Westmoreland, William Childs

▪ 2006

      general (ret.), U.S. Army (b. March 26, 1914, Spartanburg county, S.C.—d. July 18, 2005, Charleston, S.C.), commanded U.S. forces in the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1968, a period during which American involvement increased from several thousand troops to more than 500,000. Westmoreland graduated (1936) from the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, N.Y., and his career was one of rapid advancement. During World War II he saw action as a battalion commander in North Africa and Sicily. Shortly after participating in the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944, he was promoted to colonel. He served in the Korean War and in 1955 was promoted to major general, becoming at age 42 the youngest man to have achieved that rank in the U.S. Army. Westmoreland became a full general in 1964. In Vietnam he implemented a strategy of attrition, using overwhelming firepower to try to kill enemy troops at a rate faster than they could be replaced. Though he employed search-and-destroy tactics, massive aerial bombing campaigns, napalm, and the defoliant Agent Orange—all to devastating effect—the communist forces of North Vietnam and their Viet Cong allies in South Vietnam remained determined to unite their country under communist rule. Senior officials in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration and a growing number of ordinary citizens began to see the war as unwinnable, and Westmoreland was recalled to Washington and given the post of army chief of staff. He retired in 1972.

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