Withdrawal
Subtitle: reassessing America's final years in Vietnam
By: Gregory A. Daddis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 300
ISBN-13: 9780190691080
Subjects: Vietnam War, 1961-1975
Description: "A 'better war.' Over the last two decades, this term has become synonymous with US strategy during the Vietnam War's final years. The narrative is enticingly simple, appealing to many audiences. After the disastrous results of the 1968 Tet offensive, in which Hanoi's forces demonstrated the failures of American strategy, popular history tells of a new American military commander who emerged in South Vietnam and with inspired leadership and a new approach turned around a long stalemated conflict. In fact, so successful was General Creighton Abrams in commanding US forces that, according to the "better war" myth, the United States had actually achieved victory by mid-1970. A new general with a new strategy had delivered, only to see his victory abandoned by weak-kneed politicians in Washington, DC who turned their backs on the US armed forces and their South Vietnamese allies. In a bold new interpretation of America's final years in Vietnam, acclaimed historian Gregory A. Daddis disproves these longstanding myths. Withdrawal is a groundbreaking reassessment that tells a far different story of the Vietnam War. Daddis convincingly argues that the entire US effort in South Vietnam was incapable of reversing the downward trends of a complicated Vietnamese conflict that by 1968 had turned into a political-military stalemate. Despite a new articulation of strategy, Abrams's approach could not materially alter a war no longer vital to US national security or global dominance. Once the Nixon White House made the political decision to withdraw from Southeast Asia, Abrams's military strategy was unable to change either the course or outcome of a decades' long Vietnamese civil war"--Dust jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: the limits of strategy in a stalemated war; title: Abe's "one war": continuity in change; title: Vietnamization: policy of withdrawal or strategy for "victory"?; title: Pacification without peace: the travails of nation building; title: Balancing a war: the coordination of force and diplomacy; title: A beleaguered army at a long war's end; title: From victory to defeat?: Abrams's final years; title: Epilogue and conclusions: questioning "victory" in an American war.