Word: westmorelands
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...articulated an outraged world's condemnation in the war-crime trials at the end of World War II has turned the doctrine of command responsibility directly on America's former commander in Viet Nam, General William C. Westmoreland, now Army Chief of Staff. Telford Taylor, 62, who was the chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, first adumbrated his theses-without naming names-in his book Nuremberg and Vietnam: an American Tragedy (TIME, Nov. 23, 1970). Last week, on Dick Cavett's TV talk show and in talks with newsmen later, he said that Westmoreland could be found guilty...
Yamashita was judged guilty and responsible for atrocities committed by his Japanese troops in the Philippines, even though he had no regular communications with his men in the field. Westmoreland was in a better position than Yamashita to prevent a My Lai: he presided over the most sophisticated and continuous net of communications ever available to a military commander...
...Army has already weighed Westmoreland's responsibility for My Lai and found him guiltless. That is hardly surprising, since it is one thing for the victor to judge the vanquished and quite another, realistically, for an army and a nation still locked in combat to judge its own too harshly...
Telford Taylor, a retired brigadier general and presently law professor at Columbia, said Friday night that Westmoreland could be tried by the standards on which the Japanese commander in the Philippines, General Tomayuki Yamashita, was convicted and hanged. As commanding officer, Yamashita was held responsible for not stopping atrocities committed by troops under his command...
Taylor said that Westmoreland's responsibility was not merely confined to Mylai but included the overwhelming civilian deaths caused by indiscriminate shelling in so-called "free-fire zones," the forced evacuation of peasants from their homes and the deliberate lack of precaution in bombing targets...