William Childs Westmoreland

People Buried Here

Description

Following graduation in 1936, he became an artillery officer and served in several different commands. In World War II he saw combat in Tunisia, Sicily, France and Germany. He reached the temporary wartime rank of colonel, and on Oct 13, 1944, was appointed chief of staff of the 9th Infantry Div. After the war he completed a three mo mngmt program at Harvard Business School. As Stanley Karnow noted, "Westy was a corporation executive in uniform." In Jan 1964, he became deputy commander of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. As the head of the MACV he was known for highly publicized, positive assessments of US military prospects in Vietnam. However, as time went on, the strengthening of communist combat forces in the South led to regular requests for increases in US troop strength, from 16,000 when he arrived to its PEAK of 535,000 in 1968 when he was promoted to Army chief of staff. Westmoreland repeatedly rebuffed/suppressed attempts by John Paul Vann & Lew Walt to shift to a "pacification" strategy. Westmoreland had little appreciation of the patience of the American public for his time frame, and was struggling to persuade Pres Johnson to approve widening the war into Cambodia and Laos in order to interdict the Ho Chi Minh trail. He was unable to use the absolutist stance, "we can't win unless we expand the war" [into Cambodia and Laos]. Instead, he focused on "positive indicators," which ultimately turned worthless when the Tet Offensive occurred, since all his pronouncements of "positive indicators" didn't hint at the possibility of such a last-gasp dramatic event. Tet outmaneuvered all of Westmoreland's pronouncements on "positive indicators" in the minds of the American public. Although the communists were severely depleted by the heavy fighting at Khe Sanh when their conventional assaults were battered by American firepower, as well as tens of thousands of deaths in the Tet Offensive, American political opinion and the panic engendered by the communist surprise sapped US support for the war. Just hours after Westmoreland was sworn in as Army chief of staff on July 7, 1968, his brother-in-law, LT Colonel Frederick Van Deusen (commander of 2nd Batt, 47th Infantry Regt), was killed when his helicopter was shot down in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam. Westmoreland died July 18, 2005, at the age of 91 at the Bishop Gadsden retirement home in Charleston, SC. He had suffered from Alzheimer's disease during the final years of his life. He was buried on July 23, 2005 at West Point Cemetery.