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Published Airpower Journal - Summer 1989
Maj Earl H. Tilford, Jr., USAF
NEARLY 15 years have passed since helicopters hauled the remnants of America's military and embassy staffs from Saigon in ignominious defeat. During that time, historians, political scientists, sociologists, and soldiers have debated the war and its lessons. The debate has, with time, become less acrimonious but no less indicative of the divisions that split the nation during the war.
Then, as now, that cleavage leads to be along politically ideological lines, dividing into liberal (or dovish) and conservative (hawkish) points of view. From the mid 1960s until the early eighties, the more dovish interpretations favored by the political Left dominated Vietnam scholarships. While the Left has never been unanimous an any issue, it generally held that the Vietnam War was either a mistake or miserably run. Toward the center, mainstream liberals argued that the war resulted from misguided but noble aspirations gone astray. Toward the Left fringes, the radicals hold that Vietnam issued from the degeneration of a capitalist society grasping at neo-imperialism and that a cruel technology of destruction had been unleashed on the peace-loving people of Vietnam to benefit a corrupt industrial complex and to edify military bureaucracies. As the war continued and the frustrations increased, the arguments moved from the middle toward the fringes, but Left's radicals never dominated the scholastic community or its interpretations, even at the height of the antiwar movement.
In the late 1970s, a conservative point of view began to emerge, eventually to be dubbed "revisionist" by many leftist scholars. Guenter Lewy, University of Massachusetts professor of political science, published America in Vietnam in 1978.1 He held that, while American policy in Vietnam might have been misguided, it was not evil and that the American military fought honorably and well, given the constraints of a flawed strategy. It became respectable to interpret Vietnam from other than the antiwar perspective, and since 1978 what is now called the revisionist movement blossomed. Like the earlier leftist interpretations, the revisionists are diverse and often polemical, but they cannot be tarred with a single brush.
Conservative revisionists, like their dovish counterparts, run the gamut from a heavy concentration of centrists to the reactionary fringe, where one finds writers like Adm Ulysses S. Grant Sharp who, in 1978, published Strategy for Defeat,2 which blamed policies devised by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara for America's defeat in Vietnam. Though extreme, men like Admiral Sharp and other retired senior officers set the tone for the right-wing revisionists to follow.
The bellwether of the revisionist school, however, is Col Harry G. Summers, Jr., who published On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War in 1982.3 At first glance, Summers' appraisal of the war seems critical, but on closer examination the Army's brass decided that it reinforced traditional concepts of warfare and ought to be read by every officer over the rank of captain. Furthermore, On Strategy has become the bible of the revisionist movement, and Summers has emerged as a leading prophet.
Summers' central thesis was that a lack of understanding of the fundamentals of military theory and strategy, and a major disjunction in the relationship between military strategy and national policy fostered a flawed approach that ultimately led to America's defeat in Vietnam. He presented what has become the classic paradox of the Vietnam War: that the American forces won all the battles but still lost the war. Summers concluded that defeat was unnecessary and that if civilian as well as military leaders understood traditional concepts of military strategy, the United States would not have squandered its might and spilled the blood of its young men In a misguided effort against a secondary guerrilla force in South Vietnam. By indicting generals along with civilian leaders, Summers moved away from the simplistics of U.S. Grant Sharp and coincidentally, stimulated a revival in the study of military history and strategy at the Army War College and Army Command and General Staff College.
