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derivative filename/jpeg
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363-01698 to 363-01706.pdf
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Digital Object Identifier
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363-01698 to 363-01706
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Title
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Article on the history of US strategy
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Description
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Original title: "America's Inscrutable War." Original caption: "wrapup--article 1 of 4-article series." Article by Keever about the history of US strategy for New York Herald Tribune
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AI Usage Disclosure
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Draft transcripts were automatically generated via Google Document AI and are currently under review. Please report significant errors to Archives & Special Collections at archives@unl.edu.
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Transcript
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- Page 1
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Dobric
wrapup-article 1 of 4-article series
page 1
December 27, 1965
7965
wropay
Ces. Strategy
fore
NY
. H-T.
for
AMERICA'S INSCRUTABLE WAR.
PLEIKU, SOUTH VIET NAM--This was an ungainly place
for history to be written.
mid-
During the www
morning hours, on February 7,
Presidential advisor MacGeorge Bundy arrived in the silvery
C-123 transport aircraft, "The White Whale"
Used by
American commandor General William C. Westmoreland the only
airplane in the country of wall-to-wall carpeting. Standing
on the mortar-poxdd stool airstrip, Bundy glanced at the
forms of twisted helicopters and aircraft, and reviewed the
billets where 116 Americans servicemen were wounded or killed,
some of them in thier beds. The Viet Cong Communist guerrillas,
in a lightning attack by suicide and mortar squads, had created
turmoil and destructive havoc in this small corpo boadquarters
town (pop. 25,000) only 20 miles from the Cambodian border
and not far from the finger-like road-lots comprising the
Hồ Chí Minh Tel
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Doope
Wrapup-article 1 of 4 article series
page 2
Earlier, the Vietnamese commander-in-chief Lt. Gen.
Nguyen Khanh arrived, and while American Ambassador Maxvoll
D. Taylor in Saigon conferred by telephone with the highest
ranking American officials in Washington, Khanh, Bundy and
General Westmoreland escaped the inquisitive press corps
and conferred inside the "White Whale." Within seconds the
key decision was articulated to Khanh; within hours 49
American planes from 3 Seventh Fleet Carriers sped north of
the 17th parallel to the military barracks in the North
Vietnamose city of Dong Hoi.
Acc
(Ironically to observers here, the three key decision-
makes at the Saigon level were politically finished by the
end of 1965. Conoral Khanh was couped out of the country
to an Ambassadorial post he was never abged to.
Taylor resigned to become a "Presidential consultant.
Presidential Advisor Bundy ad resigned.)
Ambassador
Originally, the bombing of North Vietnam was thought
to be a policy of tit for tat--if you destroy our installations,
we'll destroy yours. But this soon gave way to a general
policy of retaliation and then to a general policy at first,
the policy was officially proclaimed as aimed at inducing the
North to negotiate, and the battle cry of the highest ranking
American officials became "we'll be at the conference table
by September."
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Doope
Wrapup-article 1 of 4 article sorios
pago 3
But Hanoi did not negotiate. Then the official line
shifted to the military objective of hitting the military
installations and routes of communication which allowed Hanoi
to infiltrate mon and material into South Vietnam. But, at
year's end, the official estimates of North Vietnamese
infiltration into the South had more than doubled--to 2500
men a month.
Superficially, the policy of bombing North Vietnam
failed to meet its political objective of forcing Hanoi to
negotiate or its military objective of stopping infiltration.
More accurately, the policy half-succeeded, for by year's
end, the bombing of the North had partially paralyzed the
economic potentials and manpower reserves of the country.
In short, if the bombings did not stop Ilanoi's policy of
aggression, in official eyes, it we would at least
malo it more expensive and painful for North Vietnam to continue
that policy. The policy of aerial escalation was also a little
WAS
noticed policy of aerial expansion--Laos 16 also known to be
群
subject to American bombing raids throughout the post year;
and by the beginning of 1966, the airwar threatened to spread
to Cambodia, which would engulf the whole Indo-China peninsula.
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Doope
Wrapup-aticle 1 of 4 article series
page 4
The air war over North Vietnam, however, did not
halt or abate the sharp deterioriation of the ground war within
South Vietnam, which had continued unimpeded since the fall of
the Ngo Dinh Dien regine in Notrombor, 1963. The coup d'etat
and resulting repercussions wrodked the government's administrative
impermanency
and intelligence apparatus; the impomoroney of a stable
government at the Saigon level produced whirlwind changes of
officials up and down the administrative ladder. More significant,
the strategic hamlet program formulated and nurtured by the
Diem regime collapsed as the Viet Cong "conquered each of the
government hamlets, leaving behind their own guerrilla bands
and political machinery they advanced forward.
The gravity of the situation in the countryside could
partially be measured by statistics. Before the fall of Diem
in late 1963, the Saigon government claimed 8,000 strategic
hamlots of the 12,000 hamlets in the countryside. By the ond
of 1965, the most optimistic "guess-timate" placed the
number of "pacified" pro-governennt hamlets at 2,000. The
government's pacification plan for 1966 is known to call for
pacifying those hamlets in a 6-mile radius the 43 provincial
ar
capitals and a 3-mile radius the 250 district towns in the
countryside.
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Deepe
Wrapup--article 1 of 4 article series
page 5
Beginning with the fall of Diom, military commanders
quickly changed their "measle" maps; the dots which had been
slightly rod were changed to Communist-controlled; the pink
contested areas became red and even the white "neasle poz"
which had once been totally government controlled became a
contested 'pink'. By mid-1965, government provincial
capitals and district headquarters were ringed by a small oasis
of friendly villages, but otherwise were isolated by the
increasing Red pressure in the countryside. Then, in July,
1964 the first North Vietnamese-born troopers hegan appearing
and these units, later to be designated as People's Army of
North Vietnam (PAVN), solidified the growing Red strength
in the countryside.
