War Without Fronts

The American Experience In Vietnam

Thomas C Thayer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000008869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book is a unique source of information about U.S. troop involvement in South Vietnam from 1965 to 1972. It stresses that Vietnam was a war without fronts or battle lines—a war different from any that the United States had previously fought.

Part One
Basic Patterns of This War Without Fronts

1
Why Was the War So Confusing?

The public was also confused because it was impossible to follow the war by simple lines on the map as in other wars.¹

General William C. Westmoreland

It was September 10, 1963. Two presidents would be killed before the end of November. The National Security Council was meeting on the issue of Vietnam. The State Department’s man was talking. He had accompanied the general on a four day trip to assess the situation in Vietnam, and was now reporting to the President. The general had already spoken. When the diplomat finished, President Kennedy looked at the two of them and said: “You two did visit the same country, didn’t you?”²

Confusion reigned. This is not too surprising because war is a game of confusion. When the fighting starts it must often seem to a commander that everything is going wrong. His enemy pulls surprises, messages get lost, missions are misunderstood, supplies disappear, and dozens of other problems arise to hamper the quest for victory. All the while he worries about the progress being made. In Vietnam the worry about progress and the demand for reports on it were incessant.

General William Westmoreland said of Vietnam: “The longest war in our history, it was the most reported and most visible to the public—but the least understood.”³ Even Westmoreland, shortly after his arrival in Vietnam, was heard to complain that he couldn’t make much sense out of the briefings he was receiving. He asked this author to develop a new system for him, but this author couldn’t make sense of the war either in those early days.

General Lewis Walt, Commander of the Marines and other American Forces operating in the northern area of South Vietnam said: “Soon after I arrived in Vietnam it became obvious to me that I had neither a real understanding of the nature of the war nor any clear idea as to how to win it.”⁴ Sir Robert Thompson, a leader in the successful British counter-insurgency effort against the Communists in Malaya, adds: “…There has been a lack of understanding of the nature of the war and of what has been happening.”⁵

This war was different. In a conventional war, like the two World Wars and Korea, a commander needs only two items to monitor his progress. First, he has to know where the front is and which way it is moving. Second, he needs to know the strengths of friendly and enemy forces.

If friendly forces are stronger than enemy forces and are pushing the enemy back, then friendly forces are winning and the front can be seen on a map to have moved in the enemy’s direction. When the North Koreans pushed the United Nations forces down into a small perimeter around Pusan in 1950, even a child could look at the maps and tell that we were in trouble. However, looking at maps of the war in Vietnam never told anybody what was really happening until the very end.

Vietnam was a highly fragmented struggle to influence the population with few large battles, and no decisive ones until the end. Instead, thousands of small actions took place every day on the battlefields of 44 different provinces, 260 districts, and 11,000 hamlets; each involved and playing its own part. The war had no fronts. This is why the war in Vietnam was so difficult to grasp.

The United States, well prepared to fight a conventional war, was simply not ready to fight a war without fronts. Without fronts, our commanders and analysts were unable to deal with the war at first. Major General Harris B. Hollis, Commander of the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam, expressed the commander’s problem:

In no other war have we been deluged by so many tidbits of information, for we have been accustomed to an orderliness associated with established battle-lines. Here, though, we have had to make our decisions based not upon enemy regimental courses of action, but rather upon the isolated actions of communist squad-sized elements⁶.

In Vietnam only one of the sets of data needed to keep track of a war was present, namely, the order of battle information on the forces of both sides. But even these data raised severe problems. The highly unusual nature of the communist force structure with its regulars, guerrillas, part time village defense forces, and subversive apparatus, made it difficult to agree on a valid picture of the whole communist lineup. The Westmoreland-CBS liability trial illustrates the point.

To further complicate matters, forces from both sides often operated for years in the same areas at the same time. This is no surprise in view of Mao’s dictum that “The most pressing and most important task of a guerrilla unit is to carry out guerrilla attacks without ceasing in the places occupied by the enemy….”⁷

Our commanders and analysts simply had to have some substitute for the front line if they were to understand even the war’s military aspects. When the political, economic and social dimensions of the war were added to the problem, the complexities appeared overwhelming.

The answer turned out to be finding the critical patterns of the war. Through quantitative reports to the Joint Chiefs of Staff from the military command in Vietnam about the hundreds of events occurring all over Vietnam every day we found the patterns. Any given action was seldom important by itself, and at first glance no patterns were seen. Analysis, however, revealed them. From these we, in Washington, were able to monitor the war surprisingly well by examining trends and patterns in the forces, military activities, casualties, and population security.

This allowed us to judge the importance of events to the progress of the war. For example, the communist offensive that opened in April 1970 alarmed those in Washington who were unfamiliar with trends that had been under way for at least two years. By the end of the first week we were able to tell the Secretary of Defense that the communists were not escalating the war because the offensive was not as intense as the previous year’s offensive. 1969’s offensive, in turn, had been less intense than the Tet offensive two years before.

The pattern of statistics suggested that the war was continuing to wind down at that time, even though the annual spring offensive had just been launched. The Secretary responded by asking us to prepare two papers a week for the President telling him how the offensive was going.

The quantification of the war was often criticized as excessive and misleading. The body count was a prime example. The problem was that quantification became a huge effort but analysis remained a trivial one. This was unfortunate because the limited analysis that was done produced much useful insight into the war and lots of questions during the war about the prospects for winning, given the way it was being fought.

The following chapters present what we found in doing classified analysis for The Secretary of Defense and other senior officials in Washington and Saigon during the war. This book does not present hindsight. Everybody with a security clearance knew what we were saying while the war was underway, although many strongly disagreed with us most of the time.

Notes

1. General William C. Westmoreland, U.S. Army (Retired), Lectures (Tufts University, Medford, Mass., December 12, 1973) p. 15.

2. David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972) p. 277. See also The Pentagon Papers, The Senator Gravel Edition, Volume II (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1971) p. 244.

3. Westmoreland, Lectures, p. 25.

4. General Lewis Walt, Strange War, Strange Strategy (New York: Funk & Wagnells, 1970) p. 7.

5. Sir Robert Thompson, No Exit from Vietnam (New York: David McKay Company, I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Map of South Vietnam
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology of Major Events in the War
• PART ONE BASIC PATTERNS OF THIS WAR WITHOUT FRONTS
• PART TWO THE “MAIN FORCE” WAR
• PART THREE THE CASUALTY TOLL
• PART FOUR PACIFICATION: “THE OTHER WAR”
• PART FIVE CIVIL OPERATIONS
• PART SIX A SUMMING UP
• APPENDIX: The Southeast Asia Analysis Report
• GLOSSARY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX