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Uh huh. Mm hmm. From Gainesville, Florida. Mhm. Hello, I'm Mike Cannon. And this is conversation. William Childs Westmoreland is a native South Carolinian who earned an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. He earned the rank, their of first captain of his class and thus joined very select company that includes Robert E.

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Lee, John J. Pershing and Douglas MacArthur. In the Second World War, he earned battle ribbons in North Africa, Sicily, France and Germany. After the war, he held a number of additional commands, including that of a paratroop brigade in Korea. In 1952 and 1953 he also served as an instructor at the Command and General Staff School at Leavenworth and the United States Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania.

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He took courses himself, including a graduate course at Harvard University. For three years, he was superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point, and in June of 1964 he took command of US Mac V. United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, where within the space of four years time, he put together an American field army of half a million men.

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It was possibly the best equipped, the most mobile and highest firepower Army ever put together under any flag. Time magazine named him Man of the Year. He addressed a joint session of Congress, and in 1968 he returned home to the United States to end his military career in the highest office of his service, that of Chief of staff United States Army.

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He retired from military service in 1972 and resides today in his home state of South Carolina. A conversation with General William Westmoreland When I return in a Moment five Live presents conversation from the University of Florida, a discussion of social, political, scientific and religious issues of the day.

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Your host is Dr Michael Vegan in Professor of History and Ethics, an assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida. Okay, General Westmoreland, welcome to conversation and welcome to the University of Florida. Pleasure to be here. It's good to have you.

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As I had the chance to say before we went on the air. I met you at the Army War College in 1971 or 72 you look no different today. I would hope you could say the same about me. It's good having you here on our campus.

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And I'd like to have the chance to talk with you a little bit about strategy conducted by the United States forces under your command in Vietnam in the years when you were commanding officer of all our forces there and not only our forces, but, uh, a multinational force.

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And as a matter of fact, I believe the multinational force under your command was larger than than that which served in Korea. Is that correct? What you say that that's probably in numbers. Yes, but technically, it wasn't under my command, but they were on the battlefield.

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And certainly I coordinate their efforts. I have a book in hand, entitled On Strategy. The Vietnam War In Context. It is written by Colonel Harry G. Summers Junior, an instructor at the Army War College Colonel of Infantry. I'd like to read a couple of sentences from his opening paragraph and ask your reaction, he said.

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One of the most frustrating aspects of the Vietnam War, from the army's point of view, is that as far as logistics and tactics were concerned. We succeeded in everything we set out to do on the battlefield itself. The army was unbeatable. In engagement after engagement, the forces of the Viet Cong and of the North Vietnamese army were thrown back with terrible losses.

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Yet in the end, it was North Vietnam, not the United States that emerged victorious. How could we have succeeded so well yet failed so miserably? First of all, do you agree with his promise? And then I do. I agree with the premise. Um, what happened that caused this anomaly?

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That we succeeded so well in every major battle we fought and yet did not win the final victory. The war became progressively on, more unpopular as it was allowed, allowed to drag on and on and on. And the default was a political one. It was not a military one.

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It was a political default. Mhm, uh, as you well appreciate. I think all thoughtful people do The President, United States as a commander in chief and the general strategy of the war is set by a political authority. And this is appropriate with, of course, advice of the military, specifically the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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The war started off as an insurgency war as it was indeed, but nevertheless initiated by the regime in Illinois, it became necessary to keep South Vietnam from being overrun by the guerrillas and later by the regular forces of North Vietnam. Insufficient attention was given to the Hanoi regime that prosecuted the war from the beginning.

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And it's Colonel Summers thesis so and, I think, a valid one, that more attention should been given to the bombing campaign against North Vietnam. And he even suggests that there should be some invasions of North Vietnam. Of course, as far as politics is concerned and politics controls everything in our society fallen in the final analysis, the president has to deal in the art of the possible.

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And even if President Johnson had wanted to take the war to Vietnam, whether he would have gotten by with it politically Uh huh, is very questionable. Colonel Summers advances the plan that was put forward by one of your deputy commanders, General Bruce Palmer Jr. Namely that US forces should have been used to penetrate the Dems and then cut across Laos to tie and thus seal off totally South Vietnam from the North Vietnamese Army and with the N V a neutralized then the Arvin, or Army of the Republic of Vietnam, uh, could be used to root out the insurgents.

