Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER‘A masterful performance’ Sunday Times‘Magnificent… One by one, the sacred canons of right and left are obliterated. The war is laid bare, with all its uncomfortable truths exposed’ The Times‘An altogether magnificent historical narrative.’ Tim O’BrienVietnam became the Western world’s most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the United States in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. He portrays the set pieces of Dienbienphu, the Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam, and less familiar battles such as the bloodbath at Daido, where a US Marine battalion was almost wiped out, together with extraordinary recollections of Ho Chi Minh’s warriors. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed 2 million people.Many writers treat the war as a US tragedy, yet Hastings sees it as overwhelmingly that of the Vietnamese people, of whom forty died for every American. US blunders and atrocities were matched by those committed by their enemies. While all the world has seen the image of a screaming, naked girl seared by napalm, it forgets countless eviscerations, beheadings and murders carried out by the communists. The people of both former Vietnams paid a bitter price for the Northerners’ victory in privation and oppression. Here is testimony from Vietcong guerrillas, Southern paratroopers, Saigon bargirls and Hanoi students alongside that of infantrymen from South Dakota, Marines from North Carolina, Huey pilots from Arkansas.No past volume has blended a political and military narrative of the entire conflict with heart-stopping personal experiences, in the fashion that Max Hastings’ readers know so well. The author suggests that neither side deserved to win this struggle with so many lessons for the 21st century about the misuse of military might to confront intractable political and cultural challenges. He marshals testimony from warlords and peasants, statesmen and soldiers, to create an extraordinary record.
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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018
Copyright © Max Hastings 2018
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover photograph © AP Photo/Art Greenspoon
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008132989
Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008133009
Version: 2018-09-24
For my dear friend Rick Atkinson, who chronicles the triumphs and tragedies of American armies with an elegance, penetration and human sympathy that his fellow-historians strive to match.
Contents
Note on Styles Adopted in the Text
1 CLINGING TO AN EMPIRE
1 STEAMROLLER TYPES
1 WAITING FOR GIAP
1 QUIT – OR BOMB?
1 ‘A REGIME OF TERROR’
1 ‘THEY’RE GOING TO LOSE THEIR COUNTRY IF …’
7 1963: Coffins for Two Presidents
1 SMALL BATTLE, BIG STORY: AP BAC
1 ‘ENOUGH WAR FOR EVERYBODY’
1 LIES
10 ‘We Are Puzzled About How to Proceed’
1 DOWN THE TRAIL
1 ‘BOTTOM OF THE BARREL’
1 WARRIORS AND WATER-SKIERS
1 STEALING
1 STONE AGE, MISSILE AGE
1 BEST OF TIMES, WORST OF TIMES
16 Waist-Deep in the Big Muddy
1 PEACENIKS
17 Our Guys, Their Guys: the Vietnamese War
1 SONG QUA NGAY – ‘LET’S JUST GET THROUGH THE DAY’
1 PRELUDE
1 FIGHTING BACK
1 DYING
1 A CRUMBLING ARMY
1 THE FISHHOOK AND THE PARROT’S BEAK
1 MARY ANN
1 LE DUAN FORCES THE PACE
1 ‘IT WILL ABSOLUTELY, TOTALLY, WIPE OUT McGOVERN’
2 ‘WE’LL BOMB THE BEJEEZUS OUT OF THEM’
1 THE PRISONER
1 INVASION
2 ‘AH, MY COUNTRY, MY POOR COUNTRY’
1 VENGEANCE
Tonkin, 1896: entrance to the pagoda of the Great Buddha.(© BnF, département des Cartes et Plans, Société de géographie, Sg XCm 707)
Tonkin, 1908: French officers with the heads of Vietnamese suspected of poisoning French troops.(Apic/Getty Images)
1945: victims of the catastrophic famine that swept northern Vietnam.(Special Collections & University Archives Department, University of Central Florida Libraries, Orlando, Florida)
OSS officers with Vo Nguyen Giap and Ho Chi Minh.
French troops with a Vietminh suspect. (Photo by adoc-photos/Corbis via Getty Images)
French troops bring in a casualty.(©Daniel Camus/ECPAD/Défense)
Dienbienphu, November 1953.(Keystone/Staff)
Giap and Ho.(Collection Jean-Claude LABBE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Cogny, de Castries and Navarre.(Ullstein bild Dtl./Getty Images)
French officers escort a Vietminh unit into their lines following the July 1954 ceasefire.(PhotoQuest/Getty Images)
Lodge and Diem.(Larry Burrows/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
Mao Zedong and Le Duc Tho.(Bettmann/Getty Images)
Gen. Max Taylor and Gen. Paul Harkins.(Larry Burrows/Getty Images)
