Lewis SorleyReseñas

From the twenty-year-old 455 tape recordings and Sorley's transcriptions of them, written by hand through a laborious, time-consuming process, emerges a picture of the senior of U.S. commander in Vietnam and his associates working to prosecute a complex and challenging military campaign in an eqally complex and difficult political context.

5755. Thunderbolt General Creighton Abrams and the Army of his Times, by Lewis Sorley (read 31 Aug 2021) This biography, published in 1992, is well researched and is laudatory of Abrams, who followed General Westmoreland as the American general in Vietnam. Abrams graduated from West Point in 1936 was in World War II at the Battle of the Bulge, and was the American general in Vietnam as the war was trying to be Vietnamized. After Vietnam he was named Army Chief of Staff but died before he served two years as such. His wife was Catholic and his six kids were all raised Catholic and he himself became a Catholic a few years before he died on Sept 4, 1974.. He was a tough guy and no doubt inspired fear at times in those serving under him, I found the closing chapters of the book moving and it raised my feeling about the book . The author is a West Point grad himself and spends much time exploring Abrams' ideas on military concepts and how the Army should be.

read 11/2015

Lewis Sorley is graduate of West Point with a doctorate in history from Johns Hopkins University and an American intelligence strategist and military historian. In A Better War, he argues that the United States army under William Westmoreland and the government of South Vietnam fought the Vietnam War rather stupidly prior to the Tet Offensive in 1968, but that once Westmoreland was replaced by Creighton Abrams the war was conducted more intelligently. He even argues (as have many other military historians) that the U.S. actually “won” the Tet Offensive on the battle field even though it cost the government the support of the people at home.

Sorley’s tale is one of lost opportunities. In Sorley’s opinion, much progress was made on the battle field from 1968 to 1972, but U.S. domestic politics rendered it all for nought. Most Americans are not even aware or at least tend to forget the details of that progress. We remember instead the last three disastrous years (1972-75) and the final humiliating departure from the American embassy in Saigon. The ultimate loss of the war was due primarily to (1) termination of American political, material, and military support; (2) failure by South Viet Nam to provide effective military leadership at high levels despite come tent and courageous junior officers; and (3) failure to cut off enemy infiltration and resupply through the Ho Chi Minh trail in Cambodia and Laos.

The book make enlightening reading and it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1999.

(JAB)

I come away from this hard-headed critique of the career of William Westmoreland with almost as many questions as I arrived to it with. Part of the problem is that while Lewis Sorley's main finding is that the virtues that propelled Westmoreland to high command came to be dysfunctional when exercising theater command, I do have the sense (having read Samuel Zaffiri's biography of the man) that one is not given a strong enough sense of the man's virtues at lower command levels. It's as though Westmoreland's faults in high command are being anachronistically projected back to his early career.

Two, I'd like to know the contingencies that brought Westy to command at what became MACV. While his arrival predates the arrival of the "Big Unit" War and attrition as a strategy, my sense is not that he was a harbinger of that war. Could it be that the man was simply in Saigon to get some seasoning before being given command at the Army level in either NATO or Korea and, again, it was simply a fluke that an apostle of conventional warfare was in command at a time when the government in Saigon really began to lose it.

This then leads to the point that I'm not sure Sorley plays up enough, that Westy was squarely in the "American Way of War" that saw the road to victory as being closing with the enemy main force to inflict comprehensive defeat. It is likely that most American generals that could have held that position in 1965 would have come up with a similar operational prescription.

Three, while Westmoreland can't avoid blame for presiding over the failures of execution exposed by the Great Tet Offensive, it is also true that he provided the Johnson Administration what it wanted. While Sorley includes H.R. McMaster's "Dereliction of Duty" as a source (and which is an essential study to read), I'm not quite clear that he embraced it in terms of providing the Washington context to this period of the war.

Four, I think Sorley could have given a better sense of the command politics of the United States Army in this period, as the time that Westy was rising to high command was also the period when the dashing paratroop generals of World War II (Maxwell Taylor, Jim Gavin, Matt Ridgway, etc.) dominated the service. Westy certainly saw these men as the main chance, and did successfully court them as patrons. I suppose that this is a roundabout way of asking the question of just how did Westy manage to avoid War College in the first place, which would have either opened his eyes to a wider world or would have aborted his rise to theater command and then to being kicked upstairs to being service chief; the chapter on Westy's even more dysfunctional time as Army Chief of Staff is most damning.

Another question I come away with from this book is the whole question of Westmoreland's anti-intellectualism. Was this simply a question of the culture he grew up in (South Carolina in the shadow of the American Civil War) and the man's level of native intelligence, or was something more at work. I begin to suspect that Westmoreland labored under the burden of dyslexia or some other reading disability, and that the drive for apparent perfection was the reaction to this condition. It doesn't seem to be an issue that occurred to Sorley.

This then is an important book, and one that any student of the American involvement in Vietnam should read, but I suspect that it isn't the last word on William Westmoreland, at least in terms of examining the whole context of his career. I also actively dislike the subtitle, as whatever Westmoreland's failures it only serves to paint the man (and whatever the faults fairly depicted) as a convenient scapegoat. Many hands made light work of creating a failure.

Very depressing! This is purported to be about CG in Viet Nam for for years. Although there is much about Westmoreland's professional qualifications, despite some "apparently" obvious issues, he was still given a 4th star and command. On the other hand, a book which supposed to be level handed, does not include his orders when taking command. Does Sorley even know what it was Westy was supposed to accomplish. There are numerous citations from others, some of which good, but this seems more like a book being written for the express purpose of dumping on someone.

A profound, masterful, and unique history of the Ameican military's efforts in the Vietnam War during the period after the Tet Offensive in 1968, when General Abrams replaced General Westmoreland as Commander, until the end of that war. Abrams replaced Westmoreland's attrition strategy with his new "one war" strategy which focused simultaneously on pacification and protection of the population, meeting or dictating to the enemy either convention warfare or counter-terrorism / anti-guerrilla warfare, and Vietnamization (training and equipping the South Vietnam armed forces so that they could take over the fight with only ongoing American financial, logistical and equipment, and tactical air support).