Summers became the US Army's version of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Soviet house dissident whose critiques are institutionally acceptable if occasionally painful. In effect, Summers' thesis was welcomed, for it vindicated the Army's traditional approach to conventional war. Furthermore, it provided the revisionists with a group of shared assumptions. First among these assumptions was the concept that North Vietnam was behind the insurgency in South Vietnam and the war was, therefore, more conventional than revolutionary. Second, because the war (as they saw it) was conventional, it could have been won by doing what the Army along with the rest of the American military establishment does best-employ massive firepower to take and hold landmasses or specific geographical points as steps toward gaining the victory that they believed would accrue when the enemy's army is engaged and destroyed. After all, if you grab them by the ears, their hearts and minds must follow. Summers' formula enforces the territorial perspective. The revisionists generally believe that the war could have been won militarily if an Army thrust across the Ho Chi Minh Trail had been coupled with a Marine amphibious book into North Vietnam at Vinh. An "unleashed" Air Force, meanwhile, would have closed Haiphong Harbor and the rail and highway routes leading into China and, perhaps, destroyed the dike system along the Red River. If these things had been done, many conservatives and revisionists maintain that victory was possible.
Invasions of Laos and North Vietnam, bombing the dikes . . . this would have meant war. Bingo! Third, the United States needed a declaration of war to focus the energies and reinforce the commitment of its people. Additionally, a declaration of war would have cleared the way for wider military action to conclude the conflict quickly. With a formal declaration of hostilities, the press could have been censored, the draft law rewritten and made fairer, and the shenanigans of some peace activists, like trips to North Vietnam, would have been legally treasonous.
Three recent books argue variations of these themes. Norman B. Hannah, a retired foreign service officer, develops the territorial theme in The Key to Failure: Laos and the Vietnam War.4 Hannah argues that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was the tactical linchpin in North Vietnam's strategy and that when United States signed the Declaration and Protocol on the Neutrality of Laos on 23 July 1962, it foreclosed on its chances for victory in South Vietnam by predestining itself to strategic failure. Laos was supposed to be neutralized by these accords, and all outside parties were to withdraw their forces. Hannah makes the point that, while most American advisers and military personnel assigned to Laos (over 650) left, thousands of North Vietnamese troops remained in eastern Laos to develop and maintain the Ho Chi Minh Trail. By not objecting, Washington tacitly agreed to this violation, and covert operations--which from 1962 until 1965 dominated the United States' tactical approach to the trail--amounted to little more than harassment. In effect, the Geneva agreements of 1962 provided Hanoi with a free hand to develop a valuable logistical pipeline to the South while putting Washington at a strategic disadvantage, in that South Vietnam was laid open, as Hannah states, "to a slow invasion masked as an insurrection."5
Like Summers, Hannah contends that American forces should have been sent into Laos to close down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But, according to Hannah, fear of escalating the war prevented Washington from embarking on such an adventure. The American military, for its part, was dominated by generals and admirals who adhered to the "no more Koreas" syndrome, holding that the United States should not become involved in a major land war in Asia. Some argued against the invasion of Laos, contending that it would take seven to eight divisions to close the trail. What Hannah does not recognize is that many generals, like their civilian superiors, never really believed that closing the Ho Chi Minh Trail with a blocking force was necessary. Led by the US Air Force, they turned to high technology in search of that silver bullet capable of working strategic and tactical magic. The Igloo White sensor system, which the Air Force started deploying throughout the trait complex in 1967, was used to monitor traffic so that gunships could be directed against trucks as they made their way southward. Furthermore, during the three years of Rolling Thunder--the aerial campaign directed against North Vietnam from March 1965 through October 1968--Laos took a backseat in sortie allocation. But, when President Johnson curtailed the bombing on 31 March and then ended it on 31 October 1968, additional planes became available for use in Laos. Two weeks later, the Air Force began Operation Commando Hunt, a series of aerial campaigns to interdict the flow of men and supplies to the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and Vietcong units fighting in South Vietnam. This argument, focusing as it does on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, is fundamental to the revisionists' "territorial approach" in that the trail was a physical and geographical conduit through which South Vietnam was invaded by the North's armies. As such, this argument works against the liberal contention that the war in South Vietnam was a revolutionary or civil war and the United States therefore had no business intervening. Furthermore, because it focuses on geography as the key to a conventional invasion, the argument implies that more or less traditional forms of force application would have been relevant.
