Thursday, February 28, 2019

Why couldn’t the Armed Forces of the old Republic of Vietnam ...

... (RVN) face the Viet Cong’s Armed Forces after the Paris Peace Accord in January 1973 ?

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This is the reason, the strangling truth for the fate of the RVN military and South Vietnam. It’s a life experience from my cousin-uncle, who was a lieutenant in an Artillery battalion of S. Vietnam Military Corps III, near Saigon, until Black April 1975.
He told me : His artillery unit was one of the 4 artillery battalions, fighting and protecting Saigon and the vicinity. After the Paris Accord in January 1973, each of the 4 battalions got order from the Commander of the Artillery force of Corps III to limit their fires of support to 2-3 rounds a day— a whole day— for 5 or 6 of the howitzers in each battalion, totaling approximately 40 to 60 rounds ( shells) a day for the whole corps III, due to the cutting of military aid from the US. At the same time, the Soviet Union and China’ s aids to North Vietnam troops kept increasing, sometimes, every month. Everyday they could shell 2000 to 2500 rounds in 1 hour, literally pouring down projectiles like rain drops on S. Vietnam troops and fields . He said, as an experienced officer of the artillery unit he belonged : It was rare for two projectiles ( shells) to fall into the same spot ( hole) , but occasionally he did see the shells from the North artillery doing that— and more rare, once in long while: 3 in the same hole— proving how many of them were fired.
The same aid of guns, tanks, ammunition from the U.S. to the armed forces was cut down to that similar level while the Soviet and Chinese aids were on the rise to invade S. Vietnam. How could S. Vietnam fight back and stand in such a situation ? The RVN armed forces did not actually need US soldiers to help them fight North Vietnam military, but facing the North’s military invasion with such aids from the Soviet Union and China, they, of course, needed military aid from the U.S. to survive and fight.
Note: During the Vietnam war (1955-1975), Vietnamese communists ( Viet cong) and their allies, especially Hanoi, always boasted, bragged about their war of liberation and for independence from American imperialism without assistance from foreign military aid. They propagandized, mouthed loudly and repeatedly, over and over, again and again as such in international and domestic conferences, meetings, on forums everywhere; their delegates lied and lied. Far from that, the truth is Soviet and Chinese aids to Hanoi, especially from (1965-1975) were very substantial. Hanoi hid these aids and kept them as “national secret” for political warfare and propaganda gain: tanks, guns, armored vehicles, jet planes, ammunition and even surface-to-air systems (SA-2 ) to shoot down U.S. war planes, as well as military advisers and combatants. The number of tanks provided for Northern military was about the same as the US number, but the amount of artillery cannons and howitzers was about 3.5 times larger; the number of guns twice. You can look up the information online to verify for yourself, now that information about the war has been declassified more and more.

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