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Ewell, Julian J. (DSC, DSM w 3 OLC), LTG.
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Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Julian J. Ewell, 93, a retired Army lieutenant general who was a highly decorated paratrooper in World War II and who oversaw a major combat operation in Vietnam that critics inside and outside the military said killed thousands of civilians, died of pneumonia July 27 at Inova Fairfax Hospital. He lived at The Fairfax retirement community at Fort Belvoir.
Gen. Ewell held two top command positions in Vietnam, as commander of the 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta and later as commander of II Field Force, the largest Army combat command in Vietnam.
Under his command between December 1968 and May 1969, the 9th Infantry Division launched a large-scale offensive, Operation Speedy Express, that aimed to quickly eliminate enemy troops with overwhelming force. The division claimed that 10,899 enemies were killed during the operation, but only 748 weapons were seized -- a disparity, investigators said, that could indicate that not all the dead were combatants.
The Army inspector general wrote in 1972, "While there appears to be no means of determining the precise number of civilian casualties incurred by US forces during Operation Speedy Express, it would appear that the extent of these casualties was indeed substantial, and that a fairly solid case can be constructed to show that civilian casualties may have amounted to several thousand (between 5,000 and 7,000)."
That report was recently revealed by journalists Deborah Nelson and Nick Turse, who reported in 2008 that the vast scale of civilian deaths was the equivalent of "a My Lai a month." My Lai, the massacre of nearly 500 Vietnamese by American troops in 1968, had scandalized the nation, deeply embarrassed the Army and undercut support for the war.
Turse described Gen. Ewell's Delta operation in a December article in the Nation magazine. In her book, "The War Behind Me" (2008), Nelson noted that after the operation ended and Gen. Ewell was at II Field Force, he "took notice of the civilian killings" and issued an order that such deaths would not be tolerated.
if ( show_doubleclick_ad && ( adTemplate & INLINE_ARTICLE_AD ) == INLINE_ARTICLE_AD && inlineAdGraf ) { placeAd('ARTICLE',commercialNode,20,'inline=y;',true) ; } "From my research, the bulk of the evidence suggests that Julian Ewell presided over an atrocity of astonishing proportions," Turse said in an interview Tuesday. "The Army had a lot of indications that something extremely dark went on down in the Delta from a variety of sources," but it opted not to vigorously pursue the allegations.
Nevertheless, the 2008 revelations were not the first indication of trouble in the operation. A sergeant serving under Gen. Ewell sent a series of anonymous letters to top Army commanders in 1970 about the high number of civilian deaths. Newsweek magazine investigated and published a truncated report. A Washington Monthly article gave an eyewitness account of helicopter gunships strafing water buffalo and children in the Delta.
Soldiers spoke out against the deaths, some in a congressional hearing, and Col. David Hackworth, who served in the division, wrote in a 2001 newspaper column, "My division in the Delta, the 9th, reported killing more than 20,000 Viet Cong in 1968 and 1969, yet less than 2,000 weapons were found on the 'enemy' dead. How much of the 'body count' consisted of civilians?"
Gen. Ewell was known in Vietnam for his attention to the enemy "body count," considered an indication of success in the war. Subordinates noted that he never ordered them to kill civilians but was insistent about increasing the body count.
In an interview Tuesday, Ira Hunt, a retired major general who was Gen. Ewell's chief of staff in the 9th Infantry Division, called him a "tremendous tactician and innovator." By training large numbers of soldiers to be snipers, Hunt said, "We took the night away from the enemy. . . . They just totally unraveled in the Delta. He got the idea of putting night vision devices on helicopters, and we stopped the infiltration."
Gen. Ewell had the support of his superiors, as well. When he was promoted to command the II Field Force, Gen. Creighton Abrams called Gen. Ewell a "brilliant and sensitive commander . . . and he plays hard." Critics of Gen. Ewell's command, Hunt said Tuesday, were engaging in "sour grapes."
Gen. Ewell's 1995 book with Hunt, "Sharpening the Combat Edge," said, "The 9th Infantry Division and II Field Force, Vietnam, have been criticized on the grounds that 'their obsession with body count' was either basically wrong or else led to undesirable practices."
The charge was not true, they wrote, and Gen. Ewell's approach, "which emphasized maximum damage to the enemy, ended up by 'unbrutalizing' the war, so far as the South Vietnamese people and our own forces were concerned. The Communists took a different view, as could be expected."
After Vietnam, Gen. Ewell became military adviser to the U.S.-Vietnam delegation at the Paris peace talks. He retired in 1973 as chief of staff at the NATO Southern Command in Naples.
Julian Johnson Ewell was born Nov. 5, 1915, in Stillwater, Okla. He attended Duke University for two years before entering the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1939. He became a paratrooper in World War II.
Before dawn on D-Day, he jumped into Normandy with the 101st Airborne Division. So many paratroopers missed their landing zones that then-Lt. Col. Ewell found only 40 of the 600 men in his battalion, but they managed to regroup and engage the Germans. In fall 1944, he parachuted into Holland, fighting in the defense of the Belgian city of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army's second-highest honor, for holding off two German divisions.
In 1952, he was sent to Korea as commander of an infantry regiment. He later spent four years at West Point, rising to assistant commandant of cadets. He became executive assistant to presidential military aide Gen. Maxwell Taylor at the Kennedy White House. He later served as executive to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon and as chief of staff at V Corps in Germany before he went to Vietnam in 1968.
if ( show_doubleclick_ad && ( adTemplate & INLINE_ARTICLE_AD ) == INLINE_ARTICLE_AD && inlineAdGraf ) { placeAd('ARTICLE',commercialNode,20,'inline=y;',true) ; } His other military awards included four awards of the Distinguished Service Medal, two awards of the Silver Star, two awards of the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal, the Purple Heart and the Air Medal.
His marriages to Mary Gillem Ewell and Jean Hoffman Ewell ended in divorce. His wife of 40 years, Beverly McGammon Moses Ewell, died in 1995. In 2005, he married retired U.S. ambassador to Madagascar Patricia Gates Lynch Ewell, in a ceremony performed at the U.S. Supreme Court offices of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Survivors, in addition to his wife, include a son from his first marriage, Gillem Ewell of Charles Town, W.Va.; a daughter from his second marriage, Dorothy Ziegler of Montgomery, Ala.; twins from his third marriage, Dale Moses Walker of Albuquerque and Stephen Moses of Williamsburg; two stepchildren, Pamela Gates Belanger of Denver and Lawrence Alan Gates of Memphis; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
