What a US General Wrote About Australian Diggers in Vietnam in His Diaries

#NuiDat #Westmoreland #VietnamWar In April 1966, General William Westmoreland was sitting at his desk in Saigon with a folder in front of him marked "First Australian Task Force." Inside was a memorandum from his own staff, telling him the Chairman of the Australian Chiefs of Staff was holding firm. The Australians would not be parceled out to American divisions. They wanted their own province. Westmoreland picked up his pen. He signed. And in doing so, he handed the Australians Phuoc Tuy Province — a place he thought did not much matter. This documentary tells the story of what General William Westmoreland wrote in his MACV command diaries about the First Australian Task Force at Nui Dat — a six-year record of a senior American commander whose opinion of the Australians moved, entry by entry, from irritation to grudging respect to something that looked, by the time he wrote his memoirs, like admiration. Discover why Westmoreland complained about the Australian operational tempo in 1967, why Major General Tim Vincent refused to change it, and how the Battle of Long Tan, the Fire Support Bases at Coral and Balmoral, and the clearance of Binh Ba produced the "acquitted themselves well" line that a professional senior officer does not give away for free. 🔥 In this video: The Pen: The signature that handed Australia its own tactical area of responsibility in Vietnam. Long Tan: What Westmoreland wrote when 108 Australians and one New Zealander held a divisional attack in the rain. The Tempo Complaint: Why Westmoreland told Tim Vincent the Australians needed to "get out and find them", and what Vincent said back. Body Count vs Pacification: Why the American metric made the Australians look poor and the Australian metric did not. The Memoir Line: The one sentence in Westmoreland's 1976 memoir that conceded the Australians had known what they were doing. Sources of Where I get my facts: Westmoreland, W.C. (1976) A Soldier Reports. Doubleday. McNeill, I. and Ekins, A. (2003) On the Offensive: The Australian Army in the Vietnam War 1967–1968. Allen & Unwin. Ham, P. (2007) Vietnam: The Australian War. HarperCollins. Horner, D. (2002) Making the Australian Defence Force. Oxford University Press. Palazzo, A. (2006) Australian Military Operations in Vietnam. Army History Unit, Department of Defence. Disclaimer: This video is a historical documentary intended for educational purposes. #NuiDat #Westmoreland #VietnamWar #1ATF #PhuocTuy #LongTan #AustralianArmy #MilitaryHistory