by Neil Sheehan
In Saigon, General Westmoreland was pressing Washington to speed the troop shipments already promised. In support of his requests, the study notes, General Westmoreland described the growth of enemy forces as of Jan. 2:
“. . . 9 division headquarters, 34 regimental headquarters, 152 combat battalions, 34 combat support battalions, 196 separate companies, and 70 separate platoons totaling some 128,600, plus at least 112,800 militia and at least 39,175 political cadre . . . (a) strength increase of some 42,000 during 1966 despite known losses.”
For the allies, he explained, this posed the danger that in any of the three military regions north of Saigon, “the enemy can attack at any time selected targets . . . in up to division strength” of roughly 10,000 men.
Diplomatic activity reached a peak during Tet, Feb. 8 to 12, as the United States halted the bombing. In London, Prime Minister Harold Wilson, acting on President Johnson’s behalf, met with the Soviet Premier, Aleksei N. Kosygin, in an effort to get the bombing stopped permanently and peace talks started.
Then, on Feb. 13, after a pause of nearly six days, the bombing of North Vietnam was resumed. Mr. Johnson said he had based his decision on what he termed the unparalleled magnitude of the North Vietnamese supply effort.
Excerpts from Mr. Wilson’s memoirs, “The Labor Government, 1964-70: A Personal Record,” published in April, 1971, in The Sunday Times of London and Life magazine, blamed President Johnson for the collapse of the talks, charging that at the last moment he had changed his terms for a bombing halt by demanding a cessation of enemy infiltration as a precondition.
By Mr. Wilson’s account, this was a “total reversal” of the offer Washington first authorized him to pass through Mr. Kosygin to Hanoi: a secret agreement under which the bombing would be stopped first, infiltration second and the American troop build-up third.
The sections of the Pentagon study available to The New York Times provide no insight into why Mr. Johnson’s position changed suddenly.
The study makes it clear, however, that the collapse of the diplomatic efforts was a turning point, for shortly afterward President Johnson began approving additional targets in North Vietnam for attack.
“The President perceived the [air] strikes as necessary in the psychological test of wills between the two sides to punish the North,” the study adds, “in spite of the near consensus opinion of his [civilian] advisers that no level of damage or destruction that we were willing to inflict was likely to destroy Hanoi’s determination to continue to struggle.”
President Johnson approved what the Pentagon account calls the “spring air offensive” in the following phases:
• On Feb. 22, for attacks on five urban thermal power plants, excluding those in Hanoi and Haiphong, and on the Thainguyen steel plant; for mining of rivers and estuaries and conducting naval barrages against the coastline up to the 20th Parallel.
• On March 22, the two Haiphong thermal power plants.
• On April 8, by relaxing the previous restrictions on raids around Hanoi and Haiphong, for raids against Kep airfield, the power transformer near the center of the city; for attacks on petroleum storage facilities, an ammunition dump and cement plant in Haiphong.
• On May 2, for a raid on the thermal power plant a mile north of the center of Hanoi.
By early May these raids, the Pentagon study relates, had become a focus of controversy among Presidential advisers. General Wheeler sent the President a memorandum on May 5, justifying the raids on such targets as power plants with this assertion:
“The objective of our attacks on the thermal electric power system in North Vietnam was not . . . to turn the lights off in major population centres, but . . . to deprive the enemy of a basic power source needed to operate certain war-supporting facilities and industries.”
In rebuttal to this was the position of McGeorge Bundy. As President Johnson’s assistant for national security until he left the government on Feb, 28, 1966, Mr. Bundy had been one of the foremost original advocates of the air war against North Vietnam. But in a personal letter to President Johnson, evidently received by the White House on May 4, Mr. Bundy termed the “strategic bombing” of North Vietnam “both unproductive and unwise,” especially the raids on the power plants. [See Document #126.]
“The lights have not stayed off in Haiphong,” he said, “and even if they had, electric lights are in no sense essential to the Communist war effort.”
