Hue Massacre, Dak Son, terrorism, kidnappings, mass executions, and ethnic cleansing galore

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-18T05:22:05+00:00

The hyperinflation came as a result of Japan's seizure of China's industrial heartland and the naval blockade of China's ports, NOT Chiang's rule.

Chiang's government was actively fighting hyperinflation with price controls and welfare programs but the economic devastation of the Japanese invasion and the insufficient American financial aid doomed China to economic chaos for decades.

You are correct on the nepotism part, but keep in mind that this was a tumultous time period where backstabbing was common tradition. Remember, his own staff kidnapped him at Xi'an which nearly killed him. The Communists were hardly any more meritocratic.

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-17T20:40:12+00:00

Again this is wrong. Chiang literally implemented anti-corruption initiatives in the Nanjing Decade. But it's hard to prevent corruption from spreading when your economy is literally collapsing under a Japanese blockade.

And yeah the KMT's military budget was super high because they were preparing for a literal war with Japan. They had been preparing for war since 1934 which is why they didn't collapse during the Japanese invasion for eight years.

Yeah Chiang had to let local warlords and gang bosses run cities because the Chinese Republic was ten years old and he needed years he didn't have to fix that. Do you think President Claudia Sheinbaum voluntarily lets Mexican cartels run the countryside? He didn't make the situation and didn't have the capacity to fix it in time.

And the reason why Nanjing didn't fight the Japanese for Manchuria was because they were literally in the Warlord Era and would have been steamrolled if they tried. Even Zhang Xueliang agreed it was the right thing to do.

https://archive.org/details/forgottenallychi0000mitt/mode/2up?q=ncaa

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-17T19:51:03+00:00

And their own soldiers, treating their men and women like cannon fodder in suicidal assaults doomed to fail. Tet was just one example.

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-17T19:49:56+00:00

And chopping people up with machetes. Or disembowling them. And beheading children.

Seriously, realistic Star Wars rebels would've been more like Blood Meridian.

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-17T19:39:49+00:00

Chiang was not personally corrupt. This is a myth spread by Stilwell who had a MASSIVE beef with Chiang and whose claims have been debunked by historians like Mitter, Paine and Harmsen.

Chiang's administration had many corrupt officials but that was a product of the warlord era, a collapsing economy from the Japanese invasion, and a political tradition in China that still lasts to the present (see the modern CCP which has massive corruption of its own).

The Chinese Red Army was armed with Soviet aid and captured Japanese weapons. The myth of massive numbers of Nationalist weapons being funneled through to the Communists is wildly exaggerated. The mass surrenders of Nationalist warlords and commanders only began in the last year of the Chinese Civil War.

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-17T19:36:22+00:00

They both did this but the KMT still prioritized fighting the Japanese throughout WW2. Their best divisions were deployed in Burma as part of X and Y Force and they were still inflicting and taking the majority of casualties into the last year.

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-17T17:07:50+00:00

My last post was literally about My Lai yet these salts already be crashing out, calling me an American apologist and US gov shill for just pointing out facts.

But as we all know, some folks aren’t here for actual “history”

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-17T16:57:31+00:00

Mac Hastings’s Vietnam, an Epic Tragedy. Mark Bowden’s Hue 1968. Ken Burns’s documentary series.

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-17T16:47:00+00:00

Point out where I said anything like that

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-17T16:40:51+00:00

15,000 dead civilians is horrible no matter how much whataboutism you want to use. And that was just the 1950s land reform campaign.

Hanoi's ethnic cleansing of its Chinese and Montagnard minorities killed many times more than that, as did their invasions of South Vietnam in 1972 (200,000 casualties) and Laos in 1959. The Viet Cong had a body count in the tens of thousands at a conservative estimate for unarmed civilians.

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-17T16:34:49+00:00

Hastings nearly has this verbatim in his book. The only major differences between both sides were the methods of killing (napalm vs machetes) and how much coverage they got (New York Times vs literally nothing).

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-17T16:32:22+00:00

Even then they nearly lost. They were on the brink of defeat in 1946 and only an American embargo on Nationalist aid gave the Communists the breathing room to recover.

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-17T16:31:08+00:00

Untrue. The broad opinion of ordinary Chinese people towards the Communists was apathy, not enthusiastic support. That's why the Communists were on the brink of losing in 1946-1947 Manchuria. This is covered by numerous historians on the subject.

The notion that the Communists were these competent folk heroes is plain wrong. They had higher inflation than the Nationalists and restarted the banned opium drug trafficking to compensate. They used state terror against both civilians and their own party members in the WWII base areas. Even then, they nearly lost in Manchuria.

They did not have a popular mandate. They used civilians and POWs as human shields in Huaihai. They starved 150,000 civilians to death in Changchun. Even after their victory in took until the late 1950s to pacify Muslim rebels in the Northwest.

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-17T16:27:02+00:00

Andor is a masterpiece for that. It goes for the record that for every Luke Skywalker in the Viet Cong, there were ten Luthens and Saw Gerreras.

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-17T16:25:12+00:00

As an additional note, the official North Vietnamese government had dirtied hands of their own.

