The Fifties

by David Halberstam

He did not merely dissent on such general terms, though. Since his President was a soldier, he made the case against intervention in terms that a soldier would understand: He sent a team of planners to Vietnam to find out what victory would take in terms of manpower. The answer was devastating: minimally, five divisions and quite possibly ten (there had been six divisions in Korea), plus fifty-five engineering battalions. Altogether, that meant between 500,000 and 1 million men. Draft calls would be far greater than those for Korea. The existing infrastructure was horrendous, and the construction costs would be immense. Worse, political conditions on the ground would be much worse than in Korea. There the indigenous population had generally supported American intervention. That would not be true in Indochina. No one ordered the Ridgway report; he did it on his own because of a profound conviction that if you were going to send young men into battle, you had better know exactly what you were getting into. When he briefed Eisenhower on what the cost would be, a groan seemed to come from the President. Ike was, Ridgway noted laconically years later, a much better listener than Lyndon Johnson. The other restraining influence was the British resistance to the idea. No matter how much Dulles pushed, neither Churchill nor Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, would bend. The pressure, much of it from Radford,