The Vietnam War

[Jacob]

The winning strategy, making a deal with the Commies in 1954 to unite the country but be allied with us against the Soviets and company seems obvious now.  But prior to Nixon and Kissinger we were politically unable to execute that sort of strategy even if we were capable of considering it.

How would we have been able to convince Ho Chi Minh to ally Vietnam with the United States?  Wouldn't he have just assumed we wanted to assume the colonial mantle from the French?

I'm not an expert on Vietnam at all, but it was my impression that Ho Chi Minh was a big fan of the US initially. I believe he patterned the Vietnamese declaration of independence on that of the US, and was hoping for an alliance.

Of course given the times and the people and so on, it seems a bit of a stretch to imagine the US and a Communist client state to maintain an ongoing healthy relationship; but I don't think the Vietnamese were particularly keen on either the Soviets or the Chinese until they were forced to embrace them.

[Admiral Yi]

It's my strong impression that the business with the Declaration was all an attempt to hornswoggle the US.  After Din Bin Foo they certainly didn't rule the North in accordance with American values.

[Valmy]

I'm not an expert on Vietnam at all, but it was my impression that Ho Chi Minh was a big fan of the US initially. I believe he patterned the Vietnamese declaration of independence on that of the US, and was hoping for an alliance.

Of course given the times and the people and so on, it seems a bit of a stretch to imagine the US and a Communist client state to maintain an ongoing healthy relationship; but I don't think the Vietnamese were particularly keen on either the Soviets or the Chinese until they were forced to embrace them.

Yep this is my understanding as well.  But we had a hard time with these sorts of situations prior to Nixon.

[Valmy]

It's my strong impression that the business with the Declaration was all an attempt to hornswoggle the US.  After Din Bin Foo they certainly didn't rule the North in accordance with American values.

During the Cold War we were pretty flexible with American Values if it meant keeping a country out of the Soviet sphere.

[alfred russel]

I'm not an expert on Vietnam at all, but it was my impression that Ho Chi Minh was a big fan of the US initially. I believe he patterned the Vietnamese declaration of independence on that of the US, and was hoping for an alliance.

He also referenced the declaration of the rights of man, but I don't think he was a fan of the French or wanted an alliance with them (considering he was fighting them). I think he was just playing public relations. The land reform in North Vietnam (among other things) in the 1950s I think makes it very clear his party was truly communist and not available for an American alliance.

[Valmy]

I believe the war could have been winnable had we invaded North Vietnam directly, but in that situation China surely would have directly intervened and nobody wanted to fight another Korean War.

Um correct me if I am wrong but the Chinese and Vietnamese despise each other.  I have a hard time imagining them welcoming Chinese intervention in any situation.

[Valmy]

The land reform in North Vietnam (among other things) in the 1950s I think makes it very clear his party was truly communist and not available for an American alliance.

The first part yes...the second no.  Heck Mao wanted an American alliance but he was a Communist of the worst kind.

[Jacob]

Right... here are the opening lines to the Vietnamese declaration of independence:

The compatriots of the entire country,
All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free...

According to the wikipedia entry on Ho Chi Minh, he reportedly petitioned Harry S. Truman for support for Vietnamese independence after the August '45 revolution.

It's not inconceivable that had Truman supported Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam at that point he could have turned the country down a different road. I'd probably still be full of factional massacres and end up as some sort of dictatorship, but it may have ended up more friendly to US interests.

... it's all alt history of course.

[Valmy]

I'd probably still be full of factional massacres and end up as some sort of dictatorship

Well yeah there is no doubt about that.

[alfred russel]

Land reform in Vietnam before the Vietnam War started (per wikipedia):

Land reform in Vietnam was a program of land reform in North Vietnam from 1953 to 1956. It followed the program of land reform in China from 1946 to 1953.

The aim of the land reform program was to break the power of the traditional village elite, to form a new class of leaders, and redistribute the wealth (mostly land) to create a new class that has no ownership. It was an element of the Communist revolution. The reform led to allegations of many villagers being executed, land being taken away even from poor peasants, and of paranoia among neighbors. Several foreign witnesses testified to mass executions.[1][2] A number of sources have suggested that about 30% of the "landlords" executed were actually communist party members.[3][4][5][6][7] Former North Vietnamese government official Nguyen Minh Can, told RFA's Vietnamese service: "The land reform was a massacre of innocent, honest people, and using contemporary terms we must say that it was a genocide triggered by class discrimination".[8]

