MacArthur’s warnings about land wars in Asia

Fifty years ago this month, Gen. Douglas MacArthur said goodbye to West Point in an emotional farewell speech. It was not his address with the memorable line, "Old soldiers never die; they just fade away." That was delivered before Congress in April 1951, after MacArthur was relieved of his command in Korea by President Harry Truman.

The West Point speech came a decade later, when MacArthur was 82. It remains important for the influence it had on both the Vietnam-bound corps of cadets who heard it and their future commander, Gen. William Westmoreland, in 1962 the West Point superintendent.

MacArthur was there to receive the Thayer Award, for outstanding service to the nation. The entire corps of cadets was assembled to hear the last goodbye of MacArthur, Class of 1903, who had served as West Point superintendent from 1919 to 1922.

"The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished tone and tint," he declared. "Today marks my final roll call with you, but I want you to know that when I cross the river, my last conscious thoughts will be of the corps, and the corps, and the corps. I bid you farewell."

The speech was, however, more than a farewell. At its center was his belief in the importance of military victory. Times had changed since he wore a uniform, MacArthur conceded. "You now face a new world — a world of change," he said. But what had not changed was the duty of the soldier. It remains "fixed, determined, inviolable — it is to win our wars," he said. "Everything else in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication."

MacArthur did not worry that such a focus narrowed the soldier's field of action. "All other public purposes, all other public projects, great or small, will find others for their accomplishment," he insisted. What remained for the soldier was "the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory; that if you lose, the nation will be destroyed." MacArthur, who had accepted the surrender of Japan to end World War II, saw this view borne out by U.S. history.

Westmoreland was deeply moved. "The most memorable of all visits during my tenure at the Military Academy was that of an aging General MacArthur in 1962 to receive the Thayer Award," Westmoreland wrote in his memoir, A Soldier Reports.

After receiving his orders for Vietnam, Westmoreland met again with MacArthur, and the advice Westmoreland recalled receiving followed closely upon the speech at West Point.

"Do not overlook the possibility that in order to defeat the guerrilla, you may have to resort to a scorched-earth policy," Westmoreland remembered MacArthur saying.

MacArthur's advice was consistent with everything Westmoreland knew. Westmoreland, West Point Class of '36, made his mark as a young officer during World War II. In Vietnam he sought to inflict on the enemy more casualties than they could bear. As he told Life magazine in 1966, "First we have to take the fight to the Vietcong and destroy them. ... We have greater mobility and firepower, we have more endurance and more to fight for."

For Westmoreland, the result was a fateful decision about the path to victory in Vietnam. His war of attrition, emphasizing body counts and search-and-destroy missions, relied on American firepower and sweeps by big units. It also meant, as in World War II, increasing numbers of soldiers on the battlefield.

At the end of 1965, U.S. troop strength in Vietnam was nearly 200,000. By the end of 1968, Westmoreland's last year in Vietnam, troop strength reached 540,000. But the escalation, which was accompanied by increasing antiwar protests at home, did not bring victory.

The irony is that in holding true to the military values MacArthur preached at West Point, Westmoreland was reacting to only one side of a general he idolized. MacArthur was acutely aware of the limits America faced in waging a land war in Asia. He had shared those views in closed-door meetings arranged by President John F. Kennedy.

In 1961, Kennedy was reluctant to get America more deeply involved in Laos and Vietnam, as many of his advisers wanted. In MacArthur he found an unexpected ally.

That summer, Kennedy invited MacArthur to meet with congressional leaders, and there the retired general threw cold water on the war cries.

"He said that we would be foolish to fight on the Asiatic continent and that the future of Southeast Asia should be determined at the diplomatic table," Attorney General Robert Kennedy reported.

MacArthur, ever the military traditionalist, was also a realist. He understood, as we increasingly do today, the danger of fighting a prolonged war in which the most likely outcome is neither a peace treaty nor a decisive victory.