Counterinsurgency Falters
At first the enhanced mobility and firepower afforded the South Vietnamese Army by helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and close air support surprised and overwhelmed the Viet Cong. Saigon's forces reacted more quickly to insurgent attacks and penetrated many Viet Cong areas. Even more threatening to the insurgents was Diem's strategic hamlet program, launched in late 1961. Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, an ardent sponsor of the program, hoped to create thousand's of new, fortified villages, often by moving peasants from their existing homes.
Hamlet construction and defense were the responsibility of the new residents, with paramilitary and ARVN forces providing initial security while the peasants were recruited and organized. As security improved, Diem and Nhu hoped to enact social, economic, and political reforms which, when fully carried out, would constitute Saigon's revolutionary response to Viet Cong promises of social and economic betterment. If successful, the program might destroy the insurgency by separating and protecting the rural population from the Viet Cong, threatening the rebellion's base of support.
By early 1963, however, the Viet Cong had learned to cope with the army' s new weapons and more aggressive tactics and had begun a campaign to eliminate the strategic hamlets. The insurgents became adept at countering helicopters and slow-flying aircraft and learned the vulnerabilities of armored personnel carriers. In addition, their excellent intelligence, combined with the predictability of ARVN's tactics and pattern of operations, enabled the Viet Cong to evade or ambush government forces. The new weapons the United States had provided the South Vietnamese did not compensate for the stifling influence of poor leadership, dubious tactics, and inexperience.
The much publicized defeat of government forces at the Delta village of Ap Bac in January 1963 demonstrated both the Viet Cong's skill in countering ARVN's new capabilities and the latter's inherent weaknesses. Faulty intelligence, poorly planned and executed fire support, and overcautious leadership contributed to the outcome. But Ap Bac's significance transcended a single battle. The defeat was a portent of things to come. Now able to challenge ARVN units of equal strength in quasi-conventional battles, the Viet Cong were moving into a more intense stage of revolutionary war.
As the Viet Cong became stronger and bolder, the South Vietnamese Army became more cautious and less offensive-minded. Government forces became reluctant to respond to Viet Cong depredations in the countryside, avoided night operations, and resorted to ponderous sweeps against vague military objectives, rarely making contact with their enemies. Meanwhile, the Viet Cong concentrated on destroying strategic hamlets, showing that they considered the settlements, rather than ARVN forces, the greater danger to the insurgency. Poorly defended hamlets and outposts were overrun or subverted by enemy agents who infiltrated with peasants arriving from the countryside.
The Viet Cong's campaign was aided by Saigon's failures. The government built too many hamlets to defend. Hamlet militia varied from those who were poorly trained and armed to those who were not trained or armed at all. Fearing that weapons given to the militia would fall to the Viet Cong, local officials often withheld arms. Forced relocation, use of forced peasant labor to construct hamlets, and tardy payment of compensation for relocation were but a few reasons why peasants turned against the program. Few meaningful reforms took place. Accurate information on the program's true condition and on the decline in rural security was hidden from Diem by officials eager to please him with reports of progress. False statistics and reports misled U.S. officials, too, about the progress of the counterinsurgency effort.
If the decline in rural security was not always apparent to Americans, the lack of enlightened political leadership on the part of Diem was all too obvious. Diem habitually interfered in military matters-bypassing the chain of command to order operations, forbidding commanders to take casualties, and appointing military leaders on the basis of political loyalty rather than competence. Many military and civilian appointees, especially province and district chiefs, were dishonest and put career and fortune above the national interest.
When Buddhist opposition to certain policies erupted into violent antigovernment demonstrations in 1963, Diem's uncompromising stance and use of military force to suppress the demonstrators caused some generals to decide that the President was a liability in the fight against the Viet Cong. On i November, with American encouragement, a group of reform-minded generals ousted Diem, who was murdered along with his brother.
Political turmoil followed the coup. Emboldened, the insurgents stepped up operations and increased their control over many rural areas. North Vietnam's leaders decided to intensify the armed struggle, aiming to demoralize the South Vietnamese Army and further undermine political authority in the South. As Viet Cong military activity quickened, regular North Vietnamese Army units began to train for possible intervention in the war. Men and equipment continued to flow down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, with North Vietnamese conscripts replacing the dwindling pool of southerners who had belonged to the Viet Minh.
