Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2022 July 8

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July 8

Why didn't the United States invade North Vietnam during the Vietnam War?

During the war in Vietnam, the United States sent in hundreds of thousand of troops to fight the Viet Cong in South Vietnam. The Americans also conducted massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam. Yet, even as insurgents kept coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail from North Vietnam to reinforce the Viet Cong in South Vietnam, the United States never invaded North Vietnam and took the fight to Hanoi. Why was that the case? --StellarHalo (talk) 02:06, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

Very possibly because of the accurate fear that China would militarily intervene on the North Vietnamese side (just like it previously did in Korea during the Korean War) if the US would have done this: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/china-contributed-substantially-to-vietnam-war-victory-claims-scholar From this link:

"However, the new evidence from China suggests that Mao was seriously prepared to intervene. There was a secret agreement between Hanoi and Beijing that if the Americans launched a ground invasion of North Vietnam (at that time, the United States had restricted itself to a bombing campaign), China would send ground troops into North Vietnam and would not allow the United States to defeat Hanoi. If the Americans bombed North Vietnam, China would match the American military action by taking measures to protect North Vietnamese cities and to rebuild roads and bridges. They would also send anti-aircraft artillery units and army engineers to support North Vietnamese troops and help them deal with the air bombing pressure.

Meanwhile back in China, Mao was making preparations in anticipation of war with the United States. He relocated industries, universities, and research institutions in the coastal areas of eastern China to the mountainous areas of southwest China. He ordered his people to build anti-air shelters throughout China.

Mao himself had staked a lot on the outcome of the Vietnamese War in terms of security as well as ideology. Mao took the American escalation seriously; he interpreted it as a security threat. But he also believed that the success of North Vietnam had ideological significance. At that time Mao was criticizing the Soviet Union for not giving enough support to national liberation movements, for pursuing détente with the United States. Thus he hoped to use the Vietnam War as a way to embarrass Khrushchev -- to show him that China had closely befriended anti-imperialist movements of the Third World.

For all these reasons, Mao was really interested in Vietnam and prepared to intervene. This means that critics of Johnson were wrong. The historical record shows that Johnson was prudent in his approach to the Vietnam War -- that he was right not to adopt more drastic measures. If the suggestions made by these critics had been adopted by Johnson, there would have been a real danger of war between the United States and China."

68.4.99.100 (talk) 03:01, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

@StellarHalo Here's a 1968 Foreign Affairs article about this topic: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/1968-04-01/must-we-invade-north You can find this article's full text for free on LibGen. Though be careful since LibGen isn't necessarily fully "legal". (Still, I haven't heard of any consumer being arrested for downloading stuff off of LibGen, but then again, maybe there are some cases of this I don't know about. I'm not sure, to be honest. Still, LibGen is an extremely useful resource.) 68.4.99.100 (talk) 05:22, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

Ashkenazi Jews Holocaust survival question

Is it accurate to say that around 75% (or around 9 million out of a grand total of 12 million) of the world's Ashkenazi Jewish population outside of Poland survived the Holocaust? I'm focusing only on Ashkenazi Jews here and not on other Jews such as Sephardi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, and Ethiopian Jews, FWIW. 68.4.99.100 (talk) 03:04, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

FWIW, I reached my calculations like this: There were around 16.6 million Jews worldwide in total in 1939. Remove Poland's 3.3-3.5 million Jews, and you get around 13 million. Remove the million of global Jews who were not Ashkenazi back then, and you get 12 million. There were 6 million Jewish Holocaust victims in total, of which 3 million were Polish Jews. So, 3 million Jewish Holocaust victims from outside of Poland. So, 3 million out of 12 million Ashkenazi Jews outside of Poland dying in the Holocaust, or around 25%, which means that 9 million out of 12 million Ashkenazi Jews outside of Poland, or around 75%, survived the Holocaust. 68.4.99.100 (talk) 03:07, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

I would be more careful. Nearly all historical population numbers are approximations, and not all use the same definitions and approaches. If you combine several of them, you are likely to get huge errors (even beyond what would be expected from purely statistical error bars). It's probably better to check the expert literature for estimates (or at least for one consistent set of numbers for your own calculation), and even then you need to take the uncertainties into account. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 07:36, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, that's what I tried to do, to the best of my abilities. 68.4.99.100 (talk) 07:49, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

I would be a bit hesitant to apply the phrase "survived the holocaust" to those who never lived in a place where the Nazis or their collaborators were in charge. Like, those who already lived in the UK in 1933. Just as we don't say that somebody survived a plane crash if they never were or intended to be on board or near the crash site. So if you want to say that x% survived, don't compare it to the worldwide Jewish population, but only to the Jewish population in Nazi-controlled territory. PiusImpavidus (talk) 18:01, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

I agree with PiusImpavidus. According to this source, there were nearly five million Jews in the United States in 1940. No one would call those people "Holocaust survivors". Cullen328 (talk) 18:07, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

Would you consider Jews in Moscow and St. Petersburg to be Holocaust survivors? What about a Jew who fled from Vinnytsia to Samara during Operation Barbarossa and thus avoided getting murdered by the Nazis that way? 68.4.99.100 (talk) 22:03, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

Moscow and Leningrad were threatened by the Germans, but not taken. That's a fuzzy area. Those who fled from places before they were conquered by Germany might be called survivors, just like those who fled from Germany itself after the national-socialists grabbed power but before persecution of Jews started (including some of the 5 million who lived in the USA in 1940), but it's a matter of opinion. PiusImpavidus (talk) 11:00, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

Wars that resembled trench warfare?

