Tuesday, January 7, 1975. The fall of Bình Phước province

Bình Phước province fell to the NVA/Viet Cong.  Only 850 of 5,400 ARVN troops who resisted the largescale invasion of the province survived.  Local South Vietnamese officials were executed.

The province borders Cambodia.

Henry Kissinger, who no doubt knew what the US reaction would be, later stated, "Phuoc Binh was the test case. If the United States reacted, there was still a chance for Hanoi to withdraw from the brink."

The US didn't react, to its lasting shame.

By TUBS - This SVG map includes elements that have been taken or adapted from this map:, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17124066

Or could we have even realistically done anything?

By 1975 the US had gone to an all volunteer military in an attempt to repair the massive morale damage done to the Army and Navy during the war.  The Navy had never used conscripts in the war (it only used conscripts in the later stages of World War Two, and very few), but it had reduced recruiting standards due to the recruiting problems the Navy had experienced and it had sustained two mutinies at the end of the war, although it refused to call them that.

The Army had effectively been destroyed as a fighting force due to the war.  Shedding conscript soldiers was helping to address that, but even at that the last draft had occurred on June 30, 1973, and conscript troops remained in the service.

Any intervention, therefore, could not really have been a largescale ground action, but an Naval air one, or an Air Force one out of Thailand, could have been mounted.  The American public, however, would have reacted negatively, and massively.

Last edition:

Monday, January 6, 1975. The Vietnam War resumes in earnest.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Annus horribilius, Australia, French Union, Hukabalahap Rebellion, Malaysian Emergency, Paris Peace Talks, Vietnam, Vietnam War

Wednesday, January 1, 1975. Cutting off Phnom Penh.

The Khemr Rouge cut off supply lines to Phnom Penh.

John N. Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman were found guilty on charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury in the cover-up of the Watergate scandal. 

Robert Mardian was found guilty on one count of conspiracy.

Queen Elizabeth II conferred knighthood on Charlie Chaplin, P. G. Wodehouse, Roger Bannister, and Gary Sobers.

I would have passed on Chaplin.

Last edition:

Tuesday, December 31, 1974. Americans get to own gold again.

Labels: 1930s, 1933, 1970s, 1974, baseball, Currency, Economics, France, Great Depression, inflation, law, Sports, television, The Great Inflation

Tuesday, July 30, 1974. Cypriot peace, Articles of impeachment.

Greece, Turkey, and the United Kingdom signed a peace agreement calling a halt to fighting in Cyprus.  The agreement was mediated by Henry Kissinger.

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee adjourned its proceedings for impeachment.  It had passed three articles of impeachment. 

A proposed fourth, asserting, illegal use of power in the 1970 invasion of Cambodia, was rejected.

An election was held in Rhodesia, which had a population of 300,000 whites and 5,700,000 blacks. Voting was segregated. The result was whites took 76% of the seats.

ZZ Top played at the Tulsa State Fairgrounds.

Last edition.

Monday, July 29, 1974. Philadelphia Eleven and Alpha Group.

Labels: 1970s, 1974, Folk Music, KGB, Music, Protestant, religion, trends, USSR, Women

Wednesday, August 15, 1973. The end of American involvement in the Vietnam War.

US bombing of Cambodia halted, bringing to an end US combat operations in Southeast Asia.

A7 Corsair II at Korat.

The last raid was flown by two A7's flying out of Korat Air Base in Thailand.  

When I was a National Guardsman, I had the interesting experience of having had a Colorado Air National Guard A7 roll over upside down above me as I was driving a Jeep attempting to clear an artillery location.  The pilot spotted me from quite high as I was driving around a curve and went into a dive, while still upside down, and came right over the top of me as I drove around the curve.  Had it been an actual conflict, I and everyone in the Jeep would have been killed.

On the same day, the USS Constellation departed Yankee Station, a fixed point off of the coast of North Vietnam.

Nixon addressed the nation on Watergate for the first time, asking the country to look forward rather than backwards, and declaring he had no knowledge of the events until after they had occured.

A rock band by the name Sick Man of Europe renamed itself Cheap Trick.

Saturday, March 17, 1973. Treason and Sad Reunions.

Khemer Air Force pilot Cpt. So Patra, son-in-law of former King Norodom Sihanouk, bombed the presidential palace in Phnom Penh, killing 36 people.  He then flew his T-28 to Hainan Island, a Chinese possession.

Vietnamese, not Cambodian, T-28.

Arrests followed.

A large release of the few remaining US POWs in Vietnam began, including the release of Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm of the U.S. Air Force.

A remarkable photograph, it depicts Stirm's 15-year-old daughter greeting her father with the rest of the family behind them.

Stirm had already received a Dear John letter from his wife, Loretta, informing him of her intent to divorce him.  They did divorce.  She died in 2010 from cancer.

His children all had the Pulitzer Prize winning photographs hanging in their homes.  He couldn't bear to.

January 31, 1941. Truce in Indochina, fighting in Libya, Movies, and Boxing

Japan, fearing the result of ongoing fighting between a client state, Thailand, and a near captive colonial entity, French Indochina, arranges for a negotiated truce between the two powers.

The Abbott and Costello movie Buck Privates was released.  I'm not really keen on Abbott and Costello, but if you like their vaudeville style of comedy, this film is one that remains fairly well regarded.  It received universal circulation at Army post theaters at the time, and oddly the Japanese picked it up for propaganda purposes to show the incompetence of the U.S. military.

The movie was a musical and also featured the Andrews Sisters.

The commencement of allied offensive action against Kufra in Italian Libya commenced.

Joe Louis KO'ed Red Burman to retain his heavyweight boxing title.

More on the days' events in the Second World War:

Day 520 February 1, 1941

Italian prisoners bombed by Germans

Today in World War II History—January 31, 1941

January 24, 1941. For Greater Knowledge

 

Stamped on back, January 24, 1941.  For a lot of people today, the concept of going to the library is now pretty lost, valuable resource though they remain.

On this day in 1941, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox sent to Secretary of War Stimson a letter warning of a possible Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Thai bombers struck Angkor in what is now Cambodia.

Italian armor at Mechili.

British forces advanced 80 miles east from Tobruk to Mechili and then were surprised by the Italian Army engaging in a counterattack. While initially successful due to British confusion, ultimately the Italian forces were defeated.

More about that event can be found here:

Today in World War II History—January 24, 1941

Day 512 January 24, 1941

The Tragedy At Kent State

Yesterday, as we noted below, was the 50th anniversary of the Kent State, Ohio, incident.

The incident, to put it briefly, occured when students at Kent State University staged a protest over the invasion of Cambodia which had been announced by President Nixon on April 30 and which for the US commenced on May 1.

This blog isn't a day by day anything, but we do commemorate certain events, most frequently those of 100 years past, when they occur.  Starting in 2018 we started picking up some fifty years past events mostly to mark the epicoal year of 1968.  We've continued with that a bit, as that is in some ways the continuation of the original story.

