perfidy

A couple military history items caught my eye over the last week.

The first is a book review by Mac Owens. In it, he examines two books by Richard Sorley - Vietnam Chronicles: The Abrams Tapes, 1968-1972 and a related, earlier book - A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam. The first book is transcriptions of audio tapes made while General Abrams was in command of American Forces in Vietnam, and is the raw material from which the second book was created.

A Better War makes the case that in the wake of the Tet Offensive and General Westmoreland's replacement, American forces were winning the war on the ground in Southeast Asia while it was being lost in Congress and at the peace talks.

Sorley's argument is controversial, but I find it persuasive. The fact is that most studies of the Vietnam war focus on the years up until 1968. Those studies that examine the period after the Tet offensive emphasize the diplomatic attempts to extricate the United States from the conflict, treating the military effort as nothing more than a holding action. But as William Colby observed in a review of Robert McNamara's memoir, In Retrospect, by limiting serious consideration of the military situation in Vietnam to the period before mid-1968, historians leave Americans with a record "similar to what we would know if histories of World War II stopped before Stalingrad, Operation Torch in North Africa and Guadalcanal in the Pacific."

Colby was right. To truly understand the Vietnam war, it is absolutely imperative to come to grips with the years after 1968. A new team was in place. General Abrams had succeeded General William Westmoreland as commander of the U.S. Military Assistance Command-Vietnam in June 1968, only months after the Tet offensive. He joined Ellsworth Bunker, who had assumed the post of ambassador to the Saigon government the previous spring. Colby, a career CIA officer, soon arrived to coordinate the pacification efforts.

Far from constituting a mere holding action, the approach the new American team followed constituted a positive strategy for ensuring the survival of South Vietnam. As Sorley wrote in A Better War, Bunker, Abrams, and Colby

brought different values to their tasks, operated from a different understanding of the nature of the war, and applied different measures of merit and different tactics. They employed diminishing resources in manpower, materiel, money, and time as they raced to render the South Vietnamese capable of defending themselves before the last American forces were withdrawn. They went about that task with sincerity, intelligence, decency, and absolute professionalism, and in the process they came very close to achieving the goal of a viable nation and a lasting peace.

The contrast between the two phases of the war are enormous. Max Boot, in The Savage Wars of Peace, also discusses how the American effort was finally beginning to work - thanks to new strategies like the Marines' CAP program for pacifying the rural south. Abrams, in the larger war, moved away from Westmoreland's ill-conceived large unit "sweep and clear" and "search and destroy tactics.

Abrams's approach focused not on the destruction of enemy forces per se but on protection of the South Vietnamese population by controlling key areas. He then concentrated on attacking the enemy's "logistics nose" (as opposed to a "logistics tail"). Since the North Vietnamese lacked heavy transport within South Vietnam, they had to pre-position supplies forward of their sanctuaries before launching an offensive. Americans were still involved in heavy fighting, as illustrated by two major actions in the A Shau Valley during the first half of 1969: the 9th Marine Regiment's Operation Dewey Canyon, and the 101st Airborne Division's epic battle for "Hamburger Hill." Most people don't realize that, in terms of U.S. casualties, 1969 was second only to 1968 as the most costly year. But now North Vietnamese offensive timetables were being disrupted by preemptive allied attacks, buying more time for Vietnamization.

...The 1972 Easter offensive [the first full scale invasion from the North] revealed the fruits of Abrams's efforts. This was the biggest offensive push of the war, greater in magnitude than either the Tet offensive [conducted by Viet Cong guerillas] or the final assault of 1975 [Another invasion from the North.] While the United States provided massive air and naval support, and there were inevitable failures on the part of some South Vietnamese units, all in all, the South Vietnamese fought well. Then, having blunted the Communist thrust, they recaptured territory that had been lost to Hanoi.

The terrible thing is that even as late as 1975, the Vietnam war could have been won. Had we lifted our heads from the Watergate scandal a little bit, and sent the military supplies and air support we promised, the South likely could have resisted the 1975 invasion. But short of ammunition and all other critical supplies, the South lost, and millions ended up refugees, or worse, sent into reeducation camps.

Another look at military history second guessing is Victor David Hanson's look at the atomic bomb sixty years after their only wartime use. There are some who still debate the utility of dropping the bomb. But the case is pretty clear that in that case, at least, the atom bomb was far preferable to the alternative.

The alternative to 300,000 killed in two atom bomb attacks is this:

• At least that many, and almost certainly far more, civilians killed in any future bombing campaign prior to an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. Curtis Le May had a nearby airbase in Okinawa, won at great cost just a month earlier. He had access to ever increasing numbers of B-29s, and would certainly have gotten access to whole fleets of B-17s, B-24s and other aircraft from the European theater. The fire bombing of Tokyo may have killed nearly a half million people. We didn't need nukes to annihilate cities, a part of accepted American strategy for over three years. Le May would have argued for laying waste to Japan by incindiaries.
• The invasion of the small island of Okinawa cost 50,000 American casualties and 200,000 Japanese and Okinawa dead. Would the invasion of Kyushu and then Honshu have been easier? Conservative estimates of American casualties range upwards from a quarter million, and Japanese dead in the millions. (American casualties for the whole war were only about twice that number.) Japanese farmers were being issued spears. 10,000 kamikazes awaited the invasion fleet. It would have been the bloodiest campaign in history.
• 10-15 million Chinese died in the war. Continued Japanese presence in China - and fighting there between the Japanese, Soviets and Americans would have resulted in hundreds of thousands more dead.
• Something Hanson does not mention is the fact that as a result of the lethally effective American blockade (American submarines sank almost the entire merchant fleet of Japan in three years) and American disruption of transportation networks, the Home Islands were no more than a few months away from famine. A full scale invasion would have completely cut off the Japanese from other sources of supply, and progressively hindered what food distribution capability they retained. Some estimates suggest that a further 2-3 million Japanese might have died in 1946 from starvation even if we hadn't invaded, but merely maintained the blockades and bombing campaigns.

Not a pretty picture. War is often about terrible choices - and about taking the least bad option.