Lt Gen Phillip B. Davidson's Vietnam at War; The History, 1946-1975 is a comprehensive, well-constructed history.6 Davidson was chief intelligence officer for Gen William C. Westmoreland and Gen Creighton W. Abrams. A sophisticated scholar-soldier with a grasp of the complex relationships between strategy and national policy, Davidson is a far cry from U.S. Grant Sharp with his simplistic bombast aimed at Robert McNamara and other civilians perceived as interfering in military affairs.
Davidson focuses on Gen Vo Nguyen Giap through three decades of war. That makes sense because Giap was, after all, there at the founding of the Vietminh in 1941, the defeat of the French in 1954, and was still serving as minister of defense when the final victory came in 1975. While Davidson contends that Giap is a giant among history's greatest captains, he also challenges conventional wisdom on several issues. Many have argued, for instance, that the siege at Khe Sanh was a feint on Giap's part to divert attention while the Vietcong and PAVN positioned themselves for the Tet offensive. Davidson claims that this is nonsense. Giap was too good a general to tie down two or three divisions, numbering upward of 40,000 men, to divert four battalions of US Marines. Furthermore, he paid too high a price in casualties from the pounding those divisions took while dug into static positions around Khe Sanh. Davidson holds that the siege at Khe Sanh was phase one in a three-part plan. The initial phase diverted attention from preparations for an attack on the cities. This attack was supposed to be a prelude to phase two: the disintegration of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) due to the ferocious, Vietcong and PAVN offensive. When the ARVN collapsed, Giap reasoned (being a good Communist) that the people would rise up against the Nguyen Van Thieu government and its American puppet masters. Then, according to this logic, the United States would have no alternative other than negotiate its way out of its coastal enclaves. During those negotiations, phase three would be consummated when the PAVN overran Khe Sanh. Hopefully, the capture of 5,000 US Marines would have the same demoralizing effect that the fall of Dien Bien Phu had had on the eve of the Geneva Conference of 1954.
The Tet offensive failed, however, because Giap was wrong in his major assumptions. The ARVN did not disintegrate but fought better than it ever had--better, Davidson claims, than it would ever fight again. The people did not join their would-be liberators but fled from the Communists to the safety of government-held areas. Finally, American firepower devastated the Vietcong in and around the cities as well as the PAVN units laying siege to Khe Sanh. But, according to Davidson, the real irony is that Giap hated this plan. He had inherited it from Gen Nguyen Chi Thanh, a long-time rival who was killed in a B-52 strike in South Vietnam in July 1967. Davidson argues that Giap considered the Tet offensive a diversion from the true course of revolutionary warfare based on a protracted war using guerrilla tactics. Here Davidson departs from the mainstream of revisionism, but he does not go far enough. He ought to consider the arguments of those people who hold that it was the protracted guerrilla war that ultimately defeated the United States by sapping the national will while bleeding the nation's youth in a seemingly endless and pointless conflict.
Unlike many revisionists, Davidson holds that "the strategy of revolutionary war was the key [Davidson's emphasis] ingredient of the Communist victory."7 Like a revisionist, however, he contends that the use of overwhelming military force would have brought a quick victory. Then, within three paragraphs, Davidson argues that America's greatest failing was that soldiers and statesmen alike failed to understand the kind of war on which the United States had embarked and that "the American leadership grasped only vaguely the broad principles of revolutionary war and never understood its nuances."8 Rather than labeling Davidson an ideological schizophrenic, it might be better to consider him intellectually eclectic and mentally nimble enough to reach conclusions outside the parameters of neatly defined ideological biases that too often skew scholarly interpretations.
Hannah's Key to Failure and Davidson's Vietnam at War are generally convincing, but the authors do not address why the American generals and their civilian leaders failed so completely when it came to devising an appropriate strategy. Retired Air Force Col Jack Broughton, author of Going Downtown: The War against Hanoi and Washington, is not as sophisticated as Hannah and Davidson in presenting his arguments, but--perhaps more perspicaciously than either of them--he gets to the heart of the matter: "The objective of our effort in Southeast Asia was to hurt Ho Chi Minh, and thus make him . . . do the things we considered to be in our national interest."9 And Broughton was at the tip of lance, "going downtown" to bomb Hanoi and Haiphong in his F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bomber.
