Page 12 of 12 FirstFirst ... 2101112
Results 111 to 114 of 114

Thread: What a German soldier of WWII thought of US soldiers.

  1. #111
    Site Supporter dogcaller's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2013
    Location
    Northern Colorado
    Quote Originally Posted by Pistol Pete 10 View Post
    My 2 cents as a "citizen soldier". I was drafted, did Vietnam 67/68 with the 1/1 Cav as a scout. The job as I saw it( and I haven't changed my mind ) was to get the job done. We were aggressive soldiers. I thought we would go into North Vietnam and take care of business, never happened. Wars are run by politicians and if your boss don't want to fight to win you don't win. LBJ had no intention of winning the Vietnam war. I do not know what his reasoning was but it was not to win. We could have bombed Ho into submission in short order. Yes, I'm still bitter, there are 50,000 plus names on the wall, a terrible waste and testament to Lyndon B. Johnson. It doesn't matter how good our troops are. Leadership is everything, good leadership will win wars otherwise you get a Vietnam.
    If you haven't already, read Dereliction of Duty by H. R. McMaster. It is the byproduct of his doctoral dissertation, and a damn good--and sobering/maddening--read.

  2. #112
    Member
    Join Date
    Dec 2017
    Location
    West TN
    Quote Originally Posted by Jeep View Post
    Again, the insurgency was effectively beaten in RVN, and the native SVN Viet Cong main force units were effectively destroyed (perhaps deliberately--many of the VC leaders were reluctant to take orders from PAVN commanders and their commissars and the Vietnamese Communist Party was thoroughly centralist). But for whatever reason, it was a spent force. The threat to RVN was the regular army division of the PAVN--the divisions that conquered the South in 1975. And those divisions could not have been maintained in RVN/Laos and Cambodia without the supply chain through Haiphong. They would have had to been pulled back and some of them demobilized (the war put a huge strain on NVN's economy--it was importing food as well as weapons and ammo from the Warsaw Pace because so many peasants were in uniform/dead).

    Without those divisions the war would have reverted to an insurgency--one in which a large percentage of the VC main force units had already been destroyed, the VCI had been crippled and the North Vietnamese units protecting it were largely gone. It is correct that a lower level guerilla war could have been continued, but the pull back of the PAVN regular army would have caused a huge loss in prestige in the VC and a big increase in prestige in the SVN government. Would some areas have remained under VC control? Yes. But Saigon's military could have contained and started reducing that, and the tensions between NVN and China that resulted in the 1979 war were already becoming obvious. Sometimes mere determination does not win wars.

    By the way, the reason why the Afghan war is unwinnable in not primarily because the Pushtun tribes are essentially ungovernable (true, but you really don't need to govern them very much so long as they just fight among themselves) but because Pakistan is supporting the Taliban, as it has done for the almost 30 years the Taliban has been in existence, and we are effectively giving it the money to do so. The fear, of course, is if we don't provide Pakistan with money it will go completely rogue and use its very dirty nukes on India.

    Had the Pakistanis not been supporting the Taliban, and had their support come only from the Russian, Iranians (and probably the Chinese) the insurgency would never have gained as much size. I suppose our strategy now is simply build up enough Harzara, Tajik, and anti-Taliban Pushtun military forces to keep the Taliban from overrunning the whole place after we leave (and thus unleashing some things that will look like genocide), but how that will work if the Pakis continue to support the Taliban, I don't know. Lots of people will continue to die no matter what happens.
    The point of bringing up Afghanistan was to was to illustrate the parallel between Viet Nam back then and Afghanistan now. There are many of those parallels. Both societies were largely agrarian and uneducated. Both had long histories of resistance to what they saw as "invaders." Both had long borders with other countries. Both societies did not look at death like westerners do. Both societies have changed very little at their core for centuries.

    One the one side (NVA/VC - Taliban), you have a group that is single-minded and will use whatever cruelty is necessary to accomplish their goal. When they are weak, they pull back and use classic guerrilla tactics, such as assassination and small hit & run raids. When they are strong, they attack in number. They do not worry about casualties because their core is fanatical. The Vietnamese and the Afghans have extensive histories of fighting "invaders," even if that means fighting for a century or two. They have developed extensive smuggling routes through some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet.

    On the other side, you have a group (SVN & current Afghan leadership) that is thoroughly corrupt. This group is easily portrayed by the other side to the mostly uneducated populace as being puppets of outside forces. This group cannot survive without being propped up by its' allies on a continuous basis. The general populace does not identify with this side and are fearful of the other side, so much so that they have to be coerced in some way (money, imprisonment, etc.) to join this side.

