Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam

by Lewis Sorley

  Belatedly, Westmoreland seems to have become aware of the multiple implications of the policy. "The turnover of personnel that has evolved from the one-year tour has been our greatest liability," he said in a later Washington Post interview. "It has brought about a situation of personnel instability. Our company commanders, first sergeants and squad leaders are rotating their assignments to the extent that they were never able to get a grip on their organizations."

  When he was Chief of Staff, Westmoreland—perhaps looking for some vindication of his stubborn insistence on the policy—had the personnel people undertake a study of the matter. That produced only more bad news. "Most personnel problems of the past six years are traceable to the 12-month Vietnam tour," said the staffers who had had to cope with the fallout of that approach. "The greatest effect of the 12-month Vietnam tour was personnel turbulence. It was felt throughout the Army over a continued period of time and had a decided adverse impact upon units, missions and individuals."39

  THE ARMY, not permitted to call up its reserve forces, scrambled to meet the multiple troop requests.40 With the 1965 decisions on sending more U.S. ground forces to Vietnam in the offing, on 24 July 1965 the service secretaries and their senior military associates met with McNamara to be told of the impending (28 July) announcement by the President of additional forces, including the new airmobile division, he had approved for dispatch to Vietnam. Then, in a reversal of what they had been anticipating, McNamara said this would be done without calling the reserves. "This came as a total and complete surprise," recalled Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson, "and I might say a shock. Every single contingency plan that the Army had that called for any kind of an expansion of force had the assumption in it that the reserves would be called," and those plans had been approved by OSD (the Office of the Secretary of Defense). Johnson spoke up: "Mr. McNamara, I haven't any basis for justifying what I'm going to say, but I can assure you of one thing, and that is that without a call-up of the reserves that the quality of the Army is going to erode and we're going to suffer very badly. I don't know at what point this will occur, but it will be relatively soon. I don't know how widespread it will be, but it will be relatively widespread." Johnson recalled bitterly that McNamara just looked at him, made no response whatsoever, and continued with his remarks.41

  Not only then but afterward LBJ steadfastly refused to call up reserve forces. Eventually Westmoreland became aware of his aversion to doing so and accepted it. Visiting the LBJ Ranch in August 1966, Westmoreland told the President, according to notes made at the time, "We're going to win this war for you without mobilization."42 When the next day the President presented Westmoreland at a news conference, one reporter asked whether he and the President had discussed the status of the reserves and whether they might have to be called up in the near future. "The source of the units and the manpower is not a matter that I have to be—fortunately—concerned about," Westmoreland responded. "I have no cognizance of the matter of the reserve forces."43

  Later he said flatly that "those of us in Vietnam did not appreciate the intensity of the debate going on in Washington relative to the call-up of reserves."44 Even if this assertion is accepted, it is difficult to understand. There was a constant flow of high-level visitors to the war zone, so much so that Westmoreland often complained about all the coming and going and how time-consuming it was for him to deal with. Senior defense officials, including McNamara, Wheeler, Sharp, Harold K. Johnson, and Krulak, were back and forth almost nonstop. Added to that were numerous members of Congress and their staffers, plus high-powered media representatives supplementing the many accredited journalists on more or less permanent assignment to Saigon. In the aggregate, these people would seem to have constituted a rich source of information and insight into all manner of military and domestic issues impinging on conduct of the war. But Westmoreland said not.

  Thus Westmoreland apparently never realized, even a decade after the war ended, the situation with respect to reserve forces. In 1986, for example, he maintained that "it was General Johnson's decision to meet my relatively modest requirements by cadreing the Army rather than by insisting on a reserve callup," a perspective so widely off the mark that it raises fundamental questions of Westmoreland's awareness of the context in which the war was being fought.