Setting the Stage for Confrontation
The critical state of rural security that came to light after Diem's death again prompted the United States to expand its military aid to Saigon. General Harkins and his successor General William C. Westmoreland urgently strove to revitalize pacification and counterinsurgency. Army advisers helped their Vietnamese counterparts to revise national and provincial pacification plans. They retained the concept of fortified hamlets as the heart of a new national counter insurgency program, but corrected the old abuses, at least in theory.
To help implement the program, Army advisers were assigned to the subsector (district) level for the first time, becoming more intimately involved in local pacification efforts and in paramilitary operations. Additional advisers were assigned to units and training centers, especially those of the Regional and Popular Forces (formerly called the Civil Guard and Self-Defense Corps). All Army activities, from aviation support to Special Forces, were strengthened in a concerted effort to undo the effects of years of Diem's mismanagement.
At the same time, American officials in Washington, Hawaii, and Saigon began to explore ways to increase military pressure against North Vietnam. In 1964 the South Vietnamese launched covert raids under MACV's auspices. Some military leaders, however, believed that only direct air strikes against North Vietnam would induce a change in Hanoi's policies by demonstrating American determination to defend South Vietnam's independence. Air strike plans ranged from immediate massive bombardment of military and industrial targets to gradually intensifying attacks spanning several months.
The interest in using air power reflected lingering sentiment in the United States against involving American ground forces once again in a land war on the Asian continent. Many of President Lyndon B. Johnson's advisers-among them General Maxwell D. Taylor, who was appointed Ambassador to Saigon in mid- 1964-belleved that a carefully calibrated air campaign would be the most effective means of exerting pressure against the North and, at the same time, the method least likely to provoke intervention by China.
Taylor thought conventional Army ground forces ill suited to engage in day-to-day counterinsurgency operations against the Viet Cong in hamlets and villages. Ground forces might, however, be used to protect vital air bases in the South and to repel any North Vietnamese attack across the demilitarized zone, which separated North from South Vietnam. Together, a more vigorous counterinsurgency effort in the South and military pressure against the North might buy time for Saigon to put its political house in order, boost flagging military and civilian morale, and strengthen its military position in the event of a negotiated peace. Taylor and Westmoreland, the senior U.S. officials in South Vietnam, agreed that Hanoi was unlikely to change its course unless convinced that it could not succeed in the South. Both recognized that air strikes were neither a panacea nor a substitute for military efforts in the South.
As each side undertook more provocative military actions, the likelihood of a direct military confrontation between North Vietnam and the United States increased. The crisis came in early August 1964 in the international waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked U.S. naval vessels engaged in surveillance of North Vietnam's coastal defenses. The Americans promptly launched retaliatory air strikes. At the request of President Johnson, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Southeast Asia Resolution-the so-called Gulf of Tonkin Resolution-authorizing all actions necessary to protect American forces and to provide for the defense of the nation's allies in Southeast Asia. Considered by some in the administration as the equivalent of a declaration of war, this broad grant of authority encouraged Johnson to expand American military efforts within South Vietnam, against North Vietnam, and in Southeast Asia at large.
By late 1964, both sides were poised to increase their stake in the war. Regular NVA units had begun moving south and stood at the Laotian frontier, on the threshold of crossing into South Vietnam's Central Highlands. U.S. air and naval forces stood ready to renew their attacks. On 7 February 1965, Communist forces attacked an American compound in Pleiku in the Central Highlands and a few days later bombed American quarters in Qui Nhon. The United States promptly bombed military targets in the North.
A few weeks later, President Johnson approved ROLLING THUNDER, a campaign of sustained, direct air strikes of progressively increasing strength against military and industrial targets in North Vietnam. Signs of intensifying conflict appeared in South Vietnam as well. Strengthening their forces at all echelons, from village guerrillas to main force regiments, the Viet Cong quickened military activity in late 1964 and in the first half of 1965. At Binh Gia, a village forty miles east of Saigon in Phuoc Tuy Province, a multiregimental Viet Cong force--possibly the 1st Viet Cong Infantry Division--fought and defeated several South Vietnamese battalions.