Going Downtown,like Thud Ridge-- Broughton's first book published two decades ago--reflects the bitterness of one who feels very keenly that he and his comrades were betrayed. The sense or concept of betrayal is not unusual in literature about the Vietnam War, but in the revisionist genre, it is almost exclusively focused on civilian officials, antiwar activists, and selected members of the press. While Broughton probably would not disagree with most revisionists on this particular pantheon of villains, he focuses much of his vituperation on senior Air Force officers and their courtiers who "would not listen to those who were doing the fighting."10 According to Broughton, the problem was not only that the strategy behind Rolling Thunder was flawed but also that Air Force leadership, dominated as it was during the Vietnam War by bomber pilots whose thinking had not advanced beyond World War II and massive bomber raids over the Ruhr Valley, was out of touch with the war at hand. Broughton subjects Gens John D. Ryan, James Wilson, and John Vogt to the kind of criticism usually reserved for Secretary McNamara.
Broughton felt betrayed by Air Force leaders who did not speak out forcefully enough against the needless slaughter of aircrews who flew into North Vietnam on the wings of a prosaically conventional doctrine devised to bomb Nazi Germany. He faults the Air Force's leadership for stifling creativity and innovation: "It was awful enough to have all those operationally uneducated folks in Washington telling its which way to turn, but then we, our own air force, went and did it to ourselves by discouraging new ideas."11
Of the three authors, Broughton may have the best understanding of what went on and what went wrong in Vietnam. The problem with people who argue from either the liberal or conservative perspective is that they too often become polarized around polemics. Each of these authors goes beyond that and reminds us that the Right, like the Left, is hardly monolithic. That is as it should be, given the enormous complexity of the issues attendant to the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, the revisionists and the liberals could learn a great deal if they would modulate the rhetoric and consider alternative points of view outside the confines of preconceived ideological notions. Revisionists, for instance, could learn from Professor Loren Baritz, who--in his cultural history of the Vietnam era, Backfire12--makes the point that an overwhelming sense of hubris led Americans, including members of the military, to the notion that as a nation we were both righteous and invincible. The Left would do well to consider the works reviewed here because they offer insights into a thinking process that not only applied during the Vietnam War but also continues to dominate certain segments of policy and strategy formulation. Scholars, both from the Right and the Left, need to move toward an approach to the Vietnam War that will contribute to a better understanding of what went on and what went wrong during that terribly divisive era. Only an objective appraisal of the many facets of that war will lead to a better understanding of the dynamics of that conflict; and to arrive at that point, scholars ought to abandon the rhetoric of the 1960's, from whatever quarter, as they search for truth and understanding in the late eighties and nineties.
Notes
1. Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York; Oxford University Press, 1978).
2. Adm Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in Retrospect (San Rafael, Calif.; Presidio Press, 1978).
3. Col Harry G. Summers, Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982).
4. Norman B. Hannah, The Key to Failure: Laos and the Vietnam War (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1987).
5. Ibid., 199.
6. Lt Gen Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History, 1946-1975 (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1988).
7. Ibid., 799.
8. Ibid
9. Jack Broughton, Going Downtown; The War against Hanoi and Washington (New York: Orion Books, 1988), xiv.
10. Ibid., xvi.
11. Ibid., 105.
12. Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (New York: W. Morrow, 1985).
Maj Earl H. Tilford, Jr. (BA and MA, University of Alabama; PhD, George Washington University), is a research fellow at the Air University Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research, and Education (AUCADRE), Maxwell AFB, Alabama. Previous assignments have included the Office of Air Force History and editor, Air University Review. He is the author of A History of Air Force Search and Rescue in Southeast Asia, 1961-1975 and is currently working on a book tentatively titled "Setup: What the Air Force Did in Vietnam, and Why."
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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