Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: desicat

I'm sure President Obama will send Sec State John Kerry to the funeral.

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ORIGINAL: crsutton

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ORIGINAL: desicat

I'm sure President Obama will send Sec State John Kerry to the funeral.

A first rate soldier. One of the best that the century has produced. You should leave your political cheese out of it. This is a history forum where the admiration for great soldiers is and always has been prime. I for one would go to his funeral.

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ORIGINAL: kaleun

He was a great tactician and an even better strategist.

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What made him a great warrior was that he did not measure his enemy by his own standards and he knew that if he could just inflict enough losses and outlast him, he would win in the end. And that he did versus the French and also versus the US.

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So, the main objectives of the NVA (and Giap) was to first weaken and afterwards destroy the South Vietnamese government/ military.

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ORIGINAL: desicat

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ORIGINAL: crsutton

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ORIGINAL: desicat

I'm sure President Obama will send Sec State John Kerry to the funeral.

A first rate soldier. One of the best that the century has produced. You should leave your political cheese out of it. This is a history forum where the admiration for great soldiers is and always has been prime. I for one would go to his funeral.

This type of funeral would not rate the President or Vice President, official protocol would dictate that the Secretary of State would be the appropriate level of US representation.

If you feel that the comment was political in a negative way then look to your own heart. A negative comment could have mentioned Jane Fonda attending the funeral.

As to him being a great strategist his primary foe seemed to disagree: "In a 1998 interview, William Westmoreland criticized the battlefield prowess of Giáp. "Of course, he [Giap] was a formidable adversary," Westmoreland told correspondent W. Thomas Smith, Jr. "Let me also say that Giap was trained in small-unit, guerrilla tactics, but he persisted in waging a big-unit war with terrible losses to his own men. By his own admission, by early 1969, I think, he had lost, what, a half million soldiers? He reported this. Now such a disregard for human life may make a formidable adversary, but it does not make a military genius. An American commander losing men like that would hardly have lasted more than a few weeks."

Westmoreland seemed to rate him more of a callous butcher than a military genius.

As for attending his funeral, as a Retired Navy pilot I would respectfully decline.

Edit - swapped "retired" in the place of "former".

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ORIGINAL: desicat

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So, the main objectives of the NVA (and Giap) was to first weaken and afterwards destroy the South Vietnamese government/ military.

Actually this was something that the Viet Kong was relatively successful at. Prior to Tet the Viet Kong had control of large swaths of South Vietnam including most of the Mekong Delta. After Tet the haggard Viet Kong survivors had great animosity for their NVA "brothers" betrayal leading to an almost total break between any cooperation between North and South. This also coincided with successful US pacification and protection operations that really put some starch in loyalty to the South Vietnamese leadership (mostly the local ARVN commanders).

Post Tet saw the South's government and military actually gaining in popularity.

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ORIGINAL: desicat

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ORIGINAL: kaleun

He was a great tactician and an even better strategist.

I find this quite curious. The North Vietnamese lost almost every tactical engagement post US involvement in Vietnam, and on the operational level they were routinely crushed in detail. The vastly over rated Tet Offensive was a crushing tactical and operational defeat that saw the almost total destruction of the Viet Kong.

Giap took credit afterwards for the "political" victory that historians claim followed, and for ridding the NVA of their troublesome Viet Kong "partners".

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Giap had been largely credited with devising the 1968 Tet Offensive, a series of surprise attacks on U.S. strongholds in the south by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces during lunar new year celebrations. Newer research, however, suggests that Giap had opposed the attacks, and his family has confirmed he was out of the country when they began.

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ORIGINAL: desicat
A clear study of the War shows that the US and the ARVN won the war through 1972 and had Congress supported them through treaty South Vietnam could possibly exist still today.

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Historian Stanley Karnow, who interviewed Giap in Hanoi in 1990, quoted him as saying: "We were not strong enough to drive out a half-million American troops, but that wasn't our aim. Our intention was to break the will of the American government to continue the war."

