@@mostlymessingabout Is it that they grow, or is the thing that when you die and your body is jammed with preservatives and dehydrated, your skin contracts and the parts of your hair and nails that were previously under your skin get revealed
There was a suggestion in Washington during the last days of the First Indochina War to utilize Ho Chi Minh as an 'asian Tito', a counterbalance to China the way Tito was to the USSR in Europe. Ho himself was apparently open to the idea of working with the USA (at the time the USA was relatively well liked in Vietnam compared to the French) but the USA didn't go for it, would have saved a lot of trouble if they had
There were many such men like Ho Chih Minh trying to egg the US to break the European empires by force. Doing so might have avoided this, but it would also destroy relations with Europe at the time. For all we know, that could have been an even bigger disaster.
Yeah the US decided they'd rather work with a brutally racist genocidal country desperate to regain control and try to bring back their slave colony plantations. Whodathunk it.
And the OSS, precursor of the CIA, trained Ho Chi Minh's forces during World War II to fight a guerilla war against the Japanese. So following the end of World War II, with the French moving in again to reclaim their colonies, they were now confronted by the Viet Minh fighting a guerilla war. And after the USA took over the 'fight against Communism,' they were thus fighting the North Vietnamese whose officers were probably trained in guerilla warfare by the Americans during WW2.
A few mistakes I noticed: 1. The country you called Cambodia is Laos. And the country you called Laos is Cambodia 2. Ho Chi Minh was already dead by 1973 (he passed in 1969). 3. The island of Phú Quốc off the southern coast should be Vietnamese, not Cambodian 4. Although China helped them during the Indochina Wars, North Vietnam was aligned with the Soviets during the Sino-Soviet split and remained suspicious of China's true motives. China would end up attacking them at the border as the result of Vietnam going after the Khmer Rouge (which was pro-China). 5. North Vietnam did not agree to stay out completely during the 1973 thing. Just for two years! That's why Saigon fell in 1975. They also let the Viet Cong form their own government in 1969 called the PRG/Provisional Revolutionary Government (and later the Republic of South Vietnam). When Saigon fell, this became the government. Vietnam wouldn't reunify officially until 1976 6. South Vietnamese-controlled Paracel Islands should be there. China invaded the whole of the Paracel Islands in 1974, but since it was under the South's control and China was helping the North, North Vietnam couldn't even protest until the relationship fell out 5 years later.
@@paul_isnice677 "little" that's not little though. They presented it as if the North broke the 1973 agreement when they didn't. That's a BIG mistake. They also made it seem like Vietnam and China were chummy with each other when they really weren't. If you're gonna present history as factual, you're expected to actually do your research. This was very biased.
I love this guy's work. It's informative, humourous and provokes discussion. I, personally, have learnt more from your comments than I did from the video, but I still applaud it, and I thank you.
3:03 Ho Chi Minh (pictured here at the Paris peace talks) actually famously refused to attend the Paris peace talks in 1973 because he didn't want to set a precedent for other communist leaders to leave their mausoleum. (i.e. lenin) He firmly believed that a good communist should stay quietly embalmed in his glass case after he or she died
Video Idea: What happened to Vietnam after 1975. The Vietnam War always gets the most attention (and, to a lesser extent, the First Indochina War), but few talk about what happened to Vietnam after 1975. From the re-education (labour) camps, the Vietnamese refugee crisis, Khmer Rouge border raids, Cambodian-Vietnamese War, Sino-Vietnamese War, and border clashes with China during the 80s. It wasn't like Vietnam reunified and it was all rainbows and sunshine.
I'm Vietnamese so maybe I can shed a little light on this. According to my parents and grandparents, it was pretty tough for the average citizen of Vietnam during that time. The economy was sluggish, the currency was nearly worthless on the world's economy, people were starving left and right and of course, freedom of speech was next to zero so as a result, many risked their lives to leave the country through any means possible (most notably the Boat People). But because everyone was suffering, my parents didn't feel that they were suffering, they thought it was just a part of life. It wasn't until 1990 when the General Secretary decided to fully open the country to the international market that lives began to get bettet. Still, even by the early 2000s, life was still tough for many families. For me, who was born in 2000, looking back, Vietnam has come a long way for the past 10 years and the Vietnam of today is much more different than the Vietnam of 15 years ago. Now, lives for the Vietnamese is much better than 30-40 years ago and it continues to grow at a precedent rate. Still, that doesn't mean everyone is happy and satisfied and thousands of Vietnamese still immigrate to a different country to work and live.
yup, plenty of people in the South were rightly fighting to avoid that future. Problem was city people and country people had much different sets of problems, and the communists had a message that appealed to the underdeveloped rural villages.
@@tachikaze222weird that the reason they were struggling was because of the so called "allies" of South Vietnam bombing everything to oblivion and then charging them the bill alongside a healthy dose of sanctions
North Vietnam reunited with South Vietnam caught the attention of Kim Il-sung. After North Vietnam's success in reuniting with its southern counterpart, he believes they too can reunite with South Korea He went to China to discuss plans to invade south Korea but China isn't interested. So it never happened
Thats the thing, he went to discuss it with China. North Vietnam had to play juggle between the USSR and China since both of them wanted a VN dependent on their military aid and neither wanted an independent and unified Vietnam
@@KyleSolokov They exist because the red armies of the world willed it to be so. Same with the rest of the communist countries in any other proxy war. Taiwan and South Korea are doing better than the North and Vietnam. India will surpass China. Communist countries don’t do well in general. China has a lot of rare materials and oil much like Russia’s vapid economy.
what the OP said is the exact reason why Korea was never united. Asking China or USSR for permission to unify is a big red flag because they wanted a buffer zone in Korea, especially not an independent Korea. The Vietnamese leaders at time was politically intelligent and determined to play the political game with those giants and managed to unify in the end, ignoring China and USSR effort of stopping the north to unify with the south. However, this was also one of the reason why China invaded Vietnam in 1979 because they were pissed off that Vietnam didn't listen to China.
@@TheBikeOnTheMoon china has a lot of influence in SEA, it is not the first time they intervened when vietnam tried to bully their weaker neighbors, they would have invaded them in any case just to keep them weak relative to china.
Another small correction: North Vietnam loves USA first but when Rooservelt died and Truman replaced him, Truman heel face turn and renounce North Vietnam as enemy that need to be eradicated even at the cost of supportng France's colonize regime. So Vietnam, currently under threat of getting invaded by France again turned to USSR and China for help. The rest was hstory.
It wasn’t Truman that decided to support them over French. They threatened French threatened to leave NATO if we did not help them. Once again it comes back around to the French being arrogant pricks.
North Vietnam was indeed bombed a lot. If you wander around Hanoi's Thanh Niên road between Tay Ho and Truc Bach lake, you will see a memorial for John McCain, who was shot down over the lake. There is also the debris of a B52 still in Ba Dinh. It was fascinating to see these little historical details while working in Vietnam.
It's not a 'memorial' for McCain. It commemorates where he was pulled from the lake by the angry locals. It's a celebration of his capture and imprisonment. He is considered a war criminal in Vietnam.
It's ironic the U.S feared China would get involved if they invaded the North, but China ended up invading anyway in the late 70s. For different reasons, but still funny in a historical sense
it was for the same reason. China could not afford to look like it did nothing if allied North Vietnam was invaded by Americans, and it also could not afford to do nothing when allied Cambodia got invaded by Vietnam. In both cases, a show of force was necessary to signal their seriousness.
They bombed the South more though. The U.S. were actually hampered in the North by tactical decisions, what to bomb, being taken ridiculously high in the chain of command, by the @#£%ing President. Bombers when interviewed repeatedly express frustration that they could not bomb actual targets because the government kept hampering the military.
@Mauro Rondelli Well, Matthias S1234's general point is still fundamentally correct esp. as the US did not confine its bombing to Laos during ghe Vietnam War (even as it did make Laos the most heavily bombed country in human history so far) . The US and its allies dropped nearly 8 million tons of bombs on SE Asia--two to three times the total tonnage dropped by all sides during World War 2.
It's estimated that if the USA used the *entire* US army to demine and debomb present-day Laos of munitions the USA dropped on them the project would take a century.
And yet didn't do anything near the damage as most of the bombs fell in the jungle. Hanoi wasn't bombed into the ground like Tokyo. Dresden or even Pyongyang....