  WESTMORELAND ULTIMATELY PROVED unable to accomplish the self-assumed mission of winning the war with American troops, but in the course of trying he managed to get massive American ground forces sent to Southeast Asia, even so complaining later that getting those forces had been like "pulling teeth."45 "It was impossible to execute the strategy that had been adopted by my government without additional forces," Westmoreland argued. "I would ask for a request that would be cut back. I'd ask for the same request again, and to include what I thought was needed, and that would be cut back. And the thing just dragged on and on and on. In other words I got piecemeal reinforcements rather than receiving what we could have received; necessary forces that could have done a lot of things if the political constraints were going to be changed based on pressures that were being applied by my cables, and presumably by the Joint Chiefs of Staff."46 Instructing Charles MacDonald on what to say about troops in the memoirs, Westmoreland said: "Note we were always cut short of what we asked for."

  Westmoreland's multiple troop requests eventually ratcheted the authorization up to 549,500, a figure that was approached but never actually reached, the deployments peaking at 543,400 at the end of April 1969. That was, of course, after Westmoreland had left Vietnam, but resulted from the arrival of men who were in the pipeline as a result of his earlier requests. There were no troop requests from Vietnam in the post-Westmoreland years.

  11. Search and Destroy

  NOW OUR STRATEGY," explained Westmoreland, "was not to defeat the North Vietnamese army. It was to put pressure on the enemy which would transmit a message to the leadership in Hanoi—that they could not win, and it would be to their advantage either to tacitly accept a divided Vietnam, or to engage in negotiations."1 Consistently inconsistent, on other occasions Westmoreland asserted that our aim was to defeat the enemy, as he maintained in an interview: "Our purpose was to defeat the enemy and pacify the country, and the country couldn't be pacified until the enemy was defeated."2

  His approach to achieving that was to wage a war of attrition, using search and destroy tactics, in which the measure of merit was body count. The premise was that, if he could inflict sufficient casualties on the enemy, they would cease their aggression against South Vietnam. In his single-minded pursuit of this objective, Westmoreland essentially ignored two other crucial aspects of the war, improvement of South Vietnam's armed forces and pacification.

  Westmoreland describes in his memoirs how and why he came to adopt an attrition strategy. There is no doubt that he himself decided on it even though, as he stresses, it was not for him the strategy of choice, merely the best remaining option—or, as he viewed it, the only other option—after his preferred approach involving operations in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam had been ruled out by Lyndon Johnson's insistence on "no wider war."

  Westmoreland confirmed the fact that, other than determining the pace of "gradual escalation" and the use of certain weapons, "the President never tried to tell me how to run the war. The tactics and battlefield strategy of running the war were mine. He did not interfere with this. He deferred to my judgment, and he let me run the war or pursue tactics and battlefield strategy as I saw fit." Also: "I, in effect, had a carte blanche in the devising and pursuing tactics and battlefield strategy of the war."3

  Implementing the attrition strategy, Westmoreland prescribed search and destroy tactics. What this meant in practice was a series of large unit sweeps, often multibattalion and sometimes even multidivision, frequently conducted in the deep jungle regions next to South Vietnam's western borders with Laos and Cambodia, designed to seek out enemy forces and engage them in decisive battle. That proved possible only with the enemy's co
operation; otherwise, as Andrew Krepinevich tellingly observed, "search and destroy was like Whack-a-Mole."4 General Alexander Haig contributed another dramatic characterization, calling Westmoreland's tactics "a demented and bloody form of hide-and-seek."5

  The early conduct of search and destroy operations fell to the 173rd Airborne Brigade, which in May 1965 deployed from Okinawa to Vietnam under the command of Brigadier General Ellis Williamson. The experiences and reactions of that unit to the Westmoreland way of war were instructive, or should have been. From the beginning "Butch" Williamson was not an admirer of that particular tactical approach. "After our thrashing around in the jungle on our first large-scale operation," he said, "I was convinced that large operations of that type were not the way to go except when we knew in advance what the objective was. Having thousands of men fight in the high grass, brier bushes, large overlapping layers of vegetation, etc. is not productive to the effort expended."6

