Edward L. Rowny
and made a four-star general. He was a protege of General Wheeler's and had the
support of the powerful group of armor officers who were then running the Army.
Johnson did not like Howze and was dead set against the air mobility concept.
Later on, when he became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the air mobile
concept had proved itself in Vietnam, Johnson became a supporter of the concept.
But before that time he did everything he could to try to kill air mobility.
Q ..
Before we leave Vietnam, let me ask you a fundamental question. In ACTIV you
made efforts to combat the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. But another way of
combatting the North Vietnamese was through the use of traditional battlefield
linear formations. Do you think that the ACTIV concepts were done away with
because it was decided that counterinsurgency operations could not be carried out
or was the high command just flat-out opposed to the whole idea and felt that
nothing could beat normal linear battlefield operations?
I think it was a combination of both. Our original idea in ACTIV was that the only
A
way to win a war against Viet Cong infiltrators was to help the Vietnamese help
themselves. But this idea lost a lot of steam after Diem was assassinated and after
successive Vietnamese leaders found they were unable to pull the Vietnamese
people together. You will recall that our original ACTIV recommendation was to
keep the war in Vietnamese hands. We insisted that the U.S. stay out of combat,
believing that if we did, the Vietnamese would cease fighting for their own
freedom. Only the Vietnamese, we said, could defeat the Viet Cong.
After the U.S. introduced its own forces into combat it forced North Vietnam to
change their tactics. Instead of relying upon the Viet Cong, they went to linear
formations themselves. We could have won that kind of a war if we had been
willing to accept the large number of casualties it would involve. But by the time
we became effective on the battlefield against North Vietnamese units, the war was
already lost at home.
The North Vietnamese mounted one last-ditch effort at Tet. The battle of Tet was
actually a military victory for the United States. But the TV coverage of our
people climbing aboard helicopters to get out of Saigon unnerved the U.S. public
and caused us to throw in the towel. Once we had lost the hearts and minds of the
U.S. people, the net effect was the same as it had been when the French pulled out
their support for the French military. The French military did not lose the war in
North Vietnam, nor did the U.S. military lose the war in South Vietnam. The
U.S. people-led along by the U.S. press-in my opinion, lost that war.
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