Which wars resembled trench warfare? Some examples off the top of my head:

• Eastern theater of the American Civil War
• Western Front of World War I
• Iran-Iraq War
• Donbass War
• Russo-Ukrainian War

What else? 68.4.99.100 (talk) 06:55, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

Spanish Civil War and World War II. ––FormalDude talk 08:08, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

The Crimean War was characterized by long drawn out battles and sieges and the use of trenches. Pinguinn 🐧 08:22, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

Prior to the First World War, making trenches was the standard tactic for besieging a fortress or defended city. So I suppose you could call any siege "trench warfare" between the 17th and and the end of the 19th century. The concept of creating a whole front of entrenchments was rather novel in 1914 and was the product of the power of defensive weapons (quick-firing artillery, machine guns, barbed wire etc) over mass assault. Neither side had really intended to create a Western Front, but once it had established itself, it suited the Germans very well, allowing them to use the bulk of their armies against the Russians. Contrary to popular belief, by 1918, the idea of a continuous trench line had been abandoned in favour of defence in depth, with deep killing zones of open ground covered by interlocking fire from entrenched strongpoints and pillboxes. Alansplodge (talk) 09:34, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

The Gun by C.S. Forester contains detailed descriptions of trenches dug as part of siege tactics during the Peninsular War; however, this is quite different from the 'trench-to-trench' fighting in WWI. -- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 17:28, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

Yep, there was the Hindenburg Line late in World War I, for instance. 68.4.99.100 (talk) 22:07, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

HD scan of Rhode Island Royal Charter (1663)

All I can find is this excerpt, which ends right around the start of the third paragraph of the Yale transcript. There is another image on the same site showing the whole document, but when I zoom in it's just blurry and illegible. Does an HD scan exist anywhere? (Preferably downloadable as a JPG or PDF, but I'll settle for one of those zoomable web interfaces if that's all that's available.)

I am aware there are plain-text transcriptions, but I'm trying to quote it accurately. A lot of the transcripts are modernized and there are inconsistencies among them (e.g. "doure persons" in the Yale transcript vs. "four persons" in the RI gov transcript), so I would like to be able to check the original manuscript. 98.170.164.88 (talk) 20:07, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

Our own File:Rhode_Island_Royal_Charter_1663.jpg is reasonably legible. Alansplodge (talk) 20:42, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, that's actually not bad. FWIW the best I was able to find was [1], which is IMO a bit more legible still. 98.170.164.88 (talk) 04:01, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

So it is neither "doure persons", nor "four persons", but "foure Persons". Interestingly, these are different scans of the same original.  --Lambiam 07:07, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

@Lambiam: I added a quotation to wikt:Portsmouth. Hope I got the orthography right. It's a little disconcerting that none of the transcripts had "Citty" when that seems to be what was written, but some have "ffor each" when it looks like there's really only one "f" present (and capitalization would not really make sense for that word anyway). 98.170.164.88 (talk) 19:23, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

Additional cases of countries getting partitioned by their neighbors?

I can think of:

• The three Partitions of Poland between Prussia, Austria, and Russia in the late 18th century.
• Nazi Germany's, Poland's, and Hungary's partition of Czechoslovakia in 1938-1939.
• Hitler's and Stalin's fourth partition of Poland with the M-R Pact in 1939.
• Nazi Germany's, Fascist Italy's, Hungary's, and Bulgaria's partition of Yugoslavia in 1941.

What else would qualify for this? I'm excluding Cold War-era partitions such as Germany, Korea, and Vietnam because they involve rival claims to be a country's government rather than attempts by foreign powers to engage in territorial conquest. 68.4.99.100 (talk) 22:38, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

Napoleon broke apart and then re-assembled Switzerland, see Helvetic Republic. However, arguably the new state was more unified than the Old Swiss Confederacy, not less. Similarly, there was a lot of re-organising going on within Germany after the Battle of Austerlitz, leading to the Confederation of the Rhine and the formal dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 09:31, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

Also, if we lose the Eurocentric view, there was an enormous amount of splitting, merging, reassembling and so on in China - especially in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period and the during the Three Kingdoms (I like this video: [2]). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 09:37, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

Status-6 Oceanic Multipurpose System name origin

Status-6 Oceanic Multipurpose System has been on the news lately due to the recent commissioning of a Russian cruise mission submarine.

What does the "Status-6" in the name refer to? Are there other similarly named "Status-X" weapons employed by the Russian military?

Thanks in advance. Cheers. Daniel T Wolters (talk) 22:47, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

Article about steaming envelopes.

I recall an article that described a method of opening wax sealed letters with vapour, instead of with a knife, in order to avoid alerting the original recipient that the communication has been eavesdropped.

Can't seem to find it. Related articles: Sealing wax Tamper-evident_technology#Seals_and_signatures TZubiri (talk) 22:58, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

Postal censorship and Mail contain the following:

"The Steamboat" - mobile steaming equipment used by Czechoslovak StB for unsticking envelopes during correspondence surveillance and censorship

I think I have heard similar claims as you before, but it's very hard to find reliable sources backing it up. Daniel T Wolters (talk) 23:38, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

TZubiri -- According to David Kahn's "The Codebreakers", in the 1700s the Austrian emperor's "Geheime Kabinets-Kanzlei" in Vienna was highly-efficient at melting the wax seals of diplomatic correspondence "with a candle", copying the correspondence inside, and then resealing the envelopes "using forged seals to impress the original wax"... AnonMoos (talk) 06:20, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

German Wikipedia article at de:Geheime Kabinettskanzlei. -- AnonMoos (talk) 06:24, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

Steaming works for envelopes sealed with moistenable gum, the same kind as used for postage stamps, which philatelists may steam off. It does not work on wax seals.  --Lambiam 07:10, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

I prefer my letters grilled or fried. Clarityfiend (talk) 10:40, 10 July 2022 (UTC)