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What do you think of that thesis? Did you ever consider that seriously? Palmer worked for me and he developed that plan based on my precise directions and the guidelines that I put forth. I had three plans to go into Laos and cut the whole human trail.

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I wanted very much to do this. It was very much on my mind Ambassador I talked to about and he was actually my boss on the scene. In addition to that, I reported militarily to the commander in Chief Pacific. And, uh, it was Admiral Sharp and Admiral Sharp, Ambassador Bunker and, uh, Ambassador Lodge were very keen on our cutting the ocean entry of going into Laos.

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And I had three plans that were made. Joe Palmer made one of those plans, but it could have been done. All we needed was a political authority which was never forthcoming. Were you surprised that with the massive firepower that we brought to bear in Vietnam, that the enemy kept coming?

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That they seemed willing to sacrifice lives on an unprecedented or what seemed to be an unprecedented scale. Well, they expended a lot of men, no question about that. The bombing campaign was not properly conducted, it was based on gradual escalation and the war was off. And on depending upon the political activities at home, we've had a number of any number of cessation of bombing any number of cease fires, all of which objected to.

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The British consul in Hanoi in 1967 wrote an article about two years ago, and he said that his contacts with the authorities in Illinois had led him to the conclusion that there were about ready to capitulate at the end of 67 because the effectiveness of the bombing, uh, so the bombing was reasonably effective.

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But it could have been, I think, quite successful. If they had not been the restraints imposed on it that were the case and that couple with the cutting the whole human trail and when I thought that might get authority to do that was after the defeat of the Tet offensive and if we had cut his supply line physically, you cannot block a line line of communication.

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You cannot stop ground troops except by having ground troops on the ground to confront them. You cannot do it with their power, which these were all political decisions we we used other means to Did we not along the DMZ e the so called McNamara trace where we had automatic weapons sensors and all those who are intelligence devices in order to give us indications of movement in order to determine why they were moving and when they were moving and they moved primarily at night so that flares could be dropped and bombing rage could be made to try to raise the cost of that infiltration?

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Uh, it was partially successful, but as I said earlier, you can't You can't block movement on the ground by any other means than having people on the ground to physically park. You criticized the way in which the bombing campaign was carried out. Robert Pisser journalist and a recently published book, The End of the Line.

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The Battle of Kazan alleges that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong also I believe, had as much as 24 hours notice prior to B 52 bombings that they had some infiltrator and headquarters of the Air Force or your command. He's not clear and specifying exactly how that information originated.

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Did you ever suspect that there was such information that got out from your people? We were so much suspicious of that. But we're ever neighborhood, never able to pin it down. I'm not at all convinced that such was the case. When you criticize the Air Force, do you do so with perhaps a special interest in mind?

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Did you have yourself command over the Air Force? I understood that one of your problems was that you did not have the Navy and did not have some of the aviation under your direct command. Well, first, let me make clear I'm certainly not criticizing the Air Force.

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What I was doing is criticizing the policy. All right? The Air Force did a fine job, and the Tactical Air Force were under my command for the strikes in Vietnam and in the area adjacent to South Vietnam. A strategic type bombing around Hanoi and Haiphong Harbor was not under me.

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It was under the command Chief Pacific who carried this particular mission out through his air component and naval component commanders. Uh, it worked quite well. I insisted that I have pre emptive authority over all airstrikes in order to support my troops if required. Did you ever think in the earlier campaigns you fought in the second World War and again in Korea that you would be in command of a field force whose success was determined by body counts rather than hill sees lines overrun, cities captured and so forth the way in which I suppose conventional warfare success was measured in the past?

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Well, I wouldn't Wouldn't agree that body count was a major success. Destruction of enemy units was a matter of success. But this was a different war. It was a war where we had the longest hostile front of any war ever fought by America was almost 900 miles long.

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We could not vital any war in order to fight Vietnam. The war in Vietnam. I like we did Korea, our World War Two or World War One. We would have needed about five million troops. I had only a fraction of those. Therefore, I had to pursue tactics in order to to confront the enemy when he violated, which he did frequently this almost 900 mile hostile front and the tactics that I pursued with the tactics of the Civil War, where terrain didn't mean anything except whether it was an airbase or are a port a seaport.

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Our key communication centers are key populations and those areas where we did provide defenses to secure that vital terrain. The rest of the train was not of any great tactical or strategic importance I had to home in on the enemy, and I had, fortunately the tremendous mobility provided by the helicopter and the Civil War.

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The mobility is provided by the horse, but the tactics were basically the same. And it's the only war that I know and America's thought other than the Civil War, where terrain was not important, mobility was essential and that mobility was exercised to the utmost and with a handful of troops.

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In consideration of the long hostile front, we kept the enemy constantly off balance. You were always looking for, uh, set battle pieces, though, where you're not centerpiece battles where you could bring your mass strength together against the North Vietnamese army. I'm thinking of ducked oh, locked in Canton and finally case on well when targets were presented by the enemy.

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Certainly we were able to use our firepower in order to destroy him. Whether you call that a set piece battle, it was an opportunity. And obviously the tactics were used were commensurate with the opportunity. Case on, of course, was designed to defeat the enemy through air power.

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I wanted to fight the enemy in an area where there was relatively no population because we were very careful to try to avoid damage to civilian property and avoid civilian casualties. If I had not fought the enemy at case on, we would have to fight him and the coastline heavily populated area.

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It would have been very costly. And civilian casualties take an awful lot of time and increased our casualties and have been tremendous damage to civilian property. Your counterpart, general vote noon jump of the North Vietnamese army came into case on to do battle with you at exactly that location.

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Did you lure him in? Had you intelligence that he was planning to come in because you certainly prepared yourself for the battle well in advance. We had a certain amount of intelligence that he was going over on that base, and that would would mean that he would outflank the defenses we had south of the demilitarized Zone.

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But that was an intermediate objectives on the way to the populated areas on the coastline. So we did have that intelligence. But on the other hand, I did take advantage of the terrain two to destroy him by air power. They were casualties to the Marines and two special forces, but they were very, very small, and they were compared with those inflicted on the enemy.

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I think of our marines in Lebanon now hunkered down, fighting a purely defensive battle. And that was in the main, the kind of battle that they fought a case on. Was it not? They held a position. Um, I know they sent out a few patrols or some larger units to try to meet the enemy outside the perimeter.

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But in the main, did we not just establish ourselves and defend the position after we had seized and were able to control the key terrain and establish a perimeter? Actually, I I gave the marine commander instructions not to send out patrols because of the patrols have been ambushed or lost we would have meant that we could not have put air power in there.

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And I didn't want anything to mask the use of our air power. So the defensive positions did attract the enemy and he attacked on a number of occasions. But in most cases, the tax was spoiled by our Tory and see, we had 1 75 guns and range specifically about a battalion and a half.

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In addition to that, we had tactical airstrikes and we had B 50 twos. It can be used when the targets justified that in World War Two and again in Korea. The Army discovered, I believe, somewhat to its dismay, that many soldiers did not fire their weapons even in life threatening situations.

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I wonder if you have any information about the performance level of infantrymen in the Vietnam War. Well, it was S L. A. Marshall. I think that came to the conclusion that a lot of soldiers are not following their weapons. Yeah, I have no evidence that that practice was followed in any and a degree during the Vietnam War because I had the M 16, which is a rapid for a weapon.

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Of course we had only semi automatic weapons in the other wars. Did the M 16 in your view, compare with the AK 47 which I think was in the main of Chinese manufacturer, at least those in the hands of the NBA? The AK 47 was more rugged.

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Weapon. It was rather difficult to two. Keep it to from misfiring. In other words, it was rugged. You could put it in the mud and pick it up, and it wouldn't operate. On the other hand, the M 16 had to be cleaned, and if not, it would be misfires.

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But when it operated and was properly cared for by the soldier, it was superior weapon to the AK 47 to turn to another subject and very briefly, because I understand you cannot talk about the subject at length, but you do have a legal suit against the Columbia Broadcasting System, the television division.

