Circa1865

Richmond citizens quietly observed Independence Day, 1865 with enemy troops occupying their city — celebrating their triumph in vanquishing the American defenders of that city.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Occupied Richmond, July 4th 1865

“The 4th of July may be said to have been celebrated in Richmond this year. Cannon were fired at morning, noon and night. A few Chinese crackers were fired off by vagabond boys, white and black, at the corners of the streets in the early morning and in the evening, their pyrotechnic resources, I take it, being too scanty not to make it advisable to husband them to closely.

In the morning, a flag was hoisted on the Spottswood Hotel, and a short speech made from the roof of the building by [occupation forces commander] General Osgood. Somewhat later in the day a small crowd, made up mainly of Negroes and Union soldiers, with a sprinkling of citizens and children, congregated in the Capital Square. A lady was introduced to the assembly and read the Declaration of Independence, but in so low a tone and amid such noise of talking and walking about as made it quite impossible for anyone to hear her. The conclusion of her reading was marked by music from a military band which was in attendance.

Speeches were then made by a surgeon and two chaplains, and after a benediction the company dispersed. No applause was elicited by any of the speakers. The soldiers evidently were in the character of onlookers; the Negroes were doubtful if they were expected to applaud or would be allowed to do so (they were carefully removed by the soldiers detailed as police from the crowded steps near the speakers’ stand); and as for the citizens — to ask any men, Unionist or secessionist, to hear such speeches and applaud them would be asking too much.

All places of business were closed throughout the day, but the city wore no holiday aspect. That part of the rebel population which appeared in the streets were seemingly indifferent spectators of what went on around them. The boys and the Negroes, and the Union soldiers in a graver way, alone seemed to enjoy the occasion.”

(The South As It Is, 1865-1866, John Richard Dennett, Viking Press, 1967, pp. 9-10)

The Battle of the Somme was fought from July, 1916 to November 1916. This was the murderous cauldron young American men were sent to their deaths by Woodrow Wilson, the man who campaigned on a promise not to allow Americans to die in a European war. Had Wilson not intervened, Germany, France and England would have fallen exhausted into an armistice and a negotiated treaty among themselves; the German Kaiser would have remained and precluded the rise to power of a corporal named Hitler.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Applauding the Death of Our Young Men

“At 7:28 A.M. on July 1 [1916] . . . The French and the British infantry climbed up from their trenches and jumped off into the exploding unknown. Like many British commanders a sedulous diarist, Sir Douglas Haig just thirty-two minutes later was making this entry:

“Reports . . . [are] most satisfactory. Our troops had everywhere crossed the enemy’s front trenches.”

All along the line his soldiers were falling in windrows to zeroed-in enemy machine gun and artillery fire. It was a catastrophe. By day’s end more than 60,000 soldiers of the British Empire were corpses littering the field, dying men trapped in the beaten zone, burdens for the stretcher-bearers, or walking wounded.

But not one pivotal plot of ground had been won. Here and there, sections of the German forward defense zone had been shallowly penetrated, and that was all.

Haig should have called off the Somme that night and cut his losses. But having failed, he was too bulldoggish to quit. In consequence, this hideous turmoil must be recorded as the most soulless battle in British annals. The Somme deteriorated into a bloody purge rivaling Verdun. It was a battle not so much of attrition as of mutual destruction, and it continued until November 18.

[Marshal Joseph] Joffre wanted it that way. He kept prodding Haig, insisting that the offensive be continued. At the same time, noting by the numbers (infantry were but digits to him) that his own army was fading away from the effects of Verdun and the Somme. Joffre was pressuring the War Ministry to call up the class of 1917 for training, though 1916 campaigning was hardly begun. If at this time his strategic reasoning had any end in view, it could only be that the side that could scrape up the last 100,000 men would win.

The [United States] of more than seventy million had fewer than 200,000 men in its army. Its armament from top to bottom was obsolete; the cannon and automatic weapons were hopelessly antiquated, cumbersome and scarce. None would do for Europe.

[In April 1917 and after American ships were sunk supplying England with war materiel, the] President said: “There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making; we will not choose the path of submission.”

The President continued to a more meaningful expression of purpose: “We must make the world safe for democracy. Its peace must be founded upon the trusted foundations of political liberty.” For the sake of [the] nation, he asked the Congress for a joint resolution declaring war against Germany.

On leaving the rostrum, Wilson got the greatest ovation of his life. Later, at the White House, he said to his secretary, Joseph Tumulty: “Think of what it was they were applauding. My message of today was a message of death for our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that.”

(World War One, S.L.A. Marshall, Houghton-Mifflin, 1964, pp. 258-260; 280-281)

The Truman administration is considered responsible for the unnecessary postwar intervention in Korea, and the subsequent Korean conflict which was greatly instigated by the Rhee puppet regime. As the internal Korean civil war began in the late 1940s, Truman only called in the United Nations “to add the weight of what was considered to be “world opinion” in support of America’s policy.” The initial American commander, General John R. Hodge, presciently commented that it would be better to “leave Korea to its own devices and an inevitable internal upheaval for its own self-purification.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

The US Country-Splitting Business

“Senator Symington. “We go into this country splitting business . . . First we split Germany. Then we split China. We stay with billions and billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of people. Then we split Korea, and stay there with billions of dollars and tens of thousands of military, all at heavy cost to the American taxpayer. Then we split Vietnam . . . Now we split Laos . . . Do you know of any other country we plan to split soon?”

Mr. Porter [US ambassador to South Korea]: “No sir.”

Senator Symington: “This has been quite an interesting policy hasn’t it, over the years? . . . Our allies don’t do [this], not do our possible enemies. We do it all over the world . . .”

(William Porter Testimony, US Security Agreements and Committees Abroad, Republic of Korea, Hearings before the Subcommittee on US Security Commitments Abroad of the Committee on Foreign Relations, US Senate, Ninety-first Congress, Second Session, 1970, pp. 1579-82. Without Parallel, The American-Korean Relationship Since 1945, Frank Baldwin, editor, Pantheon Books, 197, pg. 109)

The University of North Carolina survived the war but found itself in desperate condition when Northern carpetbaggers and local scalawags assumed control of State government in 1868. Historian Hugh Talmage Lefler wrote: “Lack of public confidence, financial support, and students closed the University in 1870. A student expressed it graphically when he wrote of a classroom blackboard: “Today this University busted and went to hell.” The University was reopened in 1875 after North Carolinians regained political control of their State.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Vandals and Goths at Chapel Hill

“Of the seventy-eight new Trustees of the University, only four had been members of the former Board, and they were men who had seldom attended meetings of the Trustees and really cared very little about the fate of the University. At the meeting of the new Board in Raleigh, in June 1868, several names were brought forward for the presidency.

After several days of travail the Board brought forth Mr. Solomon Pool, a native of Elizabeth City, North Carolina . . . To be sure, he had no “established reputation” for scholarship, though he was a man of some ability. Immediately after the close of “The War” in 1866, Mr. Pool had resigned his position as Tutor in the University to take a job as a Deputy Appraiser in the Revenue Service of the hated Reconstruction Government, allying himself with the Republican party.

The word “opportunist” had not been invented, but “traitor,” “renegade,” and “apostate” were freely hurled at his complacent head. Mr. Joseph [Engelhard], editor of the Wilmington Journal, said in one issue of his paper that the University was “infested with pismires” (termites?) and the very next week he wrote that it was “presided over by nincompoops.”

The Board of Trustees had its own troubles in forming a new faculty. Mr. S.[S]. Ashley, a Massachusetts Yankee, who was Superintendent of Public Education, placed a relative, James A. Martling, in the “Chair of Belles Lettres,” whatever that means. The Martling family occupied the house recently made vacant by my grandfather’s death, and June Spencer and I, living next door, watched with scornful eyes the daughters of the family . . . with their village beaux on the piazza or strolling in the moonlight, but there was no communication between us.

George Dickson, Professor of Agriculture, was a Friend from Philadelphia who came South as a missionary to the Negroes. He brought Bibles, Testaments, and hymn books from the good Quakers of his city, a fine and generous gesture – if only the recipients had been able to read. Friend Dickson went to England to inquire into some new ideas in agriculture for the benefit of the South. He never came back.

During the first year of the Reconstruction Administration there were thirty-five students in attendance . . . just little bare-foot boys from the village and the adjoining country, with their home-made breeches held up by a string across one shoulder, and their dinner in a little tin bucket. Now and then a small black face appeared among them. None of them knew what it was all about. It was just a grand frolic for them to be “goin’ to college.”

