LeMay? I don't like to talk badly about a man of his accomplishments, but if he had been elected (and Wallace died) we would be still fighting World War Five. He was a believer in first strike nuclear saturation bombing. He wanted to nuke Cuba and Vietnam. Literally. The downside to LeMay in charge is truly frightening.
That would have been horrible, but has to be weighed against the fact Communism killed 100 million people and sentenced billions to brutal, servile, impoverished lives. If we had nuked Vietnam it might look more like Japan than North Korea today, and we might have saved millions in Laos and Cambodia as well.
The scenes from Laos and Cambodia were unbelievably horrific, the kind of thing Westerners just cannot comprehend as being possible. You had teenagers with AK-47s marching entire cities into the jungle to be forced into slave agricultural labor, and if you resisted, were an "intellectual" (i.e. wore glasses), or just couldn't keep up you were shot and left on the side of the road. Communist misrule subsequently produced the only famine the lush region had ever known.
Fortunately, enough of that got out to turn Thailand reliably anti-Communist, and the dominoes ended there.
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing the right thing.
LeMay? I don't like to talk badly about a man of his accomplishments, but if he had been elected (and Wallace died) we would be still fighting World War Five. He was a believer in first strike nuclear saturation bombing. He wanted to nuke Cuba and Vietnam. Literally. The downside to LeMay in charge is truly frightening.
That would have been horrible, but has to be weighed against the fact Communism killed 100 million people and sentenced billions to brutal, servile, impoverished lives. If we had nuked Vietnam it might look more like Japan than North Korea today, and we might have saved millions in Laos and Cambodia as well.
The scenes from Laos and Cambodia were unbelievably horrific, the kind of thing Westerners just cannot comprehend as being possible. You had teenagers with AK-47s marching entire cities into the jungle to be forced into slave agricultural labor, and if you resisted, were an "intellectual" (i.e. wore glasses), or just couldn't keep up you were shot and left on the side of the road. Communist misrule subsequently produced the only famine the lush region had ever known.
Fortunately, enough of that got out to turn Thailand reliably anti-Communist, and the dominoes ended there.
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing the right thing.
Dude, that is so wrong I don't know where to begin. We dropped 2 ~20 kiloton bombs on Japan. If Lemay had been allowed to bomb Vietnam (and all the bombs were restricted to Vietnam) at least 90% of the population would be dead in the first week. 100's of megatons. The jungles would be desert. Of course it would not have stayed in Vietnam. How many would have died in the end? This is the 60's we are talking about here. 1 billion? 2 billion? More? Certainly me as I lived near DC at the time. Saturation bombing was never a good idea, except as a threat. Talk to me about limited nuclear war and there may be some area of debate, but LeMay was catergoricaly ( I am sure that that is spelled wrong) opposed to limited strikes. I do believe if the US had started a Nuclear war, the USSR would have backed down if the leadership remained alive and in power. I doubt I would have bet my life on it, however. Life under communism, as brutal and often short as it was (and is), is better than an irradiated grave.
BTW, Vietnam is doing quite well now. Top Gear did an episode recently where they drove the length of it.
What is the difference between ignorance and apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
We were never in Vietnam to help anyone as your willingness to commit nuclear genocide demonstrates. Americas are individualist and do not understand that the communist may have lost more men but they won the war. The fact is people are basically animals and do whatever makes us feels good and gives them power. You really think that if Pol Pot was a capitalist strong man we would have cared how many people he killed. Anyway, Pol Pot was a competitor to North Vietnam not their pawn.
As far as bombing Russia with in a first strike scenario, the USA would have likely won and lived to talk about it in the late 40's through early 50's. However, if you do it to early so would the soviets. Lemay is talking about first strikes in the 60's. In the 60's the USA may have won a first strike but we would have taken a few hundred nukes in all likelihood, possibly less depends on how good our fighters where. I would not be that worried about Russia liquid fluid ICBMs. We would have taken a few hits from nuclear torpedos and sub launched missiles. It also depends on the soviets ability to take out our early warning radar without taking too many loses. Some bomber would have gotten through. Europe would have been hit worse. I do not think Lemay would have worry much about a few cities.
McNamara is the person behind describing MAD not Lemay, Kennedy and McNamara where very forceful that the nukes stay under civilian command and control. Both Kennedy and McNamara believed in limited wars in order to keep the steady erosion of the free world from occurring.