    Again, without having the fortitude to take the war on a large scale (by that, I mean large numbers of boots on the ground) to the suppliers (back then - DRVN or even China, now- Pakistan), even the set backs of mining Haiphong or the large scale bombing in Afghanistan in 2001/2002 was just that, a set back. In the end, western democracies do not have the patience to out last that type of situation, especially when they have to spend vast amounts of their wealth to continue the fight and prop up their side while not seeing very much, if any, progress.

    Now, I do want to say that I have enjoyed our discussion. It has been a pleasure to debate someone who has done their homework and actually knows something of the subject they are discussing. While I know that neither of us has changed the other's mind, I think it does everyone good to consider all information, not just their own. My hat is off to you, sir.

  3. #113
    Quote Originally Posted by fastreb View Post
    The point of bringing up Afghanistan was to was to illustrate the parallel between Viet Nam back then and Afghanistan now. There are many of those parallels. Both societies were largely agrarian and uneducated. Both had long histories of resistance to what they saw as "invaders." Both had long borders with other countries. Both societies did not look at death like westerners do. Both societies have changed very little at their core for centuries.

    One the one side (NVA/VC - Taliban), you have a group that is single-minded and will use whatever cruelty is necessary to accomplish their goal. When they are weak, they pull back and use classic guerrilla tactics, such as assassination and small hit & run raids. When they are strong, they attack in number. They do not worry about casualties because their core is fanatical. The Vietnamese and the Afghans have extensive histories of fighting "invaders," even if that means fighting for a century or two. They have developed extensive smuggling routes through some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet.

    On the other side, you have a group (SVN & current Afghan leadership) that is thoroughly corrupt. This group is easily portrayed by the other side to the mostly uneducated populace as being puppets of outside forces. This group cannot survive without being propped up by its' allies on a continuous basis. The general populace does not identify with this side and are fearful of the other side, so much so that they have to be coerced in some way (money, imprisonment, etc.) to join this side.

    Again, without having the fortitude to take the war on a large scale (by that, I mean large numbers of boots on the ground) to the suppliers (back then - DRVN or even China, now- Pakistan), even the set backs of mining Haiphong or the large scale bombing in Afghanistan in 2001/2002 was just that, a set back. In the end, western democracies do not have the patience to out last that type of situation, especially when they have to spend vast amounts of their wealth to continue the fight and prop up their side while not seeing very much, if any, progress.

    Now, I do want to say that I have enjoyed our discussion. It has been a pleasure to debate someone who has done their homework and actually knows something of the subject they are discussing. While I know that neither of us has changed the other's mind, I think it does everyone good to consider all information, not just their own. My hat is off to you, sir.
    Thanks, fastreb, and I return the compliments.

    My own interest in this question came in a ROTC class during the Vietnam War. The ROTC class was probably the only forum on campus in which one was allowed to think, much less debate, questions regarding Vietnam; something I very much appreciated as I tried to understand the War more. The ROTC department invited in a distinguished and world renowned--though decidedly cranky--professor who delivered a lecture about how the US Army was fighting the wrong war in Vietnam, using tactics of finding the PAVN and then attacking up a mountain to dislodge it, and then doing it again and again and again. I agreed that the tactics seemed dubious--basically ensuring a bloody war of attrition--but I had no idea of what the correct tactics were. So I asked the professor--who dismissed the question as being beneath him. He was glad to sneer at the Army's tactics, but had no idea of what tactics were appropriate. Nor, frankly, did our ROTC instructors.

    So I started to do a lot of reading on war--what won wars and what lost wars? What wars cannot be won? I also talked to our Special Forces Master Sergeant; as General Abrams was purging Special Forces the Army sent a lot of the very senior and near- retirement SF senior NCO's to ROTC detachments to serve as riflery instructors and such. They were good at that, but they were also good at instructing generally because they had been taught that intensively and then had done it for years. For the most part they were far better instructors than our officers, who hadn't received much training in the field. They were also smart and very well read on military subjects (and not infrequently well-read generally--that generation of senior Special Forces NCO's were extremely impressive). Anyway, when I asked our Master Sergeant and some of his friends who came by to help teach us how one won wars, the answer was always the same--break the enemy's will. And if you couldn't do that at first, cut his main force units off from supply. A modern army cannot survive more than a few weeks without more supply. The pointed to engagements like Stalingrad, or the cutting off Japanese bases, or America's seizure of Sedan in November, 1918 (through which half of the German Army's supplies passed in World War I. The Army of Northern Virginia would never have surrendered, except that Grant finally cut Lee off from resupply in April 1865.

    That insight--something not taught in ROTC classes, strangely enough--but explained by some extraordinary NCO's--along with fire and movement, fire and maneuver (which were taught in ROTC), and the German notion of the schwerpunkt (if I'm spelling that correctly) seem to me to collectively be a a pretty good summary of the ground-war tactics that are good at winning battles and wars.

  4. #114
    Site Supporter
    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Texas



User Tag List

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •