Authors: Terence T. Finn
Tags: #History, #Asia, #Afghanistan, #Military, #United States, #eBook
Other nations, allies of the United States, contributed troops as well. Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and South Korea all sent soldiers to Vietnam. And their numbers were not inconsequential. Australia dispatched some 7,600 troops, South Korea approximately 50,000. In its battle against the VC and NVA, the United States did not stand alone.
The buildup of troops that began in 1965 was intended to save the regime in Saigon from collapse, which it did. It also had the effect of turning the war into an American effort. Not everyone thought that was a good idea. CIA director John McCone told Lyndon Johnson that such increases meant the United States would get bogged down in a war it could not win. But Johnson, concerned by the political ramifications of defeat, approved the increases.
However, the president did not announce the troop deployments with any fanfare. Indeed, he downplayed them. Worried about the fate of his legislative initiatives, Johnson made every effort to conceal from the American public the expanding scope of the war. This, combined with the optimistic assessments of the conflict regularly issued by the army, would bring trouble in the future for both the president and his generals.
One of those generals was William C. Westmoreland. At one time the services’ youngest major general, Westmoreland had attended Harvard Business School and, from 1960 to 1963, was superintendent of the United States Military Academy. More relevant to our narrative, from 1964 to 1968, Westmoreland was the senior American officer in Vietnam. He was the general in charge of the war.
Westmoreland’s strategy was to aggressively go after the Viet Cong and the NVA. Despite requesting and receiving more and more troops, Westmoreland did not have the number that would enable him to occupy most of the battlefield (which comprised essentially all of South Vietnam). So he did the next best thing. He pursued the enemy, seeking them out, hoping to crush them via superior American firepower. This strategy came to be known as “search and destroy.” Essentially, Westmoreland’s plan was to wear down the enemy, to kill so many of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars that they would either give up or fade away. It was a strategy of attrition. For Westmoreland and his soldiers it was a sensible way to fight. Unfortunately for the general and his troops, it would not have the results he desired. This despite the fact that in combat with the enemy, the U.S. Army in Vietnam never lost a battle.
One of the first battles in which the U.S. Army encountered the NVA gave Westmoreland hope his strategy would prevail. In October 1965, in the Ia Drang Valley, the north had assembled a large number of troops with the intent of splitting South Vietnam in half. U.S. intelligence officers got wind of the plan, whereupon Westmoreland sent the 1st Air Cavalry Division into action. Transported by helicopter, the troops engaged the enemy and, after fierce fighting, emerged victorious. In the battle, the first in which a large unit of the American army participated, at least 600 North Vietnamese were killed. Many, many more were wounded. American dead numbered 305. The outcome helped convince the Americans they would win the war.
One reason for the U.S. Army’s success in the Ia Drang Valley was the extensive use of helicopters. Roads in Vietnam were limited in number and size, thus making difficult the rapid movement of men and supplies. Employing helicopters therefore made great sense. These machines gave the Americans an advantage in mobility, which, when combined with the army’s firepower, provided Uncle Sam’s troops a formula for success.
Helicopters were used in Vietnam to locate the enemy, to carry troops into battle, to resupply them when necessary, to airlift the wounded back to hospital, and to withdraw troops once the battle had concluded. At times equipped with extra machine guns and rockets, helicopters also were employed as attack aircraft spewing forth death and destruction. Helicopters flew every day of the war. Such were their employment that, for Americans both in Vietnam and at home, they became the iconic image of the war. One type of helicopter was ever present. This was the Bell UH-1. Formally christened the Iroquois (as the U.S. Army named its helicopters after Native American tribes), the machine was universally known as “the Huey.” Illustrative of the scale of the conflict in Vietnam, approximately 2,500 Hueys were destroyed during the war. Many of their pilots were among the 2,139 helicopter airmen killed in action. Another 1,395 men were lost from non-battle-related helicopter crashes.
