Was Westmoreland stupid? He certainly often struck people as being not very engaged intellectually, and perhaps even worse than that. Walter Ulmer, who served in Westmoreland’s Saigon headquarters and went on to become a three-star general, recalled that “General Westmoreland’s capacity for handling cognitive complexity was severely limited.” Brig. Gen. Edwin Simmons recalled Westy announcing to a roomful of commanders in Vietnam that he would read to them the principles of war that he had carried on a card in his wallet since World War II. It turned out to be rules about getting the troops hot meals and their mail and checking their feet, which, as Simmons said, were “platitudes of squad leading.” This is yet another example of a commander under pressure regressing to his previous level of competence, a tendency American generals repeatedly showed in Vietnam as they became squad leaders in the sky.
As Army chief, Westmoreland often did not impress others at the Pentagon. “He seemed rather stupid,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. Robert Beckel, who was an aide to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “He didn’t seem to grasp things or follow the proceedings very well.” Russell Weigley, one of the foremost historians of the U.S. Army, concluded that Westmoreland’s dullness reflected poorly on President Johnson, because, he wrote, “no capable war president would have allowed an officer of such limited capacities as General William C. Westmoreland to head Military Assistance Command Vietnam for so long.” But Brig. Gen. Douglas Kinnard, himself an intellectual who went on to earn a doctorate at Princeton after retiring from the Army, and who knew Westy well, having worked for him at the Pentagon in the 1950s and in Saigon a decade later, said Westmoreland was not stupid but rather that “he was not interested in theory. He was not analytical. He was pragmatic.”
Most notably, the man who took command of the U.S. ground war in Vietnam in 1964 and would run the Army into the ground in the following three years had attended only two Army schools—the Airborne School at Fort Benning and an Army Cooks and Bakers School in Hawaii. “He was uniquely unschooled by the Army’s formal educational system,” wrote Lt. Gen. Phillip Davidson, who served as Westmoreland’s intelligence officer in Vietnam. “Westmoreland told me he considered his lack of formal military education to be an advantage in Vietnam.” He attended neither the Army War College nor its Command and General Staff College but—in keeping with the Army’s new emphasis on corporate management—became the first Army officer to attend the Harvard Business School while on active duty, taking a thirteen-week course in advanced management in the fall of 1954. “Westy was a corporation executive in uniform, a diligent, disciplined organization man who would obey orders,” Stanley Karnow wrote in his history of the Vietnam War. “Like Taylor, he saw the war as essentially an exercise in management.”
In Vietnam, Westmoreland would become the most prominent example of the Army’s shift from leadership to management. As Lt. Col. Andrew O’Meara Jr., who was decorated for valor as an intelligence officer with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Vietnam in 1969, put it,
The U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war some day may be considered one of the most magnificently managed major campaigns in the records of military history. Directed against enemy strongholds thousands of miles from home territory, the U.S. military employed a combat force of half a million men in sustained combat over many years; they had less disease, better medical treatment, better maintenance, better food and better equipment than any other military force of its size in history.
Yet, O’Meara continued, it was all for naught. Army generals failed in their fundamental task of understanding the war in which they were engaged and finding an effective way to respond. “We were beautifully managed and inadequately led,” O’Meara wrote. “We were Mr. McNamara’s Army, materially the richest and spiritually one of the poorest armies that ever took to the field.”
Westmoreland was an acolyte of Taylor’s, but the star by which he seemed to steer was MacArthur’s. The old general looms over Westmoreland’s memoirs, which open with an anecdote about an encounter with him, quote him approvingly three pages later, and invoke him repeatedly throughout the text. The book’s penultimate chapter is titled “No Substitute for Victory,” a conscious echoing of MacArthur’s battle cry against the Truman Administration.
As with MacArthur, Westmoreland’s greatest failing might have been a matter not of misunderstanding his war, but of misunderstanding how he should deal with his civilian overseers. He had inherited the MacArthur mind-set that held that political leaders should state their long-term goals and then get out of the way of the military professionals. In a major conflict such as World War II, this attitude was merely troublesome, and both President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill were strong and confident enough to sweep it aside. In smaller wars, such as Korea and Vietnam, this view would prove to be disastrous, because the essence of these conflicts was not military but political—most notably in how they ended. Neither war was a fight to the finish, as was World War II. In fact, in the Vietnam War, the politicians were not meddling in Westmoreland’s affairs; rather, he was dabbling, incompetently, in theirs. Yet he seemed to believe that civilians were ignorant and venal and simply interfered with his work, harassing him with questions and suggestions. “The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has a difficult job living with his civilian bosses, the Secretary of Defense and the President, striving to convince them in terms they can understand of matters that he views as military necessity,” Westmoreland wrote in terms that MacArthur almost certainly would endorse.
