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How to make an american angry
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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It's a shit take but so is "the French surrender immediately".
The French soldiers had a pretty impressive track record and fought well in WWII. French military planning used outdated strategies, though, and let the Germans encircle them to the point where evacuating the Allied soldiers to England was the last reasonable choice. And the French still managed to hold off the Germans for long enough to evacuate 300,000 men. The rest went quickly because it's hard to fight a war when you just had to evacuate most of your soldiers. Without their equipment.
Likewise, the USA had a decent military track record and well-equipped professional soldiers. But that didn't mean shit when they were (from the NV perspective) the bad guys in an anticolonial war of liberation with broad support from the civilian population. Vietnam was a guerilla war, to which there was no good doctrinal answer back then. And even today those are hard to deal with.
So yeah, "the French surrender when they see the enemy" is on the same level as "the US Army can't stand against the military might of a bunch of rice farmers".
Plus, people don't realize how close Rommel was to complete encirculation when he drove to the channel. He ignored all orders to halt his advance because he couldn't be supplied or reinforced. Fortunately for him, the French and British troops had no clue what was going on and couldn't capitalize on his precarious position. It was a complete failure of French military doctrine.
Yeah. While you could argue that it's no shame be surprised by a madman who keeps advancing with no concern for supply routes, it is a shame to be unprepared for mobile warfare in general. An army with more awareness of the possibilities tanks of the era offered could've countered him. Of course such an army also wouldn't have relied on the Maginot Line.
The French fought valiantly but no amount of valor can offset catastrophically bad leadership.
So the French did a 'strategic retreat' but the Americans did infact lose a guerrilla war to some rice farmers.
Well, the rice farmers were supporting a dedicated military force with the backing of two major countries and a robust covert logistics network. That kinda changes things a little bit.
You aren't doing a very good job of countering the thesis that the 'US lost a war to rice farmers'. Of course they had support, so did the US, and the US lost.
Arms manufacturers won. And they're still winning. No matter how we frame our thoughts.
The army and the foreign support did a lot of heavy lifting there. Discounting them is like saying that the American Civil War was won by a bunch of escaped cotton pickers. Sure, those escaped cotton pickers fought alongside the armed forces of some twenty-ish American states but they participated so we can attribute victory to them.
To bring the logic to the extreme, WWII was singlehandedly won by a French tennis player. Sure, his contribution consisted of finding American soldiers to rescue prisoners from the SS during the Battle of Castle Itter but he fought against the Third Reich and we'll just look past everyone else who did. (If that isn't absurd enough for you, I also could've nominated an SS officer as the war's winner, also from the same battle. It was a very weird battle.)
That is very well put. Good one.
Pretty much the entire US plan on Vietnam was "tactical retreat". Spend a week clearing the VC from this hill and return to base. Then go back out in 6 months and clear the VC from that hill again.