Ironic enough Ho Chi Minh was actually present at the Treaty of Versailles to try and represent Vietnamese independence. He was denied entry via Woodrow Wilson and left by train back to Vietnam, which took him through the Soviet Union where he read the manifesto and met Vladimir Lenin. What’s even more crazy is Ho Chi Minh lived in Harlem New York for a short time and attended UNIA meetings, A Pan-African movement. This dude also did all of this in his mid 20s and 30s.
this guy really got around. i knew that he was one of the more moderate tempered communist leaders (especially considering other communist rulers in asia not having a good track record), and was considering more of a liberator by most vietnamese people rather than a full on communist. of course he still did brutal things, war is hell and all, but i didn't know he had quite that interesting backstory i have an interest of people in history to skirt the line between good and evil. Italo Balbo and his life story of being a fascist and hating the Nazis are things i just eat up
@@sovietunion7643 he wasn’t insane like Stalin or mao but he did kill half a million north Vietnamese civilians during the “peace” in between the Geneva accords and the Tonkin incident. He is also responsible for the massacres the NVA and viet cong did during the Vietnam war. He was a dictator just like the rest.
@@Forty7-Twenty7 The half a million thing is probably the land reform? Yeah that was bad, but mostly due to civilians using the policy for revenge. The massacres you said is called a war. The Americans did a lot of massacres as well with all the bombings.
@@ddawng268 at least 100,000 north Vietnamese civilians were executed by the state. And also, there is a difference between the bombing of strategic targets by the US with little care for civilian casualties and the deliberate murdering done by the nva and Vietcong. I am not excusing the us’s policies during the war, just pointing out what a lot people don’t seem to see. Total civilian deaths from US bombing: ~65,000 During the war the PAVN and VC killed around 36,000 civilians and 17,000 civil servants for various reasons. In total there were at least 106,000 south Vietnamese civilians who deliberately killed by the north once you include the democides. There were 2,800-6,000 civilians who were executed by the PAVN and Viet Cong after the capture of hue city. The deadliest massacre ever committed by the United States was the My lai massacre, where 500 civilians were murdered. I think it is clear which side is better at intentionally murdering civilians. Note I didn’t include deaths from cross fire because it’s hard to place the blame on either side. To call it “just war” isn’t really appropriate and lets both sides off too easily.
Actually, Vietnam was aligned with the Soviets in the Sino-Soviet Split and had poor relations with China(Mao was ambivalent in interviews over supporting North Vietnam in case of an US invasion), China even abandoning support for it in 1968. Post-war, China even fought a short war with Communist Vietnam in 1979 over Vietnam's toppling of the pro-Chinese Khmer Rouge.
You got the info wrong. China sent a ton of material and man power into N Vietnam. It was after the war they had a differences. Cause Vietnam went with the Soviets. To China that was a betray. Since China sent tons of money and people to defend the N Vietnam. There were Chinese divisions inside N Vietnam fixing its infrastructure and manning anti air etc...
China did not completely abandon Vietnam after 1968. A Vietnamese paper had list out sporadic support till 1974. Relations were bad with the Soviet did not mean a complete cut off.
also consider that china has been to trying to absorb vietnam into its sphere of influence since china has been a civilization at all and its not exactly a suprise that they preffered the soviets. reminder that vietnam and china had a big border skirmish in 1979 that lasted nearly a month. not exactly a sign of good relations between communists.
@@DomWeasel yeah the Chinese were cooperating with the logistics from the border into Hanoi, which made the US bombing of this area politically tricky.
To be fair the early days of the Korean war were far bloodier than the peak of Vietnam. Vietnam cost the US more but it lasted a lot longer. Korea on an average day was bloodier. For american planners preventing a rerun of Korea was paramount. Its just that Vietnam lasted for a lot more and casualties ended up higher. But to be fair since Korea no single day of combat for the US has exceeded 250 dead.
That is because they are two completely different wars, Korea was a high-intensity war while Vietnam was supposed to be low-intensity (Guerilla). Portuguese involvement in the First World War resulted in tens of thousands dead while the Colonial War had just over 8,000 dead.
@@johnnotrealname8168 plus S. Korea didn't have Laos and Cambodia for the north to enjoy interior lines of communication basically. Plus the Communists were relatively strong in the South before 1954 and plenty of people preferred them to Diem and later Thieu.
@@tachikaze222 That is true. Although in a high-intensity war this would be less of a problem. Not the majority by a long shot but yeah. The American Counter-Insurgency programme was stupid as it did not even protect the people which is the whole point.
Remember that the Korean war (“police action”?) was an intervention approved by the UN Security Council. And also remember that the permanent Security Council member with veto power named “China” at that time was Taiwan (“Republic Of China”), not the “People’s Republic Of China”.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Yes and? Are you salty that the US didn't let the North Koreans and Soviets do an imperialism to the South? We know what would've happened if they hadn't, and it doesn't look pretty
Please do the Mexico-Guatemala conflict of 1958 next! This would be interesting to see. Guatemala was ready to go at war with Mexico, with the support of El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua to stoke resentment against Mexico… While Mexico had the support of the United States, Cuba, China, and the Soviet Union.
Star Trek First Contact is among my favourite movies (and my fav Trek movie) and still I almost missed it. It registered like three seconds after the scene was over xD
Ho chi minh traveled for 30 years and he lived in america for a time, he fought for vnmese independence everywhere. He got into communism not as an ideology at first but as a way of saving his nation. Even after that, america and vietnam still tried to work together, Ho chi minh wanted allies support and america did so for a time ( against japan). America was even present when hcm made the declaration of independence, the first line of which literally contained a line from the US' DECLARATION as a basis. Ultimately they chose the French and decided to back them in their return to Vietnam bcz communism and stuff.
This is BS propaganda. Ho Chi Minh used the US Declaration of Independence to pander to America for support, as Mao had done during WW2 and the Chinese Civil War. Does anyone think America allying with Mao would have made him less of a Communist mass murdering maniac? It was just insincere political theatre, they wanted weapons and recognition so they said what they thought America wanted to hear. Ho Chi Minh was every bit a Communist for the sake of Communism. After North Vietnam had achieved functional independence, the combined Vietnamese Independence groups formed a Coalition government and the Communists quickly rigged it against the non-Communist Vietnamese Nationalist groups like the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang. When things started getting heated between the Nationalist groups and the Communists, the Communists turned to the French and signed a treaty creating a Communist North Vietnam within the French Union and collaborated with the French Army to encircle and massacre all the other Vietnamese Nationalist forces in North Vietnam. Nationalist groups that had fought for Vietnam's Independence from France and Japan, some of them longer than the Communists. Ho Chi Minh was a dishonorable rat who betrayed his fellow revolutionaries so he could seize total power for the Communists.
Exactly, had the USA strong -armed those gallic morons in giving indipendence to their East Asian colonies,perhaps they would've spared a lot of problems, either to them AND the rest of the western world, don't forget that a lot of terrorism was inspired by the (fake) mithology of the VCs that could topple a regular army (just ask how well ended for Guevara).
@Krauses yeah sure..not like the US was pressured by the French to save their colonies. also, remind me why we should listen to you if your banner is the symbol of a nation no longer in existence and in of itself is hypocritical of its ideals.
@@YonIon996 Sidnom, thank you for your observation. That has nothing to do wilth the conversation I was having with Trung. Trung had many false points, like he has the entire chronology of France's and America's involvement in Vietnam wrong.
History matters is my all time favorite channel for learning history!!! Here are some suggestions: 1. How did the World react to the discovery of Oceania? 2. Why isn’t Dutch an official language in the Congo Kinshasa despite it being a Belgian colony? 3. How was life like in Soviet Central Asia? 4. Why does Lebanon exist? 5. Why didn’t the USA 🇺🇸 got its protectorate over Armenia?
The one thing I've never understood is why people believe Laos and Cambodia were innocent in the Vietnam-American War. They were not. They actively participated.
@@eddiewhistler7472 in undergrad you don't really focus on one topic but rather a more general history by picking various classes from different regions and time periods but in grad school you do specialize in one topic. at least thats how it worked at my uni
That corner of the world is no place for a mechanized army. Jungle, hills upon hills, torrential monsoon rains. The US could barely go toe-to-toe with PAVN at the DMZ. Escalation into the north would just make a bigger mess.
@@tachikaze222 The US annihilated the PAVN and NLF every time it fought them, and evidently that outright isn’t the case given the PAVN’s offensives in 73 and 75 involving a deeply mechanized force. ROE is what did the US in, not their order of battle. It was simply simultaneously too lax and too restrictive.
I recall that an American politician (don’t remember which one) sat in on a meeting discussing Vietnam strategy and made the observation that the north Vietnamese birth rate (and hence the rate that boys turned 18 and could fight) was much higher than the rate they were being killed in south Vietnam. In other words, the south Vietnamese and the US could never win if it was just a matter of shooting people. That politician was not invited back.