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ORIGINAL: LoBaron
... In Vietnam was, contrary to WWII, a war far away about something only few understood. It was not a war about the survival of western democracy, or freedom. Thats why Gian succeeded and the US failed.

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ORIGINAL: JeffK

He deserves the respect of his enemies, just as many laud the efforts of Rommel, Yamamoto or Guderian.

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ORIGINAL: Feltan

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ORIGINAL: LoBaron
... In Vietnam was, contrary to WWII, a war far away about something only few understood. It was not a war about the survival of western democracy, or freedom. Thats why Gian succeeded and the US failed.

LoBaron,

After the war, a large number of Vietnamese refugees came to the US. I got to know several, and one with whom I worked is among those that I call my friends.

They would take great exception to your statement that the war was not about western democracy or freedom. South Vietnam was taken over by a communist regime that was as violent and mean to the population as any stories or history that you will read about Genghis Khan and the Mongol hordes. The atrocities were really quite unbelievable, and have (as most periods of atrocities do) faded with time for most people who prefer to remain unaware.

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ORIGINAL: Terminus

War -n: the use of force to implement a political agenda.

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ORIGINAL: Feltan

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ORIGINAL: Terminus

War -n: the use of force to implement a political agenda.

T,

I do not disagree. However, I hope you acknowledge that there is a difference between practitioners of the military art (the aforementioned Rommel, Yamamoto, Guderian, etc.), and those that are basically thugs who use brute force to implement political change.

Regards,
Feltan

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ORIGINAL: LoBaron

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ORIGINAL: Feltan

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ORIGINAL: LoBaron
... In Vietnam was, contrary to WWII, a war far away about something only few understood. It was not a war about the survival of western democracy, or freedom. Thats why Gian succeeded and the US failed.

LoBaron,

After the war, a large number of Vietnamese refugees came to the US. I got to know several, and one with whom I worked is among those that I call my friends.

They would take great exception to your statement that the war was not about western democracy or freedom. South Vietnam was taken over by a communist regime that was as violent and mean to the population as any stories or history that you will read about Genghis Khan and the Mongol hordes. The atrocities were really quite unbelievable, and have (as most periods of atrocities do) faded with time for most people who prefer to remain unaware.

Feltan, important was what it meant to the US public, because that had an impact on how much the US would be able to invest into the defense of ROK. This is what I am referring to.

I never denied that it was a matter of pure survival for the ROK, not that it changed a thing.

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ORIGINAL: Terminus

Giap was not a thug. He basically created the North Vietnamese Army from the ground up.

And he didn't plan the Tet Offensive, by the way.

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ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58

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ORIGINAL: desicat

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So, the main objectives of the NVA (and Giap) was to first weaken and afterwards destroy the South Vietnamese government/ military.

Actually this was something that the Viet Kong was relatively successful at. Prior to Tet the Viet Kong had control of large swaths of South Vietnam including most of the Mekong Delta. After Tet the haggard Viet Kong survivors had great animosity for their NVA "brothers" betrayal leading to an almost total break between any cooperation between North and South. This also coincided with successful US pacification and protection operations that really put some starch in loyalty to the South Vietnamese leadership (mostly the local ARVN commanders).

Post Tet saw the South's government and military actually gaining in popularity.

Giap died in a free Vietnam. The rest is just old men wool-gathering.

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ORIGINAL: Jorge_Stanbury
In that case, the "thug" was Ho Chi Minh. And excluding Ghandi's, was there any other independence movement not using force to implement political change?

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Personally I think he was a good enough general. He became great because he commanded an army willing to take unbelievable losses and accept an extreme ammount of atrocities for a higher cause, and a population that either supported such sacrifices or did not know about them, and faught against an opponent who was not equally dedicated. Similar tactics had already failed when employed by the Japanese against the Allies after the US war machine had switched into full gear.

In Vietnam was, contrary to WWII, a war far away about something only few understood. It was not a war about the survival of western democracy, or freedom. Thats why Gian succeeded and the US failed.

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ORIGINAL: JeffK

He deserves the respect of his enemies, just as many laud the efforts of Rommel, Yamamoto or Guderian.