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“VIETNAM – AN EPIC TRAGEDY
1945-1975” by Max Hastings (Harper Collins, $NZ39:95)
In
one of the photographic sections of Max Hastings’ Vietnam – An Epic Tragedy 1945-75, there is a page labelled “Three images that crippled the US cause in
Vietnam”. The images appear in nearly every documentary film or book about
the Vietnam War and they have burnt their way into the memories of the couple
of generations.
A
Buddhist monk immolates himself in protest at both the war and the lack of
Buddhist voices in the South Vietnamese government.
A
South Vietnamese police chief summarily shoots a Vietcong after the Tet
Offensive.
A
naked little girl and other children run down a road, crying after being hit by
napalm.
All
three images were so powerful and so horrible that they intensified protest
against the American prosecution of the war and they still dominate the way the
war is popularly interpreted. This, our guts tell us, was a brutal and
pointless war which achieved nothing.
It
is quite possible that this judgment is valid, but three images alone, no
matter how powerful, cannot possibly tell the whole truth about a war – and
especially the whole truth about a war that was fought, on and off, over thirty
years from the first French attempt to re-assert colonial rule in 1945 to the final
collapse of South Vietnam in 1975.
A
massive piece of work (nearly 700 pages before endnotes, index and very long
bibliography) Max Hastings’ Vietnam, An
Epic Tragedy 1945-1975 has the virtues of both good history and the best
journalism. Hastings gives in detail the major military campaigns of this
thirty-year conflict, showing more consideration for tactics, strategy and material
facts than many slimmer accounts have done. But he is also aware of the
political manoeuvring, the changes in alliances, and the social cost as well as
the huge body count. (70,000 French died in their Vietnamese war; the total of
American dead in their long engagement was 58,000; and in the whole thirty
years of conflict, between 2 million and 4 million Vietnamese died.) As well as
consulting all the material in his formidable bibliography, the journalist side
of Hastings allows him to draw on many years of interviews with North and South
Vietnamese soldiers and politicians, former NLF people (National Liberation
Front = “Vietcong”), French colonials, American policy-makers and spooks, and
other journalists. While the superstructure is solid history, the book is also
heavy with vivid anecdotes and reminiscences.
In
broadest outline, the story Hastings tells is a familiar one. From the
mid-nineteenth century, French colonial rule of Indochina was generally abysmal.
After the Second World War, the French tried for ten years to rebuild their old
colonial empire. From 1945 to 1954, during the High Cold War, this doomed
enterprise was largely paid for by American money. Finally came the debacle of Dienbienphu
in 1954, then partition, to which the North Vietnamese communist government agreed,
thinking that it would be a temporary arrangement until the French left. There
was relative peace in the late 1950s, as the North Vietnamese had not yet
embraced a “forward” policy; but by the early 1960s, conflict intensified. 16,000
American “advisers” were in Vietnam when JFK died. Within a couple of years,
the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” gave President Johnson, seeking to show that he
was “tough on communism”, the excuse to escalate the war and put boots on the
ground . American marines landed at Danang in 1965 and the war intensified as
thousands of Americans were now rotated through the country.
The
general drift of Hastings’ narrative is that once the US committed infantry,
they came to seem an army of occupation by many Vietnamese who would otherwise
have been anti-communist. “Many harsh
things may justly be said about what communist fighters did in Vietnam,” writes
Hastings, “ but their footprint on the
ground was light as a feather by comparison with that made by the boots of the
American military. The very presence of affluent Westerners, armed or unarmed,
uniformed or otherwise, could not fail to exercise a polluting influence on a
predominantly rural and impoverished Asian society.” (p.118)
American attempts to build up a credible South
Vietnamese army (ARVN) had very mixed results. Too many ARVN personnel were not
really interested in fighting and (justifiably or otherwise) they were often viewed
with contempt by American servicemen – exacerbating existing racial tensions. American
support for a succession of compliant South Vietnamese leaders led to great moral
corruption. Despite the many atrocities carried out by the insurgent Vietcong
in the south, largely uncommitted peasantry became alienated from successive
leaders in Saigon. Says Hastings:
“While the country retained peerless natural
beauties, much of it was polluted by the war, in a fashion evidenced by its
seventy-seven orphanages and two hundred thousand child delinquents. Some
farmers, weary of seeing their paddy fields wrecked by the passage of military
vehicles, abandoned growing rice, sustaining the drift to the cities. A
permanent chemical pall hung over Saigon and its adjoining military suburbs…
Almost every street was rutted and potholed by neglect, excesses of climate and
traffic, the last increased from 1967 onwards by a tsunami of Honda mopeds.