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Um, can you at least say what the suit is about? And then we'll we'll pass on and why you cannot talk about it. No, it's just under litigation, and I cannot discuss it. All right, well, we'll let it pass at that. Let me go to a related question, though, because I have read and David Halberstam's book The Best and the Brightest, that when you first took command, a colonel and intelligence, William Crosson was asked by you to prepare an estimate on reinforcement capacity of the North Vietnamese army.

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How many troops they could send down the Ho Chi Minh Trail into your territory while not leaving Hanoi undefended, and that Crossman was astonished at the figures he turned up and, according to the story, showed his information to another general officer who persuaded him to scale the numbers down because it, uh, would be unnerving to the people back in Washington.

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And so Halberstram says in his book that this was done and the numbers presented to you were not the truthful figures. I have no knowledge of that. That's that's Halberstam's account, and I wanted to ask you directly about it. Is this the kind of war in in which uniformly you had command of everything that took place?

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I'm thinking about the effort to destroy the infrastructure Operation Phoenix and operations of that sort, which were CIA directed. Were these operations responsible to you? Did you have control over them? or were initially they were not. But there was a conference in Graham in March of 1967 at which time the pacification operation was put under me and I was given an ambassador, Mr Bob Coma, in order to handle the classification function, at which time don't know ensuring much while we affected some reorganization.

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In order to put the classification and all the facets of classification under under a single management or arrangement, the Arvin, or Army of the Republic of Vietnam went through many different changes of command. And indeed, the premiership of the country passed repeatedly from one person to another.

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Frequently, these were generals. Uh, did you find the Arvin paralyzed by politics and unable to function as an effective fighting force in 63 64 65? Yes, but the political situation stabilized after 65 and the military command basically stabilized. Yes, there were changes in division commanders and regimental commanders, but basically the commander of the Vietnamese Joint General staff remained unchanged for a number of years.

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And president too. Wow. He was the first president and one cow key is his Prime Minister. They were in office for a number of years. Is it true that many of the best Arvin fighting units crack paratrooper brigades and so forth were kept in and around Saigon under the personal command of individual general politicians and did not get out into the field and fight as you had hoped they would?

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Well, that was true during the early days 64 65. But after that, it was not true. How did the Korean troops, um, reveal themselves in battle? The rocks, I think they were called. Were they as good in Vietnam as they had proved to be in the Korean conflict?

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There were two divisions and of Korean Army troops and was one brigade of Marines, and they acquit themselves quite well. Yes, I thought it was alongside of the Koreans during the Korean War, and they weren't very good at the outset. But they improved as time went on in Vietnam.

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They acquit themselves well. Did you find that there was a certain arrogance on the part of American military people who went to Vietnam? Perhaps people who were persuaded of the superiority of American know how technological prowess, armaments, military tradition and so forth certain arrogance, which led some to believe that well, with all that we have an intelligence and weaponry, we should be able to take care of this war within a very short period of time.

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I'm not aware of any arrogance. Yeah, I'm not aware of anybody that was on the scene. Knew the situation that prevailed there. I thought that the war could be can be concluded in a relatively short time in consideration of the political parameters that had been prescribed.

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And they have been some armchair strategists back in Washington. But they were not on the battlefield. You speak of the political parameters. You've been quoted as saying that you've had to fight this war with one hand tied behind your back. Is that accurate? The restraints, their restraints and many types.

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Restraints on the targets to hit by by by the bombers, restraints and some respects on weapons to be used. At one time we couldn't use riot control agents, namely tear gas, but that was later changed. But the the restraint that plagued us was a geographical restraint where the enemy could go into Laos and Cambodia, and there was nothing we could do about it.

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We couldn't even pursue him by far from the ground. We couldn't maneuver there. And that's why we had this 900 miles hostel front. And that hostile front is running north and south of the hospital front, went across the DMZ, went across the Vietnamese lost border and the Vietnamese Cambodian border, and ended up in the the C.

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Of course I am. You've been watching five live conversation from the University of Florida with Dr Michael Veganism. Tonight's guests has been General William Westmoreland.