Charles W. Thayer

Charles Wheeler Thayer (born February 9, 1910 in Villanova , Pennsylvania , † August 27, 1969 in Salzburg , Austria ) was an American cavalry officer, diplomat and writer.

Life

Thayer attended St. Paul's School in Concord (New Hampshire) until 1928 and entered the US Military Academy in West Point that same year , which he left in 1933 with an officer's diploma. However, he did not opt ​​for a military career, but entered the diplomatic service.

From 1933–1937 he was attaché and consul in Moscow , and from 1937 to 1940 consul in Berlin and Hamburg . 1940–1942 he worked in Moscow, 1942/43 in Kabul as consul. In 1944 he became Vice Consul in London . In 1945 he worked in Yugoslavia as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army and head of the American military mission in Yugoslavia. During World War II he was in diplomatic missions in Afghanistan and in the field of Tito - Partisans active in Yugoslavia. In 1945 he was appointed head of the Office of Strategic Services in Vienna . After 1945 Thayer u. a. Consul General in Munich.

In 1963 his work Guerrillas ( Harper & Row , Publisher, New York) appeared, which in 1964 in West Germany under the title Guerillas und Partisanen. The essence and method of irregular warfare ( Rütten and Loening , Munich) appeared. In this study, he, a supporter of Carl von Clausewitz , analyzed various partisan and guerrilla wars after 1945 and also repeatedly made historical comparisons, e.g. B. to the Indian Wars in the USA. Thayer explicitly called for the political to take precedence over the military. He saw the incipient American engagement in Vietnam with extreme skepticism, since he saw the political and military leadership of the USA trapped in a crusade mentality that did not allow them to compromise with their opponents. Thayer was one of the first military theorists to deal with the Vietnam War, at the end of which Andrew Mack formulated the thesis of asymmetrical warfare .

Thayer worked through his experiences in the diplomatic service, especially in the Soviet Union, in novels with an autobiographical background, e. B. Two vodka too much (Reinbek 1972).

Guerrillas

The professional diplomat Thayer with relevant military experience was shocked by the fiasco of the CIA- led invasion of the Bay of Pigs to overthrow Fidel Castro in April 1961. He was also concerned about the situation in Vietnam, since 1962/63 there were already 10,000 US soldiers were in action in South Vietnam and there was no end to the conflict in sight. Thayer therefore analyzed a number of guerrilla and partisan wars after 1945. He dealt in detail with the activities of the Huk in the Philippines and the operations of Georgios Grivas in Cyprus . He considered Grivas to be one of the few military commanders or leaders of an independence movement who were successful with almost exclusively terrorist methods and who had forced a great power, in this case the British Empire , to give in politically.

Thayer found the fiasco in the Bay of Pigs particularly fatal. Irrespective of the numerous military, i.e. technical, mistakes, he sharply criticized the political lack of conception of the operation and the complete misjudgment of the political and military situation on the island. In Vietnam he saw a repetition of these mistakes. He noted a crusade mentality in the political and military establishment, as the USA had already revealed in earlier wars and which made it incapable of compromising with the enemy, e.g. B. enter into negotiations.

Thayer's work was one of the first analyzes of the Vietnam War. Many aspects that he analyzed and compared with historical examples are also of interest in the context of current global conflicts, which are often referred to as asymmetrical warfare .

Publications

• Guerrillas and partisans. The essence and methodology of irregular warfare , Munich 1964 (original edition: Guerrillas , New York 1963).
• Hello, Comrade General! Bonn 1953.
• The restless Germans , Bern 1958.
• Checkpoint , Bern 1965.
• Russia , Amsterdam 1966.
• Two vodka too much , Reinbek 1970.
• Bears in caviar , Gütersloh 1972.

literature

• Charles W. Thayer , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 43/1969 of October 13, 1969, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)

Web links

• Charles W. Thayer in the database of Find a Grave (English)