Throughout the spring the Viet Cong sought to disrupt pacification and oust the government from many rural areas. The insurgents made deep inroads in the central coastal provinces and withstood government efforts to reduce their influence in the Delta and in the critical provinces around Saigon. Committed to static defense of key towns and bases, government force's were unable or unwilling to respond to attacks against rural communities. In late spring and early summer, strong Communist forces sought a major military victory over the South Vietnamese Army by attacking border posts and highland camps. The enemy also hoped to draw government forces from populated areas, to weaken pacification further. By whipsawing warweary ARVN forces between coast and highland and by inflicting a series of damaging defeats against regular units, the enemy hoped to undermine military morale and popular confidence in the Saigon government. And by accelerating the dissolution of government military forces, already racked by high desertions and casualties, the Communists hoped to compel the South Vietnamese to abandon the battlefield and seek an all-Vietnamese political settlement that would compel the United States to leave South Vietnam.
By the summer of 1965, the Viet Cong, strengthened by several recently infiltrated NVA regiments, had gained the upper hand over government forces in some areas of South Vietnam. With U.S. close air support and the aid of Army helicopter gunships, Saigon's forces repelled many enemy attacks, but suffered heavy casualties. Elsewhere highland clamps and border outposts had to be abandoned. ARVN's cumulative losses from battle deaths and desertions amounted to nearly a battalion a week. Saigon was hard pressed to find men to replenish these heavy losses and completely unable to match the growth of Communist forces from local recruitment and infiltration.
Some American officials doubted whether the South Vietnamese could hold out until ROLLING THUNDER created pressures sufficiently strong to convince North Vietnam's leaders to reduce the level of combat in the South. General Westmoreland and others believed that U.S. ground forces were needed to stave off an irrevocable shift of the military and political balance in favor of the enemy.
For a variety of diplomatic, political, and military reasons, President Johnson approached with great caution any commitment of large ground combat forces to South Vietnam. Yet preparations had been under way for some time. In early March 1965, a few days after ROLLING THUNDER began, American marines went ashore in South Vietnam to protect the large airfield at Da Nang-a defensive security mission.
Even as they landed, General Harold K. Johnson, Chief of Staff of the Army, was in South Vietnam to assess the situation. Upon returning to Washington, he recommended a substantial increase in American military assistance, including several combat divisions. He wanted U.S. forces either to interdict the Laotian panhandle to stop infiltration or to counter a growing enemy threat in the central and northern provinces.
But President Johnson sanctioned only the dispatch of additional marines to increase security at Da Nang and to secure other coastal enclaves. He also authorized the Army to begin deploy ing nearly 20,000 logistical troops, the main body of the 1st Logistical Command, to Southeast Asia. (Westmoreland had requested such a command in late 1964.) At the same time, the President modified the Marines' mission to allow them to conduct offensive operations close to their bases.
A few weeks later, to protect American bases in the vicinity of Saigon, Johnson approved sending the first Army combat unit, the 173d Airborne Brigade (Separate), to South Vietnam. Arriving from Okinawa in early May, the brigade moved quickly to secure the air base at Bien Hoa, just northeast of Saigon. With its arrival, U.S. military strength in South Vietnam passed 50,000. Despite added numbers and expanded missions, American ground forces had yet to engage the enemy in full-scale combat.
Indeed, the question of how best to use large numbers of American ground forces was still unresolved on the eve of their deployment. Focusing on population security and pacification, some planners saw U.S. combat forces concentrating their efforts in coastal enclaves and around key urban centers and bases. Under this plan, such forces would provide a security shield behind which the Vietnamese could expand the pacification zone; when required, American combat units would venture beyond their enclaves as mobile reaction forces.
This concept, largely defensive in nature, reflected the pattern established by the first Army combat units to enter South Vietnam. But the mobility and offensive firepower of U.S. ground units suggested their use in remote, sparsely populated regions to seek out and engage main force enemy units as they infiltrated into South Vietnam or emerged from their secret bases. While secure coastal logistical enclaves and base camps still would be required, the weight of the military effort would be focused on the destruction of enemy military units. Yet even in this alternative, American units would serve indirectly as a shield for pacification activities in the more heavily populated lowlands and Delta.