That reminds me of the “kill ratio” -- just one of many phrases that were used in discussing the Vietnam War. Also, after it had been revealed that some Government spokesman made a claim that was debunked: “that statement is now inoperative”.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Given this history, I think that western claims about Russian combat losses in Ukraine should be greeted with a great degree of skepticism.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104commies colonists (North Vietnamese) are controlled South Vietnam over 48 years now. They are closed to Russia, China and India than other western countries. How about the massacres, crimes against humanity during the Vietnam War created by Northern Vietnamese to South Vietnam almost going silent in Western media. Very very disappointed.
“It bombed the north, a lot” for scale of how lot it was, more than double the amount of bombs were dropped on indochina between 1965-75 than the entirety of world war 2
North and South Vietnam were not granted independence as separate countries. To simplify, it was a temporary situation, and the same international treaty that stipulated it mandated a later referendum on unification. But shortly afterwards the USA refused to fulfill the treaty and facilitate any referendum, expecting to lose it and that a unified Vietnam would become Communist; so the USA unilaterally recognized South Vietnam as an independent state.
I suppose the US military was hoping the communists would give up once they faced enough causalities, but clearly that didn't happen. Ho Chi Minh was pretty clear from the beginning that the Vietnamese would suffer a lot of causalities, a lot more than their enemies, but eventually they would win in the end, and that is exactly what happened.
There is definitely something to said about setting the correct level of expectations ahead of time. You remind me of Admiral Stockdale’s recollections as a POW for seven years. “The men who thought they would be released by Christmas didn’t make it.”
It's worth mentioning as well that there were many in the government who were not optimistic about the US achieving a conventional "victory" in Vietnam, even in the early years of the war.
USA authorities were a lot smarter back then and rooted in the real world compared to now, even if they still did a lot of stupid sh!t like getting meddling in Vietnam.
There are tapes of LBJ basically admitting that Vietnam was a lost cause, and that he only stationed troops to avoid a political backlash about “losing” South Vietnam.
"Victory" in SE Asia was South Vietnam pushing NVA & Viet Cong out, having a free country. No one wanted a war or 1000s of young men dead. But Uncle Ho aka Ho Chi Minh pushed to bring the Viet Nams together. With secret, covert USSR-GRU help.
For me, as an American who was alive during those times, it’s strange to hear nothing about the coup against Diem, the Gulf of Tonkin, or the Pentagon Papers. It’s also kind of strange to hear the American motivations and responses summarized so neatly when our country was coming apart at the seams over this issue (something apparently unknown to those bewailing our current “divisions” as if they are something new).
I had always asked myself this question. Thank you for bringing answers to questions I had. These things are sometimes forgotten in the narrative and considered like obvious. Keep up the great work
I think a more accurate drawing would be to have Le Duan represent North Vietnam after 1968 rather than Ho Chi Minh since he died at that point and the VCP camp slowly went anti-China at that point
1:34 I’m pretty sure I have NEVER corrected History Matters before, but I don’t entirely agree with this argument because the People’s Republic of China 🇨🇳 switched their support to the Khmer Rouge 🇰🇭, rather than North Vietnam 🇻🇳, while the Soviet Union 🇷🇺 stayed allied with North Vietnam 🇻🇳. The Khmer Rouge and North Vietnam were both communistic, but they hated each other (though most of the hate came from the highly nationalistic, racist and genocidal Khmer Rouge)
Thanks for the video. You missed the crucial part of the background: after ww2 Ho Chi Min and his government were the USA ally, but because France wanted its colonies back and France was more important ally the USA had to stay aside while France tried to conquer Vietnam back. That made Ho Chi Min an enemy and pushed hin back to communism and USSR.
@lianakannabisovna1603: The US "stayed aside" by eventually paying about 75% of the costs and supplying most of the arms and support equipment that France needed to fight on the other side of the world-for years.
almost every historian mistakenly believe that viet nam were divided , actually it had never been divided by any agreements. the 1954 Geneva conference simply just allowed France and its colonial government to have a temporary military occupation zone before they agreed to withdraw and give independent to a unified Vietnam, signed between Paris government and Vietnamese people government. in other words it is completely different from Germany and Japan , who never signed any agreement to divide their countries , but signed between communist bloc and the western victors . Korea were japanese territories , so neither Koreans nor Japanese were allowed any negotiation at their country 's fate.
my grandpa was an officer during that war and he really said part of the reason we preformed so poorly was that we simply couldn’t launch offensive invasions. The govt. set up our troops up for failure
The other issue was the Viet Cong running on the Ho Chi Minh trail. We couldn't attack them in Laos and Cambodia but did secretly. Definitely a defensive war.
The military bigshots say how to win the war, the civilian government determined whether it is worth it. If the level of the war was known ahead of time, we would have not gone in.
The US mistake was supporting a extremely corrupt and unpopular government in Saigon that refused ammunation, food and fuel to the ARVN and that embezzeled much of the money comming from US financial aid to South Vietnam.
Another factor: the sheer cost. The Johnson administration had been trying to fight the Vietnam war on a peacetime budget, and also keeping American forces in Western Europe prepared for the USSR running the Fulda Gap, and ALSO cranking up spending on the Great Society welfare programs. This didn't work. When the Tet Offensive launched NATO forces in Europe thought it was a feint to distract from the Soviets invading, because by 1968 US European Command was being held together by duct tape and zip ties, so much had been diverted to Vietnam. Invading the North would have meant doubling the defense budget, ending student deferments in the draft, even nationalizing steel and munition productions. It would have been a Korean War size conflict at the five year mark, and there was no feasible way Congress would have approved of any of it.
When people argue over wether the US lost the Vietnam war or not there is a simple answer. Military it succeeded in its goals of driving the north to a stand still and forcing them into a peace agreement. Politically tho, the US lost as is simply left the South hoping the north wouldn’t invade later and pulled out of the “bullet for bullet” deal with the south. Military victory, political loss. Tho it is interesting how Vietnam has kind of turned into a Tito of Asia in the modern world. Siding with the US in regional affairs but not domestic.
0:41 why didn’t you mention the referendum between north and south Vietnam that would of unified them democratically under either the communists or the capitalists but was cancelled by the us
1974- USA: We're going to leave now, please keep it together South Vietnam: Sure 2010- USA: We're going to leave now, please keep it together Iraq: Sure 2021- USA: We're going to leave now, please keep it together Afghanistan: Sure
@@johnnotrealname8168 More than 3 or 4. The US footprint in Asia has been a mess from the beginning of time. Japan will always hate us for the atom bomb.
Well, if you look into how the US basically handicapped itself the entire Vietnam War, you'll soon realize they basically did everything in their power to shoot themselves in the foot, while wasting everyone's time (and many of their own lives). People compare Vietnam to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan years later, but at least the Soviets tried to commit to actually winning the thing.
Your Rambo school of thought is just rightwing B.S. Westmoreland tried to fight the wrong war and ran through his budget of 50,000 US KIA too quickly. PAVN was one tough cookie and defeating the communists probably wasn't in the cards no matter what we tried, short of outright genocide.
Then congressmen Kennedy (yes that Kennedy) wanted to work with Ho Chi Minh, but the government said no because they did not want to offend their WWII ally the French. By the time of the American involvement in Vietnam, Minh had already gotten help from the Soviets (both Russia and China) plus Minh was to old and became more of a figurehead for the VC which was now under the control of many of his younger more radicalized generals
Love your videos im actually addict to em now, but please pass the drawings slower!!! They are so funny to watch because of the most tiny details you add on em.
Besides worrying about the possibility of China intervening and crossing the Sino-Vietnamese border, the United States would have been stuck fighting a larger insurgency in both North and South Vietnam.
I think the USA also considered a land invasion of north Vietnam very costly and difficult, and may well have decided they didn't have the manpower/resources to succeed
We have historic relations with North Vietnam/Vietnam since 1950! Minh visited our country in 1957, and I got the opportunity to visit them back in 2019! Although there was a hiccup when we supported the Khmer Rouge, we've been friends since then. You failed to mention that the division between North and South after the Geneva Conference was supposed to be TEMPORARY, and the two parts of Vietnam was supposed to be united by an election. The south with US backing realized that there is no way they could win against Ho Chi Minh and so they oppressed anyone open minded towards an election. Furthermore, they enacted a brutal killing system where you could be killed just on the suspicion or accusation of being a communist. This repression caused outrage in the south, but since communist leaders were still pursuing a diplomatic solution to get an election, the strategy for southerners was to avoid confrontation with the Sai Gon government. The north after realizing that the country could end up like Korea or Germany, decided to approve armed uprising to overthrow the puppet government in the south, which results in the Uprising movement that gave birth to the Liberation Front (the half red half blue flag).