Between 50,000 and 172,000 perceived "class enemies" were executed.[9][10][11] Reports from North Vietnamese defectors at the time suggested that 50,000 were executed. A Hungarian diplomat was told that 60,000 were executed.[12] Declassified Politburo documents confirm that 1 in 1,000 North Vietnamese (i.e., about 14,000 people) were the minimum quota targeted for execution during the earlier "rent reduction" campaign; the number killed during the multiple stages of the considerably more radical "land reform" was probably many times greater.[13] Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres gave estimates for land reform executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".[14] Landlords were arbitrarily classified as 5.68% of the population, but the majority were subject to less severe punishment than execution. Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 "landlords" were executed during the "land reform", of whom 123,266 (71.66%) were later found to be wrongly classified.[11] Victims were reportedly shot, beheaded, and beaten to death; "some were tied up, thrown into open graves and covered with stones until they were crushed to death".[15] The full death toll was even greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation."[16] As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead."[17] Former Viet Minh official Hoang Van Chi wrote that as many as 500,000 North Vietnamese may have died as a result of the land reform.[18]

Gareth Porter wrote The Myth of the Bloodbath, claiming that the death toll was only in the thousands[19] but was criticized by historian Robert F. Turner for relying on official communist sources. Turner argued that the death toll "was certainly in six digits."[17] Nevertheless, historian Edwin Moise has defended this practice; asserting that the official communist newspapers of North Vietnam were "extremely informative" and "showed a fairly high level of honesty" when compared to those of other communist states.[20] Porter and Noam Chomsky argued that Hoang Van Chi used to be "employed and subsidized" by South Vietnam and the US, and challenged the reliability of translated North Vietnamese documents on which Chi's view was based on.[21] Turner defended Chi, noting that while he received a grant from the Congress for Cultural Freedom (which was later revealed to have been funded by the Central Intelligence Agency), there was no evidence this affected his conclusions.[17] Chi opined that "Mr. Porter studies....a few propaganda booklets published by Hanoi....I lived through the whole process, and I described what I saw with my own eyes."[22] Both Chi and Turner noted that Porter barely could not speak Vietnamese (despite his claim that sources about the land reform were mistranslated), and that he relied on sometimes inaccurate English translations of Nhan Dan done by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (as well as English-language propaganda meant to encourage anti-war groups).[22][17] Moise himself estimated that at least 8,000 were executed.[23] Moise's denial that China played an important role in the reform is no longer accepted by modern scholarship.[24] Chomsky cited Colonel Nguyen Van Chau, head of the Central Psychological War Service for the South Vietnamese army from 1956 to 1962, who claimed that early figures for the land reform were "100% fabricated" by the intelligence services of Saigon.[21] Chau was one of dozens of officers dismissed from their positions while under investigation in South Vietnam;[25] he later made public appearances alongside North Vietnamese, Viet Cong, and French Communist Party representatives.[26] Recent scholarship from Vietnam also suggests that a larger number of landlords were persecuted than previously believed.[11]

More than 1 million North Vietnamese people fled to the South, due in part to the land reform.[27] It is estimated that as many as two million more would have left had they not been stopped by the Viet Minh.[28]

[Valmy]

Land reform in Vietnam before the Vietnam War started (per wikipedia):

Between 50,000 and 172,000 perceived "class enemies" were executed.

That's it?  The Soviets and the Red Chinese are not impressed.

[alfred russel]

The land reform in North Vietnam (among other things) in the 1950s I think makes it very clear his party was truly communist and not available for an American alliance.

The first part yes...the second no.  Heck Mao wanted an American alliance but he was a Communist of the worst kind.

There was no way for us to ally with a communist government at the time. Who would we be allied against? How would that help us draw a hard line against communism globally as we tried to keep other countries from going wobbly?

For that and so many other reasons, if Ho was a communist that meant he wasn't available for an alliance.

[Admiral Yi]

The first part yes...the second no.  Heck Mao wanted an American alliance but he was a Communist of the worst kind.

He wanted American help against the French, not an "alliance."

[alfred russel]

It's not inconceivable that had Truman supported Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam at that point he could have turned the country down a different road. I'd probably still be full of factional massacres and end up as some sort of dictatorship, but it may have ended up more friendly to US interests.

... it's all alt history of course.

It was 1945. The world was full of communists trying to put on a good face only to reveal themselves once they achieved power. The most likely case is that Ho just wanted support to ridding himself of the French and would then go his own way.

[Zanza]

Land reform in Vietnam before the Vietnam War started (per wikipedia):

Between 50,000 and 172,000 perceived "class enemies" were executed.

That's it?  The Soviets and the Red Chinese are not impressed.

Neither is the Seventh Air Force.