Product Description

The war in Vietnam was the longest war in American history. US ground troops were in Vietnam for eight long years. In all the American commitment in Southeast Asia lasted 15 years. During that time 46,370 US servicemen died in battle, more than 10,000 died from noncombat-related causes, and a further 300,000 were wounded. The Australian and New Zealand troops who fought there lost 496 dead and 2,398 wounded. But these figures pale beside Vietnamese losses. The South Vietnamese, America’s ally, lost 184,000 soldiers; the Communist enemy a further 900,000. It is estimated that over a million civilians lost their lives. However, the psychological damage to America was incalculable. Vietnam was the first war that America lost. It left the country bitterly divided. Many of 2.7 million Americans who served in Vietnam suffered psychologically for decades to come and America discovered that, for all its might and technological superiority, it could not defeat the ill-equipped peasant army of a small and fiercely determined enemy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #71471 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From the Inside Flap
How did the USA, a staunchly anti-colonial nation, become involved in the most protracted war in its history, and how did arguably the world’s most powerful military machine, together with its Australian and New Zealand allies, allow itself to become bogged down in a jungle war thousands of miles from home?
This comprehensive and balanced account analyses the ultimate failure of the war, and the psychological impact of the war on the American people, and its effect on future US foreign policy. This book charts the course of the war in Vietnam, but more than this, it seeks to place American involvement in Vietnam in historical perspective, and to offer answers to the vital questions above.

Excerpted from Vietnam: a War Lost and Won (Arcturus Military History) by Nigel Cawthorne. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One: Into the Nam

On the morning of 8 March, 1965, the Leathernecks of Ninth Marine Expeditionary Brigade stormed Nam O Beach – military designation Red Two – outside the port of Da Nang in South Vietnam, America’s ally in Southeast Asia. This was a classic World War II amphibious assault, like that on Guadalcanal, Okinawa, or the beaches of Normandy. Indeed Nam O had been used by the US Marines as a training beach before the outbreak of the Pacific War.
Six weeks before, Amphibious Task Force 76 had set sail from Japan. Their arrival in the Bay of Da Nang was supposed to coincide with the end of the monsoon, but the officer commanding, General Frederick J. Karch, himself a veteran of the landings on the Japanese-held islands of Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima during World War II, said that in the last days the Marine assault force spent bobbing up and down in heavy seas off the coast of Vietnam he experienced the worst weather he had ever encountered in the South China Sea.

Some 3,500 Marines on board the USS Vancouver Union Mount McKinley and Henrico anxiously awaited the order to make a frontal assault on the undefended beach of a friendly nation. The Leathernecks – as the Marines called themselves – had been drilled from boot camp that there was no such thing as a friendly beach. But the only thing here that was unfriendly was the weather. As they prepared to disembark, a light drizzle gave way to a strong on-shore wind, creating a heavy swell which snapped mooring lines and made it almost impossible for the Marines to clamber down the nets into the landing craft. H-hour had to be postponed from 0730 to 0900hrs.
At 0903, Marine frogmen reached the beach, pulled themselves out of the surf and made a dash to the line of palms and fir trees that ran along the top of the beach. Hard behind the frogmen were eleven Marine amphibious tractors – LVTPs – carrying thirty-four men each. They thrust their forty-five-ton steel hulls through the white foam. With the ten-foot swell, this was a ‘high surf’ landing and smaller LCVPs had to be abandoned in favour of heavier landing craft. The LVTPs were followed by sixty-one-ton LCM-8s, whose steel jaws disgorged 200 men at a time. Within fifteen minutes, four waves of heavily armed Marines were digging in on the sand just as their fathers’ generation had on the beaches of Pacific atolls barely twenty years before. Fifty minutes later, 1,400 men were ashore, carrying rifles, machine-guns, and grenade and rocket launchers. They were ready for anything – except what actually happened.

Customer Reviews

Excellent end to end unbias coverage of the Vietnam war
I was looking for a book on Vietnam which is not the size of a phone book, but which covers all aspects of the war, including (1.) the history of Vietnam, (2.) the events leading up to American involvement in Vietnam, (3.) the war in Vietnam, (4.) the small war in the U.S. being waged by Anti war campaigners, (5.) the pullout of US troops, and (6.) vietnam today. This book covers all those points in a excellent way. The language and text are simple to read, and there are lots of interesting pictures of key figures/scenes. It is not full of military jargon, nor does it assume the reader has any previous knowledge of the war. The only downside is the frequent spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. If you can put these to the side, I would recommend this book strongly, as a great end to end coverage of this turbulent period in US history.

