Word: south
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...World War II sense was impossible under the conditions imposed by the Red Chinese and the Soviets and the nature of the war. The Pentagon should have tried harder to persuade its civilian commanders that both ought to narrow their goals. They could hope to prevent a conquest of South Viet Nam and bolster the South Vietnamese forces for a limited time-and that, perhaps, is all that the President and the nation should have expected to accomplish in Viet Nam. Military men have often said that they were asked to fight the Viet Nam War with one hand tied...
Commanders in the field have other complaints. They say that the U.S. should have moved much sooner to strengthen the South Vietnamese forces, which are now belatedly expected to take over the fighting. Field officers would have liked greater freedom to clean the Viet Cong out of populated villages without having to obtain cooperation from province and district chiefs -although the massacre at My Lai raises questions about whether the restrictions are, in fact, tight enough. Officers contend that too many of the most prominent critics of the war simply do not understand Viet Nam or the nature...
...confined itself to a far more weighty air offensive. But no one could be sure of this, and the Administration at the time judged the risk too great. Besides, Russians and Chinese could have found many means of aiding Hanoi short of rushing armies into the fight. Given South Viet Nam's porous border and long coastline, the mere resort to more systematic bombing would not have sealed off the movement of supplies from the North...
...Secretary of the Air Force from 1967 until last February. In his book The Limits of Intervention, he contends that U.S. bombing, which is geared to nuclear war, is surprisingly inadequate for interdiction strikes, "a fact shrouded in professional embarrassment." He claims that the Communist war effort in the South requires a volume of supplies so small compared with the North's capacity to deliver that it cannot be effectively shut off. Sealing off Haiphong, he also contends, would not have been a decisive move, since only a small portion of vital war supplies arrives through that port...
...troops conventionally trained by the U.S. were a little like the British redcoats fighting in lines as they engaged in forest skirmishes against the American colonists and their Indian allies. Clumsy U.S. battalions in the mid-1960s were out of place in the jungles, swamps and highlands of South Viet Nam. The excitement of technology became an almost spiritual feeling among the military. Generals thought that bigger, faster weapons systems, particularly against peasants, would...