I marked the 1970 invasion of Cambodia, an event that I can personally recall as I noted in a post about that, but I managed to almost miss the 50th anniversary of the Kent State Shootings. I marked it, but only with a post nothing it:

May 4, 1970. Kent State

I nearly missed this somehow.

The point at which the Vietnam War took on a new, tragic, aspect, as a protest resulted in a unforeseen bloodshed.

This deserves a much better post than this, but unfortunately, it'll have to wait a bit.

The event was a huge one in the story of the war as it was the point where protests over the war resulted in bloodshed, something they had not up until then.  As the anti war movement had developed some real radicals, it would have some violent incidents after Kent State, but the protest at Kent State itself was never intended to be that sort of confrontation.

It's easy to over explain what happened there, but the real oddity of it is that National Guardsmen, who were drawn from the local area and largely not reflected in the student body of Kent State, were deployed as a riot detail to the protest. That's not surprising but frankly, as a former National Guardsmen, that sort of duty is always dangerous for Guardsmen and the public, to a degree.  Guardsmen are trained as soldiers, not as riot police, and the instinct of soldiers is to fire when confronted, no matter how well trained they may be. There are plenty of such incidents all around the globe that have occured when soldiers, even very well trained soldiers, fall back on their training in that fashion.

With that being the case, the shocking thing is that the Guardsmen had been issued ammunition.  Normally this wouldn't be the case and I heavily doubt that even regular active duty soldiers who were deployed in similar roles in the 1950s and 1960s were issued ammunition.  Likely even those men deployed to disperse the bonus marchers carried nothing more dangerous than than their sabers (they were cavalrymen) in that effort, with sabers making a pretty effective non lethal crowd control weapon in the hands of somebody who knows how to use their flats.

But at Kent State the Guardsmen were issued ammunition for their M1 Garands and at some point, they used it.

What happened remains extremely unclear.  The protests had been running for several days as it was so it had grown tense.  An effort was made to disperse the crowed and as part of that the Guardsmen advanced with bayonets fixed to their M1 Garands.  Some students began throwing rocks and return throwing tear gas canisters.  At some point the Guardsmen fired a 13 second volley, which is a long sustained volley.  Sixtyseven shots were fired by the 77 Guardsmen, but slightly less than half fired at all.

That seems clear enough, but from there things deteriorate.  Forensic examination of audiotape suggests that three shots were fired shortly before any others.  Some witnesses claimed a sergeant opened fire with a sidearm first, but the FBI's expert stated that the first three shots were from a M1 Garand.  An FBI informant inside the student body was revealed to be later armed and some have claimed that he fired the first shots, but this now seems discounted.

In the end, nine students were wounded and four killed. None of the killed was any older than 20 years old.  Given the volume of shots, and the weapons used, it's amazing that only 13 people were hit, which has to lead to some speculation on whether the 29 Guardsmen who all fired actually aimed at anything or even attempted to, or even intentionally did not.

The entire matter was a national tragedy, to say the least.  It put protests on the war on a new footing, even though the United States was already withdrawing from South Vietnam at the time, something not entirely evident to Americans given the recent news.  It was also a local tragedy, however, which is rarely noted as like a lot of university towns, the residents of Kent Ohio, whose families had contributed those who were in the National Guard, never saw the incident in the same light.

I remember it.

The event referred to here, that is:

Lex Anteinternet: April 30, 1970. The Incursion into Cambodia: Well remembered, but not well remembered accurately, on this day in 1970 President Richard Nixon announced that Republic of Vietnam and the ...

On May 1, 1970, US troops entered Cambodia in Operation Rock Crusher.  The operation sent the 1st Cavalry Division, which was famously air mobile in Vietnam, i.e., "air cavalry", the 11th Armored Cavalry REgiment, the ARVN 1st Armored Cavalry Regiment and the ARVN 3d Airborne Brigade into Cambodia following a massive B-52 air strike.

Engineers of the 11th ACR sweeping for mines ahead of a M551 Sheridan.

And that's what I remember.

It surprises me to realize that at the time I was six years old and in 2nd Grade.  Indeed, that simply amazes me in recollection.  I've long known that I recalled this event, in a certain way, but I'd associated it with being older.  Not six and almost seven, and not as a 2nd Grader.

In 1970, the year I was in 2nd Grade, I was in my second year of attendance of a grade school that was later sold by the school district in a sale that I still question, even though I have no real reason to.  I'll forgo commenting on that, at that time grade schools here worked the way that they do most places. They had a territory.  Later, in a controversial move that I still very much question, that practice was altered so that there were no home schools, leaving parents to struggle to place their children in a district housing over 60,000 people, as they also juggled their daily lives. But that's another story.

Looking back, I realize that I entered public school in the Fall of 1968, completing the year as a newly turned 5 year old.  So by extension I completed first grade having just turned 6 in 1969 and I would turn 7 just before school was let out in 1970.  In April and the first of May, 1970, I was still 6.

We 6 and 7 year olds didn't think much about the Vietnam War.

Our house in about 1958. This was before my birth.  My mother is to the left of the house, the only ones my parents ever owned.

That's interesting in a way as over time there's come to be a genera of literature that reflects childhood memories of war, and mostly of World War Two.  And when I say that, I mean American memories.  Europeans and Asians who were 6 or 7 definately have memories of World War Two as there wasn't a square inch of Europe that wasn't impacted by the war.  Even lands where a German jackboot never set foot, or where Japanese infantry never trod, were heavily impacted directly by the war.  The British were bombed and sent their children, if they could, to the countryside.  Swedes lived on short rations, pinned into between the Germans in occupying Norway and the war raging on the Finnish/Soviet border.  Swiss rations in the neutral nation became so short that serious worries over starvation set in and commons gardening became common.  And of course if you were in an area where ground forces contested for ground or even occupied it the events were unforgettable.

But in the United States none of that occured and so the memories are of other things.  But they are there.  Films like Radio Days and the like by some really well known actors depict the era and what it was like to be in the various stages of being young.  Even Gene Shepherd's A Christmas Story touches on it a bit, with Shepherd setting his Yuletide recollections forward in time, as he was actually that age several years prior himself, during the Depression. Shepherd served in World War Two.

Of course, Shepherd's A Christmas Story might in fact be the most accurate depiction for a young person, the way they perceive remote events.  Set in 1940, the kids worry about Christmas gifts and school yard bullies, not the Germans having just invaded France.  Likewise, in 1968, 69 and 70, when I was first in school, we didn't worry about the Republic of Vietnam.  We didn't even discuss it in school.

When I entered grade school, and through the early years of it, the day had a pretty set routine.

My father left for work really early, often before I was up.  Back then he got up around 5:00, which seemed really early, but now I get up no later that, and often a lot earlier than that, myself.  In my very early grade school years my mother sometimes made me breakfast but a lot of times I just ate cereal and drank milk.  I still eat cereal for breakfast quite a bit, but I never drink milk anymore and really haven't since my grade school years.

