Did the US start Vietnam?

[Tolouse]

if the US had not bombed Hiroshima or Nagasaki, would the US still had been involved in Vietnam?

[Moontanman]

if the US had not bombed Hiroshima or Nagasaki, would the US still had been involved in Vietnam?

 

We inherited Vietnam from France, I don't see how we could have started something since it had already been going on for sometime before we got there. We could have done a much better job than France but we insisted on going against our own policy of free elections. Fear of communism was the excuse. Explain how the bombings WW 2 could have been connected?

[Tolouse]

so japan was looking to increase their empire during WWII, they went into Asia and started to take over

 

which was also pushing the communist parts of Asia back into China and up through N.Vietnam

 

once the US had bombed their homes in those cities, the Japanese armies headed back home to take care of their loved ones and such

 

once they all left, it left a huge hole in the countries they had previously occupied which the communists filled by coming down

 

yes, at the time, the US was allies with the French

 

and to help protect French Indo-China, the US assisted them in the mid 50's (circa 1955)

 

i don't know why the French left, but the US stayed to try to keep the communist armies in the north

 

but by the 60's, the US were fully engaged in S.Vietnam against the N.Vietnamese armies

[Moontanman]

so japan was looking to increase their empire during WWII, they went into Asia and started to take over

 

which was also pushing the communist parts of Asia back into China and up through N.Vietnam

 

once the US had bombed their homes in those cities, the Japanese armies headed back home to take care of their loved ones and such

 

once they all left, it left a huge hole in the countries they had previously occupied which the communists filled by coming down

 

yes, at the time, the US was allies with the French

 

and to help protect French Indo-China, the US assisted them in the mid 50's (circa 1955)

 

i don't know why the French left, but the US stayed to try to keep the communist armies in the north

 

but by the 60's, the US were fully engaged in S.Vietnam against the N.Vietnamese armies

 

So what you are saying is if had allowed the Japanese to keep their empire we wouldn't have had to fight in Vietnam? Maybe so but I would have rather fought Vietnam than to be fighting a guerrilla war against the Japanese in the middle of the USA! I don't see any way allowing Japan to stay in the pacific would have done anything but help them conquer and enslave the world. At that time the Japanese Empire wasn't a very nice place to be anything but Japanese. No I don't think it would have helped at all, if not Vietnam against the communists it would have been somewhere else against the Japanese. An Empire couldn't have allowed a strong democracy like the US to exist. To them we would always have been a threat, then the cold war would have fought against the Japanese instead of the communists. An entrenched Japanese empire would have been much harder to fight than the USSR, at least the USSR didn't want to be nuked any more than we did. The Japanese at that time might not have been as reasonable as the USSR was. At the very least the Japanese were much more agressive than the USSR ever was. The real question is "should we have fought at all in Vietnam? Should we have allowed free elections to come about even if the communists were favored to win? I can't really answer that and hind sight is always 20/20.

[Freddy]

The Japanese were a defeated nation by the summer of 1945. Dropping the two atomic bombs shortened the war preventing the planned US invasion of Japan. The Japanese were forced to leave every country they had invaded. Without the atomic bombing it would have perhaps taken a year longer at the most to defeat Japan. Communism under Mao and Ho Chi Minh had roots in China and Vietnam, respectively, before and during the Pacific War 1931-1945. France moved back into Vietnam quickly after WWII was over with US financial backing, but the communists fought back and pushed them out in 1954. Then the US slowly began sending military advisers to South Vietnam and by March 1965 US Marines ground troops landed at DaNang. I see no connection to a communist Vietnam and the atomic bombings.

 

One theory states that the atomic bombs were dropped to end the war quickly which kept the communist USSR from having any say in Japan's fate after its defeat.

 

Another theory states that because the US possessed nuclear weapons it made the Korean and Vietnam Wars less risky in that USSR and China would not intervene. China called the US in Korea.