Mr. Bundy emphasized that he was “very far indeed from suggesting that it would make sense now to stop the bombing of the North altogether” because that would be “to give the Communists something for nothing.” But as for the power plants, he commented: “We are attacking them, I fear, mainly because we have ‘run out’ of other targets. Is it a very good reason?”
The 200,000 Request
The main catalyst for the sharp debate in the Johnson Administration in the spring of 1967, however, was not the air war but General Westmoreland’s request for 200,000 more troops.
According to the Pentagon account, General Westmoreland first notified the Joint Chiefs of Staff on March 18 of his additional troop needs and then, at their suggestion, submitted a more detailed request on March 26. He spoke with concern about the large enemy build-ups in sanctuaries in Laos, Cambodia and parts of South Vietnam as well as about the threat posed by large North Vietnamese forces just north of the DMZ.
“The minimum essential force” needed to contain the enemy threat and maintain the “tactical initiative,” as he put it in his March 18 message, was two and one-third divisions—roughly 100,000 men—“as soon as possible but not later than 1 July 1968.” For an “optimum force,” he said he needed four and two-thirds divisions in all—201,250 more troops—to boost the ultimate strength of American forces in Vietnam to 671,616 men. [See Document #122.]
The reinforcements, General Westmoreland asserted, would enable him to destroy or neutralize enemy main forces “more quickly” and deny the enemy long established “safe havens” in South Vietnam.
In some regions, however, his picture sounded less hopeful. In the northernmost portion of South Vietnam, and in the Central Highlands along the Laotian border, he wanted more troops largely “to contain the infiltration” of North Vietnamese forces from Cambodia, Laos and North Vietnam.
One point that quickly aroused controversy in Washington, the Pentagon study notes, was General Westmoreland’s argument that the American build-up would “obviate the requirement for a major expansion” of South Vietnamese forces. This, the authors report, “prompted many who disagreed with the basic increases to ask why the U.S. should meet such expanded troop requirements when the Government of South Vietnam would neither mobilize its manpower nor effectively employ it according to U.S. wishes.”
The Joint Chiefs transmitted General Westmoreland’s main troop requests to Secretary McNamara on April 20 with their endorsement. “Once again,” the Pentagon analyst notes, the Joint Chiefs “confronted the Johnson Administration with a difficult decision on whether to escalate or level off the U.S. effort.”
“What they proposed,” the study says, paraphrasing their April 29 memorandum to Secretary McNamara, “was the mobilization of the reserves, a major new troop commitment in the South, an extension of the war into the VC/ NVA sanctuaries (Laos, Cambodia and possibly North Vietnam), the mining of North Vietnamese ports and a solid commitment in manpower and resources to a military victory. The recommendation not unsurprisingly touched off a searching reappraisal of the course of U.S. strategy in the war.”
The Joint Chiefs spoke for mobilization despite President Johnson’s previous opposition to such a move.
Without a reserve call-up, the Joint Chiefs told Mr. McNamara, the Army could provide only one and one-third of the four and two-thirds divisions that General Westmoreland wanted by July, 1968, and a second division could probably not be provided until late in 1969. “A reserve call-up and collateral actions,” they asserted, “would enable the services to provid
e the major combat forces required.”
General Westmoreland and General Wheeler put the military case before President Johnson on April 27 when, according to the Pentagon account, ostensibly to deliver a speech, General Westmoreland returned to the United States.
According to unsigned “Notes on Discussions With the President,” which the writers of the Pentagon study found in the files of Assistant Secretary of Defense McNaughton and attributed to him, General Westmoreland told President Johnson that if he did not get the first 100,000 men, “it will be nip and tuck to oppose the reinforcements the enemy is capable of providing,” though he acknowledged this would not risk defeat. The second 100,000 troops, he said, were needed to push the allied strategy to success. [See Document #125.]
That was the point at which President Johnson, worried about enemy infiltration, asked, “When we add divisions, can’t the enemy add divisions? If so, where does it all end?”
