HANOI. Nov 10: Former US Defence Secretary Robert Mcnamara in a major revision of US military history, said today Washington had erred in a key 1964 decision to escalate the Vietnam War. reports Reuter.

Mcnamara who was speaking at a news conference in the Vietnamese capital, said talks today between himself and Vietnam's top military tactician. General Vo Nguyen Giap had revealed President Johnson had acted on wrong information when he used an alleged North Vietnamese torpedo attack to justify the first air strikes against North Vietnam.

"We were wrong. General Giap made absolutely clear, and I don't think we need any further documentation, he made absolutely clear it

hadn't occurred. Had we known that at the time we wouldn't have carried out the subsequent military attack,” he said.

On August 2, 1964 North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the destroyer USS Maddox in waters off Northern Vietnam.

Two days later the Maddox reported a second attack promoting President Johnson to forward the Gulf of Tonkin resolution to Congress Justifying US retaliatory air strikes and marking a turning point tn the war

But Mcnamara said General Giap had revealed the second attack on the Maddox never took place.

Had we known that we wouldn't at that time have sent up to the Congress the resolution that ultimately was

used as the authority for the expansion of military operations in Southeast Asia.

Would that have changed the course of the war? you can't say for sure I think that resolution would have gone up later.... but clearly there was a major event on which we were in error.'

Mcnamara. 79. resigned as Defence Secretary in 1968 after overseeing the US military buildup in Indo-China. In memoirs published in August this year he sparked heated debate in the United States by saying Washington had been terribly wrong to continue the war beyond 1963.

His return to Vietnam two decades after the war ended, is ostensibly to set up a Joint US-Vietnamese seminar aimed at re-examining the events of a war which cost

more than 58.000 American lives and left more than four million Vietnamese dead or injured.

Mcnamara said he had received support for the conference plan from Vietnamese officials and was hoping the event could be held in Hanoi in late 1996.

However, he denied his return mission to Vietnam was connected to personal feelings of guilt, hinted at in his memoirs for a conflict wnich became known in the 1960s as Mcnamara s war.

We all make mistakes in life and I am not trying to atone for mine. This isn't the only error of Judgement I have made It s not atonement he said.

Mcnamara a three-day visit to Vietnam was due to end later today