8. The US Invasion of North Vietnam
As described by Harry G. Summer in On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, plans were drawn during that conflict for a US invasion of North Vietnam. Airborne landings north and west of Hanoi could help block off the Hanoi-Haiphong region, while an amphibious attack by three divisions struck the port of Haiphong. The Haiphong force would then advance on Hanoi and linkup up with the airborne troops there. With the Hanoi-Haiphong area secured, outside support would be drastically curtailed, as two major railroads from China would be severed, the country’s main seaport would be in American hands, and the lines of communications to the south would be interdicted. Starved of Chinese and Soviet arms, munitions, and supplies, and cut off from a steady infusion of North Vietnamese manpower, planners expected that organized communist armed resistance in South Vietnam would soon collapse.
Chinese Intervention
Deemed too dangerous, the plan would probably provoke China into joining the fray. In the Korean War, the previous decade, American and UN forces pursued the routed North Koreans all the way to the Chinese border, based on the mistaken belief that China would not intervene. Then the Chinese intervened and pushed the UN forces all the way back to South Korea. Chinese direct intervention in Vietnam risked an escalation that could drag in the Soviets, potentially triggering WWIII. Unlike the situation during the Korean War, the US no longer held an overwhelming nuclear superiority. By the second half of the 1960s, the Soviets had thousands of nuclear warheads and the means of delivering them to targets in America. US interests in Vietnam were deemed not worth the risk of such an escalation. The planned invasion of Hanoi-Haiphong was never carried out.