Hilarious but Ho Chi Minh was asking for a democratic country first 😂 it’s rich coming from someone that denied him of such opportunities then proceed funding the French colonists to come back to Vietnam. What a massive hypocrite. Rules for thee but not rule for me. 😂
Here you are, my friend. First time saw a comment that appreciated the truth of Vietnam War. Haha. For anyone told that this is Vietnam South - North war. It's fucking not. It's 100% Vietnam - America war !
USA: Alright bros get ready to invade North Vietnam. China: I'm going to end your career if you do. USA: Flash back to the Korean War in the 50s. Also USA: OK I changed my mind we will not attack North Vietnam.
+@@khabbad : Because? USA lost the war when China entered the war on North Korea's side. China has a large population and was also willing to take heavy loses to win and achieved their goals. USA was forced to change their goals and objectives after getting trash by China entranceto the war. When China entered the war and the Communist took South Korea's capital the 2nd time and more years of fighting. Instead of a unified Korea that USA was dreaming of it was forced to accept a divided Korea, and just made sure South still remains a US Allie. Meanwhile China's goals was to keep North Korea as a buffer zone and free nation not under US influence. Also? 200,000 was nothing to China since they pretty much won the war and achieved their objectives.
@@khabbad Considering China accomplished their mission and objectives both China and North Korea won the war. North Korea would have never won without China's help and manpower against overwhelming numbers against USA and UN forces aiding South Korea.
You're insane if you think they couldn't. They had no interest in a knock down drag out fight with the Chinese....but if they did and prepared accordingly you can bet they absolutely could and would have.
@@tremedar Except that China was already nuclear, so a fight with the Chinese very well might have meant "elimination of global civilization as we understand it." King of the ash heap, baybeeeeeeeeeee
@@wppb50 Except not? China didn't have ICBMs, all they could do was maybe, drop bombs on advancing US troops. Assuming their bombers didn't get shot down first.
Because the US-allied government in South Vietnam asked them to - the non-communist government was under a constant threat of being overthrown by North Vietnam-supported communist guerrillia (known as Viet Cong). And once the Americans got there, there wasn't any good way for them to withdraw again, without loosing face.
@@alls8990 If you knew a bit about Vietnam, you’d know that there isn’t much oil and resources for the US to exploit there (except rice) and most natural resources are located in the north anyway. The military engagement was purely politically motivated. But it was a large mistake. In almost 20 years, they gained nothing but millions of causalities and billions of taxpayer dollars down the drain. And yes, there were indeed war crimes. And the end to the whole thing: all of Vietnam became a communist state anyway. It was all for nothing.
One small correction: Ho Chi Minh is no longer alive by 1973, thus unable to stand in front of a chalkboard outlining the agreements.
Yup, i thought so too
They still display his corpse though.
@@brandonlyon730 the body is actually alive, the hair and nails still grow btw
@@mostlymessingabout that's odd
@@mostlymessingabout Is it that they grow, or is the thing that when you die and your body is jammed with preservatives and dehydrated, your skin contracts and the parts of your hair and nails that were previously under your skin get revealed
There was a suggestion in Washington during the last days of the First Indochina War to utilize Ho Chi Minh as an 'asian Tito', a counterbalance to China the way Tito was to the USSR in Europe. Ho himself was apparently open to the idea of working with the USA (at the time the USA was relatively well liked in Vietnam compared to the French) but the USA didn't go for it, would have saved a lot of trouble if they had
There were many such men like Ho Chih Minh trying to egg the US to break the European empires by force. Doing so might have avoided this, but it would also destroy relations with Europe at the time.
For all we know, that could have been an even bigger disaster.
Damn, just to think how many lives were lost for not taking that path
Yeah the US decided they'd rather work with a brutally racist genocidal country desperate to regain control and try to bring back their slave colony plantations. Whodathunk it.
And the OSS, precursor of the CIA, trained Ho Chi Minh's forces during World War II to fight a guerilla war against the Japanese.
So following the end of World War II, with the French moving in again to reclaim their colonies, they were now confronted by the Viet Minh fighting a guerilla war.
And after the USA took over the 'fight against Communism,' they were thus fighting the North Vietnamese whose officers were probably trained in guerilla warfare by the Americans during WW2.
@@AudieHolland This is the most American thing ever.
A few mistakes I noticed:
1. The country you called Cambodia is Laos. And the country you called Laos is Cambodia
2. Ho Chi Minh was already dead by 1973 (he passed in 1969).
3. The island of Phú Quốc off the southern coast should be Vietnamese, not Cambodian
4. Although China helped them during the Indochina Wars, North Vietnam was aligned with the Soviets during the Sino-Soviet split and remained suspicious of China's true motives. China would end up attacking them at the border as the result of Vietnam going after the Khmer Rouge (which was pro-China).
5. North Vietnam did not agree to stay out completely during the 1973 thing. Just for two years! That's why Saigon fell in 1975. They also let the Viet Cong form their own government in 1969 called the PRG/Provisional Revolutionary Government (and later the Republic of South Vietnam). When Saigon fell, this became the government. Vietnam wouldn't reunify officially until 1976
6. South Vietnamese-controlled Paracel Islands should be there. China invaded the whole of the Paracel Islands in 1974, but since it was under the South's control and China was helping the North, North Vietnam couldn't even protest until the relationship fell out 5 years later.
Bro he can have little mistakes it’s fine what’s the the point of typing like 2 essays 💀🤓
@@paul_isnice677 "little" that's not little though. They presented it as if the North broke the 1973 agreement when they didn't. That's a BIG mistake. They also made it seem like Vietnam and China were chummy with each other when they really weren't. If you're gonna present history as factual, you're expected to actually do your research. This was very biased.
@@detroitpeoplemover North Vietnam and China didn't have to be friends, They only needed to have a common enemy
, The U.S.
I love this guy's work. It's informative, humourous and provokes discussion. I, personally, have learnt more from your comments than I did from the video, but I still applaud it, and I thank you.
Also, I suspect that he will appreciate your input.
James Bissonette was able to escape the fall of Saigon by spinning three plates to generate lift.
three plates of pure gold
Couldn’t fly as high as Gustav Swan.
Kelly Moneymaker bought a plane in order to escape. 🤑💰🛫🇻🇳➡️🇺🇸
as suggested by boogely woogely
and Maggy Pakskowski.
3:03 Ho Chi Minh (pictured here at the Paris peace talks) actually famously refused to attend the Paris peace talks in 1973 because he didn't want to set a precedent for other communist leaders to leave their mausoleum. (i.e. lenin) He firmly believed that a good communist should stay quietly embalmed in his glass case after he or she died
This is satire right? Can't be so sure on the internet.
By 1973 he was no longer alive
@@JackLuong look up what a mausoleum is
crazy thing is HCM was at the 1919 Versailles conference, trying to drum up support for independence.
He died in 1969 ma guy. The VN gov was just hiding the fact from the outside world
Video Idea: What happened to Vietnam after 1975. The Vietnam War always gets the most attention (and, to a lesser extent, the First Indochina War), but few talk about what happened to Vietnam after 1975. From the re-education (labour) camps, the Vietnamese refugee crisis, Khmer Rouge border raids, Cambodian-Vietnamese War, Sino-Vietnamese War, and border clashes with China during the 80s. It wasn't like Vietnam reunified and it was all rainbows and sunshine.
I'm Vietnamese so maybe I can shed a little light on this. According to my parents and grandparents, it was pretty tough for the average citizen of Vietnam during that time. The economy was sluggish, the currency was nearly worthless on the world's economy, people were starving left and right and of course, freedom of speech was next to zero so as a result, many risked their lives to leave the country through any means possible (most notably the Boat People). But because everyone was suffering, my parents didn't feel that they were suffering, they thought it was just a part of life. It wasn't until 1990 when the General Secretary decided to fully open the country to the international market that lives began to get bettet. Still, even by the early 2000s, life was still tough for many families.
For me, who was born in 2000, looking back, Vietnam has come a long way for the past 10 years and the Vietnam of today is much more different than the Vietnam of 15 years ago. Now, lives for the Vietnamese is much better than 30-40 years ago and it continues to grow at a precedent rate. Still, that doesn't mean everyone is happy and satisfied and thousands of Vietnamese still immigrate to a different country to work and live.
yup, plenty of people in the South were rightly fighting to avoid that future. Problem was city people and country people had much different sets of problems, and the communists had a message that appealed to the underdeveloped rural villages.
