cover image Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam

Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam

Gregory Daddis. Oxford Univ., $34.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0199316502

Daddis, an Army colonel and history professor at the U.S. Military Academy, offers “a work of historical revisionism” in which he challenges what virtually every Vietnam War historian has written about General William Westmoreland’s handling of the conflict. The accepted narrative holds that the commanding general of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968 fatally misunderstood the nature of the war and that his attrition strategy focused too heavily on massive troop deployments, all but ignoring “hearts and minds” pacification efforts. In this academic, book-length essay, Daddis quotes scores of reports, studies, and secondary sources, attempting to make the case that Westmorland’s military strategy was sound, but didn’t work because the Johnson administration’s overall strategy was seriously flawed. Westmoreland, Daddis contends, was a sharp thinker who developed a comprehensive military strategy that consisted of more than using massive American military power to try to kill as many enemy troops as possible. He never satisfactorily explains, however, why Westmoreland asked for 260,000 additional fighting men following the 1968 Tet Offensive when American troop strength in Vietnam already was at an all-time high of 536,000. More importantly, Daddis often argues semantics, sets up straw men (that, for instance, Westmoreland “almost single-handedly lost the war’’), and merely places the blame for the war’s outcome on others. (Jan.)