Robert Thompson
Sir Robert Thompson is 'the British expert on guerrilla warfare who advised Richard Nixon'[1] and 'was military adviser to Thieu in Vietnam and still sees him occasionally'[2] (Nguyen Van Thieu -- Served as president of South Vietnam from 1967 to 1973, fleeing Saigon just before it fell April 30, 1975.)
- Gerald Templer was the intellectual and administrative father of the Vietnam war. While the French were going down to defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and the Americans leading a UN crusade to stop Communism in South Korea, Gerald Templer was coining the phrase 'hearts and minds' to wage a successful counter-revolutionary war in Malaya. He combined a sophisticated propaganda campaign, social welfare programme, large - scale deportations, village re-location schemes, and jungle trained troops given helicopter mobility to contain, isolate, and then defeat the 5,000 or so Communist guerrillas.
- Templer's success was hailed on the front covers of Time and Look magazine, promoted him to Chief of Staff and Field Marshal, and took him in 1960 to the palace of Prime Minister Diem of Vietnam, where he gave the Americans' first strong man in Saigon an intensive tutorial in how to apply the lessons of Malaya to the war against the Vietcong.
- Back in London, Templer recommended a more permanent British involvement in the war, which led to the dispatch of Sir Robert Thompson's British Advisory Mission to Saigon from 1961 to 65.[3]
Martin Walker reviewed Thompsons 1981 book on Vietnam as follows:
- A RESURGENT conservatism in Britain and the US, fresh from monetarist triumphs in the economy, is turning its confident attention to foreign affairs. Its new theory about the Vietnam War, adopting a previously fashionable model for the French defeat in Algeria, states that the Vietcong were militarily defeated after the Tet offensive and that the check to the North Vietnamese invasion of 1972 showed that the war was still "winnable" with US air support... This book has all the competence and clarity of articles in a weekly news magazine yet remains as glib. The authors are drawn, over-whelmingly, from the teaching staff at Sandhurst and from that highly controversial body, the Institute for the Study of Conflict.[4]
Affiliations
Publications
- WAR IN PEACE: CONVENTIONAL AND GUERRILLA WARFARE SINCE 1945, by Sir Robert Thompson et al (Orbis, £9.95).[5]
