The Rise and Fall of an American Army
Stanton, Shelby L.
portray America as a simple mirror image of the USSR in its international role (except that today the Soviet Union is said to try just that little bit harder for "peace"). Still, I do not believe...
...Such fierce fighting was commonplace in Vietnam...
...My guess is that they want to make up for something that went terribly wrong, namely the American intervention in Vietnam...
...Day after "A splendid book...
...The long-range alternative, given that such a course would Alonzo L. Hamby is professor of history at Ohio University and author, most recently, of Liberalism and Its Challengers...
...0 surely lead to the defeat of the Allies, would be to accept the loss of the protective shield that the British navy long had provided and to live in a world dominated by an expansionist military power...
...There remained confusion and inefficiency aplenty, but the whole of the accomplishment was greater than the sum of its parts...
...The tone and content are like nothing so much as those of a (London) Times editorial on Germany, vintage 1937-38...
...He would oppose them with the same courage, the same honesty, and the same keen (alas, not lethal) weapons he wielded when he was alive...
...At dawn the NVA withdrew...
...troops sagged dramatically once they were pulled from offensive combat missions...
...GROUND FORCES IN VIETNAM, 1965-1973 Shelby L. Stanton/Presidio Press/$22.50 Fred Barnes The biggest tourist attraction in Washington these days isn't the White House or the Jefferson Memorial or the Washington Monument or even the hulking John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on the bank of the Potomac River...
...A supply force headed by Charles Dawes accomplished miracles...
...Box 250, Ithaca, New York 14851 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 Hand-to-hand combat, rocket and grenade blasts, and clattering automatic weapons filled the bamboo thickets and shrub brush...
...His French and British counterparts were hardly as flexible...
...there were too Both the intelligent reading public and the harried graduate student in American history have long needed a readable, scholarly account of Woodrow Wilson's last four years as President...
...If Pershing recognized that machine guns often proved decisive, he believed his troops could rush them with acceptable loss of life...
...What Stanton captures vividly is the ferocity of the fighting...
...The war was Vietnamized...
...Literal translations of four major works of ancient Greek literature which treat the life and thought of Socrates...
...This, Stanton writes, meant that full victory, in the conventional military sense, was impossible...
...The immediate alternative to war was to hand over control of American commerce to the Kaiser's government...
...Pershing himself receives generally deserved accolades from Professor Ferrell for his management of the American army in France, especially his refusal to disperse it among units of the French army...
...No flares were fired for fear of silhouetting positions...
...syq~y~ CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS P.O...
...American troops were • gradually withdrawn from combat operations, then from Vietnam altogether...
...He would certainly remark that this comes not just from the vicious, the stupid, and the hypocrites on the "liberal" left, but from the smug and the supercilious on the deliquescent right, especially in Britain.' But I do not think that he would be discouraged by the waffle, the intellectual swindling and the fellowtraveling Schweinerei today, which are so exactly like those of his own time...
...4.95 paper 'm w" '+ roc...
...Carey McWilliams, Rutgers University SCIENCE, FAITH AND POLITICS Francis Bacon and the Utopian Roots of the Modern Age By JERRY WEINBERGER...
...The fighting was handed over to South Vietnamese forces, who weren't ready for the task, and Indochina was lost...
...Whatever the value of West's book in the academic game, that reminder should give it a place on the public stage...
...Both North Vietnamese and United States armed forces represented excellently equipped, professional modern armies...
...In September 1918, American and French forces won an unexpectedly easy vic WOODROW WILSON AND WORLD WAR I, 1917-1921 Robert H. Ferrell/Harper & Row/$19.95 Alonzo L. Hamby nnouncing .. . A Major Work on Genocide & Terrorism in Ukraine: HUU A J LIFE IN RUSSIA Ewald Ammende's Human Life in Russia is the long unavailable history of the "Hidden Holocaust" and the cover-up which prevented news of the starvation of nearly 7,000,000 Ukrainians from being reported in the West during 1931-1934...
...At the same time, the morale of US...
...What happened instead was that the U.S...
...Soldiers grappled in hand-to-hand combat, swinging axes and entrenching tools as ammunition ran out...
...The author devotes only passing attention to the circumstances that impelled the United States to declare war on Germany and its allies in April 1917...
...See Peregrine Worsthorne's "Tory Critique of Neoconservatives" in the October 1985 American Spectator...
...The Rise and Fall of an American Army, Shelby Stanton's remarkable battlefield history of American soldiers in Vietnam, provides fresh confirmation that the public's instinct is correct...
...It consists of two walls of stone, stuck together in a V shape, and filled with the names of the 50,000 or so American soldiers who died in the Vietnam war...