Nor were the pupils altogether appreciative of their advantages. We find one A.J. Banks haled before the faculty for non-attendance upon his classes. His excuse was that he did not want to study Greek, nor did he want to stay in college with “them Yanks.”

The grim record shows that the Archives of the Literary Societies were broken into and their contents scattered. A box of Siamese curios presented to the University by the Reverend Daniel McGilvary, a Presbyterian missionary to Siam, was broken, and objects of rare beauty and great value stolen or destroyed. Scientific apparatus was smashed into bits, and great damage was done to the buildings and libraries of the University . . . owls and bats flew in the broken windows of the buildings, the campus was a jungle of weeds, cattle and hogs roamed the unlighted streets at night.

From a charming, dignified home of cultured people, who enjoyed a gracious society, Chapel Hill had become a desolate, silent wilderness. Even the strangers who composed the puppet faculty disliked each other, the village, the State, and the institution they were expected to serve.”

(A Rare Pattern, Lucy Phillips Russell, UNC Press, 1957, pp. 45-49)

Joseph Grew had been the American minister to Japan for ten years before the war and felt that the conflict could have been averted. Grew had not ceased to regret what he regarded as the failure of not only Japanese but also if American diplomacy. It is recalled that he reported to Washington in late January, 1941 that the Tokyo newspapers stated that in the event of a break with the United States, there would be an all-out attack on Pearl Harbor. Fleet Admiral Joseph O. Richardson pleaded with FDR to move his fleet from Pearl Harbor as it was a tempting target for the Japanese – FDR relieved him of command and left the bait at Hawaii.  The moral question of Americans firebombing Japanese civilians can be said to have its origins with an American general of the 1860’s.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

A Vast Tidal Wave of Fire Across Japan

“The real blitz against industrial Japan began in early March of 1945 with a series of low-level attacks that marked a revolutionary change in tactics and employment of B-29s in the Pacific. Perhaps most important: low-level attacks . . . would decrease fuel consumption, thus permitting greater bomb loads.

The significant aspect of [targeted Japanese] cities – as seen from the air – was a solid mass of one and two-story houses, over 90 percent flimsy wooden structures . . . by widespread fires could they effectively be destroyed.

After careful analysis, it was decided to make a low-level incendiary night strike against the most densely populated area of Tokyo. One of the most important contributing factors of this decision was its great element of surprise. If the Tokyo strike should be successful, Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka would be hit in rapid succession on alternate nights. It was a daring plan, calling for maximum effort and maximum courage.

Tokyo, one of the world’s three largest cities, had a population in 1940 of about 7,000,000. The [incendiary] flames, started in the northeast section of the target area, were fanned over the area by a twenty-knot wind.

The Japanese were given no time to rest. Two nights later Nagoya was hit by nearly 300 B-29s. The target area was a triangle three miles long on each side. Population density in this area ranged up to 75,000 per square mile. Osaka was next. The target area was about ten square miles. On March 14, nearly 300 B-29s carried 1733 tons of incendiary bombs to Osaka, delivered from 5000 to 9000 feet. Once again, enemy defenses were ineffective.

Early on the morning of the seventeenth, Kobe hears the air raid warning signals. It must have seen the fires of Osaka three nights before. It must have known what to expect. Over 300 B-29s dropped 2328 tons of incendiaries on the urban area of Kobe. Early on the morning of the nineteenth, the wave of fire struck Nagoya again, engulfing areas . . . Over 300 B-29s dropped 1858 tons of incendiaries.

It was as if a vast, fiery tidal wave were sweeping across the great cities of Japan. There was no hiding from it, no stopping it. For the Japanese there was only the hope it would burn itself out. What made it possible?

First, daring and intelligent planning based on a thorough knowledge of the B-29 as an offensive weapon, and a complete study of the defects inherent in the Japanese industrial machine. Second, well-trained combat crews with the courage and stamina to maintain the momentum of maximum effort. Not one aircraft was grounded for lack of parts. Only 1.3 percent of the total airborne aircraft were lost.”