Piles of cement and rubbish were as ubiquitous as security chicanes, barbed
wire and belching black truck diesel smoke.” (p.359) Hastings gives equally
unflattering views on the moral corruption of the American forces, the huge use
of drugs by servicemen, frequent “fragging” of officers by disgruntled grunts,
prostitution on a massive scale in the cities, and other effects of the
American presence.
Meanwhile
antiwar movements grew in the West. The US leadership’s strategy was too often
dominated by considerations of what the American electorate could bear, or what
would win a president favour as the next election loomed. So the war stumbled
on through Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon until American disengagement and the
collapse of the South in the face of North Vietnam’s armies. Despite
romanticised versions sometimes heard on the Left, it was not a guerrilla
campaign that defeated the South, but a North Vietnamese army equipped with
masses of materiel supplied by China and the Soviet Union.
That
is the book if seen only as an historical chronicle, but Hastings has
particular themes which I can only summarise thus:
First
there is the contrast beween a cohesive
North Vietnamese communist government, which had the clear, simple and
comprehensible policy of uniting the country; and a wavering South Vietnamese government, which did not have the
confidence of its people, never worked out any coherent social policies and
rapidly came to be seen as a mere tool of the US. Hastings is fully aware of
the brutality of the North (of which more later), but he makes painfully clear
the “revolving door” aspect of leadership in the South, as Americans nudged a
succession of unimpressive men though South Vietnam’s presidential palace. There
was undeniable American collusion in the assassination, in 1963, of the South
Vietnamese leader Diem and then the dreary succession of “Big” Mihn, then
Nguyen Khahn, then Nguyen Cao Ky, and finally Nguyen Van Thieu, none of whom
had a democratic mandate and none of whom made any policies that might gain
them popular support. Only Thieu deserves some credit for his calm demeanour,
although even that cracked as the war neared its end.
Next
there is the matter of great deception
as practised by American leadership.
Nobody now can credibly doubt that the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964,
justifying American intervention, was largely a fiction used by Johnson to boost
his popularity before an election. Hastings says his advisers (especially Robert
McNamara) did not correct exaggerated misinformation about the incident and “allowed him to elevate into a major drama a
brush at sea that could easily and should rightfully have been dismissed as
trivial.” (pp.190-191) When the American government realised that the
ground war was unwinnable, they stepped up a massive bombing campaign in the
hope, not of gaining any military advantage, but of forcing North Vietnam to
negotiate. By 1972, when Nixon and Kissinger bargained with North Vietnam over
how American troops would be withdrawn, they were basically saving face,
claiming to have left behind a South Vietnamese army capable of defending
itself. They knew full well that they were deserting an ally, but hoped the
North Vietnamese would agree to delay any major offensive for a suitable amount
of time, so that the withdrawal could seem honourable.
So
far, this account will have many readers nodding their heads and claiming that
they already understood all this. But Hastings also emphasises other matters
that will damage some people’s received image of the war. He notes the extent
to which, from 1954 onwards, the war was a civil war, not just an affair
of imperialists against national liberation. There really was strong anti-communist feeling among millions of Vietnamese.