By the end of 1965, highest-ranking officials said
9 PAVN regiments had infiltrated from North Vietnam (American,
Korean and Australian ground units by late 1965 numbered
44 "naven" battalions--or roughly 15 Regiments.)
#revVER"
To combat internal deterioriation, and to complement
the bombing of North Vietnam, on March 8, 1965 the first
3,500 Marines rolled ashore only to be welcomed by a bevy of
girls carrying tengipangi.
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Deepe
wrapup-article 1 of 4 article series
page 6
The American influx continued throughout the year-in
"tranches" the French word for slice--a slice of the 3rd Marine
Division, and finally the whole division; a slice of the
101st Airborne, a slice of the 1st Marine Division; the
Republic of Korea tiger regiment and Marine Division; the Royal
Australian Regiment; and finally the elite 1st Air Mobile
Cavalry Division, comprising 400-some helicopters and 15,000
troops, many of them airborne qualified. By years end the
number of American combat military personnel numbered
80,000;
the outlook for 1966--the equivalent of at least one division
a month for the next 12 months--or at least nearly 200,000
more troops.
The first Marines were officially designated to provide
"local, close-in security for the Danang akibase; thon the
troops began "offensive patrolling for defensive patrolling,
but by mid-July, when the 173rd Airborne Brigade launched a
search-and-destroy operation in the Communist stronghold of
D-Zono, the American troops for the first time since the Korean
War were offensively and officially engaged with Communist
elements.
Using the approach of gradualism, the policy of the
employme of American troops, as well as the policy of bombing
North Vietnam, was slowly escalated, expanded, stiffened and
broadened until at the end of 1965 America based into a war which
it barely realized it had entered.
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Doope
vrapup-article 1 of 4 article series
page 7
On March 8, with the arrival of the first American
ground umbing units, the decade-old Cold War moved into a
Lukovarm War, if not a Hot War. The ideological conflict,
which had previously existed in diplomatic dispatches and
conference table discussions, moved down to the swapps and
jungles of South Vietnam; Vietnam became the focal point for
the conflict of what was officially described as differing and
conflicting ways of life.
But,
more significant to observers here, it was
a dramatization and crucial testing of two systems of power.
Ono was the massive physical power of America; the other was
the power of the Communists to manipulate the masses, to incito
uprisings and deterioration of Anti-Communist strength in a
var the Communists, more specifically, the Chinese Communists,
labelled as the "war of liberation." Both, Washington and
Poking appeared to agree it was the "war of the future."
The difference between these two implemontations of
power was well described by a 20-year-old American private
who saw the building in Danang.
then
"I can tell you when Uncle Sam moves in, there's no
goofing around," he explained, "There was nothing here;
the Marines moved in and the buildings started going up. We got
I word a F-100 squadron was moving in here and we had 4 days
to fill 200,000 bags of dirt for sandbagging of mortar defenses.
Even the colonels were shoveling dirt.
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- Page 8
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Deepe
Wrapup-article 1 of 4 article series
page 8
"Now you can look down this a runway and for two miles
there are American jots wingtip to wingtip. That's real power.
But the private, who had sat for 14 hours a day, for
13 months in a foxhole at the edge of the Danang runway
explained the dichotomy of the war.
"The Viet Cong know more what's happening on this
airbase than the base commander and the 20,000 American Marines
around it. There are six thousand workers who come on hore
dailyvo know some of them are Viet Cong. If the Vietnamese
security officer koops thom off, he and his family will be
lilled. The Viet Cong can come on this base right under our
noses--we don't know who's who. We saw andold woman carrying
a bucket of drain oil into the gate. When we was checked her,
there was only an inch of oil and the rest of the bucket was
a falso botton filled with plastique. We captured one of the
workers drawing all the defense structures on the base.
We captured one of the drivers of an American bus taking down.
the tail mumbors of all the American aircraft on the base.
Once my unit was given five-hours of leave to go to the
commissary. When we returned more than half of the 100
American foxholes around the base had a small paper bag in
thom. Each bag had a poisonous krait snake in it. Some worker
had just walked around and dropped a snake in each foxhole."
1:
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Deepe
wrapup-article 1 of 4 article series
page 9
This conflict in the two systems of power--the old
woman with a bucket of plastique vs. the double-the-speed-of
sound Phantom jets-was the essence of America's Inscrutable
War,
which one Western diplomat described as "the unholy
trinity of terrorism, subversion and guerrilla warfare.
The February 7th bombing of North Vietnam produced
jittery nerves in Saigon where the population attempted to
anticipate the Communist reaction. Would Hanoi's F-19s bomb
south of the 17th parallel in reprisal? Would the Chinese
Communist invade? The answer came 87 days later in Santo
Domingo, when American Marines and paratroopers were dispatched
to prevent wholesale chaos. But, as in Vietnam, Amorican
Marines and paratroopers were not a substitute for,
they create an officient, just indigenous government.
nor could
BRUSHRED
America's Inscrutable War in Vietnam had brush
into another area of the volite, underdeveloped, uncommitted
Third World.
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Date
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1965, Dec. 27
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Subject
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Vietnam War, 1961-1975; Strategy
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Location
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Pleiku, South Vietnam
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Coordinates
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13.9718; 108.0151
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Size
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20 x 26 cm
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Container
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B66, F4
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Format
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dispatches
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Collection Number
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MS 363
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Collection Title
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Beverly Deepe Keever, Journalism Papers
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Creator
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Keever, Beverly Deepe
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Collector
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Keever, Beverly Deepe
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Copyright Information
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These images are for educational use only. To inquire about usage or publication, please contact Archives & Special Collections.
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Publisher
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Archives & Special Collections
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Language
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English
