Post by Lang BangPost by Kevin BrooksPost by Jack LinthicumPost by JackFrom 10,000 in 1965, the number of VCs increased to over 100,000 in
1968.
How many were there in '69?
Think of the answer as a harbinger of things to come for aC.
Jack
Cut the article up to just show numbers
http://www.sfbg.com/39/32/x_oped.html
In January 1966 the official U.S. intelligence estimate of the Vietcong
order of battle was that there were 270,000 Vietcong guerrillas in
South Vietnam. At the same time there had been approximately 50,000 to
150,000 Vietcong deserters, as well as 150,000 casualties each year. If
these figures were correct, there were more deserters and casualties
than the total number of enemy troops. Yet the war continued. Who was
still fighting? Something was wrong.
In the Central Intelligence Agency, a young analyst named Sam Adams was
assigned to study the Vietcong full time. After careful examination of
numerous after-action reports and reports of enemy interrogations,
Adams concluded that there were at least 200,000 more Vietcong fighters
than were acknowledged in the U.S. assumptions. If Adams was right, the
enemy force was at least twice as large as the U.S. assumed.
But Adams was virtually ignored. He continued to study the evidence,
and by December 1966 he had concluded that there were 600,000 enemy
soldiers.
There were conferences at which Adams presented his evidence, and at
least one Pentagon analyst agreed with his conclusions. But the CIA and
the military resisted changing the numbers, and so the official U.S.
intelligence position was that our 350,000 soldiers were fighting only
270,000 Vietcong.
Gen. William Westmoreland was the commander of all U.S. forces in
Vietnam. He returned to Washington in November 1967 and said, "The
enemy is running out of men." Two months later, in January 1968, the
Vietcong launched the Tet offensive with simultaneous attacks on
numerous provincial capitals. U.S. troops repelled the attacks, but
more than 10,000 of them died doing it. It was the greatest
intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor.
Yet oddly enough, Tet '68 also signalled the end of the VC as a source of
major fighting forces (thereafter the NVA took over the brunt of the battle)
during the war. Now, we killed a lot of them during that period, but 600K? I
don't think so. Sounds like your source is a bit off in his estimates, and
that the official military estimates were probably closer to the mark. Your
source also has the US KIA figure during Tet all out of whack--during the
period 27 jan 68 thru 1 Jun 68 we lost a total of a bit over 7000 KIA, not
ten thousand.
www.richmond.edu/~ebolt/ history398/US_Casulaties_1968.html
Brooks
I agree. After the Tet offensive, VC forces were almost wiped out and
NVA took over all combat duties. If the number of VCs eliminated in
1968 was less than 100,000, the number of VCs in 1968 would be a bit
over 100,000 so the figures of 600,000 in the article is way too
much. The "assault youths" were unarmed labors who worked in the
battle fields to provide logistics. The ratio of assault youths/combat
VCs may be about 1/1. Because their death numbers were counted in VC
KIAs, the body count numbers provided by U.S. troops were high.
I don't know where you get your numbers, the ones I cited were worked
out by CIA analyst Sam Adams and are the subject of an official CIA
study. (See below) I sort of suspect that you are working from the
"political" numbers that required no more than 300,000 enemy of all
sorts which Gen. Danny Graham had forced through and consistently used
as his top level of opposition. Another political decison made and paid
for.
http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/vietnam/epis3.html
"For instance, when CIA analysts focused on the mostly civilian and
irregular components of the O/B as a legitimate object of their
analysis, they found many problems. As veteran military analyst George
Allen later wrote, MACV's order-of-battle holdings had long been
"misleadingly low. . . . They had done almost no real research on the
guerrilla-militia forces; their estimate remained at the 'guesstimate'
my [DIA] team had come up with in Saigon early in l962."(10)Allen's
boss at CIA, Special Assistant George Carver, told a White House
military aide in September 1966 that MACV's estimate of 100,000 to
120,000 Viet Cong irregulars "may be extremely low."(11) In January
1967, O/NE observed that documentary evidence suggested that the
enemy's irregular strength in South Vietnam had reached 250,000 to
300,000 by the end of 1965, whereas MACV was still sticking to its
100,000 to 120,000 estimate.(12) In May 1967, shortly after McNamara's
tasking of CIA and at a time when MACV was carrying a total enemy O/B
in South Vietnam of 292,000, CIA responded to an inquiry by Under
Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach that the enemy's paramilitary
and political organization in South Vietnam "is still probably far
larger than official US order of battle statistics indicate," and thus
that the total enemy O/B there "is probably in the 500,000 range and
may even be higher."(13)"
and
"But it was Carver's later briefing of the "Wise Men" on 25 March and
of the President himself on 27 March that has been cited as CIA's most
direct and telling contribution to President Johnson's decision to seek
negotiations with Hanoi and retire from office, which he announced on
31 March.(163) On the 25th, Carver, Philip Habib from State, and Gen.
William E. DePuy briefed the "Wise Men." When DePuy, leading off,
asserted that the enemy had suffered a crushing military defeat, he ran
into a buzzsaw. Pointing out the numerical contradiction between MACV's
understated enemy order of battle on the one hand, and its claims of
enemy killed and wounded on the other, in order to demonstrate that
there could be few if any NVA/VC troops left, senior US jurist and
diplomat Arthur Goldberg asked DePuy, "Who, then, are we
fighting?"(164)"
then
"Perhaps the clearest expression of the CIA view came from George
Carver, who remarked that 'intelligence is not written for history;
it's written for an audience'--meaning that it's useless if the
audience for whom it's written refuses to read it. If the White House
absolutely insists on an enemy OB under 300,000, that is what it is
going to get."(173) One of the sharpest such criticisms is voiced by a
former NSC staff officer: "Within a few weeks after Carver became head
of SAVA he had changed from an independent analyst into a courtier . .
. I felt that as long as Carver held the SAVA job, we'd never get the
right picture of the war."(174)
On 21 February a CIA Intelligence Memorandum stated that there was now
sufficient evidence to support a judgment that in his offensive the
enemy had committed numerous irregular forces, of various types.(179)
Two days later, in response to a query from the White House, DCI Helms
reported that available evidence did not support the US military's
claim of an enemy decimated by Tet.(180) On 1 March OCI and OER sharply
questioned MACV's continuing claims that the enemy had suffered a very
high percentage of losses: "the dilemma with respect to the casualties
arises when the reported enemy KIA (38,600) is considered against the
total offensive force estimated [by MACV] to have been involved
(77,000). Taken at face value, this means that approximately one half
of the attacking force was killed in the offensive and its
aftermath."(181) This OCI-OER study concluded that these figures were
exceedingly difficult to accept, given the continuing current high
level of enemy activity throughout the country.(182) An OER officer
shortly thereafter ridiculed MACV's claims, pointing out that if the
1.5 to 1 ratio of wounded to killed in action were applied, the
resultant casualty total exceeded the forces committed.(183)
Helms added that, of those totals, CIA accepted some 90,000 to 140,000
enemy irregulars, whereas MACV and CINCPAC still maintained that such
forces could not and should not be quantified.(185) And there the
matter rested.