Robert Asprey's monumental work on guerilla warfare, War in the Shadows, is really about the Vietnam War, even as he ranges across the centuries in his analysis of asymmetric methods in war. He reserves his most exacting rhetoric, and his greatest scorn, for those who ordered and conducted the failed American invasion of Indochina, for their amorality and incompetence. I was struck by how often, through the years from 1945 onwards, he was able to quote a general who confidently announced impending victory or at least great strides towards it. So I collected a few.

Source

Robert Asprey, War in the Shadows (Macdonald & Jane: 1975)

Background

We start in 1945 with British and French troops in south Vietnam, along with the defeated Japanese army.

Under the terms of the Potsdam Conference as confirmed at Yalta, Britain and China shared responsibility for occupying Vietnam: British forces moving in south and Chinese forces north of 16th parallel. p. 721

The Potsdam arrangement had been made with China's nationalist government under Chiang Kai-Shek.

In Vietnam itself, though, Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh established their own governmental machinery in north and south Vietnam, taking advantage of the brief interval between Japan's defeat and the arrival of the envisaged Chinese and British forces. Ho's main man in south Vietnam was Tran Van Giau.

Giau now met with total rebuff from the British commander, Gracey. To insure control of the area, Gracey fleshed out his small force not only by rearming some five thousand former French prisoners of war, but by retaining the better part of seventy thousand Japanese soldiers under arms.

French generals

In the end, the British gave way to the French who deployed significant forces under Leclerc, their overall commander in the Far East.

Asprey says:

By late December [1945], about fifty thousand French troops, commanded by General Leclerc, occupied the South, a good part of them Free French units (including twelve thousand men of the Foreign Legion) from Europe. .. Nearly everyone in Saigon agreed that the fast-moving combat columns would quickly pacify the countryside to extend French control throughout Indochina, just as in the old days. Leclerc himself spoke of '... a simple mopping-up operation which would take more than four weeks' p. 722

Since promising that it would take more than four weeks doesn't make much sense, I traced Asprey's source, The struggle for Indochina 1940-55 by Ellen Hammer. It turns out he was paraphrasing, and also relocated the statement by a couple of months. Hammer's version is:

On October 25 General Leclerc began the reconquest of Indochina for France. He said that it would take about a month before what he called his 'mopping-up operations' were concluded. Hammer p. 120

This inaccuracy doesn't bode well for the rest of this exercise, but I will continue with Asprey's portrayals of French confidence. As you'll see, I have checked a sample of the other quotations against their original sources, where possible. A task made slightly harder by Asprey's habit of not giving page references!

In late February 1946, General Leclerc proclaimed '... the total re-establishment of peace and order' throughout Cochin China and southern Annam. p. 726

Cochin China refers to the southern end of Vietnam, where Vietnam is located. Annam is the central/southern narrow strip. In this tripartite division of Vietnam, the northern region with its capital at Hanoi and extending inland to include the Red River valley and surrounding mountains, was known as Tonkin.

By May 1947, Paul Coste-Floret, the French Minister of War, could declare:

There is no military problem any longer in Indochina. The success of French arms is complete p.742

Indeed the northern communist command had suffered great setbacks:

Ho Chi Minh and his military leader Vo Nguyen Giap had themselves seriously erred by attacking French garrisons in December 1946. Forced into precipitate retreat, they narrowly avoided capture in 1947. This was the perigee of their fortunes, and they owed much of their salvation to a realistic appreciation and acceptance of their peculiar situation. p. 747

The world situation was changing rapidly, with the Soviet Union exploding a nuclear weapon in 1949 and the Chinese communist forces under Mao overthrowing the Nationalist government and its supporters, who fled to Taiwan. By 1950 Mao was supporting Ho Chi Minh's efforts to regain control over all of Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Korean War had started, which made the US take a more favourable attitude towards the French as an anti-communist buffer and send them military supplies.

In 1950, Giap launched his offensive, taking French outposts along the Black River in January, and in February occupying major towns across northeastern Tonkin to squeeze the colonial forces there into a string of forts along the highway from Cao Bang to the Gulf of Tonkin. Ultimately, forcing the French to battle, Giap won a decisive victory at Dong Khe over the combined fort garrisons and their relief column, plus three battalions of paratroopers sent as reinforcements.

'When the smoke cleared, the French had suffered their greatest colonial defeat since Montcalm had died in Quebec. They had lost 6,000 troops, 13 artillery pieces and 125 mortars, 450 trucks and three armored platoons, 940 machine guns, 1200 submachine guns and more than 8,000 rifles. Their abandoned stocks alone sufficed for the equipment of a whole additional Viet Minh division' p. 762, quoting Bernard Fall, Street without Joy (checked original, quote is accurate, 2nd ed. 1964 p.33)

By spring 1951, the French had appointed a new commander-in-chief, General de Lattre.

