The informational and psychological factor decided the outcome of the Vietnam WarThe belligerents have been trying to influence the psychological state of their own troops and the population, as well as the psychological state of the enemy's army and population, since wars have existed.
But it was in the twentieth century that the importance of the information and psychological component of war began to grow rapidly - in connection with the development of the mass print press first, then radio, then television and, finally, the Internet. Moreover, the effect of television turned out to be the strongest, which was manifested during the Vietnam War ("The echo of the Vietnam War is heard in Ukraine ", "HBO" from 17.02.23).
COMMUNISTS, GO AHEAD!However, the political leader of the Vietnamese Communists Ho Chi Minh and the military leader Vo Nguyen Ziap in the 1930s – 1940s did not even dream of any television: they had huge problems with the press and radio.
However, this did not prevent them from launching a very successful communist agitation in the north of Vietnam, at that moment occupied by the French, then by the Japanese, then by the French again.
For the first time in its history, the people of Vietnam received a simple, understandable and unifying ideology. Under the banner of this ideology, Ho and Wo literally created a very combat-ready regular army out of the void, which, combining the methods of guerrilla and classical warfare, inflicted a crushing defeat on the French colonialists at Dien Bien Phu (" Indochina catastrophe ", "HBO" from 05/24/19). This greatly inspired ordinary Vietnamese and greatly increased the number of supporters of the new ideology – and not only in the north, but also in the south of the country.
According to the results of the 1954 Geneva Conference, Vietnam was officially divided into North and South. At the same time, the Communist formations that had already appeared in the south were being withdrawn to the north.
Free elections were to be held in both Vietnam in 1956. But the president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to hold these elections, after which the Communists in the north decided that they were now free from any obligations. And they resumed military and information-ideological penetration into the south ("The myth of the invincibility of the partisans has long been time to reconsider ", "HBO" from 10.03.23).
This penetration was successful in both aspects. Moreover, the causal relationship was obvious: successes in the information and ideological sphere brought the Communists success on the battlefield.
The totalitarianism of the communist ideology did not bother the Vietnamese, if only because they had never lived under democracy in their history. After all, South Vietnam, having become independent, immediately turned into a dictatorship – absolutely without ideas, but extremely corrupt. Moreover, corruption was no less in the South Vietnamese army than in society as a whole. Officers and generals were promoted to top positions for bribes and on the basis of loyalty to political authorities. The soldiers starved and deserted en masse, because they had nothing to fight for.
In addition, the South Vietnamese army simply did not have combat experience, and the Communists had a wonderful experience of the war with the French. Therefore, they successfully took control of the south until the Americans came.
PLAYING ON SOMEONE ELSE'S FIELDThe Vietnamese Communists also fought well against the world's strongest military machine.
They achieved (with the help of the Soviet Union, of course) a strategic stalemate both in the high-tech air war (" Phantoms" against "MiGs ", "HBO" from 03/24.23) and in the classic war on land ("Classic war in the Vietnamese interpretation", "HBO" from 04/07.23).
But a stalemate is when neither one nor the other can win. The Communists did not agree to a draw. And they began to play on a seemingly foreign field – in the information space of the United States itself (in which, of course, the USSR also helped them). At the same time, they hit the weakest point of the enemy, showing that the Saigon regime is not a wonderful pro–Western democracy, but a cruel corrupt dictatorship. Which, in general, was the pure truth.
As a result, the American society faced the question: for whom and for what does it pay so many victims and incur such huge material costs? The leadership of the United States could not find any intelligible answer to this question. Moreover, it itself was very much split on the issue of the continuation of the Vietnam war in general, or at least on the issue of the scale of American involvement in it.
This situation for Americans was significantly aggravated by the fact that the Vietnam War was the first war that was shown on television almost live. The spectacle of fighting on city streets, footage of the deaths of American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians hit the nerves of American citizens very hard. Moreover, journalists warmed up this effect in every possible way due to the peculiarities of their profession and their worldview.
A particularly important role was played by the "New Year's offensive" of the Communists in 1968, which they completely lost militarily, but completely won in the media. Moreover, it is no longer the Vietnamese communist propagandists, but the American democratic journalists themselves who played very effectively against their own army.
