Triumph Revisited

Historians Battle for the Vietnam War

Andrew Wiest, Michael Doidge, Andrew Wiest, Michael Doidge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136974229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

More than thirty years later, the Vietnam War still stands as one of the most controversial events in the history of the United States, and historians have so far failed to come up with a definitive narrative of the wartime experience. With competing viewpoints already in play, Mark Moyar's recent revisionist approach in Triumph Forsaken has created heated debate over who "owns" the history of America's war in Vietnam.

Triumph Revisited: Historians Battle for the Vietnam War collects critiques of Triumph Forsaken from both sides of this debate, written by an array of Vietnam scholars, cataloguing arguments about how the war should be remembered, how history may be reconstructed, and by whom. A lively introduction and conclusion by editors Andrew Wiest and Michael Doidge provide context and balance to the essays, as well as Moyar's responses, giving students and scholars of the Vietnam era a glimpse into how history is constructed and reconstructed.

Section II
Debating Triumph Forsaken as History

CHAPTER 6
Triumph Impossible

JAMES DINGEMAN

Who has ownership of the meaning of the Vietnam War? This is an especially compelling question in view of our involvement in a new series of difficult conflicts around the world as a result of 9/11—virtually a global counterinsurgency campaign. The U.S. armed forces have had to relearn the sobering lessons of fighting a counterinsurgency war after decades of deliberately turning away from this kind of warfare after Vietnam. A fierce debate rages about the mindset of our senior policymakers concerning what lessons they did or did not take from the Vietnam War as they crafted our intervention into Iraq. Comparisons between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam dominate the U.S. political landscape, and many Americans feel that Iraq is a new Vietnam. Into this imbroglio a new comprehensive interpretation of the Vietnam War has arrived that renders the war as just, necessary, and winnable, a sharp contrast to the view of the majority of Americans who feel, in poll after poll, that the Vietnam War was unjust, unnecessary, and unwinnable.

The ideas of Mark Moyar are part of the complicated, diverse body of thought on the issue of why the U.S. lost the Vietnam War. His Triumph Forsaken is the latest book in the long line that seeks to create a positive image of America’s defeat. Moyar cites new scholarship and data that only became accessible after the Cold War ended, as well as Vietnamese sources. Triumph Forsaken is clearly the best expression of conservative scholarship on the Vietnam War in years. For some, this work is an act of sartori; for others, a case of angina. But whatever the reaction, his opinions cannot be swept under the rug since they reflect the latest neoconservative intellectual reaction to the defeat in Vietnam.

Moyar’s arguments are actually old wine packaged in new bottles, with whipped cream and cherries sprinkled on top. His opinions about the nature of Vietnamese communism, his portrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime, and his account of Johnson’s war escalation in 1965 will generate much contention. In my opinion, Moyar overestimates the ability of military force to alter a complicated political environment. Moyar’s examination of the American attempt to save the beleaguered French garrison at Dien Bien Phu during their occupation of Indochina is such a case. He writes that the use of U.S. airpower during the battle of Dien Bien Phu against the Vietminh “almost certainly would have thwarted their attack … and left them with sharply reduced capacity for large-unit warfare throughout Indochina.” There is no doubt that such a bombing campaign would have disrupted and possibly lifted the Vietminh siege of the French forces at Dien Bien Phu. But then what? One of the greatest opponents of bombing at Dien Bien Phu was U.S. Army Chief of Staff Matthew Ridgway. In his memoir, Soldier, Ridgway looks back on his opposition with pride: “[T]he thing that I would be most humbly proud of was having fought against, and perhaps contributing to preventing the carrying out of some hare-brained tactical schemes which would have cost the lives of thousands of men. To that list of tragic incidents that fortunately never happened I would add the Indochina intervention.”

I disagree emphatically with Moyar’s positive view of Diem, a centerpiece of his argument. As Moyar points out, it is clear that Diem, an anti-communist nationalist, was a highly complicated figure. Like some American allies in the Cold War, his power stemmed largely from U.S. support. Moyar decouples Diem from the long history of Vietnamese anti-colonialism by reducing Vietnamese communism to merely a tool of international communism. He then valorizes what other historians for decades have seen as Diem’s weakness: his narrow basis of legitimacy.