[Moontanman]

The Japanese were a defeated nation by the summer of 1945. Dropping the two atomic bombs shortened the war preventing the planned US invasion of Japan. The Japanese were forced to leave every country they had invaded. Without the atomic bombing it would have perhaps taken a year longer at the most to defeat Japan. Communism under Mao and Ho Chi Minh had roots in China and Vietnam, respectively, before and during the Pacific War 1931-1945. France moved back into Vietnam quickly after WWII was over with US financial backing, but the communists fought back and pushed them out in 1954. Then the US slowly began sending military advisers to South Vietnam and by March 1965 US Marines ground troops landed at DaNang. I see no connection to a communist Vietnam and the atomic bombings.

 

One theory states that the atomic bombs were dropped to end the war quickly which kept the communist USSR from having any say in Japan's fate after its defeat.

 

Another theory states that because the US possessed nuclear weapons it made the Korean and Vietnam Wars less risky.

 

 

I like the way you say it wouldn't have taken much more than a year to bring the Japanese to the surrender table. WOW:eek_big: Just a year:doh: I guess the US could have done that, just sit back for a year and wait for them to come to their senses. NOT! The US would have had to fight them tooth and toe nail for every square inch of Japan, causing tens or hundreds of thousand of extra combat casualties on both sides and almost certainly millions of civilian deaths as well.

 

The Japanese were preparing for the invasion of their home land by giving every man woman and child the opportunity to die for their Emperor. From what the US experienced on he Japanese islands the US invaded a great many of the Japanese people would have fought to the death or committed suicide. Millions of lives were saved by dropping those bombs.

It is very sad the US had to do drop the atomic bombs but the Japanese were indeed totally committed to death before defeat in a very real way.

 

I think the US did the correct thing, considering that Japan was developing their own weapons of mass destruction, mostly biological but some say the Japanese had already detonated a small atomic bomb off the coast of North Korea just days before the US dropped the atomic bomb on them. (see the "Secrete weapons of WW 2 on the history channel") It's certain they knew of the possibility of the atomic bomb and were working on their own version but they had done years of research on bio weapons and had already used them in China.

 

They had a super sub ready to deploy to the US with a small aircraft on board to launch from the ocean to drop bio weapons on the US at the very time the US made them surrender! A year would have allowed the Japanese to complete the advanced weapons they were working on and that the US found hidden in caves so they couldn't destroyed by the bombs being dropped every day on Japan.

 

So should the US have dropped the bomb, Oh yes, should have waited a year, Oh no! Did the US see the coming of the communists in South East Asia, probably not, but it wouldn't have changed what the US had to do.

[Freddy]

I used to believe that invading Japan would take a million lives. Those high estimates of casualties have been dropped dramatically. What has come out is that the Japanese were trying to surrender, with the main impediment being the fate of the Emperor. I doubt an actual invasion would have been necessary because the Japanese were on the verge of starvation. Six months is the figure given by scholars before capitulation by Japan. From the link:

 

"It didn't take long after the atomic bombings for questions to arise as to their necessity for ending the war and Japan's threat to peace. One of the earliest dissents came from a panel that had been requested by President Truman to study the Pacific war. Their report, The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, was issued in July 1946. It declared, "Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated." (Bernstein, ed., The Atomic Bomb, pg. 52-56)."

 

Hiroshima: the Article

[CraigD]

if the US had not bombed Hiroshima or Nagasaki, would the US still had been involved in Vietnam?

It’s practically impossible to definitively answer hypothetical questions about alternate histories, especially those involving democracies. Had the US not dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima or Nagasaki (I assume the question is limited to the atomic bombs, as these and effective every other site of strategic significance in Japan was subject to intense conventional bombing for months before the atomic bombings), politics in the US may have followed a dramatically different course resulting in an executive decision not to send combat forces to Viet Nam – but this is almost pure speculation.