We had a Zenith television at home.  It was in the kitchen, which is also where we always ate.  It'd been placed in a spot that was just below a window by the stove, kind of an awkward place to put it, and I know that it had been relocated from the living room to there. That was likely because my father often worked in the evenings using the kitchen table for a work table.  Indeed, that some table was used for absolutely everything.

Television was new to my parents at the time and the TV, looking back, I now realize had only made its appearance a couple of years prior.  Up until then they didn't have one so this television was their first TV.  As first generation television owners their habits didn't really match later generations in regard to it, although in my father's case it came to somewhat resemble the modern a bit at one time, before ceasing to once again.  Anyhow, neither of my parents turned the television on in the morning.

But I did, and my mother let me do that.

At that time there was no such thing as cable television, at least in our town, and so broadcast TV was it.  Very early on there was only one channel, but because of my specific memory recollected here, I know that we had at least two, and maybe three, channels.  One of the channels, even though it was local, rebroadcast material from Denver's KOA television and other channels.  In the morning that one played kids shows.  One was the legendary Captain Kangaroo, which I would watch before going to school, and the other was a local Denver product which featured a young female host and a sock puppet character of some sort.  That one took submissions form the viewing audience and I once had a drawing I sent in shown in that part of the show.

School started at 8:00 and some time prior to that I went out the door, rain, shine or snow, and walked to school. The hike was about a mile, which isn't far.  Nobody ever drove me or my associates to school. . . ever.  Indeed, while my mother could drive and my father had purchased what I now know was a 1963 Mercury Meteor for her to have something to drive, but she was an awful driver and it was undoubtedly best she didn't drive me to school, but then nobody's parents did. The few kids who were hauled to school by motor vehicle were hauled by school bus, if they lived in the boundaries.  At the end of the school day, which I think was around 3:30, we walked back home.

If we had homework to do we did it then, and I know that homework actually did start to become a feature of our routine in 2nd Grade.  Our parents were expected to help us with penmanship, which my mother did.  Both of my parents had beautiful handwriting.  I never have.  They also helped us with math, which at that time my mother did as well. Both of my parents were really good with math, which I also have never been.  I recall at the time that we all had to struggle with "New Math", which was as short lived ill fated experiment at teaching something that is both natural and in academics dating back to antiquity in a new way.  It was a bad experiment and its taken people like me, upon whom it was afflicted, decades to recover from it.  It also meant that both of my parents, my mother first and my father later, were subject to endless frustration as they tried to teach me math effectively, having learned real math rather than new math.

If I didn't have home work or if I had finished it, I was allowed to turn on the television once again.  Gilligan's Island, the moronic 1960s sit com, was already in syndication and one of the local channels picked it up in a rebroadcast from Denver and played it at 4:30. At 5:00 the same channel played McHale's Navy.

My father normally left work around 5:00 p.m. and was home very shortly thereafter.  At this point in time he had to travel further across town so that usually meant that he was home no earlier than 5:15 but on some occasions it was later, around 5:30.  Usually he got home prior to 5:30 however, and when he did, he switched the channel to the news over my protests.

The network nightly news came on at 5:00 and ran to 5:30. At 5:30 the local news was shown on one of the local channels.  My father watched both and the custom became to leave the television on during dinner, something that I haven't liked as an adult.  From around this time until his later years he kept the television on until he want to bed, often simply as something on in the background as he worked.  Interestingly, he'd counsel me not to attempt to do homework in front of the television as he regarded it as impossible. I didn't at the time, but he was quite correct.

I don't recall what he watched on TV as a rule.  My mother never picked up the evening television habit and just didn't watch it.  Indeed, her intentional television watching was limited to a very few number of shows including Days Of Our Lives during one hour of the daily afternoon, and things such as The Carol Burnett Show or Lawrence Welk.    Having said that, just looking through the shows that were on in 1970, it seems to me back then they both watched some series that were brand new to television at the time.  The Mary Tyler Moore Show was one they both liked and it debuted in 1970. The Odd Couple was as well..  The Flip Wilson Show they also liked and was new. The short run Tim Conway Show they also liked.  Some others that were still on that they never watched were shows like Hogan's Hero's, which was nearing  the end of its run.

One thing that networks did at that time, as well as local channels, was to run movies.  When they did, it tended to be a big deal.  I can recall Lawrence of Arabia running when I was in my early grade school years, being broadcast over two nights.  My mother, who admired T. E. Lawrence, watched both nights, which was unusual.  I also recall The Longest Day running, again over two nights, when I was in 1st Grade.

So what's that have to do with Cambodia?

11th ACR in Cambodia.

Well, a lot in terms of my recollection of this day.

We grade school boys were familiar with war, as in "the war", and that war was World War Two.  Some of us had fathers who had been in World War Two, although they were older fathers, keeping in mind that in that era people had larger families and children stretched out over their parent's lifespans often differently than they do now.  It wasn't unusual for a grade school kid to have a father who had been in World War Two, and indeed my closest friend's father had been in the ETO during the war.  The dominance of World War Two in the culture, however, may be shown by the fact that I had a father who had been in the Korean War and I still thought of World War Two as "the war" and my father more or less did as well, which is odd to realize in that it wasn't just him, but others of his age and equivalent experience who took that view.  Indeed, it seems to me that it wasn't until right about this time, 1970, that the started to talk about their own war at all, and indeed also about this time it began to creep into the culture as background elements in popular stories.

Adding to this was the impact of popular culture.  As noted, the movie The Longest Day was such a big deal that it sticks out in my mind as something shown on television around 1969, probably in a network premier.  The movie Patton, one of the most celebrated American military movies of all time, was released in April 1970, and indeed its sometimes noted that President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger watched a private screening of it just shortly before U.S. armor went into Cambodia, although the suggestion that this influenced Nixon seems specious to me, the invasion having been something that events were working up to since the mid 60s and which had been ongoing for weeks prior to the US putting its forces in.  In other media, kids who liked cartoon books, which I never have, circulated such works as Sergeant Rock or GI Combat, both of which were set in World War Two.

So, for a 6 and 7 year old boy, we knew about wars, in the childish youthful glorification of war sense that has been a common feature of the play of boys since the dawn of man, but the war we knew about was a movie and cartoonish version of World War Two.

On May 1, 1970 I watched Gilligan's Island.  Following that McHale's Navy came on and I started watching that.  My father got home almost immediately after McHale's Navy started and switched the channel to the news, over my protest.  To my shock, the news featured M113 Armored Personnel Carriers crossing a river.  

I was stunned and asked my father "what's that?".  It looked like something out of The Longest Day.  I can't recall his exact words but he told me that the scene depicted US troops in action in Cambodia.

The fact that it had an impact is best demonstrated that fifty years later, I still recall it.  It was unsettling.  Even at 6 it was obvious that the school yard games we played in which the Allies and the Axis duked it out in Europe and Asia 30 years prior were being overshadowed by a real war in our own era.  People were fighting and it wasn't a game.