...CLIP AND MAIL TO: John T. Zubal, Inc...
...And they want to express solidarity with the brave victims of that flawed policy, the war dead...
...At the end of the log were two more NVA, one of them an officer who still clutched a captured M16 rifle taken from one of the Americans...
...This caused critical personnel shortages in Vietnam, Stanton notes...
...Its army was even smaller than Portugal's and ridden with deadwood at the top...
...Human Life in Russia has long been unobtainable...
...The biggest mistake, he suggests, was turning military duties over to the South Vietnamese...
...The fighting had been so intense that one log was found in the morning with six dead paratroopers on one side and four dead NVA soldiers sprawled out on -the other side...
...As such, his work is one of the earliest histories of the Gulag, wherein the Archipelago consisted of an entire nation to be punished for its opposition to totalitarianism...
...political cruelty and oppression...
...32.50 , Also of interest...
...we make it available with the hope that the lesson of the Ukrainian Famine will not be lost on our times...
...Not that the soldiers fought poorly...
...By 1965, Stanton writes, "the war of liberation in Viet nam was no longer a squabble between midnight partisans and colonial police...
...The most obvious, of course, was the decision to bar American troops from wiping out Communist sanctuaries and supply depots in Cambodia...
...he considered them de facto allies of Nazism, and there is no doubt in my mind that he would see them that way now, with Nazism replaced by the left-wing fascism of the Soviet regime and its clients...
...at least a year and a half to raise a force capable of having any impact on the European war-assuming its troops survived the submarine gauntlet...
...Even young and inexperienced soldiers proved to be tough...
...And there was also the refusal, out of concern over mounting American casualties, to pursue the decimated Viet Cong relentlessly after the abortive Tet offensive in 1968...
...W...
...In fact, they had all but won the war by 1969, when the pivotal change in policy came...
...An entire American army was sacrificed on the battlefield of Vietnam...
...By then the Allies would have been forced to surrender...
...Still, I do not believe that Orwell would be a "peacenik" in 1985...
...Full of zeal, and bold to the point of recklessness, young and unmarried, they became the best helicopter pilots in the business...
...West and his eccentric labors, it ought to be said that he is, after all, helping to keep alive the memory of George Orwell and his lonely battle against our apologists for Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...The German government had served notice that it would wage indiscriminate submarine warfare against any American shipping bound for Great Britain or France...
...In defense of W.J...
...At the time, Germany's announcement seemed a splendid example of Teutonic rationalism...
...It is clear, however, that the issue had passed beyond the realm of choice...
...armed forces was doomed to failure," he writes...
...It is remarkable that the President waited until several American merchant ships had been sent under before he requested a declaration of war, and nearly incomprehensible that fifty congressmen and six senators voted against it...
...and Ukraine...
...Rather, it is his account, year by year from 1965 to 1973, of the actual fighting on the ground...
...He was quite straightforward about his attitude to such people...
...Americans, many of them businessmen in peacetime, rebuilt and reorganized French port facilities and railroads...
...Germany estimated that it would take the U.S...
...When the need for helicopter pilots grew desperate, the Army turned to troops still in the late stages of their initial training...
...BY U.P.S...
...His reward was typical of military organizers whose post of duty is far from the front lines...
...It isn't Stanton's analysis of the causes of defeat in Vietnam, however, that makes his book unique...
...But at least Pershing understood that offensive action was necessary for victory...
...NOTE: Ohio residents must add .91 sales tax per copy...
...Too bad their superiors in Washington weren't a little bold and reckless, too...
...SAME DAY PAYMENT IS RECEIVED ORDERS TO OTHER COUNTRIES SENT BY POST 45 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985...
...Not that American involvement itself was wrong...
...Its organizer in large measure was Major General Peyton C. March, one of a handful of truly able, decisive general officers in the U.S...
...Weinberger here seeks to establish Francis Bacon's rightful place among the founders-with Machiavelli and Hobbes---of the modern political tradition, claiming that Bacon's view of the sources of the modern age has great resonance for the problems of our contemporary society...
...The magnificent courage and fighting spirit of the thousands of riflemen, aircraft and armored crewmen, cannoneers, engineers, sig nalmen, and service personnel could not overcome the fatal handicaps of faulty campaign strategy, incomplete wartime preparation, and the tardy, superficial attempts at Vietnamization...
...11 day, crowds gather in long lines to walk past the stark walls and gaze at the names of the Vietnam dead...
...Two themes stand out in his account: The awesome power of an aroused democracy and the tragic disintegration of a great, if flawed, President...