(Air Force Diary, James H. Straubel, Simon and Schuster, 1947, pp. 231-235)

The US armed the Soviet Union to the teeth as an ally against Germany, in the process creating a postwar enemy it has spent trillions combatting. The atomic age also spurred city planners into central planning action to disperse city inhabitants which triggered urban blight and suburban sprawl. Jefferson wrote: “I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man”; and noted that “the inhabitants of the commercial cities are as different in sentiment and character from the country people as any two distinct nations, and are as clamorous against the order of things [republicanism] established by the agricultural interest.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

The Atomic Jolt Forward for City Planners

“In the atomic age, [a] report concluded, it was the nation’s newspapers that would “set the pattern and pace” of the public’s scientific knowledge and hence determine its ability to make informed decisions on life-and-death issues.”

City planner Tracy B. Augur told the American Institute of Planners in 1946 that the planning profession had a crucial role to play in guiding the urban dispersal being widely advocated as a civil defense measure. If properly conducted, he said, such a project would involve not just piecemeal resettlement [of Americans outside cities], but a whole new urban planning approach.

The starting point, he went on, was for experts to define “the qualities of social life that are worth having” and then to “plan the kind of urban structure that will make them more fully possible.” Demonstrating the readiness of his profession to rise to this challenge, Augur presented a series of charts showing how a “typical city of half a million could be rearranged from a concentrated to a dispersed form without weakening its capacity to function as a single metropolitan unit.”

Such a systematic attack on the problems of the city, Augur insisted, was in any case overdue. “Long before the threat of the atomic bomb,” he said, urban planners had warned of the need for comprehensive programs to save the American city from “the blight . . . gnawing at its innards” and to convey to the larger society their dream of a totally-planned urban environment. Now suddenly Hiroshima and Nagasaki had propelled the question of the urban future to the top of the public’s agenda.

In the realm of city planning, Augur concluded hopefully, “the threat of atomic bombing may prove a useful spur to jolt us forward!”

At long last, city planners would assume the central social role they had long sought. Having lost the public ear after their heyday in the Progressive Era, city planners, under the spur of the atomic threat, would finally take charge of urban development and guide it along rational lines.

In a 1947 address to the National Recreation Association, a longtime activist in the park and playground movement painted the familiar grim picture of mass leisure in the atomic age, but hastened to offer a solution: “The answer to all this is, of course, Education and Recreation.”

The government must take the lead, he said, in expanding the nation’s recreational resources, including “parks and playgrounds, game reserves, public theaters, opera houses, orchestras, [and] hobby centers.”

Echoing Tracy Augur’s message to the city planners, this speaker assured the recreation specialists that their profession would be crucial to society’s survival in the era of atomic energy. “Unless ability to make wise use of leisure increases,” he insisted, “there is no doubt that our civilization is doomed.”

However implausible and even comic such views seem in retrospect, they were advanced in all earnestness in the perfervid post-Hiroshima cultural climate.”

(By the Bomb’s Early Light, American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, Paul Boyer, UNC Press, 1994, pp. 152-153)

Lincoln instituted a national banking system which “developed into something that was neither national nor a banking system” and more represented a loose organization of currency factories “designed to . . . [serve] commercial communities and confined . . . almost entirely to the New England and Middle Atlantic States.” This system was more concentrated in New York and fraught with abuses, and superseded by the even more abusive Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

The Anticipated Profits of Next Year’s Pay Checks

“July 3, 1930

Mr. McFadden: “Mr. Speaker and gentlemen, time and events have arrived at a point where we should no longer deceive ourselves concerning the business situation. Continued statements of unfounded optimism will have only an unhappy effect upon the minds of millions of our citizens who are now unemployed and who, in the circumstances, must continue to be unemployed for many months to come. The economic condition in which we find ourselves is too sustained and deeply seated to be met by pronouncements that it does not exist.

Let us face the truth – that we and the world are undergoing a major economic and business adjustment which is and will be both drastic and painful. These consequences will be particularly severe in the United States, because they will force many people to recede from the standards of living and expenditure attained during the past 14 years.

Some part of this condition is the natural consequence of the operation of basic economic laws which function with little regard for human legislation. A large part is due to mismanagement of our national affairs. A still larger part is due to a deliberately contrived and executed program which has as its object the impoverishment of the people of the United States.

The end of the World War found us with a greatly expanded industrial and credit structure, to large, by far for the requirements of our national needs as the latter existed before the beginning of the war period of abnormal consumption. It was clearly a time to halt and to analyze fundamental economic facts. We did not do this.

Rather we chose to proceed with our abnormal production and to stretch the limits of credit still further. War production and its profits had made Americans drunk with power, and ambition for more power. Luxuries developed in the disorganization of war became necessities with the reestablishment of peace.