It was a type of epiphany, to be sure.  But a person needs to be careful about claiming too much.  It isn't as if at nearly age 7 I suddenly became keenly aware of everything going on in Indochina.  But suddenly I was much more aware of something that had actually been playing in the background my entire life.  Indeed, as it was in the background, but subtle, and often limited at that age to a short snipped on the nightly news that was often devoid of any real engaging footage, it was just something, up until then, that was.

Of course, while 7 years old isn't old, even at 7 your early early childhood years are waning.  The next five years in Vietnam, only three of which had a large scale American presence, were ones that were hard not to be aware of.  The unrelated but still huge news event of Watergate was impossible not to be aware of.  And by the time the Republic of Vietnam started collapsing in 1975, I was old enough to be very much aware of it.

But that awareness started on this day in 1970.

_______________________________________________________________________________
Related thread:

Growing up in the 1960s

April 30, 1970. The Incursion into Cambodia

Well remembered, but not well remembered accurately, on this day in 1970 President Richard Nixon announced that Republic of Vietnam and the United States were sending forces into Cambodia.

South Vietnamese M113 Armored Personnel Carries in Cambodia in 1970.

Recalled now most as the "U.S. entering the Parrot's Beak" region of Cambodia, in fact events had been building in this direction for weeks, months and years.

Cambodia was part of French Indochina, along with Vietnam and Laos, coming into French control due to a long struggle between Thailand and Vietnam for control of the country, which left it in Vietnamese hands at the time that Vietnam was colonized by the French.  Like Loas, it became an independent kingdom with the collapse of the French regime, achieving that status in 1953 prior to the French departure from Vietnam.  The establishment of the independent kingdom demonstrated  to a degree how the French envisioned post colonial Indochina, with it being made up of French aligned independent states with a government of a highly traditional model.  Indeed, the installed regent, Prince Sihanouk, was a French choice and installed much like the last Vietnamese emperor was in neighboring South Vietnam.  In Sihanouk, however, the French had chosen a much stronger personality who soon demonstrated that he could not be controlled.

Indeed King Sihanouk resigned his position in 1955 to become a politician in the newly independent kingdom, which made his father the king.  However, upon his father's 1960 death, he resumed the position of monarch, but limited his title to Prince. 

Right from the onset Cambodia, like the other regions of Indochina, contained left wing radicals who had come up during the colonial period, something that isn't really surprising in light of the fact that France also had left wing radicals itself.  And as with South Vietnam, the established government was not sympathetic to democratic elements.  Differing from Vietnam, however, Cambodia's monarchy survived its early independence and went on to form the government, whereas a similar effort in the Republic of Vietnam had left to a rapid downfall of the monarch.  Sihanouk had no small role in navigating this course.

Things were always accordingly troubled in the country but the ongoing wars in its Indochinese neighbors made things particularly difficult for Cambodia.  Prince Sihanouk attempted to place the country in the nonaligned camp, which was understandable under the circumstances but frankly naive given the enormous nature of the local conflict and the overarching global one.  

U.S. Air Force UH-1 helicopters over Cambodia.

On the other hand, the Prince correctly believed that the Communists would ultimately prevail in the Vietnamese War and believed that he had to be capable of dealing with that reality if Cambodia was to remain an independent state.  Perhaps realistically assessing the strength of his own armed forces as too weak to oppose the North Vietnamese, his government allowed the NVA to establish sanctuaries within the country starting in the mid 1960s, although as early as 1967 he commented to an American reporter that he would not oppose American air strikes in the country as long as they did not hard Cambodians, which of course was an impossible limitation.

In contrast right wing elements in the country increasingly wanted to take it in the opposite direction and found the Vietnamese presence humiliating.  Cambodia had its own culture and ethnicity and had long suffered from Vietnamese incursions into the country.  Indeed, large number of ethnic Cambodians lived in the Mekong are of Vietnam which itself was a sore point to the Cambodians that would continue right on into the Communist Pol Pot era.

  

In 1967 things changed for the worst when a spontaneous Communist rebellion took place in a region of the country which was followed by a more planned one in 1968.  In the same year Sihanouk openly revoked his prior comments about allowing US air strikes in the country, which given the increasing deterioration of his government's situation was probably a logical position for him to take.  By that time, however, the war in Vietnam was now highly developed.

With Richard Nixon's election in 1968 the US began to increasingly look towards action in Cambodia aimed at North Vietnamese enclaves there, something comparable to other frontier battles of other eras in which the US sought to address safe harbors across a border.  Following the Tet Offensive and Nixon's election, moreover, the US began to look for ways to withdraw from Vietnam which ironically meant occasional increases in the level of violence in the war.  In January 1969 Prince Sihanouk indicated to the US that Cambodia would not oppose ARVN and US forces that entered Cambodia in "hot pursuit" of retreating NVA forces provided that no Cambodians were harmed.  The US went one step further however and started targeting B-52 air strikes on NVA enclaves in the country, something the US later claimed that Sihanouk agreed to but which he most likely did not.  The events demonstrated the impossibility of the Cambodian position, however, as an allowance of one thing is practically an allowance of another, in war, and at the same time it was becoming increasingly impossible for the US to abstain from action in Cambodia.

In March, 1970 Sihanouk was deposed in a military coup which was supported by most of the educated urban population.  The kingdom was brought to an end and the Khmer Republic established.  A massacre of Vietnamese residents of Cambodia ensued in which thousands lost their lives and which was condemned by both North and South Vietnam.  By that time there were 40, 000 North Vietnamese troops in the country.  The new republican regime demanded that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong withdraw but instead they commenced attacks on the Cambodian state.  Prince Sihanouk, moreover, would not give up and encouraged his supporters to restore him to power. All of this fueled the native communist insurgency and the situation degraded into a civil war.  During the same period the NVA attacks became a full scale invasion and the NVA began to overrun and defeat Cambodian army positions.  Not really well known into the 1990s, the North Vietnamese in the period sound to completely overrun the country, which likely was regarded by them as a strategic necessity.  They scored significant successes in the early months of 1970 in attempting this but, remarkably, the Khmer government did not completely collapse and in fact its armed opposition to the NVA and the Khmer Rouge continued throughout the period, although they were losing ground.

The South Vietnamese and American incursion of 1970 was designed to defeat the North Vietnamese in their safe harbor.  South Vietnamese preparatory actions commenced on April 14.  Perhaps ironically President Nixon announced the withdrawal of 150,000 U.S. troops from South Vietnam on April 20.  Nonetheless plans for the action continued, and indeed they may be seen as related to some degree.  On April 30 the South Vietnamese invasion began in earnest and President Nixon announced to the nation that U.S. troops would be entering Cambodia on a temporary basis, which they commenced to do the following day, May 1.

U.S. M48s in Cambodia.

The North Vietnamese were surprised by the invasion and proved to be incapable of resisting it. They nonetheless proved adept at avoiding having their forces destroyed.  American leadership regarded the invasion as a success and US and ARVN forces would withdraw from the eastern portions of the country they occupied in July.  The expansion of the war at the very time that the Administration was committed to withdrawing, while not actually strategically inconsistent, appeared to be and it increased opposition to the war in the United States.  The Cambodian government, in contrast, welcomed the incursion and hoped that US forces would remain in the country, an act which they believed would have helped them combat the native Khmer Rouge insurgency and which they also hoped would lead to the permanent expulsion of the North Vietnamese Army from the country.  Indeed, a remaining American presence was practically a necessity for the Khmer Republic's survival.

