Monday, June 3, 1974. Leaving Laos.

The last U.S. military advisors in Laos, only three in number, left the country.

Last prior edition:

Sunday, June 2, 1974. The Forest Brothers.

Labels: 1970s, 1974, African National Congress, Algeria, Arab Oil Embargo, Bhutan, Estonia, Estonian Forest Brothers, Monarchy, OPEC, Rhodesia, Rhodesian Bush War, USSR

Friday, September 14, 1973. Winds of change.

It what was a sign of things to come, the Laotian government agreed to allow the Pathet Lao to become part of a coalition government.

Selassie in 1970.

Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was held at gunpoint by his grandson, Iskinder Desta, deputy commander of the Ethiopian Navy.  Ultimately, the coup attempt would be abandoned when Desta's mother, Princess Tenague, backed him off of it.  A towering figure of Ethiopia in the 20th Century, this too was a sign of things to come.  Things would not work out well, in the end, for Desta either.

Sunday, January 28, 1973. The war continues on.

US B-52s struck Laotian locations to interdict North Vietnamese supply lines to South Vietnam in spite of the official end of the war in South Vietnam, as the peace accords did not extend to Laos.

From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than 2,500,000 tons of bombs, or 260,000,000 bombs, making Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. The Laotian bombing campaign ended on March 29, 1973 following the Agreement on the Restoration of Peace and Reconciliation in Laos between the central government and the Pathet Lao.

Laos, the only landlocked country in Southeast Asia, remains subject to a Communist government today and is effectively one of the most isolated countries in the world.

March 21, 1971. Coming Apart

Signs that the US Army was becoming ungovernable in the field occurred with two platoons of the 1st Cavalry Rgt of the Americal Division refused to advance to the Laotian border to recover damaged equipment.  The unit had lost men in an NVA rocket attack.

M48 of the 1st Cavalry in Vietnam, 1968.

Their company commander was relieved of duty and and the men resumed their regular duties.  Gen. John G. Hill declined to discipline them.  It was the second time during the late war period in which troops fo the Americal Division had refused to obey orders.

Well known during the period, and for quite some time afterwards, but seemingly forgotten now, by this point in the Vietnam War some units of the U.S. Army was becoming highly undisciplined and some units were becoming defiant to orders.  It impacted the leadership of the Army as there was a fear that this would spread and reduce the Army to the point of uselessness.  Given this, there was an increasing desire inside the Army's leadership to get out of Vietnam before the situation became worse.  It would take the Army years to recover from the war.

February 8, 1971. The birth of NASDAQ and Operation Lam Son 715

On this day in 1971 NASDAQ began operating as the world's first electronic stock exchange.

On the same day, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam launched operation Lam Son 715.  The operation featured ARVN forces entering Laos, on their own, to take on North Vietnamese forces there.

The operation would not prove to be a success, demonstrating that deficiencies in the South Vietnamese military and security were such that it was incapable of such large scale operations on its own.  The North Vietnamese were able to anticipate South Vietnamese actions, due to loose security. Additionally, the South Vietnamese, contrary to their latter day reputation, were over aggressive in going into Laos and failed to appreciate the level of support that they routinely relied upon from the US military.

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".