What did Lyndon B. Johnson do to achieve victory in Vietnam?

Answer 1

Any Vietnam Vet will tell you "Nothing". Johnson's objective was never to "Achieve Victory", it was to convince the North Vietnamese to quit fighting.

He increased troop strength from 16,000 to 550,000, got over 50,000 soldiers killed and lost the war anyway.

He instituted Operation Rolling Thunder, which extensively bombed trivial targets while deliberately leaving the right ones alone. It was a strategy called "gradualism" in which threatening destruction would serve as a more influential signal of "American Determination" than destruction itself, it was better to hold important targets "hostage" by bombing trivial ones.

Military airfields, which should have been the firstthings hit, were totally off limits as targets. Same thing with Haiphong Harbor, which received all the Chinese and Russian war supplies. No bombs could fall within 10 miles of Haiphong.

Operation Rolling Thunder was stopped, because the enemy asked us to stop it.

The Battleship USS New Jersey was recalled to Pearl Harbor because the enemy asked us to quit shooting at them with her 16-inch guns.

So the answer is that Lyndon B. Johnson did nothing to achieve victory in Vietnam, except slap the the North Vietnamese around a little, then agree to stop if they'd talk about calling a truce.

Johnson and Robert MacNamara basically excluded the Joint Chiefs of Staff and decided what targets were hit, and how hard, from The Oval Office.

Hitler might have won WW-II if he had simply backed off and let the German Generals fight it. They were brilliant.

But Former Corporal Hitler overruled them at several critical turning points, which is the biggest reason that we don't all speak German today.

The same might be said of LBJ and the war in Vietnam.