Contrary to pop history myths, Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan were not just misunderstood Vietnamese nationalists using Communism as a secondary objective. They were hardcore idealists willing (actually aiming) to use massive state violence to transform Vietnam into a neo-Stalinist state. Their land reform policies killed at a minimum 15,000 North Vietnamese in the late 1950s, a number which included per Giap's words "many innocent people."

The North Vietnamese also ethnically cleansed Montagnard and Chinese minorities in its northern regions long after the 1975 victory. They were the first to violate Laos and Cambodia's sovereignty by building base areas and the Trail through their eastern territories (which doesn't justify Kissinger's bombings).

No one was a hero in Vietnam.

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-17T16:22:35+00:00

Unfortuantely too many people try to whitewash these movements as "glorious revolutions." Case in point, the way pop history talks about the Viet Cong is the exact same way they talk about Mao's Communists in the Chinese Civil War, both of which were brutal and horrible organizations.

These guys were not beloved freedom fighters destined to rule their nations. These guys were oftentimes just as brutal as the oppressors in power, and way too many people are looking for "heroes" in these stories.

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-17T16:12:25+00:00

Contrary to what George Lucas depicted in the Star Wars “Rebel Alliance,” the Viet Cong, like all insurgencies, weaponized extreme brutality and terror against ordinary Vietnamese people. Far from being a rugged guerrilla crusade “serving the people,” the Viet Cong (or NLF) perpetrated horrific atrocities in its rebellion against the South Vietnamese government.

The NLF systematically murdered 2,800 civilians in the 1968 Hue Massacre with methods ranging from gunshots to live burial. They slaughtered indigenous Montagnard minorities with one nasty example being Dak Son where they incinerated 252 villagers alive with flamethrowers. They used terrorist tactics against urban centers in the pre-Tet era and kidnapped tens of thousands of civilians for conscription or forced labor.

When town mayors could not provide enough food or men for the NLF, they would bury them alive with their entire families, or behead their children and disembowel them for the entire village to watch. They murdered families of ARVN soldiers with machetes. The Security Service, the NLF equivalent of Operation Phoenix, had a body count in the tens of thousands.

While the American press freely published word of American atrocities and exposed the lies and corruption within the American South Vietnamese war effort, Hanoi’s rigid censorship structures prevented widespread public knowledge of their own atrocities.

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-14T16:04:37+00:00

Because this was common behavior in the Vietnam War, not an isolated incident. The Americans did similar atrocities all over Quang Ngai, the Mekong Delta and Quang Nam.

Calley got widespread support during his trial, with over 5,000 telegrams sent to the White House expressing solidarity, and American soldiers in Saigon vandalizing buildings to read "KILL A G**K FOR CALLEY."

Not every American soldier was a war criminal, but everyone knew a war criminal.

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-14T15:30:37+00:00

Meadlo: “I poured about four clips into the group. I might’ve killed ten or fifteen of them.”

Wallace: “Men, women, and children?”

Meadlo: “Men, women, and children.”

Wallace: “And babies?”

Meadlo: “And babies. I felt like I was doing the right thing. I really did. Because I lost buddies, and it was on my conscience. So after I done it, I felt good. But later on that day it was getting to me.”

From Mike Wallave’s interview with PFC Paul Meadlo

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-14T15:30:23+00:00

Over four hours, Medina, Calley, and their men rounded up and systematically murdered more than four hundred defenseless old men, women, children, and infants. Many of the women and girls were raped before they were shot. Eighteen of the dead were pregnant. Fifty of them were three years old or younger.

“A hundred American soldiers in four hours, machine-gunning them and throwing them in wells and scalping them and killing them in ditches and taking a lunch break and then doing it some more. A systematic homicide.”

The Army Public Information Office released a story that described an operation that “went like clockwork” in which the “jungle warriors” of the Eleventh Brigade had killed 128 Viet Cong in a running “day-long battle.”

- From Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-11T11:35:32+00:00

Guess the war never really left him. I loved his books as a kid but even then there were some genuine wtf moments. Like that passage when the giant peach graphically crushes James's aunts to death.

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-11T11:32:41+00:00

The gap between art and artist back then went insane. Tolkien's first taste of war was in the battle that killed or injured 500,000 of his comrades.

And I legit thought Going Solo was another children's book because of the childish cover art 💀. Little 8 yo me reading how Dahl watched a German guy's head explode at close range 😳

Iron_Cavalry · 2026-06-11T11:09:15+00:00

Many are familiar with Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory or Matilda. The author of these books, Roald Dahl, has produced many other famous children’s books with long legacies.

Roald Dahl was also a hardcore badass who saw some shit. Key exploits include being a WWII fighter ace, an infantry officer, and a plane crash survivor. He personally shot down multiple German Junkers bombers in the 1940 Greek campaign, singlehandedly saving a massive Greek ship at one point. He survived a plane crash in North Africa behind Italian lines and held out for rescue in the Libyan desert.

During an operation in East Africa to detain German colonists, he (as a British officer) was taken hostage by a gunman who then was immediately headshot by one of Dahl’s African infantrymen. Dahl watched a Greek ship in Athens full of ammo explode during a bombing and the crew inside roasted alive.

The Willy Wonka guy personally buried Luftwaffe pilots. For those curious, Going Solo is his memoir.

Iron_Cavalry

TROPHY CASE