A quarter of a century later, Russians experienced the same thing during the first Chechen war ("A war lost on their own ", "HBO" from 13.12.19). At that time, the West was not too actively seeking to undermine Russia from within, and the Islamic countries that supported the Chechen separatists had very limited influence in the Russian information space. But Russian journalists "from the heart" smashed their own army. Like their American colleagues a quarter of a century earlier – due to the peculiarities of their profession and their worldview. And within the political leadership of the country, there was also a strong split. We see echoes of all this now, during the Ukrainian campaign.
Accordingly, anti-war sentiments began to grow rapidly in American society, which coincided with the largest racial unrest in the country's history as part of the struggle of the Black population for equality. Rallies against the war gathered hundreds of thousands of people.
Unrest among students was especially strong: it came to the introduction of National Guard units into campuses and to shooting at protesters with a considerable number of dead and wounded. In other words, the distant war in Southeast Asia brought the United States itself to the brink of civil war.
It should be noted that one of the most important motives of the anti-war speeches of American youth was the unwillingness to die in the Vietnamese jungle: after all, the US Armed Forces at that time were recruited by conscription. In this regard, the flight of young people from the USA to Canada and Europe took on a massive character. In Europe, its own left wave was rising, which was personified by the performances of Sorbonne students under the slogans "It is forbidden to forbid", "Be realistic – demand the impossible". As a result, the American and European young leftists began not just to exchange experiences, but to form a political agenda.
In the late 1970s, Vladimir Vysotsky, who personally saw this process, will write about it:
"The new Left – the brave boys/ With red flags of a violent horde, / What are you so attracted by sickles and hammers?/ Maybe you are smoked and pricked?!"
AGONYDue to the conscription nature of the American armed forces, anti-war sentiments from the United States "moved" directly to Vietnam.
As a result, the American army quickly began to decompose from within.
At a rapid pace, such previously unseen phenomena began to grow, such as conscious evasion from performing a combat mission (soldiers only imitated the search for the enemy) and drug addiction (which from a certain point became almost rampant). Cases of direct disobedience to the orders of commanders and even the murder of their sergeants and officers by soldiers have become more frequent. At the beginning of the war, all this was completely unthinkable.
Soldiers returning from the war talked about what was happening in Vietnam, and anti-war sentiment in society became even stronger. The process of moral decay has assumed a self-sustaining character. The American command failed to reverse this situation, moreover, it steadily worsened. The continuation of the war was becoming impossible.
In Hanoi, everyone saw and understood this. Therefore, while continuing to supply American society as a whole with completely truthful information about the "true face" of the South Vietnamese authorities, at the Paris peace talks in 1972, the Communists were already, in fact, dictating their terms to the US delegation.
And they got their way. Purely formally, the United States was leaving, maintaining its obligations to support South Vietnam. In fact, it was clear to everyone that the Americans would not return under any circumstances. Moreover, after the withdrawal of troops, Washington began to curtail even the supply of weapons to Saigon. Not only society, but also the US authorities sought to push Vietnam away from themselves as far as possible and forget about it as soon as possible.
At the final stage of the war, the psychological factor became absolutely decisive. The Communists managed to successfully restore the morale of their own army, which had been shaken due to huge losses during the Easter Offensive of 1972, showing that victory was already near. The South Vietnamese population was not too imbued with communist ideas, to a much greater extent they were afraid of communists. But the citizens of South Vietnam also hated their own power and were not going to die for it. They just wanted the war to finally end somehow.
The South Vietnamese army suffered from increasing desertion and "habitual" corruption. Previously, it was based solely on American assistance, physical and moral. Without the Americans, the South Vietnamese servicemen, from soldier to general, did not see any victorious prospects for themselves and simply waited for the end in a doomed way (although in terms of quantity and quality of military equipment, the South Vietnamese troops were in no way inferior to the North Vietnamese). And the political authorities in Saigon hoped to the last that the Americans would still save it, while thinking only about their own survival - not so much political as physical.
Therefore, it is quite natural that the local offensive of the DRV army on one of the sectors of the front, which did not pursue decisive goals, caused panic in Saigon, which led to the adoption of completely inadequate decisions. After that, the army and the government of South Vietnam simply collapsed, stunning even the Communists themselves with the speed of the fall.
Thus, although the United States did not win on the battlefield, it did not lose either. But they lost to their own media and their own public opinion. And South Vietnam just died of fear. So the informational and psychological component uniquely determined the outcome of the war as a whole.
Alexander KhramchikhinAlexander Anatolyevich Khramchikhin is an independent military expert.