Newspaper reading American soldier in Cambodia.

To some degree the action is a tribute to the late Vietnam War American Army and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.  The ARVN were much more fully formed and combat ready by this point in the war than they had been earlier, although they'd also become completely dependant upon American air support, which was enormous in the invasion.  The American Army, in contrast, was severely strained and suffering gigantic moral and discipline problems by this point, so the fact that they were able to effectively rally for a major offensive action is impressive.  It's also impressive, however, that the North Vietnamese were able to react to the invasion and avoid complete destruction.

There are those who want to attribute the ultimate collapse of the Khmer Republic, followed by the horror of Communist Pol Pot's regime, to this series of 1970s events, but the claim is frankly strained.  As noted, the Cambodian government of the time was becoming increasingly right wing and hostile to Communism inside the country and it was actively seeking to destroy it, albeit unsuccessfully.  A more realistic assessment would be that the results in neighboring South Vietnam were always set to dictate what happened in the smaller Indochinese neighbor.  The same political forces that had existed in South Vietnam since 1954 were present in Cambodia since 1953 except, ironically, right wing elements that wished to actively oppose Communism were significantly stronger in Cambodia.

Cambodian civilians dividing captured North Vietnamese Army rice.

At any rate, the Cambodian tragedy, in some ways, has always been strongly linked to being a small country between two larger neighbors.  Vietnam's civil war had spilled into it and now it was raging within its borders.  It's fate would now follow a strongly parallel, but more tragic and bloody course.

Was the Domino Theory Right?

One of the interesting things about the podcast that followed the Burns and Novik Vietnam War documentary is that Burns is interviewed and openly questions whether his pre documentary belief that The Domino Theory was ridiculous was in error.

That surprised me a bit as the documentary doesn't address the theory much other than to note that it was a basis for our going into Vietnam.

I've written on the Domino Theory here before, more specifically in my 2013 post on Looking at the Vietnam War differently. Not a war, but as a campaign in the Cold War.  In that post I urged that the Vietnam War should be looked at as a campaign in the Cold War in order to be viewed historically accurately.  That post came, of course, nearly four years ago and I doubt that very many people search back for post that old here very often (I suppose some might surf into it and I know that occurs with some of our older posts), but in the interesting of not repeating too much what I already have said, I'll quote at length from that post (although, please note, I'm not quoting the whole post):

This brings us back to the "Domino Theory", which was that the if any nation in Southeast Asia fell they'd all fall, one after another.  The general theory is that they'd fall all the way to India, in all likelihood.

As noted, I'm not quoting from the entire 2013 post here.   So perhaps I should flesh that out.  I did so a bit in that post when I noted:

It’s easy to dismiss the Domino Theory now, although erroneously in my view, but at the time dominoes really were falling.  One giant one fell, China, and another one, South Korea, nearly tipped over almost immediately thereafter.  With that history, with Communist insurgencies breaking out all over South East Asia, and with a big huge Communist neighbor behind nearly all of them, geographically, starting in 1947 things looked pretty darned grim. 

Let's still flesh that out just a bit.

The idea was, and it was based on prior experience, that once one nation fell to the Communist that put pressure on its neighbors, particularly if the fallen nation was in a strategic area and particularly if there was already Communist activity in the region.

This idea, following Vietnam, was widely discredited.  But was it as absurd as many would now have us believe?  Many historical examples of the success of militant movements would suggest otherwise.  When the USSR was founded, for example, Communist revolutions did in fact spared to nearby states.  Hungary, for example, had one immediately after Russia and while it didn't succeed, it nearly did.  Germany's red revolution in the 1918-1919 time frame nearly did as well. 

Fascism provides a good example also.  It wasn't as if Germany was the only state that went to the far right in the 1930s.  It was preceded by Italy and joined by Spain and Romania.  Arguably it was somewhat joined by France.  When fascism was on the rise, it wasn't on the rise in one state.  Even the United Kingdom and Ireland had fascists movements in the 1930s.

And before we get too far on the topic of the Vietnam War, let's consider Asia as a whole.

Southeast Asia.  It's big. . . but more connected when you take a little higher view.

One of the things that missed in discussions on the Vietnam War, and it was missed in the Burns and Novik documentary, is that it was Australia that was demanding Western powers get into the Indochinese War after France fell there, not the United States at first.  Australia was begging the US to get in and threatened the Kennedy Administration with going it alone if the US wouldn't go.  In retrospect, maybe we should have allowed for that.  Australia had thinner resources but it also had more experience in fighting guerrilla was in the jungle than we did.

Australian soldiers of the Royal Australian Rifles in Vietnam.

They weren't the only nation concerned about what they were seeing, of course, but looking at the map, and recalling World War Two, you can see why the Australians were particularly concerned.

 Royal Australian Rifles in Vietnam. We didn't ask them to come. ..  they asked us.

Stepping back a second, and before considering the validity of the theory itself, you can at least see why there was legitimate concern about it.  China had emerged from a long civil war in 1948 with the Red Chinese the surprise victors.  Everyone would have presumed, to include Stalin, that the Nationalist Chinese would come out on top.  They didn't, and of course, its now clear that one of the many straws that broke that camels back (and there were many) was pretty effective efforts by Soviet agents to hinder and delay US resupply to the Nationalist Chinese.  That deprived them of effective resupply in some instances, but that doesn't explain what occurred in and of itself by a long shot.  Not that we're doing a history of the Chinese Civil War here.  Of interest, the Nationalist Chinese provided some air support to the South Vietnamese early during the Vietnam War and contributed some special troops, some of whom were killed in combat, to the South Vietnamese effort during the war.

 South Korean soldiers in Vietnam.  The ROK had a major military commitment to South Vietnam and late in the war appeared set to retain up to 50,000 troops in the country even after the United States was set to withdraw. American encouragement that they leave, during the "Vietnamization" program period, secured their departure.  "Soldiers of the ROK 9th Infantry Division in Vietnam. Photo by Phillip Kemp.  Photo taken by Phillip Kemp from cockpit after sling-loading water drums to outpost..jpg"  Posted pursuant to Wikepeidia license.  South Korea was second only to the United States in terms of the number of troops it sent to support the Republic of Vietnam.

Anyhow, China fell.  North Korean was left Communist following World War Two as part of an arraignment with the United States on post war occupation.  In 1950 that turned into a North Korean invasion of South Korea that was only halted at great costs to the United States and its allies, and only after the Truman Administration changed its mind about what was going on globally and regionally.  We'll pick up on that in a moment.

 Soviet troops marching into North Korea at the end of World War Two. They'd stay briefly, as would US troops in the South, and set up a state modeled on the USSR while they were there.  That nation would try to reunite the peninsula by armed force in 1950. 

And it wasn't just there.

