EFFORTPOST On Kaamrev's opinions about the Tet Offensive

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@Redactor0 grandpa confirm what I got wrong

Nothing fam. Just like I expect from you. Let's see if there's a few points I can elaborate on slightly.

USA Navy forces were not immediately aware of the ramifications the Battle of Midway would have upon the momentum of the Pacific Theatre

Keep in mind that both sides didn't even know how what ships the other had. They were getting bullshit intelligence from their own pilots all the time, so for example the Japanese were overestimating how many carriers they had sunk and had no idea we still had 3 left in the Pacific at that time.

the sheer dominant magnitude of the influence an aircraft carrier would as a weapons platform would supercede even the wildest prewar speculations

I gotta push back on this just slightly. Battleships were going obsolete but it wasn't completely over quite yet. Notice how important they were at Leyte Gulf on both sides and that was near the end of the war. This is one thing where I actually got some insight from computer games. Like so often, that comes in the form of actually getting the geometry involved. A battleship at flank speed could get about as far overnight as a carrier-based plane could fly (I'm oversimplifying here, but you get it). So you could actually dash in and catch them with a little luck. Especially if there were a few clouds out.

But it was really marginal. At the end of the war the proximity fuze for AA shells came out which helped the battleships a lot but also jet engines and guided bombs. And just planes that could fly farther. So it was really obvious by 1945 that within a few years they would be totally useless for fighting other ships.

the Royal Palace in hue

The bastards got there before Old Man Redactor could take pictures of it. But there was a lot of beautiful stuff left in Hue even after the battle.

this upcoming deafeat would be the greatest blow dealt to the US for the entire war

That's a really good way of putting it. You must have some angloid DNA.

It was the single greatest massacre of VC forces to the extent that they literally ceased to fricking be a political power within the communist sphere in Vietnam entire and Cambodia. From then on the North Vietnamese had near absolute control of military operations.

The VC were never really an independent force. At least not at the top level. There were lots of commies in South Vietnam at the beginning of the war of course, but the leadership was always directed from Hanoi. What was really changed by Tet is that all these low-level commies native to the South got killed off. After that, there was no longer any pretense that this was a guerilla war. By the time the old man got there (I think 1970) it was completely a conventional war between the North and the South fought with advanced high-tech weapons. He wasn't hauling an M-16 around when he was on his photography trips to old historical buildings in Hue because there weren't any guerillas to be scared of. Those people were all dead.

The Phoenix Program was also very helpful here. Just using basic 1960s police and office work they rooted out the commies in the villages. This was basically just turning the tables on them. Going after everyone who is on the enemy side. Except we didn't use terrorism the way the VC did, chopping off the head of the mayor's kid and shit like that. The cops just arrested people in 90% of cases. (Statistics on the Phoenix Program are quite interesting, something to go into more detail about someday.)

The US and ARVn performance was absolutely spectacular, perhaps one of history's great battles like fricking Cannae or Waterloo or something

Let's not suck our peepees too hard here. Old Man tells me a story second hand of a guy who had been in some big base around Saigon during Tet. He complained that he never got to shoot anybody because they were all slaughtered by .50 cal machineguns before they even got close enough. This wasn't Hannibal or Wellington we were dealing with.

us Air Cavalry (helicopter troops)

My dad will swear up and down that he hated everything about the Army but this is exactly the kind of comment that would draw him out. The 101st was airborne, it was NOT cavalry!

the lies and deception of the military a and 2 administrations about how good the war went

That's what the real crisis was. If it wasn't Tet it would have been something else to trigger it. They kept saying the war is about to end and they were clearly lying. This is a generation that wasn't beyond sacrifices. Everyone's parents had been in WW2 in some shit job sweeping asbestos off the floor of a shipyard or on the side of the world fighting. A lot of them never came back. But there was a purpose. People will sacrifice a lot for a purpose, but if they're getting jerked around, they notice real fast.

Old Man's story about this is listening to the radio where Nixon is saying that we're not bombing Laos and he's looking up in the sky and there's planes above him heading west. It didn't take fricking Descartes to guess where they were going.

unexpectedly brought low USA civilian morale to continue to send their sons overseas into the meatgrinder

A lot of the conventional wisdom about this isn't always right. We had something like half our casualties after Tet. (One third, I dunno.) And popular support for the war wasn't really eroded all that much if you look at the polling data.

Keep in mind that there's a certain class of people who dominate the discussion of the Vietnam War. Specifically: Guys who dodged the draft so they didn't have to go there and know anything about it. There's an extreme level of self-serving bullshit they claim. Like that the "Anti-War Movement" (lol you sure cared about the Vietnam-Cambodia war) had any impact at all on anything other than being so disgusting they helped get Nixon elected in 1968. These are the last fricking people on Earth you should ever believe. I trust the guys fighting on the other side 1000x more than them.

By the time 2023 arrived the most critical munitions would be basic artillery shells

So my two things I was saying going into this is ATGMs are gonna be important (because of experience in the Middle East in previous decades) and basic b-word artillery shells. There was this cult of precision munitions from Desert Storm. The thing I never heard anybody explain is: What if you don't know exactly where the enemy is tho?

Unironic WW1 bunkers and trenches also came to dominate the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine from Donbass to Crimea, with static artillery war and massed charges for both sides being the most popular strategy, on a grinding stalemate similar as to the ending phase of 1952s Korea War.

The last full-scale war we had between two opponents that was a fair fight was the Iran-Iraq War and it was a heck of a lot like this. I keep telling everyone, but nobody believes little old Redactor. I guess I gotta post more Chronicles of Victory.

!historychads !anticommunists