Withdrawal: Reassessing America's Final Years in Vietnam

About this book

A "better war." Over the last two decades this term has become synonymous with US strategy during the Vietnam Wars final years. The narrative is enticingly simple appealing to many audiences. After the disastrous results of the 1968 Tet offensive in which Hanois 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 Americas 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 Abramss 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 Abramss military strategy was unable to change either the course or outcome of a decades long Vietnamese civil war. In a riveting sequel to his celebrated Westmorelands War Daddis demonstrates he is one of the nations leading scholars on the Vietnam War. Withdrawal will be a standard work for years to come.