Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,066
By This is the grave of Earle Wheeler.
Born in 1908 in Washington, D.C., Earle didn’t grow up super wealthy or anything. His father abandoned the family. His mother’s second husband officially adopted the boy. He joined the military at the age of 16, enlisting as a private in the DC National Guard. But he was very good at what he did, people saw promise in the boy, he was promoted quickly, and in 1928, was discharged from the Guard so he could attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He graduated in 1932. Now, this was not a very exciting time for the military, not during the isolationist era. So he was a low-ranking officer in the infantry and was stationed in China in 1937 and 1938. He then came back to West Point to teach mathematics.
World War II of course changed the reality for the military forever and there was a lot more room to advance. Still a pretty young officer, Wheeler, who was seen as nothing if not competent, did a lot of training of new infantry battalions early in the war and then was named chief of staff for the 63rd Infantry Division in Europe beginning in late 1944. Wheeler rose the ranks in part by being extremely unexciting. He wasn’t a big ego guy, it doesn’t seem. He did his job and he did it well and people saw him as good at what he did. So he rose without any big stories behind him. He just kept getting promoted or moved to a higher responsibility job, being good at it, and getting promoted or moved again.
What this meant in the Cold War was working in Germany in the late 40s as part of the occupation, serving as a staff officer in NATO in the early 50s, and commanding the 351st Infantry in Trieste in 1951-52. He was brought onto the general staff at the Pentagon in 1955. He was the boring but competent military bureaucrat who just kept going up the ladder. He became the commander of III Corps in 1959 and Director of the Joint Staff in 1960. In 1962, he was Deputy Commander of U.S. Forces in Europe for about 5 minutes before being promoted yet again, this time to Chief of Staff for the Army. Of course many of these promotion came with actual rank promotions. He became brigadier general in 1952, major general in 1955, lieutenant general in 1960, and then full general in 1962.
All of this slow rising eventually meant the big job. In 1964, Maxwell Taylor left the position of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest ranking military position in the government. Lyndon Johnson named Wheeler to the job. This of course was at a key moment–Johnson and Robert McNamara had decided to go all in on Vietnam. Wheeler’s job was see this through. His arrival in that position was not met with universal acclaim. However, the fact that the person most publicly disgusted was Curtis LeMay might have been a good sign. The fact that he was chosen instead of LeMay wasn’t necessarily preordained either given that McNamara and LeMay had worked so closely together in the past. But LeMay thought Wheeler wasn’t a fighting general, just a bureaucrat, which wasn’t really untrue, even going back to World War II. There were of course many reasons that a man like LeMay wasn’t going to get a job like that, even though he was Air Force Chief of Staff.
In any case, Wheeler was completely supportive of Johnson and McNamara’s military adventurism in southeast Asia. He was among those who would visit South Vietnam and come back and tell Johnson and McNamara that the war was going fine and that the “insurgency” would be under control soon, whatever that meant. Wheeler’s main complaint was that Johnson didn’t drop enough bombs on North Vietnam, constantly demanding more. Given that the U.S. engaged in more aerial bombing over Vietnam than the entirety of World War II, this seems ridiculous. But it comes out of a couple of places. First was the undying belief that aerial bombing worked, a legacy of World War II. It doesn’t, unless you just want to kill a lot of people. Second was Wheeler’s concern about minimizing losses among American troops. That of course makes sense, but the aerial bombing campaigns didn’t really help since they did nothing to force the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong to give up their fight.
Wheeler wasn’t that dumb. He realized this wasn’t working. When the word “stalemate” ended up describing where the U.S. war in Vietnam was in 1968, Wheeler agreed with it privately. In fact, the term was leaked to the press by Gen. Frederick Weyand. But Wheeler wasn’t going to go public. In fact, his response to Tet was wanting more troops. He called for additional 205,000 ground troops. But this was getting unrealisitc. Resistance at home was real. So was the ineffectiveness on the ground. Wheeler also worried about depleting American military forces in other parts of the world. All of this helped contribute to Lyndon Johnson choosing not run for reelection in 1968, realizing that he had no plan to end the war.
When Nixon took power in 1969, he kept Wheeler on as Joint Chiefs. Nixon’s Vietnamization program was given to Wheeler to implement and he did his job. Wheeler resigned as Joint Chiefs head in 1970, retiring from the military as well. At the time, he was the longest-serving Joint Chiefs head.
In 1975, Wheeler had a heart attack and died. He was 67 years old.
In the end, Wheeler was not the architect of the Vietnam War. Real blame for it goes onto other people. McNamara and LeMay can burn in Hell. But it takes career military officers to see it through, to support it without telling those in power the truth, and to do the best they can to win in a hopeless situation for it to be implemented. I’m not saying that Wheeler holds any particular responsibility here. He did what any military officer would have done, or most of them anyway. The question is what should officers do in such a situation. At the very least, Wheeler is no hero. He’s just a military bureaucrat, for better and for worse.
Earle Wheeler is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.
If you would like this series to visit other Americans involved in the Vietnam War, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Curtis LeMay is in Colorado Springs, Colorado and Creighton Abrams is also at Arlington. It’s a big cemetery. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.