During 1966 and 1967 the tempo of the ground war picked up as General Westmoreland moved aggressively to engage the Viet Cong and the NVA. That first year his troops conducted eighteen major operations. In 1967 two of his efforts received much attention. They were called Operation Cedar Falls and Operation Junction City. The first took place in January. Westmoreland sent thirty thousand U.S. and ARVN troops into what was known as the Iron Triangle. Comprising some 125 square miles, this was an area twenty miles northwest of Saigon, heavily infested with the enemy. A month later, the general launched Junction City. This too involved a large number of troops. It occurred in War Zone C, an area of 180 square miles close to the Cambodian border. In each operation, Westmoreland’s soldiers did well, inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy. U.S. casualties were light. In Operation Cedar Falls they numbered 428, in Junction City a little less.
In both endeavors Westmoreland’s men won the day. The problem was that, while the general and his troops defeated the enemy, they did not destroy them. During both battles, and in a pattern that was repeated throughout the war, the VC and NVA would fight, disengage, and then escape into Laos or Cambodia (both countries theoretically were neutral, but in fact served as sanctuaries for those Vietnamese fighting the Americans). In other words the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese regulars would live to fight another day.
Because the war in Vietnam did not involve traditional lines of separation between the two sides—no front lines existed, ahead of which lay the enemy—measuring success was not easy. Westmoreland could not point to a map and say his army had seized from the VC or NVA this amount of territory or that amount of land. How then to measure progress? The general had an answer. As his strategy was one of attrition, success would be measured by the number of enemy killed. Kill large numbers of VC and NVA, and success or failure could be determined. Or so the general argued.
Thus came into being one of the hallmarks of the Vietnam War. This was the body count. After each engagement, commanders reported the number of the enemy who lay dead on the field of battle. This number was reported up the chain of command, eventually reaching the secretary of defense, a man who relished statistics. Because an army officer’s performance evaluation was influenced heavily by the number of enemy his unit had killed, the numbers often got inflated. This resulted in a focus on body counts as well as a distortion of the progress being made. That army officers in the field could not always distinguish between civilian dead and enemy killed made the metric even more unreliable.
This emphasis on statistics (some would call it an obsession) extended to the air force as well. Secretary McNamara wanted numbers, so what mattered to the generals in blue were sorties flown and bombs dropped. That the latter more than occasionally missed their target mattered little, and certainly less and less the closer to the secretary the general was. As noted above, Robert McNamara wanted statistics, and because he denigrated those who believed war was as much about morale and tactics, it was statistics he got. Then and now, many would agree that the man went to his grave not understanding the nature of warfare. He thought it was an exercise in accounting.
By the end of 1967, a year in which much fighting had taken place, both sides of the conflict had reason to worry. For the United States, casualties were mounting. Rolling Thunder was not working, and the ARVN still was not the fighting machine U.S. advisors had hoped to create. At home opposition to the war was growing.
In part, this opposition was stoked by the images of violence seen by Americans on their television sets. Vietnam was the first televised war. On nightly newscasts the people of the United States saw for the first time the ugly aspects of war. Often the images were shocking. The result was a conviction on the part of some that war in general was wrong and that this war, in particular, was immoral.
Among those protesting the war were religious leaders who spoke out against U.S. participation in what they deemed a civil war among the Vietnamese. Liberals too opposed the war, often not peacefully. Students, many of them eligible for the draft, took to the streets instead of the classroom. Making matters worse were the racial tensions endemic to an America that overtly discriminated against its citizens whose skin was black (and who, in large numbers, served in the army that was fighting in Vietnam). In 1967 and early in 1968, especially in April of the latter year, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, racial tensions exploded. People were angry, and civil discourse often gave way to violence. Yet, despite the dissent, Lyndon Johnson persevered. So did General Westmoreland, who continued to issue optimistic assessments of the progress being made.
In Hanoi no protests were taking place, but Communist leaders had cause for concern. Their casualties too were mounting, American troops were flooding the south, American aircraft were wreaking havoc all across their country, and the government in Saigon—whom they despised—seemed nowhere near collapse, and neither was the ARVN in full retreat. From their perspective the war was in stalemate.