...Recalled from France in early 1918 to become Army Chief of Staff, March relentlessly purged incompetents from the military bureaucracy, gave it a new sense of purpose, and quite possibly provided the margin of victory...
...Why do they come...
...This command desire to cut further losses inhibited any chance of a ruthless follow-up campaign aimed at finishing off the VC remnants and discouraging future NVA [North Vietnamese Army] activity in South Vietnam," says Stanton...
...It's the Vietnam Memorial, which isn't large or beautiful or especially interesting to look at...
...FOUR TEXTS ON SOCRATES Plato's Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, and Crito, and Aristophanes' Clouds Translated with Notes by THOMAS G. WEST and GRACE STARRY WEST...
...All night long the two [American] companies were raked by NVA heavy weapons...
...it belongs in every collection of books on the U.S.S.R...
...When the war was finally over, the United States military had to build a new volunteer army from the smallest shreds of its tattered remnants...
...March went into retirement and died barely remembered in 1956...
...The message in all this is that the American military can still fight...
...argued persuasively in On Strategy, was not between wellequipped Americans and Viet Cong guerrillas who wore black pajamas and straw hats and were expert only at setting booby traps...
...In 1965, for instance, an infantry battalion was ambushed by the Viet Cong near Saigon...
...This crash program to mold the South Vietnamese military overnight into an image of the self-sufficient, highly technical U.S...
...Army at the beginning of the war...
...I reckon too that he would despise utterly the current humbug, journalistic cheating, and political double standards used in discussing Communism both in Europe and in other places like the Caribbean, Africa, and Central America...
...The monument is embedded in the ground on the fringe of the Mall, and there is practically nowhere nearby to park...
...Nonetheless, the author leaves one with questions about Pershing's grasp of the sort of war he was fighting: "The AEF was not well prepared for gas war...
...Publishers 2969 West 25th Street - Cleveland, OH 44113 Phone: 216-241-7640 - - Telex: 298256 ZUBAL UR Please send copy/copies of Human Life in Russia to: NAME: STREET ADDRESS: CITY/STATE/ZIP: My check in the amount of ($13.95 per copy) plus $1.85 postage per copy is enclosed...
...Indeed, as Stanton points out in accounts of battle after battle, American troops fought with incredible courage, frequently in face-to-face clashes in which they had to resort to knives or bayonets or shovels to combat Viet Cong or North Vietnamese troops...
...Yet that doesn't keep people away...
...In the end, Stanton says bluntly, the American army in Vietnam was allowed to unravel...
...put two million men under arms, transported them to France with insignificant losses, and began to make a difference as early as mid-1918...
...It didn't have to happen that way, and Stanton points out many of the tragic mistakes...
...Reinforcements were impossible...
...I suspect most pilgrims to the memorial figure America acted morally in intervening, then erred badly in pursuing the war effort, for whatever reason...
...ORDERS SHIPPED THROUGHOUT THE U.S...
...Both sides tried to recover their wounded comrades from the fringes of the battle line, and more dead were added in the thin space separating the two forces...
...Then, there was the unwillingness to call up Reserve and National Guard units for fear of public backlash...
...Robert Ferrell's latest book, a fine study of a period that changed the world, fills that requirement very well...
...It would lead to war, but the United States appeared to be in no position to make a decisive contribution to the nearly exhausted Allies...
...He placed his trust in individual marksmanship...
...Ammunition was airdropped into a large bomb crater near the position's center by helicopters, which were guided in by flashlight...
...At times, his descriptions make you think he's writing about the bloody front in World War I. Take this account of a battle in the Central Highlands in 1967: THE RISE AND FALL OF AN AMERICAN ARMY U.S...
...Ammende, a professional humanitarian whose career is markedly similar to that of Raoul Wallenberg a decade later, gathered eyewitness testimony on the Famine as a means of exposing the awful truth of the genocide and terrorism then occurring in Ukraine...
...The book, 330 pages in a cloth binding and striking jacket, is well illustrated and documented...
...The war, as Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr...
...To the Army's surprise, these young soldiers-who often possessed no college background or career aspirations, but only the desire to fly-proved to be just the answer," Stanton says...
...It possessed almost no understanding of tanks, and had few...
...few helicopters to fly them in," writes Stanton, a former Army captain who was wounded in Laos during the war...
...The nation heaped honors, including the unprecedented rank of General of the Armies, on the Commander of the American Expeditionary Force, John J. Pershing...
...Nevertheless, "Vietnamization proceeded at a breakneck pace [from 1969 on], and the South Vietnamese Army was abandoned before it had a chance to properly assimilate American equipment and military doctrine...
Vol. 18 • December 1985 • No. 12