Moyar arduously reconstructs the progress of the war on the ground. He argues that the war had been turned around by 1962 and that Diem’s ill-timed demise accelerated the subsequent turn for the worse. Others view this period differently. In JFK and Vietnam, John Newman documents disputes over the order of battle of the Viet Cong that began in the Kennedy period. At the conference held in Honolulu in February 1962, Robert McNamara asked: “What happened to the V.C.; in July they were reported to have a strength of 12,300, in December 17,000, in January 20–25,000. Have they increased or have we been miscounting?” He then was told that there were also 100,000 militia and local self-defense forces, which prompted Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Louis Lemnitzer to say: “The apparent growing strength of the V.C. makes it look like we are losing.” This resulted in an intense effort to ascertain what the actual V.C. order of battle was. Led by George Allen, it produced an estimate of V.C. main and local force battalions that amounted to 40,000 active troops. Newman recounts how General Paul Harkins hacked this figure down to the point at which the first official order of battle published on April 15, 1962, listed the V.C. as 16,305 regular troops. These details raise serious questions concerning Moyar’s depiction of the war from 1960 to Diem’s coup as being a march of progress.

Moyar downplays the threat of Chinese intervention in 1965. We have much to learn about this subject, but what we do know tends to differ from Moyar’s interpretation. U.S. policymakers viewed Mao’s China as an aggressive, Stalinist dictatorship, willing to use force massively to expand its aims. The fact that China was on the verge of building nuclear weapons prompted both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to explore the issue of preemptive attacks against Chinese nuclear facilities. China openly supported “people’s wars” around the world. The situation was perilous, and miscalculations between the U.S. and China could have led to a general war.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident and the U.S. reaction took the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (D.R.V.) and the Chinese by surprise. China reacted quickly. Fearful of a general war with the U.S., the Chinese moved key industries from vulnerable eastern China to the western and central provinces. The D.R.V. asked immediately for their newly equipped 921st Jet Fighter Regiment currently training in China to redeploy to Vietnam. China doubled their air defenses in southern China. Moyar cites several statements by Mao to support his claim that Mao wanted the Vietnamese to wage war alone against the U.S., and was hesitant to give support. Mao told the North Vietnamese in early October 1964 that if the Americans invade, “you must not engage in a head to head confrontation and must well maintain your main force.” In January 1965, Mao said to Edgar Snow, “only if the United States attacked China would the Chinese fight … the Vietnamese can cope with their own situation.” According to Moyar, these comments show that China would not have intervened outside its borders, even if the U.S. had invaded the D.R.V.

But later events provoked an altogether different response from China. Indeed, Mao’s comments were made before the beginning of the U.S. bombing campaign and the landing of U.S. ground troops in February– March 1965. At the time Mao made these remarks, the Chinese were urging the D.R.V. to wage a more intensified ground war in order to finish off the South Vietnamese before further reinforcements arrived from the U.S.

Moyar plays down the possibility of Chinese ground intervention and maintains that a Sino-Vietnamese conventional offensive of twenty divisions could have been rebuffed by five to eighteen U.S. divisions. All of this presumes a U.S. will to mobilize and fight a major war of this magnitude with China in Southeast Asia. But this was precisely what President Johnson was seeking to avoid. Furthermore, Moyar does not address the practicalities of mobilizing and logistically supporting a force of this size in Southeast Asia. The temptation to use tactical nuclear weapons would have been difficult to restrain and could easily, dangerously, have spilled into a general war with China.

When the U.S. began bombing North Vietnam and sent ground troops in March 1965, China responded in kind. On April 12, 1965, the country issued a general order to mobilize for war, and China gave immediate support to North Vietnam. Zhou Enlai made it clear that a U.S. ground assault on the North would be met with an overwhelming Chinese response. China immediately sent three reinforced divisions, designated the “Corps of Chinese Rear Services,” to build up the Vietnamese defense and transportation networks. In addition, two Chinese antiaircraft divisions were sent to North Vietnam by the summer of 1965. Between 1965 and 1969, the Chinese sent 320,000 troops to North Vietnam, of which 150,000 were in antiaircraft units.

