Operation Cedar Falls - Assessment

Assessment

Senior US commanders involved in Operation Cedar Falls were convinced that this operation had been an unqualified success. According to Gen. Rogers, Gen. Westmoreland thought that it was “very impressive in its results”. Summarizing the effects on the enemy, II Field Force commander Gen. Seaman argued that the enemy’s offensive capabilities had been disrupted. Moreover, he predicted that the losses suffered by the Vietcong would have a “serious psychological impact” on “the VC-dominated populace” and that they now would have to “re-evaluate the relative capabilities of their forces as opposed to ours.” General William DePuy, then commander of the 1st Infantry Division, noted a “complete breakdown in confidence and morale on the part of the VC” and called Cedar Falls a “decisive turning point in the III Corps area; a tremendous boost of morale of the Vietnamese Government and Army; and a blow from which the VC in this area may never recover.”

In the literature on the Vietnam War, Cedar Falls is evaluated much more negatively. Phillip Davidson is one of the few authors who sees it as part of a meaningful broader strategy. While he concedes that Cedar Falls missed some of its short-term goals, he holds that, along with its follow-up Operation Junction City, it had beneficial long term strategic consequences: It dealt a serious blow to the North Vietnamese strategy of protracted guerilla warfare by permanently driving the NLF's main force from the more populated areas and across the Cambodian border. Already this conclusion, however, is contested by Shelby L. Stanton. He notes the same effect as does Davidson but interprets it as detrimental to the American military strategy. Instead of driving the Vietcong into a more “vulnerable posture”, as had been intended by MACV, they were in fact driven into Cambodia and hence into a region beyond the allied forces’ reach where, together with the North Vietnamese Army, they established sanctuaries immune to US attacks.

Most authors, though, focus on the short-term outcome of the operation. They argue that, for all its impressive statistics, Operation Cedar Falls failed to achieve its primary goal: Whereas it did deal a serious blow to the Vietcong, communist forces swiftly reestablished their dominant position in the Iron Triangle. Moreover, the saturation bombing and artillery fire as well as the forced deportation of 6,000 civilians are considered tactics which, in addition to being morally highly questionable, were militarily counterproductive as well. While writing from completely different, if not opposed, political points of view, both journalist Stanley Karnow and political scientist Guenter Lewy cite the deportations of Operation Cedar Falls as an example of a larger military strategy which deliberately displaced hundreds of thousands of the very people the US claimed to defend and thus alienated them from the South Vietnamese regime and their American allies.

Some authors therefore see Operation Cedar Falls as a prime example of what they consider as the fundamental misconceptions of America’s military commitment in Southeast Asia as well as of the moral ambiguities or even outright atrocities caused by it; one author even cites the operation as an example of how not to wage an asymmetric war.