Lewis Sorley by Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam

Author:Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam [Vietnam, Westmoreland: The General Who Lost]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Military, History, Vietnam War
ISBN: 9780547518268
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2011-10-11T05:00:00+00:00

WESTMORELAND'S DEPARTURE ENDED four years during which, as Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird later observed, "the war had been Americanized." Said Laird, "We had not been giving the South Vietnamese the tools to do the job. We had been doing the job for them." Or, he might have added, trying to.

The attrition strategy had not worked. The enemy had not lost heart, nor given up his intention of unifying Vietnam by force. Under Westmoreland, allied forces had indeed imposed large numbers of casualties on the enemy, a horrifying number really, but that had not diminished the will or magnitude of the opposing force. Instead the communists just kept sending replacements down from the north, year after year, keeping Westmoreland on a kind of treadmill. Meanwhile U.S. losses were also accumulating and, while they were not as large as those the enemy was experiencing, that really did not matter. What did matter was that they became more than the American people were willing to accept as the price for what seemed to be at best a stalemate in a faraway war.

Many years later, when he belatedly decided to speak out on the war, Robert McNamara recalled "the seemingly endless reports and requests made by Gen. William Westmoreland to Washington between 1964 and 1968." His assertions of progress and success of the attrition strategy were, now saw McNamara, "an illusion. At no time during Westmoreland's tenure in Saigon, it now appears, was there the slightest chance of reaching the famed crossover point beyond which the fortunes of the Vietnamese communists would decline, leading them eventually to sue for peace."17

General DePuy—the architect of search and destroy—had once said, in what he called a "coldly realistic" assessment of the situation, "We are going to stomp them to death. I don't know any other way."18 In a much later interview, by then considerably chastened, he explained the outcome: "We were arrogant because we were Americans and we were soldiers or marines and we could do it, but it turned out that it was a faulty concept, given the sanctuaries, given the fact that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was never closed. It was a losing concept of operation."19

At least in the views of some observers, responsibility for such failure resided more with LBJ than with his field general. "No capable war President," wrote historian Russell Weigley, "would have allowed an officer of such limited capacities as General William C. Westmoreland to head Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, for so long."20

Some senior officers saw it the same way. "If Westmoreland couldn't have done it," said Lieutenant General Samuel T. Williams, "they could have jerked him and put someone in there that could have done it. They had plenty of people who could have done it. Abrams could have done it."21 Williams had served in Vietnam for five years as first chief of the MAAG and knew a lot about its challenges.

Perhaps, too, fortune played a role in how things played out during these years of greatest American involvement in the war.

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