re: #16 Dark_Falcon

No, Ho was always Communist. And he actually started out fighting the Japanese during WWII, truth to tell.

We wouldn’t have needed extermination, though. Things like earlier mining of Haiphong Harbor coupled with a amphibious invasion of the North a short ways North of the DMZ would likely have forced the North to back off for a time, thus giving South Vietnam time to blunt the popular grievances that fed the growth of the VC. It might not have worked ultimately, but such a strategy would have had a good chance and it would have actually cost far fewer lives on all sides in the long run.

Thanks for the corrections about Ho, although the part about Ho not being a puppet is still true. Ho had serious nationalism credibility by the time he had fought the Japanese and French, and dealt with Chinese encroachment. There weren’t really any South Vietnamese leaders of comparable significance —- in fact the usual corruption and abuses associated with colonial rule and puppet regimes were always a problem in the South.