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The communist where much better at propaganda then we where. They had political officers attached to units and they were willing to make sacrifices for their ideology.
Let us say you invade and occupy the north then what you still have Laos, Cambodia and china. Who are going to be crossing the border constantly look at the place it is surrounded. At some point, china will come in hard. The only way to win in Vietnam would have been to win the people. You know what 18 year olds with rifles really suck at that. Plus, supporting a dictator was not helping.
You say what if we just bombed them back to the Stone Age. We would still have lost in the long run why because the communist were willing to make sacrifices and where experts at propaganda. They had the support of the Vietnamese people in addition you they had Laos, Cambodia, and china. If you did not invade the north with ground troops and just bombed them, back to the Stone Age the north would have sued for peace. Then built up a massive air defense this time with Russian / Chinese aircrafts and pilots we would have been back at war with in a year or two, which is kind of, what happened. If the strategy is right but the tactics wrong, battles will be lost but the war will be won. Since Truman sacked MacArthur military leaders have been, choose for their loyalty. They make great tacticians but paltry strategist. It has gotten to the point where we will not even leave bodies behind. Hell, you may as well just have some sergeant in charge.
This is all a bit before my time but the ramification are still very relevant.
Why didn't Haigpong Harbour get mined in '64 instead of 72.' Then they would have mainly needed to concentrate the bombing of bridges crossing the river from China or dropping minelets on them. I find it hard to believe it took 8 years to figure out that idea.
choff wrote:Why didn't Haigpong Harbour get mined in '64 instead of 72.' Then they would have mainly needed to concentrate the bombing of bridges crossing the river from China or dropping minelets on them. I find it hard to believe it took 8 years to figure out that idea.
Because mining is an operational level tactic, it is good for nuisance / area denial in the short term. It is not designed as a long-term solution to anything. We are already getting too focused on tactics here. It seems to be a failure of your military never to make it beyond the operational level. Again, if the strategy is right but the tactics wrong, battles will be lost but the war will be won.
The reason we were fighting in Vietnam was the domino theory. While I do not agree with the domino theory in its strong form, communism was actively trying to spread by force and we may have had to pick somewhere to stop it. Just do not pick a country with more border then land mass as your tripwire. Vietnam is not Korea. You cannot just change you tactics and expect to win. In fact, we were very efficient at killing Vietnamese. However, it did not get us a lot. In addition, democratic self-determination is important.
We really need better strategic analysis. Not done by political science or military science majors but by economist we are supposed to be capitalist. Yet our military is run by ideology. Some will say they are not but rather followers of Realpolitik and yet in practical terms there is little difference. All are strongly nationalist and demand sacrifice for their ideals rather than following market forces.
I vote for a political officer to be attached to each company. His job would be to spread capitalism. I think it might be a good start for a paradigm shift. At least if we plan to continue our nation building efforts.
m14 wrote: I vote for a political officer to be attached to each company. His job would be to spread capitalism. ;) I think it might be a good start for a paradigm shift. At least if we plan to continue our nation building efforts.
I'm just hoping the contract officers in charge of Polywell are capitalists.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
I keep pointing out that LeMay wanted to wipe out the soviets atomic bomb capacity BEFORE they were able to use it.
There would have been no nuclear exchange, nor would it have required "Gigatons" of bombs.
From "Dark Sun, The Making of the Hydrogen bomb."
by Richard Rhodes. (Page 347)
So when LeMay took his ideas for a SAC war plan to USAF Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg in November 1948, he proposed that "the primary mission of SAC should be to establish a force in being capable of dropping 80% of the stockpile in one mission." By then he was confident, he told Vandenberg, that "the next war will be primarily a strategic air war and the atomic attack should be laid down in a matter of hours." Vandenberg agreed; in the first SAC Emergency War Plan that LeMay delivered in March 1949, his November proposal became a goal to increase SAC capability "to such an extent that it would be possible to deliver the entire stockpile of atomic bombs, if made available, in a single massive attack" Fitted to the most recent JCS war plan, Lemay's plan for SAC meant destroying seventy Soviet cities within thirty days with 133 atomic bombs, causing at least 2.7 million civilian deaths and another four million casualties. (This scale of destruction corresponds notably to that of the firebombing of Japan, which resulted in the burning out of sixty-three Japanese cities and the killing of 2.5 million civilians. Such a relatively modest atomic-war plan, limited not by strategic restraint but simply by the exigencies of the atomic stockpile, reinforced the protective delusion that atomic war would differ from conventional war primarily in efficiency. But the bombing of Japan had been a maximum effort, while the atomic campaign could and would increase in destructive scale as the stock-pile grew.) The Air Force high command signed on to LeMay's plan at a conference at the Air University in December, allotting SAC top budget priority.
