists have a thread on javan basket weaving forum
>"america got blown so hard! vietman sure showed them!"

i dont even...

>>72633292
The PLA had around 130,000 troops in North Vietnam, mostly for support/logistics, but the great majority of the NVA's equipment was Soviet since the USSR had more advanced technology and anyway, most Chinese military gear was just clones of Soviet stuff. The US military knew they were there, but kept quiet about it, much like how they covered up how Soviet pilots were flying aircraft with Chinese and North Korean markings in the Korean War.

>>72633515
It should be stressed that the Chinese had more of a direct stake in the war since North Vietnam was right on their border. The Soviets got less direct benefit from assisting Hanoi, but were eager to give their intelligence and army officers some experience and also get a chance to see how well their weapon systems fared against the US military.

We should have nuked Vietnam

No offense to any Vietnamese reading this

>>72632426
The American people didn't want to waste money and lives on a useless war they provoked themselves against a people who posed no threat to them.

What's even more surprising is the fact that the Vietnamese are totally cool about everything.

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>>72632561
>It was a proxy war between the US and Soviet Union/China.
>amerfats unironically believe Ho Chi Minh was a Soviet puppet

>>72632426
>northern vietnam backing the vietcong
>russia and china backing them, they had sams in their soils and americans couldn't attack them because they didn't want an escalation
>vietnamese being farmers during the morning an pajama ninjas during the evenging, americans didn't have any kind of support from the locals and thus their intelligence sucked
>even the areas that supposely were pro west was filled with anti-americanism
>americans didn't have a proper strategy to fight in the jungle and they were happy with having a 10 to 1 kill ratio but it wasn't enough because even when the vietcong units were slaughtered northern vietnam just send their soldiers dressed up as them
>aussies on the other hand were moderately successful by using the same tactics than the vietcong but they had small numbers and later withdraw the war
>the american army moral was extremely low, they lived on a constant state of stress and when they had to enter the jungle for 20 days it was a nightmare

>>72634458
Ho was not a fan of the Chinese and had once been jailed by them, but he'd take help wherever he could get it.

>>72633313
We didn't have enough combat troops to actually launch a ground invasion of the north. At the peak troop strength in 1969, there were 530,000 US military personnel in Vietnam, which sounds big, but only 25% of them were actual combat troops, the balance being support and logistics. It would have required a large-scale mobilization/draft to get enough troops there for an invasion.

>>72632426
Nobody in Vietnam even care of this war (only Americans and VNCH autists do). We are always more concern of China.

>>72632426
Don't listen to the memes. The NVA was supplied with top tier gear by the Soviets/Chinese, while the US army was limited to manuevering in South Vietnam and was unable to invade the North for fear of Soviet/Chinese retaliation.

Their goal was "prop up the South Vietnamese regime as long as possible". In the absence of a clear military goal, the US army wasted inordinate amounts of time and resources defending vast tracts of jungle that often hid no more than a few dozen Vietcong at a time.

The US lost because South Vietnam was a weak ally. Couple that with the rise of the anti-war movement on the homefront, and the only politically sound thing to do was leave Vietnam to its fate.

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"Vietnamese POWs in Guangxi after the 1979 border war. They will receive political reeducation and publish self-criticisms for waging aggressive war on the Chinese people."

>>72640663
Chinks are ridiculous. I'm observing an edit war on Wikipedia between chinks and Vietnamese on the Sino-Vietnamese War. Hilarious shit. There are dozens of sources that say that Vietnam won, but the chinks delete them all and only leave the ONE source that says that it was a draw.

Seriously, chinks are a bunch of subhuman vermin. I can't wait until the communist party collapses and the Chinese population resorts to mass cannibalism.

>>72640910
There are plenty of arguments for whatever outcome of the war you prefer.

>Vietnamese victory
Chinese mostly got their shit pushed in by militia with pitchforks and old guns, taking 20,000 casualties in the process.
>Chinese victory
The ostensible goal of Beijing to "teach Vietnam a lesson" was accomplished and the areas where the fighting took place were totally devastated. In addition, the Chinese wager that the Soviet Union would do nothing to aid Vietnam was proven correct.
>stalemate
The status quo antebellum was largely preserved.

>wondering about vietnam in 2017

There were a couple possible reasons why Deng Xiaoping initiated the war.

1. He wanted to demonstrate the PLA's backwardness and disorganization as justification for economic reforms
2. He wanted to test the Soviet Union's reaction to aggression on their ally
3. The PLA was a stronghold of hardline communists who opposed economic and political liberalization. By momentarily distracting them with a war, Deng could initiate reforms without them getting in his way.

>>72641188
Then why won't the chinks allow something like

Tactical Vietnamese victory

Strategic stalemate

But nooooooope, chinks are fucking subhuman vermin. They spam their pro-China shit on wikipedia and whitewash or delete everything that makes chinks look bad. They rely on their massive numbers to bruteforce their way on wikipedia.

Seriously, there will come a day when China is thrown in chaos and hundreds of millions of Chinese starve to death and kill each other, and i'm going to enjoy every single minute of it.

>BTFO of america, wealthiest country in the world
>BTFO of pol pot, evil genocidal dictator
>BTFO (sort of) the chinese who invade to try and stop you stopping pol pot

WTF I love Vietnam now

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>>72641605
>Then why won't the chinks allow something like...

Admits chinks winning even the edit war, while murica BTFO by cybercongs

>>72632630
>giving up

The same way the ussr lost the winter war

>>72642137
Not even sort of true. We didn't take massive casualties because of horrifically poor planning and tactics only to sign a """white peace""" that got us what we mostly wanted anyways.

We lost because the left back home didn't want to be involved and because the Communist Vietnamese had far stronger support in Vietnam and despite taking millions of casualties they were nowhere near surrender.

The only similarity was our weapons being shit.