 

Assuming that political factors in the US, USSR, and the rest of the world proceeded not much differently had the US developed, but not used atomic bombs other than in tests, I think it unlikely that either the end of war with Japan or the First Indochina War would have occurred much differently than it did in actual history. This war was essentially a war of rebellion by the Vietnamese against the French, who colonized Vietnam and some surrounding countries in the 1850s, and attempted to re-assert colonial control following the end of WWII, and would, I think, have occurred due to generations of unpopularity of French colonial exploitation, regardless of events elsewhere in the world. Large-scale war and the temporary splitting of Vietnam into separate north and south states could arguably have been avoided had the French government pursued a policy of gracefully ceding independence (as a nation, not, as they did in 1949, as a state within the French Union), and had the Chinese government been cooperative. However, the outbreak of war between Vietnam and France, and eventually with England and the US, seems to me little related to nuclear weapons, although as these weapons strongly influenced China and the USSR to support the Vietnamese against these countries, they may (again, very speculatively) have significantly affected its conduct and outcome.

so japan was looking to increase their empire during WWII, they went into Asia and started to take over

 

which was also pushing the communist parts of Asia back into China and up through N.Vietnam

This is historically inaccurate. Although China effectively ruled Vietnam from 257 BC to 938 CE, they had no significant forces there until 1945, when they played an occupying role as dictated by the Potsdam Declaration prior to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan’s unconditional surrender later that year.

 

It’s also important to note that, when Japan occupied Vietnam in 1941, it was in a sense a “friendly” occupation, because the nominal French colonial government of Vietnam at that time was technical a Japanese ally, the French government at that time having surrendered to and allied itself with Nazi Germany. The Japanese occupation, while cruel and explotive, was not militarily intense, the Japanese acting nominally in support of the French colonial government, a condition widely regarded by the Vietnamese as a “double-puppet” government.

i don't know why the French left [Vietnam] ...

As outlined by many good-quality histories, and summarized in articles such as the preceding wikipedia link, the French and their local allies left Vietnam in 1954 for essentially the same reason that the US did in 1975 – they were militarily defeated. In both cases, these more powerful countries retained the ability to continue the war, but their governments could no longer justify its human, financial, and political cost against the potential economic and political benefits – in a sense, both conceded victory, rather than being reduced to inability to wage war.

 

In summary, to answer the thread’s title question, “Did the US start [the 1946-1975 war in] Vietnam?”: no, by no reasoning I can imagine can the US be said to have significantly caused this War. In short, the main cause of the war was the 1858 colonization of Vietnam by the French, with WWII affording Vietnamese nationalist an opportunity for rebellion. Although popularly viewed, especially in the US, as a strategic contest between the US and the former USSR, in retrospect, the goal and eventual outcome of the war was Vietnamese independence.

[Eclogite]

In summary, to answer the thread’s title question, “Did the US start [the 1946-1975 war in] Vietnam?”: no, by no reasoning I can imagine can the US be said to have significantly caused this War. In short, the main cause of the war was the 1858 colonization of Vietnam by the French, with WWII affording Vietnamese nationalist an opportunity for rebellion.

An accurate post, that can be made - I think - more accurate if you add the rider "but the US did prolong the war, arguably unecessarily".

[CraigD]

An accurate post, that can be made - I think - more accurate if you add the rider "but the US did prolong the war, arguably unecessarily".

I believe this is the consensus among genuine historians (as opposed to political ideologs on either side, who alternately view the Vietnam war as an example of wanton US aggression catastrophically failed, or heroic altruism spectacularly successful - I’ve actually met people who seriously claim that the US won the war, and account of the 1975 fall of Saigon story is an invention of “the left-wing media”).

 

One of my favorite analyses of the necessity or lack of necessity of the Vietnam war is in Shelby L. Stanton’s 1985 “The Rise and Fall of an American Army”, which I understand was required reading at the US military colleges in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Based on interviews with US intelligence analysts and leaders, Stanton’s conclusion was that US policy makers believed that a US withdrawal from then South Vietnam would result in the effective annexation of Vietnam by China, but that later, as the US diplomatic relationship with China improved, it was learned that this was never seriously considered by the Chinese government. In short, he concludes that the major justification for the war was an honest, but tragic intelligence error.

[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]

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]

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