Military Review English Edition March-April 2014 | Page 79

INSIGHT Dung cogently stated in Nhan Dan in April-May 1976 that “the [Paris] agreement represented a big victory for our people and a big defeat for the U.S. imperialists and their [Vietnamese] lackeys.”9 After we recovered our prisoners of war and returned our troops to the United States, America lost interest in Vietnam and the fate of the Vietnamese. It was then difficult to get any aid, especially military aid, for them. Congress reduced military aid to South Vietnam from $2.3 billion in fiscal year 1973 to $799 million in fiscal year 1975—a crippling reduction. Gen. Van Tien Dung said in Great Spring Victory, “[President] Nguyen Van Thieu was forced to fight a poor man’s war. Enemy firepower had decreased by nearly 60% . . . [and] its mobility was also reduced by half.”10 While this reduction in aid contributed substantially to South Vietnam’s defeat in the spring of 1975 (after the North had three years to recover from its 1972 defeat), the final blow was the 4 June 1973 CaseChurch Amendment that cut off all funding for U.S. military operations in Indochina. This made it impossible for us to enforce compliance with the Paris Accords. It also ensured that South Vietnamese troops would not have the U.S. air support that was essential in 1972 and encouraged the final attack by the North in 1975, which conquered the South. We had abandoned our South Vietnamese allies to a grim and tragic fate, whereas, Hanoi would continue to count on its loyal allies, China and the Soviet Union. Isaacs’ Final Point This brings us to the last point: should we have ever fought this war? I argue that by continuing to disparage the South Vietnamese government and its armed forces, our media convinced the American public that Vietnam was not worth fighting for. Certainly, the South Vietnamese government suffered from corruption and at times was incompetent. (Corruption was far more extensive in the tightly controlled North. In 1967, Ho Chi Minh inveighed on the radio against the widespread corruption in his country.) South Vietnamese troops performed poorly at times and lost four times as many troops as did the United States, but in the end, South Vietnam was winning the war. The test for the South came during the 1968 Tet Offensive when enemy troops (mostly Vietcong) overran the MILITARY REVIEW March-April 2014 majority of the towns and cities in the country. The North’s initial success was widely publicized by the U.S. media, making a lasting impression on the American public. What received little attention was the South’s widespread and courageous resistance, which remained true to the government and successfully countered VC efforts to incite a popular uprising against it. It was scarcely reported that the VC was soundly crushed and never really recovered from this disastrous defeat. The resulting increased security in the countryside made possible one of the most successful land reforms in history. Even when under siege, those areas under government control enjoyed a remarkable degree of freedom. To me, South Vietnam was worth defending. United States Enters WW II Because of Vietnam When I was teaching at Georgetown, students were surprised when I said that the United States got into World War II because of what is now Vietnam. When the Japanese were rampaging all over China, and even in response to the notorious 1937 Nanking Massacre, the United States took no serious punitive steps against Japan. However, when Japanese troops occupied what is now Vietnam, the United States and its allies placed embargoes on shipments of oil, scrap iron, and rubber to Japan. The embargo posed a major threat to Japan’s economy, and Tokyo no doubt considered it a warlike move. We took this step because then-French Indochina was an ideal staging area for invading the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Japan then assumed that when they moved in this direction, we would attempt to interpose our fleet to thwart them. To prevent this, Japan sought to neutralize our fleet by attacking it at Pearl Harbor. It then moved to capture vi