Dude, that is so wrong I don't know where to begin. We dropped 2 ~20 kiloton bombs on Japan. If Lemay had been allowed to bomb Vietnam (and all the bombs were restricted to Vietnam) at least 90% of the population would be dead in the first week. 100's of megatons
That's just silly; no one's plans ever call for killing 90% of the civilians. Did we kill anything remotely approaching 90% of the Japanese? Hell, we dropped leaflets telling them to leave. More likely the remnants of their leadership would have surrendered after being decapitated on the first day, and in the end millions fewer would have died, and the rest would have lived the free lives Vietnamese are still denied today.
BTW, Vietnam is doing quite well now.
No, South Korea is doing well. Taiwan is doing well. Vietnam has no free elections, no free expression and at $2800 GDP PPP per capita is considerably poorer than even China, which at $6000 is still less than half that of Mexico, whose inhabitants are constantly fleeing here uninvited in the hope of a better economic life. Westerners can scarcely even imagine the conditions denizens of the southeast Asian Communist holdovers live in. Both China and Vietnam are only "doing well" in comparison to how much worse it was before they recently started abandoning Communism after tens of millions of deaths and total impoverishment. This is like celebrating finding a nickel after losing your life's savings, your family, and being sent to prison for the rest of your life.
They had the support of the Vietnamese people in addition you they had Laos, Cambodia, and china.
They never had the support they claimed to. That's why they didn't and don't hold elections.
It's hard to understand why anyone thinks Communism had wide support in South Vietnam. People weren't cheering the NVA armored columns that came down after we left. More people fled after the war than during it.
Dude, that is so wrong I don't know where to begin. We dropped 2 ~20 kiloton bombs on Japan. If Lemay had been allowed to bomb Vietnam (and all the bombs were restricted to Vietnam) at least 90% of the population would be dead in the first week. 100's of megatons
That's just silly; no one's plans ever call for killing 90% of the civilians. Did we kill anything remotely approaching 90% of the Japanese? Hell, we dropped leaflets telling them to leave. More likely the remnants of their leadership would have surrendered after being decapitated on the first day, and in the end millions fewer would have died, and the rest would have lived the free lives Vietnamese are still denied today.
To this day, no one knows why Hirohito finally decided to surrender. There was a Junior Officer's coup in the works just before the broadcast of the surrender. It failed by minutes. The Japanese War Cabinet had known they were defeated for months, but remained deadlocked. Even the second nuke wasn't enough to break Hirohito's spirit; the surrender didn't occur until almost a week after Nagasaki.
Look at the death rates of Japanese civilians in the outer Islands. Iwo Jima, etc. Mothers took their children and jumped off cliffs en masse. And the casualty rates for Allied servicemen were intolerable. No way in hell was the US going to eat Iwo Jima level loss rates in taking the main islands. And no way in hell he don't take the main islands - the Pacific war was a race war with massive mutual hate-ons in each direction. We would've sold the northern half of the main islands to the Russians and let them bleed for them, and we had massive stores of chembio weapons on hand. We would've gassed and nuked the Japanese nonstop. Had Hirohito refused to surrender, the Japanese would be extinct as a people today; Japanese truly would be spoken only in hell.
The reason >99% of the Japanese people did not die turns on the actions of one man. Hirohito. It is not an artifact of American mercy. Our grandparents were not going to be merciful to the Japanese. We don't know why Hirohito decided to finally surrender, and we never will.
ravingdave wrote:I keep pointing out that LeMay wanted to wipe out the soviets atomic bomb capacity BEFORE they were able to use it.
There would have been no nuclear exchange, nor would it have required "Gigatons" of bombs.
