Was Vietnam a war that the United States could never win?

Ever since the final Communist victory in Vietnam in 1975, historians, particularly in America, have wrestled with this question.  Initially, the consensus was that the war was indeed unwinnable.  According to the ‘quagmire’ thesis, successive US governments increased American involvement in Vietnam in gradual, incremental steps until, by the late1960s, the United States found itself mired in disaster.  In the process, American policy-makers failed to heed the lesson of the Korean War (1950-3), namely that land wars in Asia could consume men, money and resources in frightening quantities and should be avoided at all costs.  Why, then, did the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations in particular reject the Korean precedent?  The answer is that they did so unwittingly.  Each step America took in its descent into Vietnam — beginning with support for the French in the 1950s, continuing with Kennedy’s despatch of 16,000 military ‘advisers’ to the South Vietnamese government, and climaxing with Johnson's decision to engage US military power directly in 1965 — was taken in the belief that it would secure victory.  But as each commitment failed to bring success, it led inexorably to the next.  Recognising by early 1968 that the war could not be won, and that even waging it at existing levels was more than public opinion and an over-heating economy could bear, the Johnson Administration concluded that America had no choice but to try and seek an honourable exit.  Thus America’s leaders, had they possessed the gift of foresight, would never have become involved in Vietnam in the first place, but lacking this gift, they plunged blindly into a quicksand war. 

More recently, the ‘quagmire’ theory has been challenged.  Advocates of the so-called ‘stalemate’ interpretation argue that victory might well have been achieved had it not been for serious deficiencies in the political direction of the American war-effort.  From 1950 onwards, decisions were taken in Washington in the full knowledge that the forms of involvement being sanctioned could not obtain victory.  This was particularly the case during the 1960s.  Neither President Kennedy, nor his successor, Johnson, were prepared to make the kind of military investment in Vietnam needed for victory, because the inevitable. 

It follows, therefore, that America in the 1960s half went to war in Vietnam against an enemy dedicated to total war.  But there is an alternative version of ‘stalemate’, centred on President Johnson and less cynical in its assessment of his motivation.  Johnson, it is argued, was so committed to domestic reform in America, to building what he called a Great Society, involving far-reaching civil rights, health-care, educational and environmental legislation, that he deliberately limited the scale of US involvement in Vietnam.  Worried that an all-out effort would divert attention and money from his domestic programme, Johnson sought ‘just enough, but not too much’ to combat the Vietnamese Communists.  The result was still a stalemate leading to eventual defeat, but in this interpretation Johnson emerges as a leader caught in a difficult dilemma, unable to choose between Vietnam and the Great Society. 

In either form, the ‘stalemate’ interpretation offers a more convincing explanation for American defeat than the ‘quagmire’ theory.  It is clear, for example, that President Johnson did indeed insist upon a policy of ‘doing just enough’ in Vietnam from mid-1965, committing America to ‘limited’ rather than all-out war.  But by 1968, this approach had led to Vietnam becoming the most bombed country in the history of warfare, and to the involvement of over 500,000 US troops in a savage war in South Vietnam.  The problem was that neither Johnson nor his top advisers ever calculated exactly how much ‘just enough’ would be.  On the other hand, the military power that the United States brought to bear in Vietnam in the name of ‘limited’ war was so intense that one must still ask why overall victory was not forthcoming. 

In explaining this situation, historians have pointed out that the US Air Force never actually aimed to deliver a complete ‘knock-out’ blow against North Vietnam, only to find Hanoi’s ‘threshold of pain’: the point at which it would sue for peace, ending its support for the Vietcong in return for a cessation of the bombing.  America never found that threshold.  Johnson, concerned to avoid bringing Communist China and even the Soviet Union into the war on North Vietnam's side, insisted that the populous centres of major cities like Hanoi were off-limits to American bombers.  Bombing was also restricted near the Sino-Vietnamese border and around the port area of Haiphong, in order to avoid provoking Beijing or risk sinking Soviet vessels.  But understandable as these limitations were in terms of reducing the risk of a show-down with the major Communist powers, it remained the case that much of North Vietnam's military supplies entered the country either from southern China or via Haiphong, hence no amount of American bombing was ever going to destroy Hanoi’s capacity to supply the Vietcong.  In addition, the United States clearly over-estimated the value of air war as a means of breaking the morale of a people inspired as much by a deep-seated nationalist fervour as they were by the ideology of communism. 

Even in South Vietnam, it might be argued that 500,000 US troops equipped with state-of-the-art military technology and supported by a South Vietnamese army numbering nearly a million men, ought to have prevailed.  But here, too, Johnson authorised only a ‘limited’ war.  The American Commander, General William C.  Westmoreland, was never given enough men at one time, due to the incremental nature of troop deployment.  Nor were his troops permitted to engage in ‘hot pursuit’ when the enemy escaped over the border into neutral Cambodia.  On the other hand, the tactics adopted by Westmoreland himself also failed to hasten victory.  The strategy of ‘search-and-destroy’ was initially based on locating and eliminating main-force North Vietnamese/ Vietcong units.  But the Communists chose instead to wage an unrelenting guerrilla war, aimed at preserving their strength whilst steadily eroding that of the Americans.  Consequently, the bulk of engagements in the 1965-8 period were small scale, high intensity and mostly initiated by the Communists at times and places of their own choosing.  By 1968, ‘search-and-destroy’ had deteriorated into the widespread destruction of peasant villages as the Americans tried to root out a largely invisible enemy.  Such indiscriminate violence did little to endear the Americans to the native population, and this is another reason for failure.  If the Vietnam War could ever have been won, it needed to be addressed on the political as much as the military level, but the Americans spent less time in trying to win ‘hearts-and-minds’ than in trying to counter Vietcong popularity by the crude application of massive firepower. 

The Vietnam War could be said to have been unwinnable from the outset.  It may also have been rendered unwinnable by decisions taken in the White House, or by inappropriate military tactics in the warzone itself.  However, it is worth noting that most American accounts of the war, in their obsession with explaining why the United States lost or how it might have won, hardly ever consider the reasons why the Communists triumphed, even though this is clearly a critical aspect of any assessment of the conflict.  Those historians who do consider this angle inevitably highlight the inborn patriotism of the Vietnamese people, and the skill with which the Communists used this nationalist motive in winning mass support.  Then there was the inspired and inspiring leadership of Le Duan, Vo Nguyen Giap and, until his death in 1969, Ho Chi Minh.  Of particular importance was Ho's conviction that democratic powers like the United States were not best suited to winning long, drawn-out wars in which their national survival was not at stake.  At some point, Ho believed, if the loss of blood and treasure became too great, the spine of domestic support for the war would fracture.  In those circumstances, no democratic government could maintain its war-effort.  It was a case, therefore, of settling down to outlast America, just as the French had been worn down between 1946 and 1954.  The Americans were ‘practical and clear-sighted’, Ho once remarked.  ‘They will not pour their resources into Vietnam endlessly’.  With the Tet Offensive in 1968, the resultant hardening of American opinion against further attacks, and the start of the process that led to US withdrawal in 1973, came proof of the accuracy of Ho’s forecast.