One for the coffee table?
It's hard to see who would benefit from reading this book. Yes it covers the whole war, including the lead-up and aftermath, but so superficially as to be worse than useless. The author shows no fresh insight, or understanding of the conflict, either military or political, and large sections of the book are little more than cut and paste jobs from earlier works such as Karnow's classic.
If you want to get to grips with this wide and complex subject there's no escaping the fact that you need to read some more substantial (bigger!) works, such as Karnow's, Caputo's, or Sheehan's.

WHEN FIRST WE PRACTICE TO DECEIVE
We become enmeshed in our own deceptions and lose all sense and recollection of what we were trying to do in the first place. Simplifications that were once convenient become quagmires that we can't escape from when they are no longer so. Pretences that we thought we could get away with become embarrassments and millstones round our necks when the truth starts to get out. Objectives that seemed clear at early stages turn out to have unforeseen difficulties to them that we would rather people did not understand, so we start by blurring them in the minds of others and end up in fog and confusion ourselves.

The Vietnam war really needs a Thucydides, but it has not lacked for chroniclers and commentators, much of the story has got out into the public record, and at least Nigel Cawthorne's account is level-headed and free from histrionics or preaching. It doesn't come over to me as a political work in the sense of taking a particularly judgmental stance regarding the combatants, and while Cawthorne obviously knows an atrocity when he sees one, where there are wider lessons to be drawn he leaves it by and large to his readers to draw them. I have not attempted to verify the detail, but a good deal of this ghastly narrative rings a bell, and I would guess that he is unlikely to be far wide of the facts in general. The miasma of deception that pervades the book is not of the author's creating, it comes from the actors. The Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to the first ratcheting-up of the stakes in the war seems to have been fabrication. Victories were regularly claimed that were no victories at all. Bombing of neighbouring countries was happening and being denied with barefaced mendacity. However it is one thing to lie to other people if one's own mind is at least clear. What in my own view is a lot worse is a pig-headed refusal to see that some basic strategic assumptions were at best questionable. Underlying this conflict was a perceived need to combat some ill-defined spread of international communism, often conveniently summed up as the domino theory. Any reasonable person could see that the Soviet Union was a squalid nuisance and that firmness was needed in dealing with it. In addition it had aspirations as a world power seeking parity, or more, of status with America, in consequence of which America invented the concept of something called 'the West', a number of nations given rather more of a role than they might have wished in furthering American objectives and threatened with domino status if they stepped out of line. However it had been obvious from an early stage to President Eisenhower for one that red China was no domino nor any lackey, to say the least, of the Soviet Union, but the domino concept had caught hold, and that was what the war in Vietnam was originally supposed to have been about. Neither the Soviet Union nor China, it became increasingly clear, had much influence over Ho Chi Minh or General Giap, but we were in there now and we thought we had to stay there. Strategy after military strategy failed but the pretence of success had to be kept up, and the worse we were faring the more the same failing approach was seen as the remedy, in a familiar way -- Milton's 'Serbonian bog...where armies whole have sunk'. There were even people whose credulity ran to believing that some sort of democracy was on offer from some quarter, although their number can't have included many Vietnamese.

Let me take you to the New York Times of 9/4/67. There you will read 'US encouraged by Vietnam vote: officials cite 83% turnout despite Vietcong terror', and more along the same lines. Does this remind you of something in the early weeks of 2005? Cawthorne's conclusion is interesting. We lost the wretched war anyway, and now here is Vietnam providing sweatshop labour for American commerce. The Soviet Union and any supposed threat from it have gone, and I would add that it would have collapsed anyway through its monstrous war economy with or without either Mr Reagan or the war in Afghanistan. The Vietnam war achieved precisely nothing that I can see, but we went into it as self-righteous know-alls. We are now back with that mentality, still seemingly unable to understand what motivates people and how it differs from what motivates us, under similar mendacious pretexts. It's not so much the deception that bothers me as the self-deception in it all.