It is hard to come to definite conclusions about the Vietnam War. There are gaps in our knowledge of the decision making on both sides. Moyar does not accept these crucial ambiguities. Moreover, the United States and its allies were defeated, and this had serious and far-reaching implications for historiography. We did not capture the archives of our foes or employ their senior officers in writing accounts of their activities as we did, so extensively, after World War II. The German Military History Program produced accounts of all the war theaters where the Wehrmacht had fought. These narratives, famously known as the Green Book Series, were used to prepare the official histories of the U.S. Army. Nothing like this exists for the Vietnam War. Until scholars have unfettered access to the archives of China, the U.S.S.R., Vietnam, and the U.S., controversies will continue to be fought over limited evidence, overladen with interpretative schema.

CHAPTER 7
Fighting Stories

CHARLES HILL

Herodotus was a hedgehog. The “One Big Thing” he knew was that the stories we tell about ourselves will shape our political community. At some point, the accepted, dominant narrative will have to defend itself against another version in the Herodotean phenomenon of “fighting stories.”

The Vietnam War’s “master narrative” locked onto the national mind after Tet ’68. Books, articles, films, and documentaries produced after that date almost invariably covered events up to and including 1968, but almost nothing of what happened during the years that followed until the fall of Saigon in 1975. The success of the post-Tet “one war” strategy pursued by General Creighton Abrams and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, and the striking achievements of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam in throwing back the huge North Vietnamese invasion of April 1972 went unchronicled. It is not too much to say that the South Vietnamese government and armed forces, with strong air support by the U.S., won the Vietnam War on the ground in the early 1970s until the U.S. abandoned its ally after the 1973 Paris Agreement.

While studiously avoiding the post-Tet ’68 period, the storytellers of the war probed back into every detail of American and South Vietnamese policies and actions since the 1954 French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Their narrative ran something like this: the U.S., out of arrogance, ignorance, and lust for imperial dominance, was pulled—or pushed itself—into an insignificant civil war between admirable, anti-colonialist nationalists and reactionary authoritarians. America took the side of the authoritarians against the will and interests of “the people.” The U.S. fought this war with foolish strategy and brutish tactics. Although the American record in the war was one of failure upon failure, presidents nonetheless prolonged the devastation and string of defeats in a feckless attempt to preserve “credibility.” (The only exception, according to this story, was President Kennedy who, had he not been assassinated, would have closed out America’s involvement.) The story concludes in a dishonorable, deceptive, and disgraceful defeat.

But not a few who served in Vietnam knew that there was something wrong with this master narrative. It had its source in the layers of domestic American cultural revolutions of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was infected by the importation of a European New Left ideology that saw all aspects of the American polity through the lens of “late capitalism,” doomed but dangerous in the throes of its final stage of existence.

Tellers of this story only recently have sensed that another version has entered the ring. The entrenched narrative still holds 90 percent of the battlefield, but a contest of “fighting stories” is at hand. Mark Moyar’s Triumph Forsaken tells the Vietnam War’s history from the ground up and from a perspective untrammeled by 1960s doctrine.

Scholars, reporters, and analysts have hurried to excoriate Moyar and his book, and to insist once again on adherence to the master narrative, energized by the belief that it is a truth generally acknowledged that a story told interminable times becomes a truth generally acknowledged. But Triumph Forsaken reveals that what has been called “truth” should more accurately be recognized as “truthiness”—a story that its tellers want to be true.

Moyar’s book is of larger significance than even the important matter of getting the Vietnam War story straightened out. Triumph Forsaken delves into an array of categories that may be observed across a larger pattern of American warfare since the end of the Second World War. From that time to this, the U.S. has fought at least ten wars—in the Cold War context, the post-Cold War decade, and at the opening of...