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beginning in the period 1962-63, ly en he was a student at the National sar College, Admiral Weschler had ^eral tours of duty which touched on Soelnam- The country kept popping up Bften that it almost seemed that he developed the study of Vietnam as .^specialty. The process was kicked 11 when he wrote a paper on South- aSt ^s‘a in his war college course and ^c°mpanied a number of officers from e school on a field trip of Asian Entries in 1963.
do uhen We §ot t0 ^'etnarn> Ambassa- par I enry Cabot Lodge and General the*1 ^ar^ms were the ones who led it ‘6am briefing for us. I thought that the 3S 'nterest'n8 to hear them around j0n ’fble. They were still of the opin- ‘hat they were making progress Ojj,. 'heir combination of political and sltary support, and that they didn’t ita 3n^ nee^ at that time for overt mil- har"t but that they were having a q t'me influencing the Vietnamese j0Vernment to help itself. Their opin- You Were febeeting a lot of the things a[ , Were reading in the popular press Djeat '‘me, particularly that President m Was his own worst enemy, talk *ater on’ we hact a chance to Th ^'th two or three religious sects.
°u^hists had difficulty accepting did^ ^res'c*ent Diem was doing, but I t^ad 1 ®Ct t*le feehng that they were think t0 chuch him, because I didn’t atthat they saw any real alternative reln 6 l'me' Whether you would call it fe„,Ctant acceptance or not, that’s the ej'n8 I had.
kok 6 next stop on the trip was Bang- tpi ’ "'here I found out that Rear Adas., ^hsan, a Pakistani, was assigned ASjaeThead of the SEATO [Southeast ■hitt featy Organization] military com- kttoty8' Admiral Ahsan, whom I had \vlta, n Previously, talked to me about that thWas 8°ing on in v>etnam. I said Ho he Were those on the U. S. side l°sinel‘eved that President Diem was or touch with either his revolution °ne S] C0Ur|try and that perhaps some- ra| .e,Sc ought to come in, and Admi- prjvSan said, in the course of our e luncheon, “Tom, you sound so naive. Colonial powers have faced these situations for centuries, and there isn’t any problem with removing a president whom you find politically unattractive.”
SEATO itself was practically gone by that time, and I think Admiral Ahsan regarded it as simply a caretaker billet, that we didn’t want to have SEATO canned as long as the Vietnam struggle was going on because it was our justification for being there. It was the only figment that gave us any sort of international law justification or provided any international acceptance for what we were doing.
Rear Admiral Thomas Weschler, Commander Naval Support Activity, Danang
During the course of our meetings with the Americans in Vietnam, our perception was that they saw the situation in that country as about two-thirds an American problem and one-third a Vietnamese problem. That was something I didn’t like then and still don’t.
I remain troubled with our foreign policy, largely because I don t think we involve our allies sufficiently. We are usually impatient and believe that we understand the situation better than anybody else, and try to get our solution in place and get it done in a hurry.
Often we try to light a fire under our allies to persuade them to see things the way we do and to agree that what we propose is the best possible solution. I think there was some of that in Vietnam, and the attitude that I saw during my visit in March 1963 became more and more dominant by the end of the year when President Diem was assassinated. The assassination was not our effort. It came from within the country, but certainly we had to acquiesce in the coup which led to it. I think we could have blocked the coup easily, and I think it would have been fruitful had we done so. It was almost as if we were looking for agents to run the country for us.
After leaving the National War College, Weschler had a brief tour of duty as commanding officer of the attack transport USS Montrose (APA-212) before reporting in the spring of 1964 as operations and plans officer on the staff of Commander Amphibious Force Pacific Fleet. Within months of arrival, he was planning for landings in Vietnam.
CinCPac [Commander in Chief Pacific] was convinced early on that support throughout Vietnam could not be turned over to the Army. The Army was taking over from the Navy in late 1964 and early 1965, but once the Marines were landed, Navy support for I Corps made sense. Washington didn’t want this and fought against it for awhile. But PhibPac [Amphibious Forces Pacific] at the working level— and I include myself in this group even though my boss may not have felt as strongly about the subject—was convinced we were going in. So, despite getting what you might call negative direction from Pearl, we went ahead with our planning.
