The Spectator - October 20, 2018

In cold blood

George C. Herring

Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy

1945–1975

by Max Hastings

William Collins, £30, pp. 784

The 50th anniversary of the Vietnam war

has produced an outpouring of books, along

with Ken Burns’s 18-hour television spectac-

ular, which sparked in the United States yet

another round of heated debate on the war.

The journalist and military historian Max

Hastings’s fast-paced and often compelling

narrative will surely rank as one of the best

products of this half-century reappraisal.

Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy is a monu-

mental undertaking. Many books ana-

lyse major Vietnam war policy decisions.

Others discuss military operations; still oth-

ers recount personal experiences. Hastings

does all three in a single volume, although

he gives greatest attention to the on-the-

ground activities of North and South

Vietnamese, NLF and NVA, Americans,

Australians and even New Zealanders.

Americans usually date their Vietnam

war from 1961, when John F. Kennedy

drastically escalated the US commitment,

or from Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 decisions

to bomb North Vietnam and send combat

troops to the South. Hastings treats the first

and second Indochina wars as a single enti-

ty. The conflict begins with Ho Chi Minh’s

declaration of independence from France

in September 1945 and ends with the fall of

Saigon in April 1975.

Controversy raged worldwide during the

war itself, continued long after it ended, and

persists a half century later. Hastings tackles

the key issues head on. Why did the United

States spend 58,000 lives and an estimated

$150 billion on an area so remote and seem-

ingly insignificant? He stresses Cold War

exigencies and above all US domestic poli-

tics. There is no Reagan-like ‘noble cause’

here, no Ken Burns’s good intentions gone

awry. From Truman to Nixon, US leaders

escalated the commitment rather than be

‘seen to quit, fail, or lose... to the commu-

nists’, while ignoring the needs and interests

of the Vietnamese people.

Hastings is surely right in emphasising

domestic politics. What he does not always

provide is the unique context that helps

explain each of the major decisions. There

is no mention, for example, of the intense

pressure on Washington from Paris and

London in 1948 and 1949 to help stave off a

French defeat in Vietnam, the last time Brit-

ain would urge US escalation.

Hastings is equally unsparing in assess-

ing the reasons for US failure in Vietnam.

Americans fought the way they knew how

to fight in an area and type of war singularly

inappropriate for it. They relied on air power

(4 million tons of bombs were dropped on

South Vietnam, significantly more than on

the North), artillery and chemicals laden

with dioxin, all of which wreaked massive

destruction on the country they were try-

ing to save and alienated the people whose

hearts and minds they sought to win. They

thrust aside the Saigon government, for

which many Americans had contempt, and

its army, in which they had no confidence.

They inundated South Vietnam with money,

materiel and men, undermining an already

fragile social and political fabric.

The book also poses a question Amer-

icans seldom ask: how did a backward,

post-colonial nation like North Vietnam

ultimately prevail in a war with the world’s

greatest power? Hastings singles out the

iron will of Hanoi’s leaders, especially Le

Duan, who wrested leadership from Ho Chi

Minh as early as 1960. Even after the mas-

sive end-the-war offensives of 1964, 1968

and 1972 failed miserably, with catastroph-

ic costs in men and materiel, Le Duan’s

politburo managed to negotiate the United

States out of Vietnam in 1973 and mount

a final offensive in 1975. Hanoi, Hastings

adds, had the singular advantage of con-

trolling information so that its numerous

ghastly mistakes were not exposed to pub-

lic scrutiny or debate.

Among the military leaders discussed

in the book, there are no heroes. Gener-

al William Westmoreland was out of his

depth; his successor Creighton Abrams

was a ‘competent, decent officer, well suit-

ed to conventional warfare in Europe’.

The South Vietnamese are venal, corrupt

and, worst of all, incompetent. Even the

legendary Vo Nguyen Giap draws criti-

cism for his imperviousness to the loss of

human life.

The North Vietnamese gained sympathy

among some antiwar protestors and leftists

as victims. Hastings shows them as hard-

bitten ideologues: nationalists, to be sure,

but also firmly committed Stalinists, who

brooked no dissent and imposed enormous

hardships on their own people. They won,

but at a staggering cost in human life.

Where the book excels is in telling the

stories of countless people from numerous

countries who got caught up in the 30-year

struggle. We encounter those Viet Minh who

hauled the heavy artillery into the moun-

tains around Dien Bien Phu, and those

frantic northerners, Catholics and other-

wise, who left behind family and belongings

to escape to the South after the 1954 Gene-

va Conference. We meet Colonel Nguyen

How did a backward, post-colonial

nation like North Vietnam prevail

against the world’s greatest power?

A US Navy Seal,

camouflaged

with greasepaint,

watches for enemy

activity during a

search and destroy

operation in the

Mekong Delta’s

swampy jungle

(1968)

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