“A big country cannot make a small war.” The phrase is from the Duke of Wellington, but General Westmoreland (1914-2005) liked to use it to talk about Vietnam, not knowing that it revealed the great mistake that would make it go down in history. Westmoreland was unwilling or unable to wage the small war that the US could win in Vietnam, engaging instead in a huge war that could only be lost. When he arrived in the country in January 1964, there were 16,000 American “advisors” and 200 had died. When he left in mid-1968, he left behind more than 530,000 soldiers and 22,000 dead on his side alone. And he lost the same.
Although General William Childs Westmoreland’s name is now forever associated with America’s first major defeat, when he arrived in Vietnam as second in command in 1964 he had the air of a winner. He had been the youngest general in the history of his army and had been victorious in World War II and in Korea. Even when he had already been in command in Vietnam for two years, Time magazine named him “man of the year” and did an interview with him that is full of phrases that today seem prophetic, but in reverse.
“If the enemy can live and fight in these conditions, so can we,” he said at the time of the American soldiers who fought in the jungle, harassed by mosquitoes and tropical diseases, but also by the discomfort of not being very clear about what they were doing there. . That would be Westmoreland’s other big mistake: Americans, those in uniform in Vietnam and those waiting for them back home, were unwilling to go through the same thing as their Vietnamese enemies, who firmly believed they were fighting for their country against another colonizer.
Westmoreland had a very clear idea to win in Vietnam. He believed that if he managed to kill enough North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerrillas, the enemy would not be able to replace them in time. His will to fight would then break down and they would negotiate with South Vietnam, the US regime ally. So the mission was to kill more and faster the better. On a battlefield that was mostly jungle and villages, Westmoreland understood that to conquer and hold territory was absurd, one had to kill.
To kill more, one had of course to shoot more. That is why Westmoreland convinced the South Vietnamese government to multiply his army by three, but also made the US military, which had dedicated itself mainly to advising its ally’s troops, go to fight on the front line. By the end of its first year in Vietnam, the US had 180,000 military personnel there; when he was relieved of command he had already requested 670,000.
Westmoreland’s big problem was that the plan worked, but the war went wrong. That is to say: his soldiers killed more and more, but the enemy showed no signs of weakening. By the end of his first year as US commander in Vietnam, 4,800 enemies were dying in combat a month, and by the time he left it was over 8,100, but the attacks continued and enemy soldiers continued to pour into South Vietnam. Westmoreland was shooting with everything he had, which was a lot, but to no avail.
As historian Stanley Karnow put it, “He was an ordinary general in an extraordinary war, and he was fighting as American generals had fought in the past: unleashing the full force of America’s military power. In the end, however, General Westmoreland did not understand that he was facing an enemy prepared to face unlimited losses. He, President Johnson, President Nixon, the other generals… they thought there was a point where if you killed enough enemies you’d break their morale, but they found it didn’t matter. You could win every battle, but it was irrelevant.”
Westmoreland was still winning battles, but he was just as far from victory. Also, he kept asking for more and more troops and sending the US more and more coffins. Still, the general took every opportunity to make optimistic statements and soon began “cooking” the reports to make them more hopeful. To maintain the idea that the communists would soon have no soldiers to replace the dead, he made official estimates say that the enemy had fewer troops than it did, contrary to the judgment of some of his intelligence officers and the CIA.
However, reality was stubborn. When the communists launched the Tet Offensive, millions of Americans watched from their homes on television as enemy troops attacked the heart of South Vietnamese cities, and all of Westmoreland’s optimistic proclamations proved hollow. When the general immediately called for another 130,000 recruits and the mobilization of reservists, the White House gave him a “promotion” to get him out of Vietnam and correct course four years later.
However, it was late. The internal protests in the US, especially from a generation that flatly refused to go to war, were too strong. Many Americans no longer believed anything the Government and the Army said about the progress of the war and only wanted an “honorable discharge”, while President Johnson had given up running for re-election that he saw as losing. Westmoreland was right about one thing: “Our Achilles heel is our determination.”
Back in his country, General Westmoreland soon fell into irrelevance. Johnson first and Nixon later wanted nothing to do with his advice. Four years after leaving Vietnam he retired and tried to go into politics, but failed miserably. A few years later he sued the CBS television network for 120 million euros for a report in which they accused him of having manipulated the data on the war when he was in charge, but he ended up withdrawing the lawsuit.
General William Westmoreland passed away in 2005, aged 91, after battling Alzheimer’s for a decade. To his knowledge, he never acknowledged that the US had lost the Vietnam War. He preferred to say that his country “had not fulfilled its commitment to South Vietnam.” In his mind, they had forced him to retire when he was winning. Once again, his was the most optimistic interpretation of the US role in Vietnam.