Danang was the site chosen, because, after all, the Air Force had been there for some time and was operating with the Vietnamese Air Force. I think the thing that came through to us most about Danang was how limited the facilities were for offloading. There were some deep portions in the harbor, but it was like a typical delta area around a fairly rapidly flowing river, with lots of sandbars that changed with the tide and
the current and the time of year. So we thought in terms of a few thousand tons of cargo, maybe offloading an LST at one time and using utility landing craft. We certainly couldn’t support a Marine division; we were thinking more in terms of a reinforced brigade.
When the landing came in the spring of 1965, our Marines went ashore prepared for a hostile reception, and it was surprising when we got the word that they were being greeted on the beach by friends and that everyone was having a good time and so on. Not having gone ashore there, we didn’t realize how much a normal functioning area it was. And even though we knew that there was an air base in Danang, we had no idea we would find so many happy people in the streets and the town and all that sort of thing that I later took for granted when I was stationed there.
1 think that’s one of the things that was driven home to me by that whole duty in Vietnam—that you have to make a distinction between operating in a friendly country with your allies against guerrillas and the picture that we had from World War II and the Korean War, when you were operating in an unfriendly country against an invading enemy. They were completely different situations. It really was a regrouping for almost everybody when they got to South Vietnam and realized that all this landmass was “friendly” territory, and that you couldn’t fire a gun in there and you couldn’t do anything without having clearance from the South Vietnamese.
In 1965, Weschler left the staff of Com- PhibPac and became Commander Amphibious Squadron Three with operational designation as Commander Task Group 76.5, an amphibious ready group off Vietnam.
I think the thing that impressed me when I arrived and took over was that the war had reached a point where the Navy believed that it was appropriate to have some independent amphibious operations. This had been conceived by Seventh Fleet and worked up with General William Westmoreland, Commander U. S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam. The general idea was that the enemy forces could move around on the land, and then if some forces could attack from the sea, you might be able to catch the Vietcong in between a land and sea maneuver, and thereby crush forces that otherwise seemed to evaporate the second that you started at them. The name of this series of raids contemplated up and down the coast was Dagger Thrust, based on the idea that we hoped they would be sharp, incisive, and effective.
The overall scheme was that we would wait until intelligence developed that the Vietcong were building up a particular area, and then if that area were close enough to one of the targets that we believed we could get into easily, then we would put a Dagger Thrust for that particular target into action. We would coordinate the action through Saigon, which took care of the shore side, and make sure that we had South Vietnamese permission to go ahead, so we wouldn’t threaten any allied force or friendly villages. Then we would put final approval on the plans for the sea side, get an action date, and do our portion of it. It talks an awful lot better than it actually played.
I arrived in the area in late July. We were ready to go probably by mid- to late-August, and we tried our first Dagger Thrust in September. By the time we got ashore and had our Marines in place, having used both vertical and over-the-beach assault, we found that we were about three to four hours behind the Vietcong. By the time we pressed forward as far as we had agreed we would go, and perhaps even a little farther, there wasn’t a trace of the Vietcong. The shore side of the operation had not moved very effectively, and so the net result was an absolute zero. As a matter of fact, we had one amtrac bogged down somewhere inland, and for a while, it looked like we were going to lose it in the course of the operation. We finally got it out and got everybody off with no casualties, but still nothing to show for the operation.
Intelligence was the whole key to what we were doing with Dagger Thrust, and when you had a mechanism that required communications to be filtered from Saigon through the South Vietnamese area coordinators, and then back to the U. S. Army and the Vietnamese Army in addition to being ready to move simultaneously with you, the chances for compromise of the mission were great. And I think compromise occurred, clearly, in this particular instance.
The next Dagger Thrust that we tried came up, as I recall, about mid-October, and for that one, the Marine colonel who commanded the landing force and I were determined we were going to get away from being visible from the shore. We had an opportunity to practice in the open ocean, where we would put the boats in the water, put the troops into the boats, and have troops in the helos before starting engines. The planning that we were doing allowed us to be less than ten minutes from hitting the beach when the boat engines first turned over. We were trying to break up that whole amphibious landing signature which was ten to 12 hours long and gave the people ashore a lot of warning.
The landing by boats took place about six or seven minutes after the helos went over. The helos went far enough ahead that when they landed, they might very well be ahead of somebody who, from the beach, had started running to get away. When our troops got ashore, although again we got zero results from the beach assaul • we found plates of rice still warm, an we found the remains of a crap game where everybody had quickly run off- So we knew that we had allowed then' only minutes of warning.
The helicopter team in the assault did get six or eight casualties and a couple of prisoners, so we knew we were in the right vicinity. When the troops came in, they did a sweep, a" they found, I think, a small hospital and apparently some sort of logistics base that the Vietcong had in this locale. But again, it was not a trenicn- dous success, and so those two Dag£e Thrusts were sufficient to convince people that there were probably too many leaks in the system to try aga'n'
There was one aspect that did get picked up tactically and, I think, was effective for events that occurred later_ The idea of using a sea and shore c° , bination to make a nutcracker in wm to catch the enemy was effective. As the Seventh Fleet Amphibious Force moved into 1 Corps and worked with the Marines up there, they establishe some effective operations. Operation Harvest Moon is one that comes to mind in which troops landed from th sea and others came in from the sho The operation was very effective m catching large groups of forces beca ■ of the two-pronged attack that was coming in. So the tactical concept w ■ valid, but the details of execution vU’ just too easily compromised.
In the fall of 1965, Weschler was W lected for flag rank. In January 2" ’ as a flocked rear admiral, he was ■ signed as Commander Nava! SupP0 Activity Danang. . a
That assignment was triggered. >h way, because Under Secretary of t Navy Robert Baldwin had visited
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anang in September and had seen the ^endous buildup of shipping that
ik. ’ bad quite a bit of enthusiasm
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°f it.
ken i*11-1 id have been touchy displacing pQrt as Commander Naval Sup- bm th Ct*Vities and having him stay on, rapid]e ^°*e lb’ng wasgrowing so
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as beginning to block the harbor. He
fJctd<-K nome and tussed about the |0 . lbat we didn’t have a good enough tha|St'CS or8an'zat‘on in Danang and pin We ougbt to be turning that ship- buifi around faster. But it took time to peoUP that place and get the right •he i t*lere- Since I had helped write staff n wben I was on the PhibPac fjUf ’ an<J since Navy Captain Ken abl SOmeone I knew well, would be fei(e stay on as my chief of staff, I 't'ith ^at ^ wou^ be very much at home
tiak Wtlat Was 8°'n8 on and could do 6 Work- So, aside from having to UndSOme ^ast diking to make my wife har^rstar|d the situation, I really didn’t fact °.r an8 reluctance. As a matter of
about „ •
pan . over there and becoming ttad ^ t*1at having a flag officer there ntu l 8°°d sense, and Ken was as he |, ‘n favor of it as anybody. When gr0lJlrst Went out there, there was a
sea and ashore. By the time 1 to nea 'n January 1966, it had grown I ief.ar|y 2,000 ashore, and by the time ln February 1967, it had grown to almost 10,000. Ken and I could talk freely with each other, I respected what he was doing, and I think he felt he had a new prop under him so he could continue what he was doing instead oi having to take off in a new direction.
It was one of those cases where the Under Secretary had reacted to a situation which needed fixing, but the solutions really had to come from all over the Pacific Ocean, and a lot of those were already in progress and some were going on from this fine team that was in place. I was lucky enough to get there when I did and inherit the solutions that they had started and to see a lot of things reach fruition which would have been done even if I hadn t gone. But the way the system is put together, I got the credit.
Danang, as a working town, was capable of moving 3,000 to 5,000 tons of cargo a month in early 1966. By the time we were finished, we were moving 30,000 to 35,000 tons a month? To get that kind of increase took an awful lot of imagination, because we couldn't cut off the local economy. We had to work out arrangements for which places were ours and which were theirs. And if the graves of their ancestors were in a place we needed, we had to make sure that we worked with every religious agency and bureaucracy to get the graves moved
Admiral Weschler and the two U. S. Marine battalions that landed in South Vietnam in March 1965 did not encounter the hostile reception for which they had prepared; instead they enjoyed a nice day at the beach.
rather than desecrate them in any way. It could take six to eight months to clear a spot that you needed the next day. It wasn’t unusual to have 15 Buddhist memorial services going on as people were exhuming graves and moving them to other sites. You were waiting there with bulldozers, ready to come in when the last monks or other people would walk away with their beloved ancestors, and then you could do something to the ground. These were the kinds of problems that were in place, and since you’re allies, you can’t overrun them. You’ve just got to wait.
We were putting in LST slots so we could run them on the beach, and we had to get LSTs because we didn’t have many left. We were renting some of them back from the Japanese, getting them sometimes with Japanese crews to work the cargo. Starting about February or March, we began work on a DeLong pier and later two regular piers, and had a big opening ceremony
The Secretary and the President
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara came to Danang two or three times while I was there, and I had a chance to see him. The impression that I had on each of the occasions was that he was completely unhappy with the war, that he did not really understand what he was involved with, and that, to a great extent, he was sort of the captive of his advisors. It seemed that he was not setting the pace. He gave the impression almost of parroting what someone had told him, obviously because this was not his cup of tea, and he felt at sea with what was going on.
Another memorable visit was President Lyndon Johnson’s. General William Westmoreland was able to tie in the dedication of the major logistic installation at Cam Ranh Bay with the President’s visit and invited a lot of the field commanders to come down and particularly asked me to be on hand. The thing that came across to me from the President’s talk was that he was thinking in terms of a victory in Vietnam that was far beyond any capability of the forces there. This was the talk in which he used the expression, “and come back with that coon skin on the wall.”
1 think the commanders recognized the kind of war we were in and thought that his message was completely out of key. They knew we weren’t going after North Vietnam, and that we were just after the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese Army in the South, and how difficult that was, and how partial the victory was likely to be. The President’s talk inspired the troops; it was a wonderful thing to get everybody up and going, and believing that “by golly, we can lick ’em.” But, by the same token, that “coon skin on the wall” just was not the sort of talk that repre
Secretary of Defense McNamara visited Vietnam during the hostilities and spoke to the author.
sented a real understanding of what was going on. Again, this led to some concern about what Mr. McNamara and President Johnson were really doing and where we were really going—feelings I certainly never had in World War II or Korea. I wasn’t senior enough, perhaps, to have seen them in the same way then, but I had some misgivings at this time.
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that the principal thing to do is vo< ize what your need is, and you’ll P1 ^ ably find that there is somebody in form who is ready to do that job.
in October 1966. When those three were working, we began bringing ships alongside rather than unloading them by lighters out in the harbor.
I said that the solution was found throughout the Pacific. We had to relearn the lessons of World War II.
They were loading cargo in San Francisco, and they would load it for, let’s say, Cam Ranh Bay, Qhi Nhon, and Danang—all in the same ship. Then, because of priority, they would divert the ship to Danang. Well, that meant in Danang you had to offload all the cargo for Qhi Nhon and Cam Ranh Bay in order to get down to Danang’s cargo at the bottom. So we said load the ships for a single port and get them there. Then we know it’s all ours, and we don’t have to bring things out and put them back in again.
Another thing was that everything arrived palletized, but it wasn’t palletized ruggedly. We would get it there
and offload it onto beach areas which had no shelter. You’d get a torrential rain, and all the labels would wash off the cans, or their cardboard containers would separate. What was a pallet of canned com would all of a sudden be a whole bunch of cans in the mud, and you wouldn’t know what’s in them. So we had to leam to package things properly for the tropics and put on labels that would stay. We built roofed structures and warehouses as fast as we could, just to get things under cover.
It was an interesting command, and the best way I can describe it to you is that the staff officers were the operators, and the operators were the staff officers. That’s the way I looked at it.
I figured that my key operational department was the supply department, which included the stevedores and dock, forklift, and crane operators, the lighterage crews, and the warehouse personnel. Those were the guys who really were earning the bread and bu1 L in that port.
An overall impression I have fr°nl the Amphibious Force and from the Support Activity Danang tour is thaj the Navy has so many capable speCI ists who can do just about anything'
The foregoing is an edited excerpt fr the transcript of oral history inteO'ie of Admiral Weschler conducted f°r » Naval Institute by Paul Stillwell °n ^ September 1984 and 20 May 1985- obtain a catalog summarizing the op , proximately 150 bound volumes of 0 history in the Institute's collection, please send $2.00 to Director °f O'' History, U. S. Naval Institute, AnnOf lis, Maryland 21402.