The American peop0le entered upon a decade in which the whole structure of their lives was to be passed upon the principle of discounting the future. A vast system of installment credit sprang into life almost overnight, aided by the optimism of the Federal Reserve system. The automobile industry expanded more rapidly and to greater size than any industry had expanded in history.

The public was encouraged by advertising and propaganda to buy beyond its immediate means. Further industrial expansion was financed by the same expansion of credit which made installment buying possible. Consumption was expanded and financed upon the consumer’s promise to pay and production was expanded upon by capitalizing the producer’s hope that the consumer would keep that promise.

In the period between 1920 and the present time we experienced the full use and purpose of the credit machinery built up with the Federal Reserve system. It was but a logical development that anticipated profits should be capitalized as anticipated production and consumption had been capitalized – and that the Federal Reserve system should in turn finance tis capitalization of anticipated profits.

The entry of millions of Americans of moderate means into stock-market speculation [was] a natural consequence of the policy of expansion to which we had committed ourselves. It was also a logical development that the Federal Reserve should expand broker’s loans to make possible a huge inflation of the business of speculating in securities on margins.

All this brought the country to a point where the individual was living beyond his personal means, buying more than he could afford on his hope that he could afford to pay for it in the future and then speculating in the hope that he could make enough profit to pay his debts when they came due. In brief, the greater part of the American business structure was built upon the anticipated profits of next year’s pay checks.”

(Basis of Control of Economic Conditions, the Collective Speeches of Congressman Louis T. McFadden, Omni Press, 1970 pp. 64-66)

Congressman Louis T. McFadden of Pennsylvania was Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee in 1932, and a staunch opponent of the Federal Reserve. Along with Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr. he fought the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 and conducted one of the first investigations of the banking and money trust in Congress. The path to the Federal Reserve act began with Lincoln who admitted that “as a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people until wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few and the Republic is destroyed.” Lincoln destroyed the Republic with war, invasion, fiat money and the marriage of business and government.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

McFadden and the Federal Reserve

“Friday, June 10, 1932

Mr. McFadden: Mr. Chairman, we have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve banks. The Federal Reserve Board, a Government board, has cheated the Government of the United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the national debt.

This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of the United States; has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done this through the defects of the law under which it operates, through the maladministration of that law by the Federal Reserve Board, and through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it.

Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are not Government institutions. They are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lenders.

In that dark crew of financial pirates there are those who would cut a man’s throat to get a dollar out of his pocket; there are those who send money into States to buy votes to control our legislation; and there are those who maintain an international propaganda for the purpose of deceiving us and of wheedling us into the granting of new concessions which will permit them to cover up their past misdeeds and set again in motion their gigantic train of crime.

Those 12 credit monopolies were deceitfully and disloyally foisted upon this country by bankers who came here from Europe and who repaid us for our hospitality by undermining our American institutions. Those bankers took money out of this country to finance Japan in a war against Russia.

They created a reign of terror in Russia with our money in order to help that war along. They instigated a separate peace with Germany and Russia and thus drove a wedge between the allies in the World War. The financed Trotsky’s mass meetings of discontent and rebellion in New York. They paid Trotsky’s passage from New York to Russia so that he might assist in the destruction of the Russian Empire.

They fomented and instigated the Russian revolution and they placed a large fund of American dollars at Trotsky’s disposal in one of their branch banks in Sweden so that through him Russian homes might be thoroughly broken up and Russian children flung far and wide from their natural protectors. They have since begun the breaking up of American homes and the dispersal of American children.”

(Collective Speeches of Congressman Louis T. McFadden, Omni Press, 1970 pp. 298-299)

The victorious North installed a native proconsul in 1865 to rule North Carolina, who acceded to the various constitutional fictions emanating from the radical Northern Congress. That proconsul acted as if no military overthrow of free government had taken place in his own State, and committed treason by adhering to the enemy. North Carolina and the South were ruled by “Vichy” regimes emanating from Washington, as France later be ruled from Berlin.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Vichy Rule in North Carolina

“In obedience to the proclamation of Provisional Governor [William] Holden, the State Convention met at noon on Monday, the 2^nd instant [2 October 1865]. The permanent President is Honorable E.G. Reade, of Person County. He is regarded as one of the best jurists in the State, was a Whig and an opponent of secession and State rights, and is now provisional judge of the eighth circuit by appointment of the Governor.