@@tachikaze222weird that the reason they were struggling was because of the so called "allies" of South Vietnam bombing everything to oblivion and then charging them the bill alongside a healthy dose of sanctions
Cambodia in particular
@@edh8900 it wasn't until 1986 that Le Duan finally kicked the bucket that is.
Doi Moi was initiated within the same damn year.
It's so amazing just how much history I've learned from this channel. Especially on topics & questions that would have never crossed my mind.
Well History Matters
Part of your thanks should go to James Bisonnette.😊
I didn't know our Captain is also here. We'll meet back on the ship!
Never thought I’d see you here
ayo it's you
North Vietnam reunited with South Vietnam caught the attention of Kim Il-sung. After North Vietnam's success in reuniting with its southern counterpart, he believes they too can reunite with South Korea
He went to China to discuss plans to invade south Korea but China isn't interested. So it never happened
Thats the thing, he went to discuss it with China. North Vietnam had to play juggle between the USSR and China since both of them wanted a VN dependent on their military aid and neither wanted an independent and unified Vietnam
@@KyleSolokov They exist because the red armies of the world willed it to be so. Same with the rest of the communist countries in any other proxy war. Taiwan and South Korea are doing better than the North and Vietnam. India will surpass China. Communist countries don’t do well in general. China has a lot of rare materials and oil much like Russia’s vapid economy.
@@zachdave2994 they still shit on the streets
what the OP said is the exact reason why Korea was never united. Asking China or USSR for permission to unify is a big red flag because they wanted a buffer zone in Korea, especially not an independent Korea. The Vietnamese leaders at time was politically intelligent and determined to play the political game with those giants and managed to unify in the end, ignoring China and USSR effort of stopping the north to unify with the south. However, this was also one of the reason why China invaded Vietnam in 1979 because they were pissed off that Vietnam didn't listen to China.
@@TheBikeOnTheMoon china has a lot of influence in SEA, it is not the first time they intervened when vietnam tried to bully their weaker neighbors, they would have invaded them in any case just to keep them weak relative to china.
Another small correction: North Vietnam loves USA first but when Rooservelt died and Truman replaced him, Truman heel face turn and renounce North Vietnam as enemy that need to be eradicated even at the cost of supportng France's colonize regime.
So Vietnam, currently under threat of getting invaded by France again turned to USSR and China for help. The rest was hstory.
It wasn’t Truman that decided to support them over French.
They threatened French threatened to leave NATO if we did not help them.
Once again it comes back around to the French being arrogant pricks.
North Vietnam was indeed bombed a lot. If you wander around Hanoi's Thanh Niên road between Tay Ho and Truc Bach lake, you will see a memorial for John McCain, who was shot down over the lake. There is also the debris of a B52 still in Ba Dinh. It was fascinating to see these little historical details while working in Vietnam.
should have let them keep mccain, after he betrayed his comrades.
@@nyarlat2609 How did he betray anyone?
We should go back for round two
@@tigerabraham5582 Vietnam and America are now friendly towards one another. Neither nations likes China.
It's not a 'memorial' for McCain. It commemorates where he was pulled from the lake by the angry locals. It's a celebration of his capture and imprisonment. He is considered a war criminal in Vietnam.
It's ironic the U.S feared China would get involved if they invaded the North, but China ended up invading anyway in the late 70s. For different reasons, but still funny in a historical sense
The US feared about China declaring war on them, US doesn't give a fuck China attacking North Vietnam
it was for the same reason. China could not afford to look like it did nothing if allied North Vietnam was invaded by Americans, and it also could not afford to do nothing when allied Cambodia got invaded by Vietnam. In both cases, a show of force was necessary to signal their seriousness.
@@Samuel-wm1xr ummmmmm...... no it was completely different.
@@Samuel-wm1xr lol, thats not the reason
@@Samuel-wm1xr pol pot was kinda asking for it tho
Am I the only one that got the Star Trek reference at 2:00 ?
First Contact FTW! You guys are epic indeed.
'They bombed the North...a lot'
*uses more explosives in South-East-Asia than all warring nations during WW 2 combined*
They bombed the South more though. The U.S. were actually hampered in the North by tactical decisions, what to bomb, being taken ridiculously high in the chain of command, by the @#£%ing President. Bombers when interviewed repeatedly express frustration that they could not bomb actual targets because the government kept hampering the military.
@Mauro Rondelli
Well, Matthias S1234's general point is still fundamentally correct esp. as the US did not confine its bombing to Laos during ghe Vietnam War (even as it did make Laos the most heavily bombed country in human history so far) . The US and its allies dropped nearly 8 million tons of bombs on SE Asia--two to three times the total tonnage dropped by all sides during World War 2.
It's estimated that if the USA used the *entire* US army to demine and debomb present-day Laos of munitions the USA dropped on them the project would take a century.
And yet didn't do anything near the damage as most of the bombs fell in the jungle. Hanoi wasn't bombed into the ground like Tokyo. Dresden or even Pyongyang....
@@Truth_Hurts528 They do blow the legs of children to this day, fifty years later . . .
Ironic enough Ho Chi Minh was actually present at the Treaty of Versailles to try and represent Vietnamese independence. He was denied entry via Woodrow Wilson and left by train back to Vietnam, which took him through the Soviet Union where he read the manifesto and met Vladimir Lenin. What’s even more crazy is Ho Chi Minh lived in Harlem New York for a short time and attended UNIA meetings, A Pan-African movement. This dude also did all of this in his mid 20s and 30s.
this guy really got around. i knew that he was one of the more moderate tempered communist leaders (especially considering other communist rulers in asia not having a good track record), and was considering more of a liberator by most vietnamese people rather than a full on communist. of course he still did brutal things, war is hell and all, but i didn't know he had quite that interesting backstory
i have an interest of people in history to skirt the line between good and evil. Italo Balbo and his life story of being a fascist and hating the Nazis are things i just eat up
Woodrow Wilson's biggest failure will always be due to his extreme racism.
@@sovietunion7643 he wasn’t insane like Stalin or mao but he did kill half a million north Vietnamese civilians during the “peace” in between the Geneva accords and the Tonkin incident. He is also responsible for the massacres the NVA and viet cong did during the Vietnam war. He was a dictator just like the rest.
@@Forty7-Twenty7 The half a million thing is probably the land reform? Yeah that was bad, but mostly due to civilians using the policy for revenge. The massacres you said is called a war. The Americans did a lot of massacres as well with all the bombings.
@@ddawng268 at least 100,000 north Vietnamese civilians were executed by the state.
And also, there is a difference between the bombing of strategic targets by the US with little care for civilian casualties and the deliberate murdering done by the nva and Vietcong. I am not excusing the us’s policies during the war, just pointing out what a lot people don’t seem to see.
Total civilian deaths from US bombing: ~65,000
During the war the PAVN and VC killed around 36,000 civilians and 17,000 civil servants for various reasons.
In total there were at least 106,000 south Vietnamese civilians who deliberately killed by the north once you include the democides.
There were 2,800-6,000 civilians who were executed by the PAVN and Viet Cong after the capture of hue city.
The deadliest massacre ever committed by the United States was the My lai massacre, where 500 civilians were murdered.
I think it is clear which side is better at intentionally murdering civilians.
Note I didn’t include deaths from cross fire because it’s hard to place the blame on either side.
To call it “just war” isn’t really appropriate and lets both sides off too easily.
America: The NVA promised us they won't invade the south after we leave.
The NVA: I'm Gonna Do What's Called a Pro Gamer Move.
DRV: The French promised us they will let us unification our country
The US: I'm Gonna Do What's Called a Pro Gamer Move.
ngo refused elections. not usa@@tovarishsus
Ur cringe
The NVA didn't invade the south, it was the South Vietnamese Liberation Front who did it
nope, ho chi minh invaded the south with the support of ussr. learn history@@Kidtoucher-wg9gg
Loving the Star Trek First Contact reference at 2:01
No little ships were harmed in the making of this video though.
See you in the next video, Ahab
@@sevenprovinces Little... *klingon frown* >:(
Well played indeed
Isn't that a Churchill reference that star trek used as well?
Actually, Vietnam was aligned with the Soviets in the Sino-Soviet Split and had poor relations with China(Mao was ambivalent in interviews over supporting North Vietnam in case of an US invasion), China even abandoning support for it in 1968. Post-war, China even fought a short war with Communist Vietnam in 1979 over Vietnam's toppling of the pro-Chinese Khmer Rouge.