General Westmoreland replied that the Vietcong and North Vietnamese now had 285,000 troops, or roughly eight divisions, in South Vietnam and had “the capability of deploying 12 divisions. . . . If we add 2½ divisions, it is likely the enemy will react by adding troops.”
Later, according to the notes, the general warned of prolonged fighting. He predicted that “unless the will of the enemy is broken or unless there was an unraveling of the VC infrastructure the war could go on for five years.” Reinforcements would shorten the time—“with a force level of 565,000, the war could well go on for three years,” General Westmoreland said. “With a second increment of 2 1/3 divisions leading to a total of 665,000 men, it could go on for two years.”
General Wheeler, presumably citing other reasons for a reserve call-up, voiced his concern that the United States might face military threats elsewhere—in South Korea or in the form of Soviet pressure on Berlin.
In Indochina, he went on, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were deeply concerned about the North Vietnamese build-up in Cambodia and Laos and felt that American troops “may be forced to move against these units.” Beyond that, he was quoted as putting forward the idea of possible invasion of North Vietnam: “We may wish to take offensive action against the D.R.V. with ground troops.”
Picking up that theme, General Westmoreland told the President that he had an operational plan that “envisioned an elite South Vietnamese division conducting ground operations in Laos against D.R.V. bases and routes under cover of U.S. artillery and air support.” In time, he foresaw “the eventual development of Laos as a major battlefield,” as the analysts put it.
According to the Pentagon account, General Westmoreland also told President Johnson “that he possessed contingency plans to move into Cambodia in the Chu Pong area, again using South Vietnamese forces but this time accompanied by U.S. advisers.”
Turning to the air war, General Wheeler argued that it was time to consider action “to deny the North Vietnamese use of the ports” because otherwise the American air strategy was “about to reach the point of target saturation—when all worthwhile fixed targets except the ports had been struck.”
The Pentagon study says that President Johnson concluded this discussion by asking: “What if we do not add the 2-1/3 divisions?” General Wheeler was quoted as replying that the allied military momentum would die and in some areas the enemy would recapture the initiative, meaning a longer war but not that the allies would lose. General Westmoreland’s reply, if any, was not recorded.
The President then reportedly urged his commanders to “make certain we are getting value received from the South Vietnamese troops.”
The cleavage between the military and civilian views in the Johnson Administration emerged at once.
On April 24 Under Secretary of State Katzenbach, acting in Secretary Rusk’s absence, ordered an interagency review of two major options that in effect set out the two opposing views:
• Course A—providing General Westmoreland with 200,000 more troops and, as the analysts put it, “possible . . . intensification of military actions outside South Vietnam including invasion of North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.”
• Course B—confining troop increases, in Mr. Katzenbach’s words, to “those that could be generated without calling up the reserves.” Coupled with this, the various agencies should consider “a cessation . . . of bombing North Vietnamese areas north of 20 degrees (or, if it looked sufficiently important to maximize an attractive settlement opportunity, cessation of bombing in all of North Vietnam.)”
The resistance of high civilian officials to the military proposals was virtually unanimous, according to the Pentagon study, though the position of Secretary of State Dean Rusk is not described. The three most sensitive issues were the reserve call-up, attacks on the port of Haiphong, and allied ground offensives into Laos, Cambodia or North Vietnam.
At the State Department, Assistant Secretary Bundy, in a memorandum on May 1 to Under Secretary Katzenbach, came out “totally against” ground operations against North Vietnam, asserting that the odds were 75 to 25 that it would provoke Chinese Communist intervention. He was also “strongly opposed” to sending a South Vietnamese division into Laos.
Except for allowing attacks on the Hanoi power station, Mr. Bundy was against further expansion of the air war, especially the mining of Haiphong so long as the Soviet Union refrained from sending combat weapons through the port. Both Mr. Bundy and the C.I.A., in a special intelligence estimate in early May, warned of the dangers of Soviet counteraction if the port was attacked, according to the Pentagon account.