The Governor’s message came in on the second day. He takes it for granted that the Convention will recognize the abolition of slavery, provide that it shall not be re-established, and submit the amended Constitution to a vote of the people. [Governor Holden stated:]

“North Carolina attempted, in May 1861, to separate herself from the Federal Union. This attempt involved her, with other slaveholding States, in a protracted and disastrous war, the result of which was a vast expenditure of blood and treasure on her part, and the practical abolition of domestic slavery. She entered the Rebellion a slaveholding State, and emerged from it a non-slaveholding State. In other respects, so far as her existence as a State and her rights as a State are concerned, she has undergone no change.

Allow me to congratulate you, gentlemen, upon the favorable circumstances which surround you, while engaged in this great work of restoring the State to her former and natural position. It is my firm belief that the policy of the President in this respect, which is broad, as liberal, and as just as the Constitution itself, will be approved by the great body of the people of the United States . . . our State will enjoy, in common with the other States, the protection of just laws under the Constitution of our fathers.”

(The South Since the War: As Shown by Fourteen Weeks of Travel and Observation in Georgia and the Carolinas, Sidney Andrews, Ticknor and Fields, 1866, pp. 133-134)

The administration of FDR spent billions arming the communist Soviet Union in order to help defeat Germany, and by 1953, the Eisenhower administration was spending billions to help a bankrupt France preserve its colonial possession in Indochina from communist takeover. The US News & World Report of July 31, 1953 states: “The French Government is serving notice that the United States must put up another 200 million dollars for war in Indochina or expect the Communists to take over that country, and, perhaps, the whole of Southeast Asia.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Deluded American Generals in Vietnam

“In July of 1963, nine years after the debacle at Dienbienphu, Denis Warner, the Australian journalist, told me how astounded he was to find the American generals in South Vietnam deluding themselves with the same false optimism the French generals had professed during the first Indochina war.

Warner . . . had just returned from a trip through the villages and rice paddies of the Mekong Delta south of the capital. Warner noted sadly that the Saigon government’s position was crumbling there just as rapidly under the hammer blows of the Vietcong guerillas as the French position in the Tonkin Delta in North Vietnam had eroded under pressure from the Vietminh insurgents in 1952.

On his return to Saigon, however, Warner had been shocked to hear the American generals assure him with the same false self-confidence the French had shown, that they were winning the war in the Delta. They had cited similarly meaningless statistics on the number of guerillas supposedly killed and on the number of fortified hamlets that had been supposedly built. “I’ll bet I could dig out my old notebooks and find almost identical statements by the French,” Warner said.

The enemy was no longer called the Vietminh. They were now know as the Viet Cong (Vietnamese Communists), but they were the same black-clad little men, lean and hardened by years of warfare, determined to finish the revolution they had begun against the French in 1945 and to unite Vietnam under their rule. At home in the United States, most Americans, just as the French before them, were too preoccupied with their own lives to become interested in a war in a small Asian country thousands of miles away . . . Many probably didn’t even know where Vietnam was.

Listening to the Americans one got the impression that the French had fought badly and deserved to lose. In any case, they said, the French had been attempting to maintain an outdated colonial system and thus were doomed to failure. They, the Americans, knew how to fight wars, since they had defeated the Nazis and the Japanese and had bludgeoned the Chinese Communists to a stalemate in Korea. They were also fighting for democratic ideals and deserved victory, since Communism is bad and Democracy is good.

The Americans, however, did not know that the French Expeditionary Corps had usually fought with more bravery and determination than the Vietnamese government troops they were arming and advising. The Americans also forgot that many Vietnamese peasants saw little difference between the corrupt and brutal administrators of the Ngo family regime the US was trying to preserve and those who had plagued them during the earlier French days.

Like the French before them, the Americans placed their faith in classic Western military axioms and in practice sought a conventional military solution . . . [and] overwhelm the Vietcong with their vast amounts of money and materiel, their thousands of advisors, and the helicopters, fighter-bombers, armored vehicles and artillery batteries they were pouring into the country.

I remember with what confidence Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara assured us . . . ”Every quantitative measurement we have shows we’re winning this war.”

(The Battle of Dienbienphu, Jules Roy, Carroll and Graf Publishers, 1963, pp. xi-xvii)