You got the info wrong. China sent a ton of material and man power into N Vietnam. It was after the war they had a differences. Cause Vietnam went with the Soviets. To China that was a betray. Since China sent tons of money and people to defend the N Vietnam.
There were Chinese divisions inside N Vietnam fixing its infrastructure and manning anti air etc...
China did not completely abandon Vietnam after 1968. A Vietnamese paper had list out sporadic support till 1974. Relations were bad with the Soviet did not mean a complete cut off.
@@TheZachary86
Especially as the Chinese hated the US after Korea. There were plenty of Chinese volunteers in North Vietnam, manning AA systems.
also consider that china has been to trying to absorb vietnam into its sphere of influence since china has been a civilization at all and its not exactly a suprise that they preffered the soviets.
reminder that vietnam and china had a big border skirmish in 1979 that lasted nearly a month. not exactly a sign of good relations between communists.
@@DomWeasel yeah the Chinese were cooperating with the logistics from the border into Hanoi, which made the US bombing of this area politically tricky.
Delighted to see a new upload. I hope all is well in History Matters land
To be fair the early days of the Korean war were far bloodier than the peak of Vietnam. Vietnam cost the US more but it lasted a lot longer. Korea on an average day was bloodier. For american planners preventing a rerun of Korea was paramount. Its just that Vietnam lasted for a lot more and casualties ended up higher. But to be fair since Korea no single day of combat for the US has exceeded 250 dead.
That is because they are two completely different wars, Korea was a high-intensity war while Vietnam was supposed to be low-intensity (Guerilla). Portuguese involvement in the First World War resulted in tens of thousands dead while the Colonial War had just over 8,000 dead.
@@johnnotrealname8168 plus S. Korea didn't have Laos and Cambodia for the north to enjoy interior lines of communication basically. Plus the Communists were relatively strong in the South before 1954 and plenty of people preferred them to Diem and later Thieu.
@@tachikaze222 That is true. Although in a high-intensity war this would be less of a problem. Not the majority by a long shot but yeah. The American Counter-Insurgency programme was stupid as it did not even protect the people which is the whole point.
Remember that the Korean war (“police action”?) was an intervention approved by the UN Security Council.
And also remember that the permanent Security Council member with veto power named “China” at that time was Taiwan (“Republic Of China”), not the “People’s Republic Of China”.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Yes and? Are you salty that the US didn't let the North Koreans and Soviets do an imperialism to the South? We know what would've happened if they hadn't, and it doesn't look pretty
Great video as usual, but just wanted to note that you accidentally mixed up Cambodia and Laos on the map ^^
Noticed that as well.
@@maartenwitpaard1737 Me three.
Me four
I did not, so minus one
Me five
Please do the Mexico-Guatemala conflict of 1958 next! This would be interesting to see.
Guatemala was ready to go at war with Mexico, with the support of El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua to stoke resentment against Mexico…
While Mexico had the support of the United States, Cuba, China, and the Soviet Union.
yeah that's probably why it didn't happen
what nigerian civil war bullshit is this?
@Elon Tusk And Cuba too.
Why does this broken autobalancing keep putting the strongest players together, Guatemala just got a noob team
Central America should be one country. Now it's mostly a bunch of failed states. United, it would have the population of Colombia or South Korea...
That First Contact reference killed me, my dude. Great vid!
The "this far, not further" bit is gold! Well done as always, love this channel !!
Star Trek First Contact is among my favourite movies (and my fav Trek movie) and still I almost missed it. It registered like three seconds after the scene was over xD
I miss Ten Minute History
@@Unknowngfyjoh Same
Ho chi minh traveled for 30 years and he lived in america for a time, he fought for vnmese independence everywhere. He got into communism not as an ideology at first but as a way of saving his nation. Even after that, america and vietnam still tried to work together, Ho chi minh wanted allies support and america did so for a time ( against japan). America was even present when hcm made the declaration of independence, the first line of which literally contained a line from the US' DECLARATION as a basis. Ultimately they chose the French and decided to back them in their return to Vietnam bcz communism and stuff.
This is BS propaganda. Ho Chi Minh used the US Declaration of Independence to pander to America for support, as Mao had done during WW2 and the Chinese Civil War. Does anyone think America allying with Mao would have made him less of a Communist mass murdering maniac? It was just insincere political theatre, they wanted weapons and recognition so they said what they thought America wanted to hear.
Ho Chi Minh was every bit a Communist for the sake of Communism. After North Vietnam had achieved functional independence, the combined Vietnamese Independence groups formed a Coalition government and the Communists quickly rigged it against the non-Communist Vietnamese Nationalist groups like the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang. When things started getting heated between the Nationalist groups and the Communists, the Communists turned to the French and signed a treaty creating a Communist North Vietnam within the French Union and collaborated with the French Army to encircle and massacre all the other Vietnamese Nationalist forces in North Vietnam. Nationalist groups that had fought for Vietnam's Independence from France and Japan, some of them longer than the Communists. Ho Chi Minh was a dishonorable rat who betrayed his fellow revolutionaries so he could seize total power for the Communists.
Exactly, had the USA strong -armed those gallic morons in giving indipendence to their East Asian colonies,perhaps they would've spared a lot of problems, either to them AND the rest of the western world, don't forget that a lot of terrorism was inspired by the (fake) mithology of the VCs that could topple a regular army (just ask how well ended for Guevara).
@Krauses yeah sure..not like the US was pressured by the French to save their colonies. also, remind me why we should listen to you if your banner is the symbol of a nation no longer in existence and in of itself is hypocritical of its ideals.
Trung, Ho was Communist, France wasn't.
@@YonIon996 Sidnom, thank you for your observation. That has nothing to do wilth the conversation I was having with Trung. Trung had many false points, like he has the entire chronology of France's and America's involvement in Vietnam wrong.
I was hoping to see someone running through a field of daisies…
…But it didn’t happen. 😞
Next time.
You wanted gallivanting through a field of flowers, but fun fact: no.
@@pokehybridtrainer One can hope.
Soon
After dropping all that Agent Orange, there were no daisies to skip through.
History matters is my all time favorite channel for learning history!!!
Here are some suggestions:
1. How did the World react to the discovery of Oceania?
2. Why isn’t Dutch an official language in the Congo Kinshasa despite it being a Belgian colony?
3. How was life like in Soviet Central Asia?
4. Why does Lebanon exist?
5. Why didn’t the USA 🇺🇸 got its protectorate over Armenia?
For nr.5 congress didn't approve it
Lebanon is just Phoenicia.
@@gamingwitmc7041 no we're not :)
Also for nr.2 the belgians tried to enforce dutch but it never caught on
@@marcnassif2822 you sure? I seen a lot of dna test of y’all descending from Phoenicians
I almost had a heart attack at 0:08 when you list "Cambodia and Laos" but highlight them on the map in the opposite order.
The one thing I've never understood is why people believe Laos and Cambodia were innocent in the Vietnam-American War. They were not. They actively participated.
These videos are great, but too short. I'm just left wanting more more MOAR!!1
Vietnamese here. Your videos are always entertaining, well researched, and fun to watch. I've learned a lot from you.
I've always wondered what "Mao" meant in Estonian. Thank you!
Damn this is a question I probably should have asked myself as an American college student when I was getting my history degree. Thanks for the video!
I assume you studied a different period of history than the 20th Century? Or are history degrees kind of general to all points in history?
Haha right, same. The nooks and crannies of history are endless, even the obvious ones
@@eddiewhistler7472 in undergrad you don't really focus on one topic but rather a more general history by picking various classes from different regions and time periods but in grad school you do specialize in one topic. at least thats how it worked at my uni
That corner of the world is no place for a mechanized army. Jungle, hills upon hills, torrential monsoon rains. The US could barely go toe-to-toe with PAVN at the DMZ. Escalation into the north would just make a bigger mess.
@@tachikaze222 The US annihilated the PAVN and NLF every time it fought them, and evidently that outright isn’t the case given the PAVN’s offensives in 73 and 75 involving a deeply mechanized force.
ROE is what did the US in, not their order of battle. It was simply simultaneously too lax and too restrictive.
Valeu!
Another amazing video
0:08 you got those countries confused. The blue one is Laos and the white one is Cambodia.
he got the order wrong
As a South East Asian, you are god damn right
0:08 FYI Cambodia is the country in the South (with access to the ocean) and Lao is the landlocked country in the North.
Love the video!