The mobilization required to provide large troop reinforcements for the ground war, Mr. Bundy contended, would entail “a truly major debate in Congress.” With signs of rising domestic dissent over the war, he advised that “we should not get into such a debate this summer.”
The Assistant Secretary felt the “real key factors” were the political development in the South leading up to presidential elections in September. The internal political turmoil in Communist China, he suggested, was an important and potentially helpful factor because of the worry it caused in Hanoi.
In the Pentagon, resistance to the Westmoreland-Wheeler strategy came from another angle. The systems-analysis section, headed by Assistant Secretary of Defense Alain C. Enthoven, produced a series of papers late in April and early in May arguing that, contrary to General Westmoreland’s expectations, American troop increases did not produce correspondingly sharp increases in enemy losses.
“On the most optimistic basis, 200,000 more Americans would raise [the enemy’s] weekly losses to about 3,700, or about 400 a week more than they could stand,” Dr. Enthoven told Secretary McNamara in a memoradum on May 4. “In theory we’d then wipe them out in 10 years.” [See Document #127.]
A major effort to oppose the military strategy and to limit the air war was building in Secretary McNamara’s office. The moving force, the Pentagon study shows, was Assistant Secretary McNaughton, who eventually wrote key portions of Mr. McNamara’s controversial May 19 memorandum.
Roughly two years before, Mr. McNaughton had been an advocate of the “progressive squeeze” on Hanoi through air power. But by October, 1966, he was so doubtful of its effectiveness that he helped Secretary McNamara draft the first suggestion for a cutback in the air war and for political compromise.
Now, in May, 1967, the Pentagon account relates, both he and the Secretary of Defense were preparing for a more vigorous argument. First, on May 5, Mr. McNaughton sent Mr. McNamara a paper intended for inclusion in a memorandum from the Secretary to President Johnson, known as a Draft Presidential Memorandum—D.P.M.—because it not only stated the Secretary’s views but also was intended to become a policy document for the President’s signature.
The core of Mr. McNaughton’s paper was a recommendation that “all of the sorties allocated to the Rolling Thunder program be concentrated on the lines of communications—the funnel’ through which men and supplies to the south must flow—between 17-20 degrees, reserving the opt
ion and intention to strike (in the 20-23 degree area) as necessary to keep the enemy’s investment in defense and in repair crews high throughout the country.”
The proposed cutback of the air war, he said, was to reduce American pilot and aircraft losses over heavily defended Hanoi and Haiphong and not primarily to get North Vietnam to negotiate. No favorable response should be expected, Mr. McNaughton said, but “to optimize the chances” for such a response he proposed this scenario:
“To inform the Soviets quietly (on May 15) that within a few (5) days the policy would be implemented, stating no time limits and making no promise not to return to the Red River Basin to attack targets . . . and then to make an un-huckstered shift as predicted on May 20.”
Without what he called “an ultimatum-like time limit,” Mr. McNaughton suggested that North Vietnam “might be in a better posture to react favorably than has been the case in the past.” The American public should be told, he said, that the bombing was being concentrated on the southern infiltration routes to “increase the efficiency of our interdiction effort” and because “major northern military targets have been destroyed.”
According to the Pentagon account, the McNaughton paper, combined with other Defense Department proposals on the ground war, was read by Secretary McNamara at a White House meeting on May 8, although it is not clear whether Mr. McNamara also signed it and sent it to President Johnson.
Its significance, the Pentagon study reveals, is that for the first time a specific recommendation was put before President Johnson urging a cutback on the bombing to the 20th Parallel. That went a step further than the McNamara memorandum of Oct. 14, 1966 which urged the President “to consider” narrowing the bombing campaign as a possible step toward negotiations.
Several other papers went before President Johnson on May 8, according to the Pentagon account. They included one, recommending a bombing cutback, by Mr. Rostow, described in the study as a “strong bombing advocate” long in favor of attacks on the “North Vietnamese industrial target system.”