  In early August 1965 Williamson issued one of his periodic Commander's Combat Notes, saying, "I hope that we have conducted our last 'search and destroy' operation. I am thoroughly convinced that running into the jungle with a lot of people without a fixed target is a lot of effort, a lot of physical energy expended. A major portion of our effort evaporates into the air."7

  As early as March 1965, when the U.S. troop buildup was just beginning, senior Washington officials had begun to perceive the problem with Westmoreland's approach. McGeorge Bundy wrote to the President on 6 March, describing a discussion he, Robert McNamara, and Dean Rusk had just had. "Last night Bob McNamara said for the first time what many others have thought for a long time—that the Pentagon and the military have been going at this thing the wrong way round from the very beginning: they have been concentrating on military results against guerrillas in the field, when they should have been concentrating on intense police control from the individual villager on up."8 What is baffling is that these senior civilian officials nevertheless allowed Westmoreland to doggedly pursue his flawed approach for year after bloody year. "Westy believes the war begins and ends with killing VC," reported a senior defense official in frustration after a trip to Vietnam.9 But nothing was done to change course.

  McNamara described matters as bleak even at this early juncture. "We had no sooner begun to carry out the plan to increase dramatically U.S. forces in Vietnam than it became clear there was reason to question the strategy on which the plan was based," he observed. "Slowly, the sobering, frustrating, tormenting limitations of military operations in Vietnam became painfully apparent."10

  Westmoreland's nominal military superior, Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, had a clearer view of the nature of the war and its imperatives than did his field commander. Sharp cabled General Wheeler in September 1965 to observe that "this is a counterinsurgency war... the primary object is to restore security to the population.... If we are to succeed we must do a number of things at the same time and do them differently than we did in past conflicts."11 Nonetheless Sharp did nothing to redirect Westmoreland.12

  Even Ambassador Lodge saw the problems inherent in Westmoreland's approach. "Let us visualize meeting the VC on our own terms," he suggested at a July 1965 meeting. "We don't have to spend all our time in the jungles."13

  General Fred Weyand was of the same mind, explaining: "In South Vietnam, the sole basis for effective, meaningful operations is specific intelligence information; without it, the commander is left groping almost aimlessly."14 Such groping characterized much of what constituted search and destroy operations.

  But perhaps the most devastating judgment on Westmoreland's approach was rendered by Edward Murphy, author of a history of the Marine Corps in the Vietnam War. "One major flaw existed with Westmoreland's plan," he wrote. "Just months earlier he had pleaded for the deployment of U.S. troops, arguing that the ARVN were incapable of protecting only a few air bases. How he now expected them to handle the much more difficult task of providing security for more than twelve thousand hamlets remained unexplained."15

  Meanwhile Westmoreland was rendering highly optimistic reports, even though just months earlier he had forecast dire consequences unless major U.S. ground forces were dispatched to the war zone. "In summary," he said in his COMUSMACV Monthly Evaluation for March 1965, "current trends are highly encouraging and the GVN may have actually turned the tide at long last."16

  By late June 1965, with combat operations heating up and many more troops on the way, Westmoreland rendered a contrastingly gloomy report. "The struggle has become a war of attrition," he wrote. "Short of decision to introduce nuclear weapons against sources and channels of enemy power, I see no likelihood of achieving a quick, favorable end to the war." Having planted that arresting idea, he went on to emphasize his need for still more troops.17 Then, despite having himself so recently raised the matter, Westmoreland dictated in his history notes for 23 November 1965: "Congressman [Hays] came in to see me and I was surprised to hear him ask about the possibility of using atomic weapons in-country. The thought had been [so] remote that it caught me by surprise."

  THE FIRST MAJOR battles between U.S. ground forces and the North Vietnamese Army took place in October 1965 in a region known as the Ia Drang Valley. Elements of the 1st Cavalry Division slugged it out with three NVA regiments. This was the battle later made famous in the book by Lieutenant General "Hal" Moore and Joe Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once... and Young. Westmoreland's reaction to what took place there, or in any event to his interpretation of the battle, confirmed his belief that he could deter further enemy aggression by imposing unacceptable casualties on the NVA and the Viet Cong.