De Lattre vigorously denied it was a colonial war. Instead, in Robert Shaplen's words: 'De Lattre was convinced that he was leading a crusade against Communism. He told me that the French were in Vietnam 'to save it from Peking and Moscow', and he predicted victory in fifteen months. He insisted there was no longer an ounce of colonialism left in French intentions.' p. 766, quoting Robert Shaplen, The Lost Revolution: Vietnam 1945-65

In 1953, Giap had five regiments of regulars and an estimated 60,000 guerillas operating behind French lines. A ceasefire in Korea meant that China could provide further arms, equipment and instructors to the north Vietnamese army.

This dismal picture stood at odds with French and American pronouncements. In May 1953, General Salan 'had predicted a shift in the war to France's advantage within three years' p. 859

In September of the same year, yet another commanding French general (perhaps the seventh since Leclerc), Henri Navarre, was on the cover of Time magazine, who quoted him as saying:

'A year ago none of us could see victory. There wasn't a prayer. Now we can see it clearly like the light at the end of a tunnel.' p. 865

In the spring of 1954 came the great north Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu. Navarre had fortified this position with 17,000 troops, as a base for forward operations and possibly also as bait to draw Giap into a major attack. That part of Navarre's plan worked, but his hopes of easily repulsing such an attack with major losses for the Viet Minh were unfounded.

Giap's most important success lay in secretly bringing up artillery and other heavy weapons through jungles and over mountains, a fantastic logistics effort that resulted in bombardment of French jerry-built positions by 75-mm and 105-mm howitzers, 75-mm recoilless rifles, 120-mm mortars, and, towards the end, Soviet multiple-rocket launchers. p. 873

The Viet Minh destroyed the French air-strip, forcing ammunition and supply to be dropped by parachute, then plagued the incoming planes with dense quantities of anti-aircraft fire.

To evade flak, cargo planes resorted to higher altitudes, which meant widely dispersed cargo drops, with much vital supply falling to the Viet Minh.

On May 8, 1954, the beleaguered garrison surrendered to the Viet Minh. Over two thousand defenders had died; the remainder, including some five thousand wounded, marched forlornly into captivity. p. 882

Here was a cruching defeat too great for the French to accept and still fight on. The Paris and Saigon governments fell; in June, General Ely replaced General Navarre. Although the French army in Indochina remained a cohesive unit, with 95 per cent of its strength intact, government and country had suffered enough. The Expeditionary Corps, since 1945, had suffered over 170,000 casualties including nearly 75,000 missing (of whom nearly twenty-seven thousand were Vietnamese); the war had cost France nearly $7.5 billion (plus another $4 billion in US aid). p. 882

Following this, Ho Chi Minh negotiated from a position of strength at Geneva and a ceasefire was agreed, with the country partitioned pending elections (which never happened). The US had only narrowly held back from direct intervention at Dien Bien Phu, now they backed a new government in the south, led by Ngo Dinh Diem. But he did not succeed in gaining the confidence of the population, and unrest continued to be a problem.

However, upbeat assessments continued:

'The Viet Minh guerillas ... were gradually nibbled away until they ceased to become a major menace to the government' p. 927, quoting Major General Samuel Myers

'The [south Vietnam] government is becoming more and more effective in curbing these terrorist acts ... the internal situation has been brought from chaos to basic stability.' p. 928, quoting Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow

'On October 26, 1959, South Vietnam will celebrate its fourth anniversary of the Republic of Vietnam. The anticipated elections of 1956 have never been held, and the Communist capability in Vietnam, south of the 17th parallel, has been reduced to one of sheer nuisance activity. ... It is one Asian area where Communism has been rolled back without war ... There is little likelihood of a revolution against the regime.' p. 929, quoting Wesley Fishel writing in the Yale Review

A failed coup against Diem in November 1959 strengthened his hand, and his oppressive measures intensified.

The US gets pulled in

In early 1961, newly elected US President Kennedy sent his VP Lyndon Johnson on a tour of southeast Asia. Saying of Diem, he's all we've got out there, his conclusion about Vietnam was:

The country can be saved - if we move quickly and wisely. p. 1063, quoting Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days

By early 1962, the United States was funding a hefty increase in South Vietnam's armed forces ... American army and marine helicopters began ferrying Vietnamese troops to and from 'combat areas'. By spring, some six thousand Americans were serving in Vietnam; a significant portion of field advisers and helicopter crews were being shot at; some military advisers were beginning to shoot back, as were armed helicopter crews. p. 1086

Every quantitative measurement we have shows we're winning this war. p. 1087, quoting US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara

1963

In January 1963, the American presence had increased to nearly ten thousand. President Kennedy, in his State of the Union message, said: 'The spearhead of aggression has been blunted in South Vietnam' p. 1087

In March 1963, the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, stated that the war was 'turning an important corner ... government forces clearly have the initiative in most areas of the country.' p. 1094

In April 1963, General Harkins met McNamara in Honolulu. As recorded by Roger Hilsman, newly promoted to Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs:

'General Harkins gave us all the facts and figures - the number of strategic hamlets established, number of Viet Cong killed, operations initiated by government forces, and so on. He could not, of course, he said, give any guarantee, but he thought he could say that by Christmas it would all be over. The Secretary of Defense was elated. He reminded me that I had attended one of the very first of these meetings, when it had all looked so black - and that had been only a year and a half ago.' p. 1095, quoting Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation (this is another quote I've traced to source, and it's accurate. Doubleday 1967 edition, p. 466).