From "Dark Sun, The Making of the Hydrogen bomb."
by Richard Rhodes. (Page 347)
So when LeMay took his ideas for a SAC war plan to USAF Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg in November 1948, he proposed that "the primary mission of SAC should be to establish a force in being capable of dropping 80% of the stockpile in one mission." By then he was confident, he told Vandenberg, that "the next war will be primarily a strategic air war and the atomic attack should be laid down in a matter of hours." Vandenberg agreed; in the first SAC Emergency War Plan that LeMay delivered in March 1949, his November proposal became a goal to increase SAC capability "to such an extent that it would be possible to deliver the entire stockpile of atomic bombs, if made available, in a single massive attack" Fitted to the most recent JCS war plan, Lemay's plan for SAC meant destroying seventy Soviet cities within thirty days with 133 atomic bombs, causing at least 2.7 million civilian deaths and another four million casualties. (This scale of destruction corresponds notably to that of the firebombing of Japan, which resulted in the burning out of sixty-three Japanese cities and the killing of 2.5 million civilians. Such a relatively modest atomic-war plan, limited not by strategic restraint but simply by the exigencies of the atomic stockpile, reinforced the protective delusion that atomic war would differ from conventional war primarily in efficiency. But the bombing of Japan had been a maximum effort, while the atomic campaign could and would increase in destructive scale as the stock-pile grew.) The Air Force high command signed on to LeMay's plan at a conference at the Air University in December, allotting SAC top budget priority.
David
I could go into a detailed beak down of soviet capabilities. They build up rapidly but did not have the reach to hit the United States until 1959. By 1950, they had R-2 missiles with a radiological warhead that would disperse radioactive fluid at altitude large numbers deployed by 1953. Tu-4 in 1949, 1956 R-5M in 1956, FROG-1 in 1957, R-11FM and P-5 in 1959, R-16U in 1963 are notable turning points in capacity. I should guess that by 1950 Europe would have been nuked in a nuclear war at least lightly and by 1963 the USA would have been nuked heavily. Lemay headed SAC from 1948 to 1957 in that time period it is conceivable to win a nuclear war. By the end of this period, you would have a few soviet bombs getting through to the USA. They had this little think called radar. Lemay is still living in 1952 when he said in October 1968 "that he, unlike many Americans, clearly did not fear using nuclear weapons"
The soviets where never big believers in nuclear war and would have been happy to use their larger conventional forces in Europe. Not going to go beyond 1963 because after that what is the point? R-14U will be deployed in 1964 and so on etc. You can see that a lot of the USSR nukes at least the ones that could reach us where on bombers. Lemay was air force of course he thought we could shoot down the soviet bombers. We had nuclear air-to-air missile to help in that.
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@ TELLDAVE The idea that the Vietnamese supported the government in the south is even more laughable. You know people do support brutal dictatorships all the time Americans cannot seem to understand that. Your argument amounts to my football team lost we should have nuked them. You do not give a shit about the Vietnamese.
Sure supporters of the government in the south fled among others. Mind control and propaganda are very effect as you are demonstrating.
Dropping UXB's can be just as effective as dropping explosives. If you blew up something in North Vietnam, they just rebuilt it, maybe civilians got killed and made for bad press. Drop UXB's like the German's did with England, and they have to disarm each and every one. Every time they start making headway disarming them all, just drop more. Nothing gets destroyed, hardly any emeny get killed, they just can't move war material to the South, build more in their factories, or bring it in from the communist block. After a while they say, 'this is stupid' and negotiate.
Concentrate the drops on strategic chokepoints, like harbours, bridges or mountain passes. One of the most effective weapons the VC used were Punji sticks, you don't always have to kill the enemy to succeed.
djolds1 wrote:
The reason >99% of the Japanese people did not die turns on the actions of one man. Hirohito. It is not an artifact of American mercy. Our grandparents were not going to be merciful to the Japanese. We don't know why Hirohito decided to finally surrender, and we never will.
We don't know why? How about "we've lost the war?" He didn't have a lot of good options: surrender to us, surrender to Russia, subject the Japanese people to near extinction. They surrendered to us for the same reason the remnants of the German armies fled into our arms in Europe: they knew the Russians would be worse, and mass suicide is rarely considered the best option.
Rewriting their constitution to enshrine basic freedoms and rebuilding the country into the world's second-largest economy while defending them from the Soviets and Chinese is the measure of American mercy.
I think it might be a good start for a paradigm shift. At least if we plan to continue our nation building efforts.