  Moore, who as a lieutenant colonel commanded the battalion most centrally involved in the Ia Drang battle, recalled with some bitterness an incident during the fighting. Around midnight one night he was passed an astonishing message: "General William Westmoreland's headquarters wanted me to 'leave X-Ray [the landing zone where the desperate fighting was centered] early the next morning for Saigon to brief him and his staff on the battle.' I could not believe I was being ordered out before the battle was over!" Moore, a man who knew where his loyalties belonged, sent his regrets and stayed with his men.18

  Then, wrote Moore and Galloway, "In Saigon, the American commander in Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, and his principal deputy, General William DePuy, looked at the statistics of the thirty-four-day Ia Drang campaign—3,561 North Vietnamese estimated killed versus 305 American dead—and saw a kill ratio of twelve North Vietnamese to one American. What that said to two officers who had learned their trade in the meat-grinder campaigns in World War II was that they could bleed the enemy to death over the long haul with a strategy of attrition."19

  And, said Moore, "Westmoreland would learn, too late, that he was wrong; that the American people didn't see a kill ratio of 10-1 or even 20–1 as any kind of bargain."20 A very influential visitor, Senator "Fritz" Hollings from Westmoreland's home state of South Carolina, had warned him about relying on such ratios. Westmoreland told him, "We're killing these people at a ratio of 10 to 1." To that Hollings responded, "Westy, the American people don't care about the ten. They care about the one."21

  Besides the American people's antipathy to friendly losses of the magnitude experienced in these battles, there was another factor that might have warned Westmoreland and his senior staff about the longer-term viability of the Ia Drang model. The 1st Cavalry Division basically spent the month of December in recovery mode, rebuilding its logistical stocks, putting its overworked helicopter fleet back in shape, and integrating large numbers of replacement personnel. In just two months, October and November 1965, division losses amounted to more than a quarter of total authorized strength. Besides 334 killed and another 736 wounded, there were 364 nonbattle injuries and "2,828 cases of malaria, scrub typhus, and other serious diseases." More than 5,000 replacements had to be brought in.22 Meanwhile, as of 1 December 1965, 100 of the division's helicopters were inoperable due to parts sh
ortages.23

  Eric Bergerud wrote, "The engagement provided evidence of what Westmoreland wanted to believe—that the enemy forces would accept battle in dense terrain where helicopter-borne U.S. infantry, backed by artillery and air power, could find them, force them to battle, and defeat them."24 In those respects, it turned out, the Ia Drang battle had been unusual. Westmoreland's confidence was built on the exception, not the rule. Much more typical were large U.S. formations struggling to find the enemy, then to bring him to battle on favorable terms, with the enemy basically dictating when, where, and for how long such combat would continue, disengaging when it suited his purposes and withdrawing to sanctuaries to rest, refit, and prepare to fight again. David Halberstam observed tellingly that "we underestimated the willingness of these peasants to pay the price. We won every set piece battle. Westy still believes that he never lost a battle. We had absolute military superiority, and they had absolute political superiority, which meant that we would kill 200 and they would replenish them the next day. We were fighting the birth rate of a nation."25

  Only a few days after the Ia Drang, the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, was back at the division base camp at An Khe on a cold and rainy Thanksgiving. Lieutenant Colonel Robert McDade, the battalion commander, met a visiting Westmoreland near the mess hall and told him that everyone was just about ready to eat their Thanksgiving dinners. But Westmoreland said, "Get them all together and let me talk to them." The troops had been issued a hot meal, real coffee instead of the powdered stuff that came with C-Rations, turkey, and the trimmings. They were walking back to their squad tents to enjoy this special repast when the order was given to assemble. "There stood General Westmoreland himself," said Sergeant John Setelin. "He made a speech there in the rain and while he talked we watched the rain turn that hot dinner into cold Mulligan stew. Who knew what the hell the man said? Who cared?"26