In May when the NLF [National Liberation Front - South Vietnamese communist organisation] was collecting taxes in forty-one of South Vietnam's forty-four provinces, Harkins told Saigon reporters that the war would be won 'within a year' p. 1095

A month later - American troops in Vietnam now numbered over fifteen thousand - Ambassador Nolting told Saigon reporters: ' South Vietnam is on its way to victory over communist guerillas' p. 1095

Diem's government remained unpopular, especially as a result of oppressive tactics against the major Buddhist organisations.

Open rebellion broke out in May, in Hue, when government troops, attempting to disperse a Buddhist crowd, opened fire and killed nine Buddhists. Although the Diem government blamed this on Communist agitators, it gave in to some Buddhist demands. During negotiations, a Buddhist fanatic, following an ancient sacrificial custom, burned himself to death in a public ceremony in Saigon, an act photgraphed by Malcolm Browne and one that helped turn world opinion sharply against the Diem regime. Subsequent immolations kept the issue alive and brought continuing demands from the Kennedy administration for a settlement. p. 1096

Instead, Diem declared martial law and sent police and special forces (US-trained for counterguerilla warfare) to raid Buddhist pagodas throughout south Vietnam. Thousands of students turned out onto the streets to protest, and arrests led to further protests. In November, Diem was toppled in a coup, and along with several of his senior supporters, summarily executed. Less than three weeks later, Kennedy was assassinated.

Lyndon Johnson

Despite the official line that victory was around the corner, incoming President Johnson was briefed by McNamara that:

'Current trends, unless reversed in the next 2-3 months, will lead to neutralization at best and more likely to a Communist-controlled state'. ... McNamara also told the President that the situation 'has been deteriorating in the countryside since July to a far greater extent than we realize because of our undue dependence on distorted Vietnamese reporting.' p. 1137, McNamara quotes are from the Pentagon Papers

LBJ accordingly ordered an increase in troop numbers, more aggressive mission types such as commando raids and destructive covert operations, a bombing campaign in Laos, and greatly increased intelligence-gathering through U2 overflights and from the sea, mapping coastal radar and defenses. p. 1138-9

By August 1965, according to General Wheeler, there were 75,000 US troops serving in Vietnam, and by December 1965 this had risen to 200,000. McNamara was in Saigon near the end of the year, and was convinced by General Westmorland of the need for an increase to 400,000 by the end of 1966, and a potential further 200,000 troops in 1967. p. 1270

1967

In his State of the Union message in early January 1967, President Johnson once again justified American presence in Vietnam in the strongest possible terms. p. 1277

'Our men in that area - there are nearly 500,000 now - have borne well the burden and the heat of the day. Their efforts have deprived the Communist enemy of the victory that he sought and that he expected a year ago. We have steadily frustrated his main forces. General Westmorland reports that the enemy can no longer succeed on the battlefield.' p. 1278, quoting Johnson, State of the Union speech

The President's words reflected optimism current among the hawks; as he later wrote in his memoirs: 'By early 1967 most of my advisers and I felt confident that the tide of war was moving strongly in favor of the South Vietnamese and their allies, and against the Communists.' p 1278, quoting L. B. Johnson, The Vantage Point (checked as accurate, 1971 edition p. 257-8)

By late 1967, the half million or so US troops had alongside them 700,000 South Vietnamese (at least on paper), 45,000 from Korea and some smaller contingents from allies Australia, Thailand and New Zealand. Direct operational costs for the year zoomed to over $25 billion. p. 1280

'40 percent of our combat-ready divisions, half of our tactical airpower, and at least a third of our naval strength ... were waging full-throated war on the Southeast Asian peninsula.' p. 1280, quoting Townsend Hoopes, The limits of intervention

In late 1967, data furnished by US advisers in the field had been collated that allowed Robert Komer, deputy ambassador and responsible for the pacification program, to claim that 'only one South Vietnamese in six now lives under VC control' p. 1291

In October, General Westmorland told newsmen that 'the enemy is in the worst posture he has been in since the war started.' ... Prior to leaving for Washington, in November, General Westmorland told newsmen that he was 'more encouraged than at any time since I arrived here.' p. 1292

General optimism continued to be expressed by Administration officials as the year closed. ... At the turn of the year, Secretary of State Rusk spoke optimistically of 'a clear turn of events on the ground'. p. 1293

General Westmorland's annual report, delivered on January 27 [1968], included the following ... 'The year ended with the enemy increasingly resorting to desperation tactics in attempting to achieve military/psychological victory; and he has experienced only failure in these attempts.' p. 1294

Note about editions

Page references are to the 1975 Macdonald and Jane's one-volume edition.

There is also a two-volume edition, revised and updated (Morrow 1994, and reprints), in which some chapters were abridged and others were added with new material. Unfortunately that means all the page and even chapter references do not apply across editions.