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Gen. William C. Westmoreland Was RightBy Dale Andrade | Vietnam | 7 comments | Print This Post | Email This Post  Gen. William Westmoreland (Ret.) at the 1986 dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Fort Jackson in Columbia, S.C. The harsh realities on the ground dictated a big unit strategy to push back the main force so the guerrilla insurgent could be stamped out. See Sidebar, Westmoreland’s Last Interview. Subscribe Today
For better or for worse, the Vietnam War continues to cast a long shadow over how the United States fights wars. It is the standard everyone wants to avoid. “No more Vietnams” has been the mantra for a generation of military planners, policymakers and pundits. Scores of articles and editorials in the past few years have warned against repeating the “mistakes” of Vietnam in Iraq and Afghanistan. For example, military analyst Max Boot has written “The biggest error the armed forces made in Vietnam was trying to fight a guerrilla foe the same way they had fought the Wehrmacht.” While the image of a big army stumbling around after agile guerrillas has come to represent the predominate “lesson” learned from Vietnam, this is in fact a misleading caricature. Since the United States lost the Vietnam War, historians have rightly concentrated on what went wrong and who was to blame. Two basic schools of thought developed, both arguing that the United States failed to identify the true nature of the war. One side argued that the real center of gravity was in Hanoi, and that the war was really an invasion by North Vietnam, and the guerrillas were largely a sideshow. The leading proponent of this point of view was Colonel Harry Summers, whose book On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War argued that the Viet Cong guerrillas provided a distraction so “North Vietnamese regular forces could reach a decision in conventional battles.” Others believed just the opposite—that the war was fought by a conventionally minded U.S. military that ignored counterinsurgency. Andrew Krepinevich, in The Army and Vietnam, argued that “In focusing on attrition of enemy forces . . . MACV [Military Assistance Command, Vietnam] missed whatever opportunity it had to deal the insurgents a crippling blow at a low enough cost to permit a continued U.S. military presence in Vietnam in the event of external, overt aggression.” But the reality was that the Communists were able to simultaneously employ both main forces and a potent guerrilla structure throughout South Vietnam, and any strategy that ignored one or the other was doomed to failure. A deeply rooted political infrastructure formed a permanent presence in South Vietnam’s villages while increasingly large military formations could challenge South Vietnamese forces on their own terms. It was an ideal insurgency, yet this is ignored by most historians. Instead, Summers and Krepinevich are compelling because they argue that there was a simple strategic “choice”—a right way and a wrong way to fight—and the wrong choice was made. General William C. Westmoreland, the MACV commander, usually gets the blame for making that wrong choice. A leading proponent of this view is Lewis Sorley, who wrote in A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam, that Westmoreland foolishly used a search-and-destroy strategy that could not possibly catch guerrillas dispersed throughout the countryside. Sorley contends that Westmoreland’s successor, General Creighton W. Abrams, switched to counterinsurgency to thwart the guerrillas in the villages rather than continue to fruitlessly chase them in the jungle. “Abrams brought to the post a markedly different outlook on the conflict and how it ought to be conducted,” argued Sorley, switching from “search and destroy” to “clear and hold.” Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to
            Tags: Historical Figures, Vietnam War
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7 Comments to “Gen. William C. Westmoreland Was Right”
No mention is ever made that the “Allies” encouraged Ho Chi Min to fight the Japanese on the promise that Viet Nam would be united under his leadership. The Allis were influenced by Joe Stalan to separate nations i.e. N/S Korea, N/S Viet Nam, E/W Germany. Fortunately Japan was our war and the Atomic Bomb prevented Russia from entering to any degree (Kurel Is.) or we would have had a N/S Japan. Then the French tried to maintain the South Separate from the North and dien bien phu ended their attempts. Then comes Lyndon Johnson who tries to micro manage the conflict from the White House with the aid of that Ford car company reject, MacNamara. The rest is history. Sorry for misspelled words. But then, America is lost without a shot.
By Gilbert R. Switzer on Apr 3, 2009 at 10:02 am
To clarify the earlier comment, General Order #1 divided the Korean peninsula into North and South primarily to reflect the advances of the Red Army from the north. Stalin’s “influence” in Korea was in effect the same “influence” used in Germany, and for that matter the same “influence” that the US wielded: an occupying army.
It’s tempting at times for any combatant nation to view a campaign as “our war,” particularly when it was “our bomb” that arguably ended the war.
But it’s also important to note that literally hundreds of thousands of Soviet, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, ANZAC, and other soldiers fought in the theater as well.
By M. O'Connor on Apr 6, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Page 2 – “The popular conception of the enemy in Vietnam is that it was a grassroots insurgency sprung from the peoples’ content with an illegitimate government in Saigon and the presence of a foreign invader.”
The author here tries to downplay two historical truths- the government in Saigon was illegitimate, and the U. S. was a foreign invader. Thirty-three years after the war has ended, and the writer is still calling the Vietnamese “the enemy” and the “North Vietnamese.”
How long will Cold War propaganda be disseminated? When will the day come when American historians will be able to refer to Vietnam by the proper names (yes, that would mean recognition, wouldn’t it?) of the Vietnamese and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam?
Is the author still trying to prove to us the U. S. invasion was justified by reminding us of China and Russia’s involvement? This seems ridiculous when the U. S. supported the French, and then helped set up, support and control Diem’s dictatorship in the south. It took two to tango then, and it matters little now which side took the first step.
Perhaps if we compare the numbers of Chinese and Russian soldiers that served in Vietnam at the time with those of the U. S., Australia, Korea, Thailand, New Zealand, etc. – then we might have a case. Or have there been declassified documents of the Russians offering the Vietnamese nuclear weapons, such as Dulles offered the French, that we do not know about?
By jstrum_bn on Apr 9, 2009 at 1:30 am
As long as there was a “hands off” policy on North Vietnam the military could not effectively prosecute the war.
By R.Kassebaum on Apr 10, 2009 at 10:38 am
BUNDY: “It is an awful mess.
JOHNSON: “What is Laos worth to me? What is Laos worth to this country? We’ve got a treaty, but hell, everybody else has got a treaty out there, and they’re not doing anything about it.”
(From the transcript of a telephone call on May 27, 1964, between President Lyndon B. Johnson and McGeorge Bundy, his national security adviser. A year later. Johnson began the large-scale deployment of troops to Vietnam. The transcript was released in February by the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas)
As my deceased friend would remind me, retired Republic of Vietnam Major Julian Dubuc, in September of 1954, the United States, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan formed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, or SEATO. The SEATO charter was vitally important to the American rationale for the Vietnam War. The United States used the organization as its justification for refusing to go forward with the 1956 elections intended to reunify Vietnam, instead maintaining the divide between communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam at the 17th parallel. As the conflict in Vietnam unfolded, the inclusion of Vietnam as a territory under SEATO protection gave the United States the legal framework for its continued involvement there. The problem was Johnson’s structure in running the war as a fool.
From a Disabled Republic of Vietnam Combat Veteran
By JOHN C. BRUNGER on Apr 27, 2009 at 4:17 pm
As myself a Vietnamese who wanted the South to win. I agree that there was not a lot of chances for the United States but I am very thankful for everyone who fought in the war.
By Chuong on Jun 17, 2009 at 5:30 pm
RIP for the fallen on both side
By henrylim88 on Nov 10, 2009 at 12:28 am