Louis Thorley, a military historian and retired U.S. Army officer who argued that the United States won the Vietnam War but later lost it by betraying the Vietnamese, died on September 25 at his home in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He was 90 years old.
His death was confirmed by his stepdaughter, Susan Merritt.
Mr. Thorley’s revisionist book, “A Better War: The Unexplored Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Final Years in Vietnam,” published in 1999, was popular at the Pentagon during the early days of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Read this book in the hope that it will bring a positive prognosis to those conflicts.
As it turns out, that wasn’t the case. And outside the Pentagon, the book’s main theories were largely rejected.
Mr. Thorley, who was an officer in the Vietnam War, flatly declared in the central chapter, “It’s time to win the war.” That period, he said, dates back to the late 1970s, when “rural South Vietnam was in decline.” Widely pacified. As Thorley said in a later interview, North Vietnam was only able to overcome its adversaries after 1972, when the United States failed to “fulfill” its “repeated commitments to South Vietnam.” Body.
Thorley, a third-generation West Point graduate, has particular praise for Gen. Creighton Abrams, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, with whom he served, and whose recorded meetings with his subordinates are a key research tool for the book. It became. General Abrams abandoned his predecessor William Westmoreland’s “war of attrition” strategy in favor of a policy that won the hearts and minds of rural Vietnam, a strategy Thorley believed was successful. (In 2011 he would write a biography of General Westmoreland.)
“The decisive factor was the withdrawal of political support for South Vietnam by its former ally, the reduction of material support, and even the eventual denial of financial support,” Thorley wrote in the book “Better I wrote this in the conclusion of “War”. Defeat of the South.
Historians, journalists who covered the war, and many veterans rejected Thorley’s views both before and after his book was published. Their view downplays the conditions that made the Vietnam War “virtually unwinnable,” as historian Kevin Boylan put it in a 2017 New York Times op-ed.
Thorley’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated book minimizes several important elements. In other words, the conflict with the Americans was a form of national liberation for Vietnamese communists, just as the Vietnamese expelled the French in 1954 and 1955. ;The US-backed Saigon government, riddled with corruption and torture, had little popular support, a pattern that would be repeated in Afghanistan half a century later. that the killing of civilians on a grotesque scale helped turn the population against Americans (the 1968 My Lai massacre was mentioned only briefly); And, as Mr. Boylan put it, the South Vietnamese military’s “Achilles heel was a weak will to fight, and this shortcoming was never overcome.” This was another way the war foreshadowed the Afghanistan war, in which government forces collapsed in its final weeks.
Journalist and historian Jonathan Mirsky, writing in the New York Review of Books, dismissed Mr. Thorley’s argument, saying, “This argument raises the question of the most important question of all: Why did the South Vietnamese military attack South Vietnam?” “It fails as part of a serious analysis,” he wrote, because it “does not mention at all whether it was military.” Is a country supported by the most powerful country in the world really that weak? ”
Mr. Mirsky characterizes the book as “an exasperated defense of Clayton Abrams,” and indeed Mr. Soley devotes much space to the general’s Accelerated Pacific Campaign, calling it the key to his strategy and success. I believed it.
“The central goal of the APC, as it was abbreviated, was to elevate 1,000 disputed settlements to a status of relative safety in 90 days,” Thorley wrote. “As the initial success of the operation exceeded expectations, the number of target villages was increased to 1,300, of which 1,320 had some kind of force by early January 1969.”
But other historians have argued, as Mirsky wrote in his review of Thorley’s biography of Westmoreland, that General Abrams was “like the “Speed Express,” in which the 9th Division “taken off the kid gloves.” He defended the “mopping-up operation”.” During a six-month operation in the Delta. This resulted in a huge number of civilian casualties. ”
Thorley was harshly critical of Ken Burns’ widely acclaimed 2017 PBS documentary series on the Vietnam War, which chronicled the war’s horrific failures. He called it “deeply flawed.”
Lewis Stone Thorley III was born on August 3, 1934 in West Point, New York, the son of Col. Mellow Thorley, who taught military arts and engineering at the U.S. Military Academy, and Louise (Hunt) Thorley. . Bob, as his family called him, graduated from the Texas Military Institute in San Antonio in 1951 and earned a degree in military engineering from West Point in 1956.
A long career in the military followed. From 1957 to 1960, he was a tank platoon commander in Germany. From 1963 to 1966, after earning a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania, he served as a lecturer and assistant professor in the English department at West Point University. He served as the executive officer of a tank battalion in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967, and then as assistant chief of staff in Vietnam from 1968 to 1970. and in 1973, he joined the Department of Military Planning and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College.
After retiring from the Army in 1976, he served as a senior civilian official at the CIA. He received his Ph.D. in 1979. in National Security Policy from Johns Hopkins University.
Mr. Thorley is the author of Honor Bright: History and Origins of the West Point Honor Code and System (2008), Vietnam Chronicles: The Abrams Tapes, 1968-1972 (2004), and Honorable Warrior: General Harold. Also an author. “K. Johnson and the Ethics of Command” (1998), “Thunderbolts: General Clayton Abrams and the Military of His Era” (1992), and “Arms Transfers under the Nixon Administration: A Policy Analysis” (1983).
In addition to his stepdaughter, Mr. Thorley is survived by two stepsons, Douglas Becker and Timothy Becker. sister Judith Simpson; and four step-grandchildren. Mr. Thorley’s wife, Virginia, died this year, and his daughter from a previous marriage, Kathy Thorley, also died in 2018.
“He loved the Army, loved being in the military and loved driving tanks,” his stepdaughter Merritt said in an interview. “And he had great respect for the generals he wrote about.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed to the research.
