Battle Of Hamburger Hill Case Study

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The Battle of Hamburger Hill is one of the important battles of the Vietnam War, which was fought by the United States and South Vietnam against North Vietnamese forces between 10-20 May 1969. There were a lot of controversies regarding the strategic value of the heavily fortified Hill 937, the US soldiers received the order to capture it via frontal assault. Taking into consideration that soon after the battle it was abandoned, this case caused a lot of debates and controversies in the American political and military spheres. A lot of researchers started to develop the idea that America had joined the Vietnam War, not for the sake of saving human lives and ending the war, instead for the sake of stopping communism spreading. The meaning of …show more content…
General Adams took the decision to stop the policy of maximum pressure against the North Vietnamese and transform it into a protective reaction for troops. At the same time the first withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam was officially declared. Head (2015) writes that the real batter of Hill 937 took place in the American Senate and media and not on that mountain in Vietnam. It was already mentioned that when Americans finally took the hill, the military leaders were accused of taking little care of the lives of their soldiers and giving them out just for the sake of taking an unimportant position. Young openly accused American generals of having no idea about military history and making the soldiers continue ineffective repeated attacks, which only resulted in more and more victims. Most of the historians consider this battle to be a watershed event of negative public perception of the Vietnam War in general. It is utterly difficult to make concrete conclusions about winning or losing the war. The fact is that most revisionist analysts assumed that America did not lose battles during the Vietnam War, instead these were the politicians, who lost this war. “The Hamburger Hill battle had run afoul of a fundamental war-fighting equation. Master philosopher of war Karl von Clausewitz emphasized almost a century and a half earlier that because war is controlled by its political object, the value of this object must determine the sacrifices to be made for it both in magnitude also in duration.” (Head, 2015, p.

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