In July 1967, the Communist leaders decided to break the stalemate. They fashioned a plan they expected would topple the South Vietnamese government, shatter the ARVN, cause an uprising throughout the south, and force the United States to withdraw. The plan—they referred to it as the General Offensive—would begin with attacks in the countryside to draw Westmoreland’s troops away from densely populated areas. Then, having covertly moved men and supplies into position, they would launch strikes on the cities and towns across South Vietnam. To achieve maximum surprise, the attacks would occur during a traditional Vietnamese holiday when most people would be limiting their daily activities. The holiday, celebrating the beginning of the new lunar year, was called Tet.
The North Vietnamese initiated their General Offensive, which would become known to Americans as the Tet Offensive, as planned. Late in 1967, they and their Viet Cong compatriots began attacking American and ARVN outposts that were far from the populated centers of South Vietnam. One of these, Khe Sanh, became a major battle, longer and bloodier than either side had anticipated.
Khe Sanh was a marine outpost near the Laotian border, just south of the DMZ. When General Westmoreland received intelligence reports that the enemy was amassing troops there—eventually the NVA would deploy twenty thousand soldiers in the hills surrounding the base—he believed they were attempting to repeat their triumph at Dien Bien Phu. Westmoreland welcomed the news, as he was eager to engage the VC and NVA in a pitched battle. The resulting struggle—it began when the Vietnamese attacked the marines on January 23, 1968—lasted seventy-seven days. American casualties in the battle numbered 1,029, of whom 199 were killed. Reflecting the efficacy of American firepower, at least 1,600 of the enemy were dead, with thousands wounded.
In the United States the siege of Khe Sanh received extensive media coverage. Aware that loss of the base would be a political disaster, Lyndon Johnson required his military advisors to state in writing that the base would be held. Were it to fall, the president intended to deflect the inevitable flood of criticism to the military.
One reason the marines at Khe Sanh held the enemy at bay was the massive use of tactical air support. U.S. Air Force and Navy planes pounded the enemy with bombs and rockets, flying some twenty-four thousand air strikes. Joining the battle were the giant B-52s. These huge aircraft conducted numerous missions in support of the marines. Rarely has airpower been so successful.
The Americans believed Khe Sanh was a victory. The marine base was not overrun, while a large number of the enemy were put out of action. Yet the North Vietnamese also considered the siege a success. They argued that General Westmoreland was forced to pour reserves into the fight, thereby weakening the forces available to counter the main thrust of the General Offensive. Their official history of the war states that Khe Sanh represented “a serious military and political failure for the American imperialists. This failure demonstrated the impotence of their strategically defensive posture.”
At the task of assembling men and weapons for the General Offensive the North Vietnamese proved masterful (no doubt helped by the fact that their agents had penetrated practically every organization comprising the government of South Vietnam). At having all their teams strike at exactly the same time they were less successful. A few of the teams attacked prematurely, thereby alerting the Americans, who, via intelligence sources, knew that the Communists were planning some sort of attack. When, as a result, General Frederick Weyand, one of Westmoreland’s senior commanders, redeployed his troops, the Americans were in a much better position to repel the attacks.
The main strikes took place on January 21, 1968. They were hard-hitting and extensive. Vietnamese teams struck in thirty-six of forty-four provincial capitals, in sixty-four district capitals, and hit many, many military installations. In Saigon, they blasted their way onto the grounds of the U.S. Embassy. The scope of the attacks stunned the Americans. But Westmoreland’s men rallied, as did the ARVN. Together, they threw back the attackers. In some places the fighting lasted several weeks. But, when it was over, North Vietnamese casualties were heavy—approximately forty thousand of the attackers were dead. American deaths numbered eleven hundred. Such were the enemy losses that the Viet Cong ceased to be a factor in the war. After Tet the United States was fighting the North Vietnamese Army.