Apropos to the last post, let’s talk a bit more about bad leadership, good leadership and turning around losing fights.
In December 1950, the Chinese intervened en masse in Korea, hurling the U.S. Eighth Army back down the Korean peninsula from the Yalu River. While the Marines made an orderly withdrawal from the Chosin Reservoir in the east, the army’s withdrawal in the west was anything but orderly, with entire divisions being decimated (such as the U.S. 2nd while running the Chongchon gauntlet). By late December, panicked U.S. forces halted at a new line south of Seoul as the Chinese outran their own lines of supply. The army’s demoralization was complete. The entire sorry story is best recounted in Don Fehrenbach’s classic work, This Kind of War or more recent treatments like David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War.
When the Eighth Army commander, Walton Walker, died in a jeep accident on December 23, 1950, President Truman appointed General Matthew Ridgeway as his replacement. It was an inspired choice. Matthew Bunker Ridgeway was one of the best soldiers America ever produced. A veteran of the airborne in World War II, Ridgeway was a fighter, pragmatic and mystical by turns. In the words of David Halberstam:
If ever an American officer was perfectly suited for a particular purpose in American military history, it was Matthew Bunker Ridgeway when he was summoned to take over the shambles of a dysfunctional Eighth Army. He was the flintiest of men, rather humorless, fiercely aggressive, as unsparing of himself as he was of others. One could not think of him except as a soldier – and not a peacetime soldier either. . . . He believed that he and the men he commanded were the direct descendants of those who had gone before them, dating back to Valley Force, and that they owed a great deal to those who had preceded them in uniform. It was if George Washington and the men who had fought at Valley Forge were always looking over their shoulders. Ridgeway sometimes talked in an almost mystical way of those who had fought in the Revolution or the Civil War, and of the need for his men to be worthy of the hardships they suffered.
In a matter of weeks he restored morale, recovered lost ground and taught the U.S. Army how to fight the numerically superior Chinese at battles like the Chipyong-ni. In The Korean War, Ridgeway described his changed tactics:
As for our purpose: It remained the infliction of maximum damage on the enemy with minimum to ourselves, the maintaining of all major units intact, and a careful avoidance of being sucked into an enemy trap – by ruse or as a result of our own aggressiveness – to be destroyed piecemeal. We were to pursue only to the point where we were still able to provide powerful support or at least manage a timely disengagement and local withdrawal.
Fast-forwarding to Vietnam, conventional wisdom has it that the war was lost from the start and stayed lost until Saigon fell in 1975. In fact, leadership and tactics counted in Vietnam as in every war. The conventional wisdom is correct in one sense: the war was indeed lost while directed by William Westmoreland. Large formation search and destroy missions didn’t work any better in Vietnam than they did in Iraq. The war dramatically changed within minutes of Westmoreland’s relief by Creighton Abrams in 1968. Abrams refocused the war on village security rather than destroying enemy formations and changed tactics while dealing with steady troop withdrawals at the same time.
By 1972-73, the countryside was largely pacified with the South Vietnamese army taking over increasing responsibility under U.S. air support and continued funding. After Linebacker II in December 1972, the war was won and could only be lost by the U.S. Congress, which rose to the occasion by cutting off funding in 1974. The rest, of course, is tragedy – the same sort of tragedy that Congressional Democrats tried to repeat in Iraq. Fortunately, they did not succeed.
In A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam, Lewis Sorley discusses Abrams’ remarkable performance and the turnaround in Vietnam that was largely ignored by the political establishment and suppressed by the media. Sorley’s book is a must-read for those interested in the possibility of victory in every war and the means by which it can be irretrievably lost.
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