The Philippines had presented the US with a domestic Communist guerrilla movement to contend with as the US was returning to them during World War Two.  Of the various anti Japanese guerrilla movements that sprung up during the war was the Hukbalahap, more commonly called the Huks.  Relationships with them were tense following the war as the Philippines moved towards independence and they broke out in full scale rebellion in 1949, the year after China fell.  The Philippine government managed to put them down with US military assistance and, significantly, through the co-opting of their movement by some rather brilliant men in the early CIA.  Even at that however, various Communist guerrilla movements continue on in the Philippines to the present day.

During the Vietnam War the Philippines would supply 10,000 non combat troops to aid South Korea.

Of course, as we've already noted, the British also contended with Communist guerrillas in Southeast Asia in the Malayan Emergency, which they successfully managed to counter in a combined policing and military operation that went on from. . .  yes, 1948, and lasted until 1960.

Malayan police patrol in 1950.

And then there was Burma.

Burma was a region which was, at first, largely happy to see the Japanese take over from the British during World War Two, but soon grew discontent with the Japanese. Some armed groups that supported the Japanese at first actually switched sides during the war.  This did not mean that they looked forward to the return of the British.  They country, now Myanmar, became independent in that fateful year of 1948 and did not join the English Commonwealth.  In 1962 a military coup brought the military into power and it chose to rule the country in a manner inspired by the Soviet Union to a significant degree.  The country even changed its name to the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma.

Between Burma and Cambodia/Laos is Thailand. Thailand did not participate in World War Two and was not a colony of any nation during that period or any other.  It's the only nation in Southeast Asia that has never been colonized (it even sent an envoy to the Pope as early as 1688.) A monarchy, it had acquired Japanese military aid prior to World War Two, it was in a difficult spot during the war and more or less participated on both sides of the war, while technically, due to a declaration of war, was at war with the United States and the United Kingdom, after having fought briefly against Japan.  It's treaty with Japan provided that Japan would assist Thailand to reacquire territories lost to colonial powers on all sides of it, include to the French in what became Laos and Cambodia.

Following World War Two Thailand faced an encamped Nationalist Chinese army in its far north (for decades) and a domestic Communist insurgency that broke out in the 1960s.  Thailand would provide air bases to the United States during the Vietnam War and would ultimately contribute combat troops just as the United States started to withdraw. Thailand's commitment to the war would amount to 12,000 men just as the United States was pulling out, with their troops including contributions of elite units.

 Artillerymen from New Zealand's army in Vietnam.  New Zealand was still more English than the English the time, but unlike the UK or any European power (excluding France) they also sent troops to Vietnam. . . no doubt looking at their position on the globe.

That takes us to the Vietnam War.  Communist forces were not just active in South Vietnam or even North and South Vietnam. They were active in Laos, where they succeed after the fall of South Vietnam, and in Cambodia, where they also did. They were also active throughout Southeast and Central Asia.  Indeed, the Communist Party is still a political force in India.  So, no wonder:

And not only in our view, but in the view of nearly every Western nation.  The UK had been in nonstop combat against some Communist force since before the end of World War Two up through 1954, and at least Australia had been involved in two wars against Communist forces by the end of 1954.  The French had been involved in two such wars, one in Indochina, and had actually sought our aid there, but the British vetoed it (we were reluctant) as they felt, probably rightly, that the French had a hard time distinguishing the difference between a war against Communist insurgents and a war against French colonialism, with the latter being doomed even if the two efforts were mixed.

Looking at it that way, with Communist insurgencies breaking out everywhere in Asia, with the potentiality for more breaking out where they hadn’t already, and with a lot of the insurgencies seeming to be successful, it’d be hard to imagine Western nations regarding any of the wars as mere local affairs without global implications.  A person might ask “why Vietnam” but the answer might just be that it was Vietnam’s turn.  The British and Australians had already fought one war against Communist in Southeast Asia and it reasonably looked like not putting the fire out where it broke out would make things worse. Indeed, it almost certainly would have.  The Australians were, for their part, urging the US to take action in Vietnam before we did.  And in terms of the big Communist powers, China and the USSR, Vietnam did have a good deep water port which was strategic enough that the US had attacked it from the air,during WWII, when the Japanese occupied it.

Maybe the theory was, therefore, correct.  At least it seemed rational to believe it was, as we noted:

The question almost would have been whether to draw the line in Vietnam or somewhere else,with all the other somewhere else’s being increasingly bad choices.  I don’t really see how the war could have been avoided.

Indeed, I was less clear on the challenges faced in my earlier post than I have been in this one (which I researched on this topic a bit more).  During the early 1960s, when the Kennedy Administration was faced with trying to decide how much, and how, to support South Vietnam, it faced a situation in which nearly every country in the region had been challenged by a Communist insurgency and some had been successful while others had only been recently defeated by hard effort.

I went on from there in my original post to ponder what that meant, and I'll leave the reader to review that in the context of my Cold War analysis that I offered there, but I'll note that it started off with this:

And maybe the war, if considered a campaign in the Cold War, the campaign worked, although it certainly wasn't an unqualified success.  It would have been, rather, a type of extraordinarily long, and unintentional, delaying action.

This went on, and looked at the war in the context of a Cold War campaign.  You can judge for yourself whether I was right or wrong, or partially right or wrong on that, but I'm going to divert from quoting that post here to go on to the main point here.  That is, was the Domino Theory correct?

Well, the evidence would suggest. . . it was correct.

The proponents of the theory argued that if Vietnam fell (or continued to fall, as North Vietnam had fallen to Communism) then Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma and India would all follows suit.

So how can you say that it was correct, critics (now) say, Thailand didn't fall the Communists?

That's right, Thailand didn't.  But you have noticed that Laos and Cambodia did, correct?

And they fell after South Vietnam, which is more than a little coincidental.  Both nations had been part of French Indochina and both had Communist movements in the 1940s, but neither fell to Communism until after Saigon fell in 1975.

Now, to be fair, Laos was falling in slow motion since the mid 1960s. . . or even the 1950s.  But something kept it from teetering completely over the edge.  That something was the war in South Vietnam.  North Vietnam was willing to dominate parts of the country and to force it into an uneasy neutrality but it apparently feared tipping it over the edge as that might have caused the United States to intervene full scale in Laos, rather than low scale as it was doing.

Pathet (Communist) Laotian troops, 1972.

That came to an end when the South collapsed in 1975. At that point, the North basically invaded Laos and forced it into Communism, where it remains. 

So, I suppose, a person could argue that it didn't fall, it was pushed.  The significant thing there, however, is that it wasn't pushed any earlier than that.

Cambodia wasn't pushed, it fought it out late in the Vietnam War and then fell to the Khmer Rouge as it received increased support, for awhile, from the North Vietnamese.  Cambodia had favored the Communist effort, slightly, during most of the Vietnam War but when its monarchy fell in a coup the Army chose to actively enter the Vietnam War, albeit on its own soil.  This turned into a fierce civil war and when the war went badly for the South Vietnamese in the end it went just as badly for Cambodia.  Like South Vietnam and Laos, it fell in 1975.