Moreover, Westmoreland’s command of the war in Vietnam would suffer from a lack of strategic direction that could only compel his superiors to get involved in what he considered his province. His explanation of how American ground troops were introduced into the war, perhaps one of the two or three most important decision points of the conflict, is worth noting for the backward way in which it came about. When President Johnson decided to bomb the North in order to encourage it to enter negotiations, Westmoreland said, “I realized that the airfields—and we had three jet-capable airfields—were extremely vulnerable. If that strategy was to be a viable one, we had to protect those airfields. I feared the Vietnamese did not have the capability of protecting the American aircraft on those airfields, and therefore, my first requests for troops were associated with the essentiality of protecting the airfields.” Like his idol, Westmoreland also tended to view events back in Washington in conspiratorial terms. “The cut-and-run people had apparently gotten to McNamara,” he stated, in trying to explain why he no longer enjoyed the full-throated support of the secretary of defense. In a meeting in Hawaii in 1966, Johnson had explicitly warned Westmoreland against trying to “pull a MacArthur on me.” The admonition might have been lost on the general. “Since I had no intention of crossing him in any way, I chose to make no response,” Westmoreland later wrote. One wonders whether President Johnson was reassured by that silence.
Westy took to South Vietnam the most conventional of approaches. “It is always the basic objective of military operations to seek and destroy the enemy and his military resources,” he believed. This axiomatic approach certainly falls in the mainstream of American military thinking, but destroying the enemy is hardly the only possible objective, and so cannot “always” be the goal of military operations. For example, weaker foes frequently will seek to run away from the enemy rather than confront him, which can stretch an adversary’s supply lines, making him more vulnerable not just to military operations but to pilfering and poor weather—one of the major lessons of the British loss in the American Revolution. Or a military force can try to make its enemy irrelevant, or try to make him turn on the population and so lose popular support—another lesson of that earlier war. Or, as in Vietnam, a foe might just want to hunker down and outlast the Americans.
Westmoreland and William DePuy, his chief of operations in Vietnam, tended to regard the Vietnamese people more as an impediment than as the prize. They were hardly alo
ne. One of the most striking moments in Norman Schwarzkopf’s autobiography is his recollection that in 1965, when he was an adviser in Vietnam, he had tried to take his Vietnamese counterpart to an American officers’ club, only to be told by the club manager, “We don’t serve Vietnamese.” That was a symbolic error, but the approach also carried significant tactical costs. When Westmoreland chased the enemy away into the hill country, the Viet Cong would move into the areas left uncovered, the people there now unprotected from Communist retaliation.
Frederick Weyand commanded the 25th Infantry Division from 1964 to 1967, leading it into Vietnam. He eventually would become the last American commander in Vietnam and then in 1974 would become the chief of staff of the Army. Looking back, he charged that the Westmoreland approach was essentially futile:
I, of course, was not at all happy when my division would be ordered by General Westmoreland to move north to deal with an enemy base area. Sometimes the main force units were in there. More often than not, they weren’t. Whenever I had to go off on these missions of search and destroy, looking for main force units, I had to leave some or all of Hau Nghia province uncovered. My experience was not a happy one because when we returned I would find that once again the VC had moved in, intimidated the local officials, assassinated school teachers, and intimidated the people who were raising crops. . . . In general [it] set back a lot of progress we’d made. I was continually objecting . . . about this business of going off to fight the big war.
Westmoreland came to embody a certain facelessness on the part of American leadership. Few people relate anecdotes about Westy as a war leader, and when they do, the stories often are unflattering. It is no accident that one of the most illuminating studies on American generals in Vietnam, by retired Brig. Gen. Douglas Kinnard, is titled The War Managers. Historian John Gates observed that “Vietnam seemed to be a war fought by committee.” The two most remembered officers of the war, he added, probably are Gen. Westmoreland and Lt. William Calley, of My Lai notoriety. Maxwell Taylor, the general who might be most responsible for getting us into the war and for some of its basic missteps, is hardly remembered in connection with it, or at all, except by military historians.
CHAPTER 17
William DePuy
World War II–style generalship in Vietnam
Unlike Westmoreland, William DePuy was a brilliant general, thoughtful and dedicated to constantly improving his understanding of his profession and of the conflict at hand. Unfortunately, in Vietnam, his understanding of both would be proved lacking.
As a young officer in Normandy in 1944, DePuy had seen ineptitude among American commanders lead to two months of slaughter of the soldiers of the hard-luck 90th Division. “We went to war with incompetents in charge,” he said about Normandy. “That incompetence trickled down and caused the tactical failures . . . and the incredible casualties. All this was indelibly stamped on my mind and attitude ever after for both good and bad.” That summer, he saw two of his division commanders fired. In Vietnam, in March 1966, DePuy finally became a division commander himself, moving from Westmoreland’s staff to take over the 1st Infantry Division, of which Marshall had been a member during World War I, and which Terry Allen had commanded in World War II. In an astonishing irony, DePuy would himself come close to being fired.
In leading the 1st Division, DePuy, a charismatic “banty rooster” of a man, at five foot seven and 145 pounds, applied two lessons he had learned in World War II. First, he focused on applying a tremendous amount of firepower—mainly artillery and air strikes—on enemy positions. Second, he removed anyone he deemed ineffective. Sadly, neither lesson really worked. The lavish use of firepower was inappropriate in the conditions of Vietnam, a limited war fought among the people.
