Westmoreland's War: Reassessing American Strategy in VietnamGregory A.Daddis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Abstract

Westmoreland's War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam Gregory A. Daddis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.Until now, the historical fate of General William Westmoreland can best be compared to that of British Field Marshal Douglas Haig, who, during World War I, commanded the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front from 1915 through the end of the war in 1918. Haig led his troops into the bloodbaths of the Battle of the Somme and Passchendaele. In the years after the Great War, Haig's command came to symbolize the murderous attritional warfare of the trenches; he was seen as one of the donkeys who sacrificed a generation of young British lions in the bloody mud of Flanders. In recent years, a new generation of scholars has attempted to rehabilitate Haig's reputation, arguing that he was a capable and, at times, even an innovative general, who was forced to work within constraints imposed by the new industrialized technologies of destruction which had been unleashed in 1914. William Westmoreland, who headed the United States's Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) from 1964 to 1968, receives much of the blame for American failure in the Vietnam War. Like Haig, he is derided as yet another military practitioner of attrition, fixating on body counts in a conflict where such bloody statistics were beside the point. Typical of this perspective is Lewis Sorley's Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam (2011). As the title of Sorley's book makes clear, he believes that Westmoreland lost a winnable war in Vietnam by focusing on conventional tactics rather than on counter-insurgency warfare. Westmoreland also figures prominently and unhappily in Thomas E. Ricks's The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today (2012), where he is an exemplar of what Ricks sees as the modern American general, bureaucratically savvy, but unable to produce military victories.Gregory A. Daddis, a colonel in the United States Army who teaches history at West Point, takes issue with the conventional wisdom in Westmoreland's War. He boldly contradicts the stereotypical picture of William Westmoreland. He does so in classic revisionist style by revisiting and reexamining the primary sources. A virtue of Daddis's book is his attention to the institutional culture of the United States Army during the early 1960s. He creates a context for his study of Westmoreland by analyzing trends in American military thinking in the early Cold War. …