By that time, of course, Burma had already gone to its own odd brand of near Communism. Thailand was surrounded.

But nobody else fell. So surely that means that the Domino Theory was wrong, correct?

Well, that''s hard to tell, in the end.  What we do know is that nearly every Southeast nation fought a war against a communist insurgency.  Some were successfully fought, some were not.  A person might argue that the long war in Indochina gave other nations that had already fought a war against Communist insurgents the chance to consolidate politically so that their wars would not renew.  Arguably the war in Thailand failed as it came too late, after the Thai government had been given an extra decade to plan against it and to have cut its teeth on the war in Vietnam.

Of course, you can argue it the other way around.  After the North Vietnamese won against the South and then intervened with finality in Laos, they ended up invading Communist Cambodia and fighting a guerrilla war against the Khmer Rouge.  China invaded North Vietnam and was thrown back.  The rift between Chinese Communism and Soviet Communism proved to be pretty bitter and the respective allies of those nations would fight amongst themselves.  North Vietnam proved to be highly Soviet at first, but it was never a Soviet puppet and ultimately, would be forced to later abandon much of its hardcore economic Communist that it espoused.  Cambodia would reemerge from Vietnamese rule as a free state and a royal one at that, no longer Communist. So things didn't work out they way they were hoped for or feared for anyone.

None of which answers the question. Was the Domino Theory correct?  It's impossible to say, but even now, the evidence suggests it might have been.

The Vietnam War

 

The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novik

I have already mentioned in a couple of threads that I've been watching this documentary.

Given the focus here on the Punitive Expedition and, more recently, World War One, it might come as a surprise that I have a real interest in the Vietnam War, although I've written about it here before.  This will be, however, only the 30th post on the topic of the war since we started the blog.  Not a lot compared to the 613 on World War One (to date) or even the 182 on World War Two (to date).  Still, it has been for a very long time something I've been pretty interested in.

That's the case for a variety of reasons, one being that the war is within my living memory.  The war was ongoing when I was born in 1963 and it was something that I became increasingly aware of in my youth.  When the US pulled out of the war in 1973 I was ten and can well remember that, including various things that occurred in the war during the Nixon Administration period.  To my surprise, in fact, I can personally recall some things about the war much earlier than that.  When the North invaded in 1975 and the Republic of Vietnam collapsed I was only a couple of years older but that was something that I was very much aware of.  Indeed, at that time in my youth I thought I might want to opt for a military career and I followed the fading fortunes of South Vietnam carefully, even putting up a National Geographic map in my bedroom so I could follow the war as the NVA closed increasingly in on the doomed former ally of the United States.  The war was a topic of conversation in the house as I grew up, although probably not in the way you might figure.*  My father and mother thought the war was a mistake.  I, my youthful self, didn't.

Soon after that I started to try to find histories on the war and to this date I've frankly never been satisfied with any of them.  But I did learn quite a bit about the war.  Later on, when I joined the National Guard, I learned a different prospective yet as so many of the fellow Guardsmen I served within the 1980s were veterans of the war.  One of the first major essays I wrote in college was an exploration of the Tet Offensive of 1968. And so on.

So I was looking forward to the documentary, although holding back some reserve about that as well.  I like the Ken Burns documentaries I've seen quite a bit and I was worried this one wouldn't measure up, and that if it didn't it might make me question a bit his earlier documentaries that I do like.

So I'm glad to report that I think this documentary is okay.

Not spectacular, but not bad. And frankly, it's a really tough topic to take on.  If I were grading it, I think I'd give it a B-.

Burns and Novik worked on this for a decade.  At least one of the people interviewed for the documentary has passed away in that period.  In releasing it, Burns has stated that it was his view that only now, in the 2010s, can a documentary on the war be released and be objective.  I think that's likely correct, and I also think that we are now ready, perhaps for the first time, for a good objective treatment of war in the written form.  I'll hope for that.

The documentary is presented in ten episodes, some of which are 1.5 hours long but most of which are two hours long.  Not every episode is equal in quality to the others.  In my view, the documentary might have been better to have been seven episodes rather than ten, but that's a tough call for the doumentarian to make.  I'd guess they probably had enough material for twenty episodes had they chosen to go that long (which would have been a mistake).

The documentary is presented in the now standard Burns form.  We are introduced to a collection of speakers who speak in nearly every, but not every, episode.  Unlike The Civil War, or Baseball, these speakers tend to all have first hand experience with the topic being addressed, which does make it different from those well known documentaries (I haven't seen Burn's documentary on World War Two which may follow this form to a degree).

Because it's ten sequential episodes its a bit difficult to determine how to properly review it.  Reviewing each episode might be tedious, but on the other hand its hard not to do that in some sense.  Nonetheless I'm not going to strictly do that.  Indeed, I'm going to start off where I think the documentary falls short, which may be additional bad form.  Nonetheless. . .

The most significant failure of the documentary was the failure to really handle the story of French involvement in Vietnam adequately. This is a failure, however, that nearly every treatment of the Vietnam War makes. In fairness, this failure was less pronounced here than it often is.  There's always a temptation to treat the French Indochinese War as simply a minor prelude to the American war in Vietnam, but that's a fairly serious mistake.

It's a mistake as the French first became involved in Indochina, and more particularly in Vietnam in particular, in the early 1600s. That's correct.  French presence in Vietnam predates, by decades, American independence from the United Kingdom. The story of that early involvement, indeed how France came to be in Indochina at all, is exceedingly complicated and very difficult to understand.  It mirrors, however, to some degree the story of the British in India.  Basically, French interests of various types, not the French government, entered the area and that lead to conflict.  As the French interest expanded, the French government began to take an active role in what ws occurring.

 French naval infantry in Tonkin, ie., northern Vietnam, 1884.

This lead the French ultimately to directly intervene in Vietnam in 1858, an event which touched off thirty years of conflict with the indigenous people.  French dominion of the region, including Vietnam, lead to a sort of unitary geography that had never existed before so, as with India, while France didn't create the Vietnamese, in some ways it created Vietnam.

 French Indochina in 1930.  Note that the borders on the map heavily reflect the modern states in the region.

The French were so successful in "pacifying" Indochina that the region became the desired post for French Foreign Legionnaires, who dreamed of being posted there.  Nonetheless the Vietnamese never accepted French dominion of their heavily rural jungle land, even as they acquired bits of French culture. Again, this strongly recalls the British in India, who managed to stamp British culture on the existing Indian one as they formed an India out of a collection of regional states, while never really acquiring the loyalty of the people who lived in them.  Open rebellion in native troops broke out in 1930, signaling that all was not well.  By that time, as the documentary correctly and importantly notes, Ho Chi Minh was already a Communist seeking the liberty of the Vietnamese from the French

Of course, part of what came not to be well was Japan had different ideas for Asian people that didn't include liberty, even if it didn't include Europeans.  When the Pacific War broke out on December 7, 1941, France was already the anemic Vichy state that the Germans had left it and the Japanese basically simply walked into Indochina with the French accepting it.  The Vietnamese, however, did not and a guerilla war against Japan broke out.