I recall that an American politician (don’t remember which one) sat in on a meeting discussing Vietnam strategy and made the observation that the north Vietnamese birth rate (and hence the rate that boys turned 18 and could fight) was much higher than the rate they were being killed in south Vietnam. In other words, the south Vietnamese and the US could never win if it was just a matter of shooting people. That politician was not invited back.
That reminds me of the “kill ratio” -- just one of many phrases that were used in discussing the Vietnam War. Also, after it had been revealed that some Government spokesman made a claim that was debunked: “that statement is now inoperative”.
no war can be won by just shooting people, thats called a genocide
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Given this history, I think that western claims about Russian combat losses in Ukraine should be greeted with a great degree of skepticism.
@@dpeasehead Ukraine may well turn out to be Russia’s Vietnam.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104commies colonists (North Vietnamese) are controlled South Vietnam over 48 years now. They are closed to Russia, China and India than other western countries. How about the massacres, crimes against humanity during the Vietnam War created by Northern Vietnamese to South Vietnam almost going silent in Western media. Very very disappointed.
“It bombed the north, a lot” for scale of how lot it was, more than double the amount of bombs were dropped on indochina between 1965-75 than the entirety of world war 2
@Mauro Rondelli Laos is the most bombed country per capita.
false comparison 10 years Vietnam vs just 6 years(US 4\3.5) WWII.
@@armoredinf except this is accounting for ALL bombs dropped by ALL countries during WWII.
North and South Vietnam were not granted independence as separate countries. To simplify, it was a temporary situation, and the same international treaty that stipulated it mandated a later referendum on unification. But shortly afterwards the USA refused to fulfill the treaty and facilitate any referendum, expecting to lose it and that a unified Vietnam would become Communist; so the USA unilaterally recognized South Vietnam as an independent state.
I suppose the US military was hoping the communists would give up once they faced enough causalities, but clearly that didn't happen. Ho Chi Minh was pretty clear from the beginning that the Vietnamese would suffer a lot of causalities, a lot more than their enemies, but eventually they would win in the end, and that is exactly what happened.
There is definitely something to said about setting the correct level of expectations ahead of time. You remind me of Admiral Stockdale’s recollections as a POW for seven years. “The men who thought they would be released by Christmas didn’t make it.”
It's worth mentioning as well that there were many in the government who were not optimistic about the US achieving a conventional "victory" in Vietnam, even in the early years of the war.
USA authorities were a lot smarter back then and rooted in the real world compared to now, even if they still did a lot of stupid sh!t like getting meddling in Vietnam.
I find that fact amazing given the narrative I was fed.
Our government had no intention to win this war
There are tapes of LBJ basically admitting that Vietnam was a lost cause, and that he only stationed troops to avoid a political backlash about “losing” South Vietnam.
"Victory" in SE Asia was South Vietnam pushing NVA & Viet Cong out, having a free country. No one wanted a war or 1000s of young men dead. But Uncle Ho aka Ho Chi Minh pushed to bring the Viet Nams together. With secret, covert USSR-GRU help.
2:00, I got that Star Trek reference. Got a good chuckle out of it.
For me, as an American who was alive during those times, it’s strange to hear nothing about the coup against Diem, the Gulf of Tonkin, or the Pentagon Papers. It’s also kind of strange to hear the American motivations and responses summarized so neatly when our country was coming apart at the seams over this issue (something apparently unknown to those bewailing our current “divisions” as if they are something new).
Wow learned so much from a war I look so much into! Thanks a lot!
dude i love watching your vids before i sleep/to help me sleep!
I had always asked myself this question. Thank you for bringing answers to questions I had. These things are sometimes forgotten in the narrative and considered like obvious.
Keep up the great work
I think a more accurate drawing would be to have Le Duan represent North Vietnam after 1968 rather than Ho Chi Minh since he died at that point and the VCP camp slowly went anti-China at that point
1:34
I’m pretty sure I have NEVER corrected History Matters before, but I don’t entirely agree with this argument because the People’s Republic of China 🇨🇳 switched their support to the Khmer Rouge 🇰🇭, rather than North Vietnam 🇻🇳, while the Soviet Union 🇷🇺 stayed allied with North Vietnam 🇻🇳. The Khmer Rouge and North Vietnam were both communistic, but they hated each other (though most of the hate came from the highly nationalistic, racist and genocidal Khmer Rouge)
Thanks for the video. You missed the crucial part of the background: after ww2 Ho Chi Min and his government were the USA ally, but because France wanted its colonies back and France was more important ally the USA had to stay aside while France tried to conquer Vietnam back. That made Ho Chi Min an enemy and pushed hin back to communism and USSR.
@lianakannabisovna1603: The US "stayed aside" by eventually paying about 75% of the costs and supplying most of the arms and support equipment that France needed to fight on the other side of the world-for years.
Estonia mentioned, literally the best day of my life
1:51 I want to know more about that fella "Domino Theory" ... nice if you can make a bio video of him 😊
almost every historian mistakenly believe that viet nam were divided , actually it had never been divided by any agreements. the 1954 Geneva conference simply just allowed France and its colonial government to have a temporary military occupation zone before they agreed to withdraw and give independent to a unified Vietnam, signed between Paris government and Vietnamese people government. in other words it is completely different from Germany and Japan , who never signed any agreement to divide their countries , but signed between communist bloc and the western victors . Korea were japanese territories , so neither Koreans nor Japanese were allowed any negotiation at their country 's fate.
Great video as always !
my grandpa was an officer during that war and he really said part of the reason we preformed so poorly was that we simply couldn’t launch offensive invasions. The govt. set up our troops up for failure
The other issue was the Viet Cong running on the Ho Chi Minh trail. We couldn't attack them in Laos and Cambodia but did secretly. Definitely a defensive war.
The military bigshots say how to win the war, the civilian government determined whether it is worth it. If the level of the war was known ahead of time, we would have not gone in.
The US mistake was supporting a extremely corrupt and unpopular government in Saigon that refused ammunation, food and fuel to the ARVN and that embezzeled much of the money comming from US financial aid to South Vietnam.
Exactly ! That is the truth.
@@Housemusicguy-u5mThe operation Lam Son 719 in 1971 done attacked VC/NVA bases in Laos territory
Why haven't you uploaded for 2 weeks?
Another factor: the sheer cost. The Johnson administration had been trying to fight the Vietnam war on a peacetime budget, and also keeping American forces in Western Europe prepared for the USSR running the Fulda Gap, and ALSO cranking up spending on the Great Society welfare programs.
This didn't work.
When the Tet Offensive launched NATO forces in Europe thought it was a feint to distract from the Soviets invading, because by 1968 US European Command was being held together by duct tape and zip ties, so much had been diverted to Vietnam.
Invading the North would have meant doubling the defense budget, ending student deferments in the draft, even nationalizing steel and munition productions. It would have been a Korean War size conflict at the five year mark, and there was no feasible way Congress would have approved of any of it.
They seriously thought the entire communist world was that co-ordinated?
@@dfv2060 Utter doofuses they were.
They should have protected their ally properly. If you want cannon-fodder, the Koreans will gladly massacre Communists or so I am told.
@@dfv2060 Better be safe than sorry.
@davidstruck8109: Everyone talks about the costs of the Great Society programs. What did 100 years of jim crow cost America?
Nice “First Contact” reference!
I'm thankful this war wasn't escalated any further myself. Thank you for another comical video.
God be with you out there everybody. ✝️
0:06
Laos is the northern country to the west of Vietnam.
Cambodia is the southern country to the west of Vietnam.
Love, a Lao fan of History Matters.
I love your channel keep up the great stuff
Can you do a video about the German mediatization that occurred between 1802-1814? Like which states ate smaller states and which got eaten etc?
That would be an hour long video lol
@@luisfilipe2023
This bloke did a 10 minute long video covering the entire fall of the western Roman Empire from 395-476
He can handle it…..
When people argue over wether the US lost the Vietnam war or not there is a simple answer. Military it succeeded in its goals of driving the north to a stand still and forcing them into a peace agreement. Politically tho, the US lost as is simply left the South hoping the north wouldn’t invade later and pulled out of the “bullet for bullet” deal with the south. Military victory, political loss. Tho it is interesting how Vietnam has kind of turned into a Tito of Asia in the modern world. Siding with the US in regional affairs but not domestic.
The US acomplished none of the goals it had set out from the begining. You might win tactical victories but these do not imply strategic victories.
Wow! I knew almost none of this. But it all makes sense. Thanks for the insights!!
