Vietnam is yet another graveyard of the Franco-American "alliance." De Gaulle threatened to pull out of the proposed NATO and other postwar arrangements (and seriously dangled friendship with the USSR for decades) aimed at hemming in the Russkies if he wasn't allowed to waste Truman Plan (sold to Congress and the voters as the "Marshall" Plan) money on holding Indochina.
"States don't have friends. They have interests." --Charles de Gaulle
The military architect of the US defeat in Vietnam was Sir Robert Grainger Ker Thompson, a supposed master of counter insurgency.
Born in 19 16, Thompson held a history degree from
Cambridge and was fluent in both Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese. During World War II, Thompson had
been a member of Gen. Orde Wingate's Chindits, a prototype of later special forces. He later commanded "Ferret
Force ," a British anti-guerrilla unit in Malaya, where he
devised the strategic hamlet program that was later to fail
miserably in Vietnam. By 1961 , Thompson was Secretary
for the Defense of Malaya. In this year, Thompson was
invited to South Vietnam by President Diem; he became
the chief of the British Advisory Mission and a key adviser
and counterinsurgency "idea man" to Diem.
Thompson never concealed his contempt for the United States. His favorite slur on the ungrateful colonials
was, "The trouble with you Americans is that whenever
you double the effort you somehow manage to square the error. In 1965 , as the U. S. buildup began, South Vietnamese
Defense Minister Gen. Cao Van Vien had submitted a
strategy paper entitled "The Strategy of Isolation," in
which he posed the problem of cutting off the infiltration of troops and supplies from North to South, arguing that
if this were done, the insurgency in the South would wither
on the vine. I
Cao Van Vien wanted to fortify a line along the 17th
parallel from Dong Ha to Savapnakhet, a point on the
Mekong River near the Laos-Thailand border to interdict
the famous Ho Chi Minh Trail, a strategic artery used
by motor vehicles and which was flanked by gasoline
pipelines. Cao Van Vien wanted to follow this with an
amphibious landing north of this line, near Vinh along the
1 8th parallel, to cut off the North Vietnamese front from
their rear echelons and supply lines. The goal would have
been to deny North Vietnam "tl)e physical capability to
move men and supplies through I the Lao corridor, down
the coastline, across the DMZ,! and through Cambodia
... by land, naval, and air actiops."
According to this plan, the blocking position from the
DMZ to the Mekong could have been manned by eight
divisions (five U .S., two South Korean, and one South
Vietnamese) while Marine divisions could have been kept
ready for the amphibious attack. U.S. forces would have
remained on the defensive, in fortified positions; it would
be left to the South Vietnamese Army to deal with the
guerrilla forces in the South Vietnamese countryside. This
meant there would have been nQ search and destroy missions by the United States, no My Lais, and far fewer
U.S. casualties.
The rejection of this strategy in favor of counterinsurgency is a testament to the influence wielded by Sir
Robert.
Ker Thompson's success in pushing Diem and the American's into "counter insurgency" led to long 10 year defeat of the United States just as Sir Robert had planned.