Vichy propaganda poster showing unity between France and northern Vietnam, 1942.

Burns and Novik handle this history, but in a light form.  Like most treatments of the Vietnam War, the entire century plus long story of France in Indochina prior to the Japanese occupation is handled in a light form.  Vietnam had long been occupied by the French prior to the Japanese occupation. Why was there only one significant rebellion, prior to World War Two, by the Japanese?  How much had French culture impacted the Vietnamese?  Why did the rebels of mid 20th Century find refuge in Communism in Vietnam, as in so many other places. What about the other, and there were other, nationalist movements that sought to expel the French but didn't adhere to Communism?  This stuff would be nice to know.

And it would also be nice to know why the French ever wanted Vietnam.  It's an odd possession, quite frankly, for them, or anyone. For Europeans it was primitive and dangerously diseased ridden. Early French military missions fell by the droves to disease. What was it about the place?

The story of the rising Communist/Nationalist struggle against the Japanese, and how it morphed into a struggle against the return of the French was also given a typical treatment and as usual it gives a light treatment to European dreams of restored colonial possessions and American opposition, at first, to that.  This could also have been treated more completely.  This is a complex story but of note the British, while not openly admitting it, had come to the reluctant conclusion that the sun was setting on empire everywhere and was acting accordingly.  India, the crown jewel of the British Empire, was granted independence in 1947.  The UK made a pretext of not granting independence to Israel voluntarily but in actuality simply withdrew from the region to let the contestants fight it out in the same year. The British were clearly going home.  They even worked to prevent the Dutch from restoring their presence in the Dutch East Indies, a rare example of one colonial power refusing to allow another to keep its colony while not trying to take it for its own. 

The French, however, seeking to restore France's position in the world following its defeat at the hands of the Germans in 1940 acted to try to hand on to, and restore, its empire.

The US, at first, opposed and would not cooperate with French efforts.  The Roosevelt Administration was not terribly alive to the threat of Communism anywhere and the Truman Administration, at first, was only slightly more concerned.  Given this, the administrations either actively opposed French colonial restorations or were not cooperative with them.  In 1949, however, the situation abruptly changed when China fell to the Chinese Red Army.  The prior year, 1948, the dangers of Soviet expansion became manifest when the Soviets blockaded Berlin.  The isolationist Republican Party became converted to active global opposition to Communism overnight and the heat then fell on Truman in a major way.  The North Korean invasion of South Korea cemented that and the US began to slowly, but actively, support the French effort on the thesis that it was an anti-communist effort, which was true, but only partially.

French Foreign Legion airborne artillery in Indochina during their war following World War Two.

Burns and Novik touch on part of this history, but not all.  I wish they'd dived into it more deeply.  They do a good job, however, with the French Indochinese War, although they failed to cover the request the French made for the US to deploy atomic weaponry at Dien Bien Phu, which is a significant oversight.

Following this, I think they do a good job with the story of American involvement in the war thereafter.  They do an excellent job revealing the political machinations that occurred behind the scenes.  Some of the revelations are startling and hard to grasp.  Kennedy comes out looking better than I'd generally credit him to be (I'm not a Kennedy fan).  Lydon Johnson comes across as shrewd and alert, but bizarrely inclined to keep wading deeper into the "Big Muddy" even though he was expressing absolute doubts about the entire project, privately.  Nixon comes across as an even bigger crook than we generally look back upon him to be, which is pretty horrifically exposed.  All of the Administrations come across as willing to lie and scheme against the presumed wishes of the American people.

 US Army advisers and Vietnamese Special Forces, Vietnam War.

Well, what of the portrayal of the American war itself?  I think it was well done, balancing events back home, politics and the war, quite well.  People with strongly vested views in the war will likely be unhappy that their side isn't more fully portrayed as correct.  Revisionist histories of the war, of which there are now several significant ones, are not given pride of place.  The arguments presented, and they are arguments even if they do not appear to be, given the conflict on interpretations of the war and how it was waged, and lost, are very well presented and hard to argue against. For those who can recall the war personally the end of the documentary is gut wrenching.  It must be leagues more so for those who experienced it in any fashion.

Boomers protesting the Vietnam War, from our thread Boomer, wake up. Generations, Part One of Three.  Of interest in this photo, only one of these young people have anything approaching a Hippie look even if they are protesting.

I was glad to see that the documentary went on after the fall of Saigon to briefly note Vietnam's following war in Cambodia, although I was disappointed that the fall of the non Communist regime in Cambodia was not dealt with itself, as I'd consider that to be part of the Vietnam War.  Indeed, the wars that occurred in Cambodia and Laos are part and parcel of the same story, so their omission was surprising.  A bit more on Vietnam's war with China, which occurred in the late 1970s, would also have been appreciated.

Pathet (Communist) Laotian troops, riding in an American 6x6 truck, in Vientiane in 1972.  The situation in Laos had been tense since the country had gained independence from France and it had teetered on the edge of falling to Communism for years.  Like South Vietnam, it fell in 1975.

Burns and Novik's history of the war is presented as an unresolved history by its own admission. The documentary makes the argument that the rift in American culture that we clearly see all around us know came about due to the war and that perhaps the documentary can be a step on the way towards healing that rift. That's a big claim, worth examining, and a big hope as well.

 

 Infantry in Vietnam.

There are indeed good reasons to look back on the Vietnam War as a major factor in the split in the countries culture into two cultures in a near cultural civil  war with one another.  Indeed, that's one of those arguments which fits under our You Hear It Hear First category as we've cited the rise of the Boomer left as a major element of this.  Given this, I'll credit this argument to a certain degree but I think it may be too simplistic to believe that no divide existed before the 1960s.  More accurately, the strong divide that had existed between right and left at various points prior to World War Two closed as a result of the war and while it rose again briefly after the war, the rise of Communism in the late 1940s closed it again. This is not to say that everyone saw everything the same way, as that would definitely not be true. But the big cultural divide we now have does indeed stem, at least to some degree, to a rift that developed during the war.

CH-54 landing in Saigon, April 30, 1975. At the time this photograph was taken, , as pointed out in an earlier thread, Hillary Clinton had already worked on the Nixon impeachment effort, Chuck Schumer was already in the New York Assembly, and Nancy Pelosi was already involved in California's Democratic Party.

Healing that rift is a big task and its unlikely that Burns' and Novik's documentary will achieve that, no matter how much that might be wished for. The split today isn't over the Vietnam War but rather over many other things.  Indeed the remaining rifts of the Vietnam War itself are more likely to be healed by the passing of that generation.  But that we can look back and see what occurred is a good thing, and perhaps that will contribute to the wider hope of recovering the middle that seems in recent years to have been lost, or at least recalling that there is a middle and where it is.

 Vietnamese refugees being evacuated from Saigon in 1975.

*A person shouldn't overemphasis this however.  In all of our households in that era, World War Two was the war that was "the war".