Former commander of US forces in Vietnam,
General William Westmoreland, in 1972.
General William Westmoreland, who commanded US forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, died last night. He was 91.
For Westmoreland, Vietnam was an exercise in frustration. In his memoirs, A Soldier Reports, published in 1980, five years after North Vietnamese troops marched into Saigon, Westmoreland argued that with enough resources, the US could have won the war.
In particular, he believed that another 200,000 US troops after the 1968 Tet offensive, when the Vietcong guerrillas suffered heavy casualties, would have been enough to turn the tide. But President Lyndon Johnson and his defence secretary, Robert McNamara, decided it was politically unacceptable to boost the US military presence. At the time, 500,000 American troops were already in Vietnam.
What comes through in Westmoreland's writings is a certain political naivety. He only seemed to see the war through a military perspective, neglecting the messy political calculations that complicated the equation.
Westmoreland saw the Tet offensive as a strategic opportunity, a chance to go after the enemy when he had taken a knock. But what seemed to be beyond his grasp was the enormous psychological effect the offensive had on the public back home.
For years, the American public had been fed a steady stream of news in the so-called living room war about how well the war had been going - this was the spin coming from Westmoreland and the White House. Suddenly, Americans were seeing TV images of Vietcong guerrillas fighting their way into the grounds of the US embassy. If the war had been going so well, Americans wondered, how on earth had the Vietcong managed to catch American and South Vietnamese troops napping?
The reality failed to match the spin and Westmoreland became the fall guy. Not long after the Tet offensive, the administration replaced Westmoreland, who had come to personify America's military impasse in Vietnam.
Even if Westmoreland was right about the Tet offensive - that it was a military failure for Hanoi - it is difficult to see how more American troops would have turned the tide. It was true that after 1968, the Vietcong - mostly composed of south Vietnamese guerrillas - was finished as a military force. But the war entered another phase as the conflict became one that pitted regular North Vietnamese troops against the South Vietnamese army backed by the US military.
Westmoreland believed that more bombing, more troops and an extension of the war into Laos and Cambodia would have broken Hanoi. It was that kind of thinking that prompted the author Jessica Mitford to ask him whether he suffered from "massive self-delusion" - a question Westmoreland dismissed as nonsense.
General Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese military commander, who saw off the French and the Americans, was probably closer to the mark.
He told the historian Stanley Karnow in 1990: "He was a cultivated soldier who had read many military texts. Yet he committed an error following the Tet offensive, when he requested 206,000 troops. He could have put in 300,000, even 400,000 more men. It would have made no difference."
Westmoreland himself said: "There comes a time in every battle - in every war - when both sides become discouraged by the seemingly endless requirement for more effort, more resources and more faith. At this point the side which presses on with renewed vigour is the one to win."
In Vietnam, Westmoreland overestimated the vigour that America was prepared to bring to bear on a conflict on the other side of the world.