Born:
March, 26, 1914
On the whole, General Westmoreland pursued a conservative course militarily durng his four years of command in Vietnam, where he spent most of his time - in starched green fatigues - in the MACV headquarters in Saigon, known as Pentagon East. After United States combat units began to arrive in 1965, at his urging, he is said by fellow officers to have preferred to employ those units and to relegate Vietnamese Army forces to secondary roles in maintaining local security.
General Westmoreland's strategy was one of a "war of attrition," in which he sought to kill infiltrated and indigenous Vietnamese Communist soldiers more rapidly than they could be replaced.
The general followed a plan of "search and destroy" missions in which well-trained and armed American Units would try to find and bloody so-called main-force Communist forces. However, General Westmoreland was under constant pressure from Washington to avoid the kind of disaster that befell the French Army during the 55-day siege at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 that ended the French effort in Indochina.
For this reason, he normally forbade any military operations by units smaller than a battalion of about 750 men. He also developed a somewhat unusual method of operation in which artillery guns were airlifted into fire bases and troops were, for the most part, forbidden to proceed past the 11,000- to 20,000-yard "fan" of the artillery.
Place of Birth:
Spartanburg County, South Carolina
Military University:
West Point
Wars Fought:
-World War II
-Korean War
-Vietnam War 1965-1968
Military Decorations:
-5 Honorary Degrees. 17 Battle campaign in 3 wars.
-4 Distinguished Service Medals.
-Decorated by 16 foreign countries. (4 from S. Amer., 5 Eur., 7 Far East.
Vietnam War:
From 1964 until 1968, General Westmoreland acted as the chief of the Military Assistance Command in Vietnam, the American establishment formed to help South Vietnam in its battle against Communist forces. In that year, a large Communist force fell upon South Vietnamese and upon American troops under General Westmoreland's command during the Vietnamese Lunar New Year known as Tet. Though the Communists suffered major casualties, the offensive had the effect in the United States of seeming to undermine both public and official will to pursue the war.