The second lesson, the swift relief of failing officers, was unwelcome in the U.S. Army of the 1960s. “I wanted people who were flexibly minded, didn’t need a lot of instructions, would get cracking, and would get out and do something useful on their own once they were given a general direction,” he later explained. In his one year of leading the 1st Infantry Division, DePuy would fire eleven of his top officers, including seven battalion commanders, plus many majors, captains, and sergeants major, for a grand total of fifty-six reliefs in one year, according to Gen. Donn Starry, who had his office review Army personnel records to arrive at that number. Starry did not disagree with this approach and in later years would argue that the problem in Vietnam was that other division commanders had not followed DePuy’s unforgiving example.
DePuy’s ax-swinging approach to officer management caught the unhappy attention of Gen. Harold K. Johnson, by then the Army chief of staff. “If every division commander relieved people like DePuy, I’d soon be out of lieutenant colonels and majors,” Johnson complained to subordinates. “He just eats them up like peanuts.” Johnson wrote to DePuy instructing him to slow down on reliefs, to give people second chances, and to stop being so capricious. Part of the division commander’s job, Johnson noted, was to train people. It was a striking line to take, in particular because Johnson, as a colonel in the Korean War fifteen years earlier, had witnessed the turnaround in morale and battlefield success brought about by Gen. Ridgway, in part through a series of dismissals of division and regimental commanders.
The written message did not take, so on Christmas Day of 1966, Gen. Johnson, on a trip to Vietnam, repeated it in person to DePuy. Only a bit more than two decades had passed since Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley led American forces in Europe with the philosophy that a division commander must relieve failing subordinates, and if he will not, he must be relieved himself. As Bradley wrote in his memoirs, “Many a division commander has failed not because he lacked the capacity for command but only because he declined to be hard enough on his subordinate commanders.” But times had changed, and now the Army chief of staff came with a far different message: Instead of pushing a division commander to relieve subordinates, he would all but order him to stop.
Gen. Johnson’s Christmas visit began with a briefing by DePuy to the visiting chief of staff and his entourage. DePuy began discussing personnel issues, complaining that “he was not getting his share of the qualified people.” Gen. Johnson said nothing, but after the briefing, as they were walking to the mess hall, DePuy brought up the subject again. The Army chief finally said to him, “Bill, to me the mark of a great leader is a man who can make do with the resources he has.”
DePuy was nothing if not tenacious. Later that day, DePuy and his assistant division commander, Brig. Gen. James Hollingsworth, met with the Army chief of staff in DePuy’s “hootch,” his personal living quarters. Gen. Johnson turned to Hollingsworth, who was as much a natural-born brawler as DePuy. “You are relieving too many battalion commanders,” Johnson said to Hollingsworth. “You are supposed to train them.”
“I’ll answer that,” DePuy intervened.
“No, sir, he asked me,” Hollingsworth said. Then Hollingsworth looked at the Army chief and said, “General, I had the idea that you were going to train them and we were to fight them over here and save soldiers’ lives.” It was a remark verging on impudence.
DePuy backed Hollingsworth. “I’m not here to run a training ground,” he shouted. “They get people killed!” In DePuy’s view, command was a privilege to be earned, not a right. He thought it unfair to soldiers to saddle them with battalion commanders who had never been prepared by serving time as battalion executive officers or operations officers.
DePuy explained to Johnson his formative World War II experience. “I fought in Normandy with three battalion commanders who should have been relieved in peacetime,” he once told an interviewer, and he likely said something similar to Johnson. “One was a coward, one was a small-time gangster from Chicago . . . and the other was a drunk.” Harking back to World War II was not the most politic of approaches, given that Johnson had been captured at Bataan early in that war and spent the rest of i
t in a Japanese prison camp. DePuy told the Army chief of staff how, back in 1944, “we suffered inexcusable and enormous casualties” because of the failure to remove clearly incompetent commanders. “In the six weeks in Normandy prior to the breakout, the 90th Division lost 100 percent of its soldiers and 150 percent of its officers. . . . That’s indelibly marked on my mind.”
DePuy dug in deeper. As a matter of personal integrity, he told the Army chief, he couldn’t change. It was quite a challenge. “I either would have to be removed,” DePuy later recalled, “or I would continue to remove officers who I thought didn’t show much sign of learning their trade and, at the same time, were getting a lot of people killed. You can’t get a soldier back once he’s killed.”
Gen. Johnson held to his sharply different view. “I can’t have you be the filter for all the best officers we have in the Army to see if they meet your approval,” he replied.
DePuy emerged from the half-hour confrontation dejected. “The chief of staff just left, and I’m probably going to be relieved,” he confided to Sidney Berry, commander of his 1st Brigade. He followed up by writing a letter of self-defense to Johnson, listing the relieved officers and the reasons for their ousters:
The Generals Page 23