Turns out trying to fight a purely defensive war with a population dedicated to fighting you in horrible terrain really isn’t a winnable situation
You got Cambodia and Lao mixed up on your map at the beginning.
I love how ypu answer the questions I never thought to ask.
You know it’s a good day when History Matters and iSorrowProductions upload.
Glad to see a fellow fan of both.
They didn't invade North Vietnam as James bissanete had property rights in the north.
…
The USA took one look at the jungle Mosquito 🦟 and said NO THANK WE PASS HAHAHAHA 🤣 LMAO...
Basically, it would have been Korean War 2: Indochina Boogaloo
But why was Vietnam initially split up into North & South? @ 0:33
It was part of the peace agreement signed between France and its Vietnam colony.
China: *sends soldiers to Vietnam*
American soldiers: *ah shit here we go again*
0:41 why didn’t you mention the referendum between north and south Vietnam that would of unified them democratically under either the communists or the capitalists but was cancelled by the us
Undemocratic referendum, we need to intervene with our democratic bombs and tanks
So, now I want a video about how the intra-Vietnam war went.
Loved the Picard Star Trek: First Contact reference!!!!!
1974-
USA: We're going to leave now, please keep it together
South Vietnam: Sure
2010-
USA: We're going to leave now, please keep it together
Iraq: Sure
2021-
USA: We're going to leave now, please keep it together
Afghanistan: Sure
One out of three I guess.
@@johnnotrealname8168 More than 3 or 4. The US footprint in Asia has been a mess from the beginning of time. Japan will always hate us for the atom bomb.
As a Vietnamese, Happy to see more content related to our history.
Even if it tries to be objective? Unlike the "American War" nonsense that has always been spread by the Vietnamese regime.
@@martinusv7433I have. Does it change my opinion ? No.
Ho Chi Minh was a grifter.
@@khanhgiapham-mi4hgProjection lol
So the US lost the Vietnam War. The question is, how do the Vietnamese free themselves from the Communist dictatorship they are under now?
Cambodia: *highlights Laos*
And
Laos: *highlights Cambodia*
Well, if you look into how the US basically handicapped itself the entire Vietnam War, you'll soon realize they basically did everything in their power to shoot themselves in the foot, while wasting everyone's time (and many of their own lives).
People compare Vietnam to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan years later, but at least the Soviets tried to commit to actually winning the thing.
Your Rambo school of thought is just rightwing B.S. Westmoreland tried to fight the wrong war and ran through his budget of 50,000 US KIA too quickly. PAVN was one tough cookie and defeating the communists probably wasn't in the cards no matter what we tried, short of outright genocide.
Then congressmen Kennedy (yes that Kennedy) wanted to work with Ho Chi Minh, but the government said no because they did not want to offend their WWII ally the French. By the time of the American involvement in Vietnam, Minh had already gotten help from the Soviets (both Russia and China) plus Minh was to old and became more of a figurehead for the VC which was now under the control of many of his younger more radicalized generals
US State Dept - "The line must be drawn HEAH!"
“…And all it took was 15 years and millions of people.”
3:06 Annnnd history would repeat itself nearly 50 years later. Well done America.
Your Ten Minute History series' are one of the best RUclips series of all time. Why'd you stop those?
Great video as always. Always thought it was because China was a little too close for comfort, and I guess I was right. :)
US: Yeah, why not invade North Vietnam!
China: Hey bro do you remember me? Remember the Korean War?
US: I take it back.
China: please ignore that i am in no shape to fight a war (quietly hiding the Cultural Revolution)
Love your videos im actually addict to em now, but please pass the drawings slower!!! They are so funny to watch because of the most tiny details you add on em.
Besides worrying about the possibility of China intervening and crossing the Sino-Vietnamese border, the United States would have been stuck fighting a larger insurgency in both North and South Vietnam.
I think the USA also considered a land invasion of north Vietnam very costly and difficult, and may well have decided they didn't have the manpower/resources to succeed
3:05 "Stating that they totally wouldn't annex the south" im dead 😭
We have historic relations with North Vietnam/Vietnam since 1950! Minh visited our country in 1957, and I got the opportunity to visit them back in 2019! Although there was a hiccup when we supported the Khmer Rouge, we've been friends since then. You failed to mention that the division between North and South after the Geneva Conference was supposed to be TEMPORARY, and the two parts of Vietnam was supposed to be united by an election. The south with US backing realized that there is no way they could win against Ho Chi Minh and so they oppressed anyone open minded towards an election. Furthermore, they enacted a brutal killing system where you could be killed just on the suspicion or accusation of being a communist.
This repression caused outrage in the south, but since communist leaders were still pursuing a diplomatic solution to get an election, the strategy for southerners was to avoid confrontation with the Sai Gon government. The north after realizing that the country could end up like Korea or Germany, decided to approve armed uprising to overthrow the puppet government in the south, which results in the Uprising movement that gave birth to the Liberation Front (the half red half blue flag).
Communists don't deserve to have a place in an election. Totally right for south Vietnam to back off
Hilarious but Ho Chi Minh was asking for a democratic country first 😂 it’s rich coming from someone that denied him of such opportunities then proceed funding the French colonists to come back to Vietnam. What a massive hypocrite. Rules for thee but not rule for me. 😂
Kim, your laughingly twisted view of history must have been fun to dream up.
Here you are, my friend. First time saw a comment that appreciated the truth of Vietnam War. Haha. For anyone told that this is Vietnam South - North war. It's fucking not. It's 100% Vietnam - America war !
USA: Alright bros get ready to invade North Vietnam.
China: I'm going to end your career if you do.
USA: Flash back to the Korean War in the 50s.
Also USA: OK I changed my mind we will not attack North Vietnam.
? Last I checked South Korea is independent. And the Chinese were shredded losing 200,000 in less than three years. Terrible cost of life
+@@khabbad :
Because? USA lost the war when China entered the war on North Korea's side. China has a large population and was also willing to take heavy loses to win and achieved their goals. USA was forced to change their goals and objectives after getting trash by China entranceto the war. When China entered the war and the Communist took South Korea's capital the 2nd time and more years of fighting. Instead of a unified Korea that USA was dreaming of it was forced to accept a divided Korea, and just made sure South still remains a US Allie. Meanwhile China's goals was to keep North Korea as a buffer zone and free nation not under US influence. Also? 200,000 was nothing to China since they pretty much won the war and achieved their objectives.
@@Clee-os6pv Did you just say China won the Korean War? Cuckoo
+@@khabbad :
Yes, because China achieved their goals and objectives.
@@khabbad Considering China accomplished their mission and objectives both China and North Korea won the war. North Korea would have never won without China's help and manpower against overwhelming numbers against USA and UN forces aiding South Korea.
I miss the longer 10+ minute videos you used to make
Short answer : *They couldn't*
You're insane if you think they couldn't. They had no interest in a knock down drag out fight with the Chinese....but if they did and prepared accordingly you can bet they absolutely could and would have.
@@tremedar Except that China was already nuclear, so a fight with the Chinese very well might have meant "elimination of global civilization as we understand it."
King of the ash heap, baybeeeeeeeeeee
More like could, but too risky.
@@wppb50 Except not? China didn't have ICBMs, all they could do was maybe, drop bombs on advancing US troops. Assuming their bombers didn't get shot down first.
@@tremedar funny how saying the US couldn't do something gets peoples' ire all up.Pretty childlike view of the world, really.
Harder question: given that all that was known, why did the US go to Vietnam in the first place??
Because the US-allied government in South Vietnam asked them to - the non-communist government was under a constant threat of being overthrown by North Vietnam-supported communist guerrillia (known as Viet Cong). And once the Americans got there, there wasn't any good way for them to withdraw again, without loosing face.
@@alls8990 If you knew a bit about Vietnam, you’d know that there isn’t much oil and resources for the US to exploit there (except rice) and most natural resources are located in the north anyway. The military engagement was purely politically motivated.
But it was a large mistake. In almost 20 years, they gained nothing but millions of causalities and billions of taxpayer dollars down the drain. And yes, there were indeed war crimes.
And the end to the whole thing: all of Vietnam became a communist state anyway. It was all for nothing.
@@mutfol ah yes, the US were there to supported the South Vietnamese government established by the French you mean 😂
Gulf of Tonkin incident!
They were only providing support at first. But? Everything changed when US warships suffer some damages known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Love the "First Contact" reference!
Imagine the horrific death toll of American forces trying to push through North Vietnam, there's no way that would've been politically viable
0:09 You got the 2 of them confused
Thank you for video sir
Wow, apparently Mao means "Snakes" in Estonian! The more you know!