A third proposal had particular appeal to General Johnson. He wished to employ U.S. and allied ground forces across the Laotian panhandle to interdict enemy infiltration into South Vietnam. Here was a more direct and effective way to stop infiltration than the use of air power. Encumbered by military and political problems, the idea was revived periodically but always rejected. The pattern of deployment that actually developed in South Vietnam was a compromise between the first two concepts.
For any type of operations, secure logistical enclaves at deep-water ports (Cam Ranh Bay, Nha Trang, Qui Nhon, for example) were a military necessity. In such areas combat units arrived and bases developed for regional logistical complexes to support the troops. As the administration neared a decision on combat deployment, the Army began to identify and ready units for movement overseas and to prepare mobilization plans for Selected Reserve forces. The dispatch of Army units to the Dominican Republic in May 1965 to forestall a leftist take-over caused only minor adjustments to the build-up plans. The episode nevertheless showed how unexpected demands elsewhere in the world could deplete the strategic reserve, and it underscored the importance of mobilization if the Army was to meet worldwide contingencies and supply trained combat units to Westmoreland as well.
The prospect of deploying American ground forces also revived discussions of allied command arrangements. For a time, Westmoreland considered placing South Vietnamese and American forces under a single commander, an arrangement similar to that of U.S. and South Korean forces during the Korean War. In the face of South Vietnamese opposition, however, the idea was dropped. Arrangements with other allies were varied. Americans. in South Vietnam were joined by combat units from Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Thailand, and by noncombat elements from several other nations. Westmoreland entered into separate agreements with each commander in turn; the compacts ensured close co-operation with MACV, but fell short of giving Westmoreland command over the allied forces.
While diversity marked these arrangements, Westmoreland strove for unity within the American build-up. As forces began to deploy to South Vietnam, the Army again sought to elevate the U.S. Army, Vietnam (USARV), to a full- fledged Army component command with responsibility for combat operations. But Westmoreland successfully warded off the challenge to his dual role as unified commander of MACV and Army commander. For the remainder of the war, USARV performed solely in a logistical and administrative capacity; unlike MACV's air and naval component commands, the Army component did not exercise operational control over combat forces, special forces, or field advisers. However, through its logistical, engineer, signal, medical, military police, and aviation commands, all established in the course of the build-up, USARV commanded and managed a support base of unprecedented size and scope.
Despite this victory, unity of command over the ground war in South Vietnam eluded Westmoreland, as did over-all control of U.S. military operations in support of the war. Most air and naval operations outside of South Vietnam, including ROLLING THUNDER, were carried out by the Commander in Chief, Pacific, and his air and naval commanders from his headquarters thousands of miles away in Hawaii. This patchwork of command arrangements contributed to the lack of a unified strategy, the fragmentation of operations, and the pursuit of parochial service interests to the detriment of the war effort. No single American commander had complete authority or responsibility to fashion an over-all strategy or to co-ordinate all military aspects of the war in Southeast Asia.
Furthermore, Westmoreland labored under a variety of political and operational constraints on the use of the combat forces he did command. Like the Korean War, the struggle in South Vietnam was complicated by enemy sanctuaries and by geographical and political restrictions on allied operations. Ground forces were barred from operating across South Vietnam's borders into Cambodia, Laos, or North Vietnam, although the border areas of those countries were vital to the enemy's war effort. These factors narrowed Westmoreland's freedom of action and detracted from his efforts to make effective use of American military power.
Groundwork for Combat: Build-up and Strategy
On 28 July 1965, President Johnson announced plans to deploy additional combat units and to increase American military strength in South Vietnam to 175,000 by year's end. The Army already was preparing hundreds of units for duty in Southeast Asia, among them the newly activated ist Cavalry Division (Airmobile). Other combat units--the 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, and all three brigades of the 1st Infantry Division--were either ready to go or already on their way to Vietnam. Together with hundreds of support and logistical units, these combat units constituted the first phase of the build-up during the summer and fall of 1965.
At the same time, President Johnson decided not to mobilize any Reserve units. The President's decision profoundly affected the manner in which the Army supported and sustained the build-up. To meet the call for additional combat forces and to obtain manpower to enlarge its training base and to maintain a pool for rotation and replacement of soldiers in South Vietnam, the Army had to increase its active strength, over the next three years, by nearly 1.5 million men. Necessarily, it relied on larger draft calls and voluntary enlistments, supplementing them with heavy draw downs of experienced soldiers from units in Europe and South Korea and extensions of some tours of duty to retain specialists, technicians, and cadres who could train recruits or round out deploying units.
Combat units assigned to the strategic reserve were used to meet a large portion of MACV's force requirements, and Reservists were not available to replace them. Mobilization could have eased the additional burden of providing noncommissioned officers (NCO's) and officers to man the Army's growing training bases. As matters stood, requirements for experienced cadres competed with the demands for seasoned leaders in units deploying to South Vietnam.
The personnel turbulence caused by competing demands for the Army's limited manpower was intensified by a one-year tour of duty in South Vietnam. A large number of men was needed to sustain the rotational base, often necessitating the quick return to Vietnam of men with critical skills. The heightened demand for leaders led to accelerated training programs and the lowering of standards for NCO's and Junior officers. Moreover, the one-year tour deprived units in South Vietnam of experienced leadership. In time, the infusion of less-seasoned NCO's and officers contributed to a host of morale problems that afflicted some Army units. At a deeper level, the administration's decision against calling the Reserves to active duty sent the wrong signal to friends and enemies alike, implying that the nation lacked the resolution to support an effort of the magnitude needed to achieve American objectives in South Vietnam.
Hence the Army began to organize additional combat units. Three light infantry brigades were activated, and the 9th Infantry Division was reactivated. In the meantime the 4th and 25th Infantry Divisions were alerted for deployment to South Vietnam. With the exception of a brigade of the 25th, all of the combat units activated and alerted during the second half of 1965 deployed to South Vietnam during 1966 and 1967.
By the end of 1965, US military strength in South Vietnam had reached 184,000; a year later it stood at 385,000; and by the end of 1967 it approached 490,000. Army personnel accounted for nearly two-thirds of the total. Of the Army's eighteen divisions, at the end of 1967, seven were serving in South Vietnam.
Facing a deteriorating military situation, Westmoreland in the summer of 1965 planned to use his combat units to blunt the enemy's spring-summer offensive. As they arrived in the country, Westmoreland moved them into a defensive arc around Saigon and secured bases for the arrival of subsequent units. His initial aim was defensive--to stop losing the war and to build a structure that could support a later transition to an offensive campaign.
As additional troops poured in, Westmoreland planned to seek out and defeat major enemy forces. Throughout both phases, the South Vietnamese, relieved of major combat tasks, were to refurbish their forces and conduct an aggressive pacification program behind the American shield. In a third and final stage, as enemy main force units were driven into their secret zones and bases, Westmoreland hoped to achieve victory by destroying those sanctuaries and shifting the weight of the military effort to pacification, thereby at last subduing the Viet Cong throughout rural South Vietnam.
The fulfillment of this concept rested not only on the success of American efforts to find and defeat enemy forces, but on the success of Saigon's pacification program. In June 1965 the last in a series of coups that followed Diem's overthrow brought in a military Junta headed by Lt. Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu as Chief of State and Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky as Prime Minister. The new government provided the political stability requisite for successful pacification.
Success hinged also on the ability of the U.S. air campaign against the North to reduce the infiltration of men and material, dampening the intensity of combat in the South and inducing Communist leaders in Hanoi to alter their long-term strategic goals. Should any strand of this three-fold strategy falter (the campaign against Communist forces in the South, Saigon's pacification program, and the air war in the North), Westmoreland's prospects would become poorer. Yet he was directly responsible for only one element, the U.S. military effort in the South. To a lesser degree, through American advice and assistance to the South Vietnamese forces, he also influenced Saigon's efforts to suppress the Viet Cong and to carry out pacification.
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