Apprehension about the type of state a communist regime would impose was
not confined only to Americans and a few privileged lackeys. One million Vietnamese
fled from the north and Ho Chi Minh’s government after the Geneva agreement
partitioned the country in 1954. In the American phase of the long conflict, over
100,000 defected to the South from the North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong.
The North at first expected a massive uprising in the South, led by the Vietcong,
to overthrow the government of the South – but the attempt at such a concerted
uprising (the Tet Offensive) failed, as the mass of peasants were as
indifferent to the communist cause as they were to the Saigon government. As
Hastings shows in his final chapters, despite their well-founded reputation for
often lacking the will to fight, the ARVN, no longer supported by American
troops, fought many battles as the NVA invaded in 1975, and was able to prevail
in some. This suggests that many of those ARVN soldiers did not want a
communist victory. Finally, despite what some mythology says, not all those who
fled (or wanted to flee) in 1975 were bar girls and secret police. Thousands of
Vietnamese knew exactly what a communist government would entail.
Hastings
does not short-change in relating American atrocities – the burning of hamlets
to no purpose; the killing, on mere suspicion, of thousands who were
non-combatants; and scandals like the My Lai massacre of 1969. Where he differs
from other chroniclers, however, is his readiness to point out the equal, and
probably much greater, ruthlessness of both
the North Vietnamese leadership and the Vietcong .
“The merits of rival causes are never absolutes,” he tells us on the
very first page of his introduction, “… Only simpletons of the political right and
left dare to suggest that in Vietnam either side possessed a monopoly of virtue.”
(pp.xix – xx)
In
the late 1950s, after the French had been ousted, North Vietnam’s communist
government did not have a “forward” policy towards the South. It was partly
exhausted by the war with the French, and partly still expecting an uprising in
the South. In this time, despite all the deficiencies of the rule of Diem, the
South prospered and was able to feed itself, while collectivisation in the North
caused mass famines. Says Hastings:
“While today the failure of collectivisation
is apparent in every society where it has been tried, in the twentieth century
it was probably historically inescapable that impoverished rural societies,
China and Vietnam notable among them, should attempt inplementation of the
theories of Marx and Lenin, in order to discover for themselves their
unworkability. The human cost was appalling – but so was that of the American
attempt to prevent such an experiment by force of arms.” (p.229)
The
benign image of “Uncle” Ho Chi Minh belied the reality of a single-minded
Stalinist who believed in mass “re-education” for those who did not comply with
his state, mass imprisonment for dissenters and total state-controlled
censorhip. Yet he did realise that his country was in no condition to pursue
all-out war. For most of the war with the Americans, Ho was sidelined by the more
bellicose Le Duan and Le Duc Tho and he became little more than a propaganda
figurehead. Says Hastings:
“Le Duan was the principal personality
driving renewal of the unification struggle: it is hard to exaggerate his
personal role in what followed. As for his politburo comrades, it seems
legitimate to speculate that some favoured war in the South as a means of
escaping acknowledgement of the failure of their policies at home; of
instilling a new sense of purpose in Ho Chi Minh’s threadbare people. It was
their good fortune that the ‘imperialist’ foe, indispensible to such a regime
as their own, had harnessed its fortunes to Ngo Dihn Diem, a dead donkey if
ever there was one. The war that now gained momentum was such as neither side
deserved to win.” (p.108)
All
of which brings me to the last major issue with which Hastings deals. This is
the major matter of perception. A
totalitarian regime, such as Ho Chi Minh’s, has strict and unquestioned control
of all mass media, and certainly does not allow news photographers and
cameramen to rove relatively freely, reporting what they will. In this respect,
as Hastings notes a number of times, we of the television age have a completely
unblanced view of where much of the war’s brutality lay. Further, he remarks: “Relative American openness contrasted with
the communist commitment to secrecy, in my view constitutes a claim upon a
fragment of moral high ground. The egregious error committed by US statesmen
and commanders are not that of lying to the world, but rather of lying to
themselves.” (p.xxiii) In the terrorisation of peasants, summary executions
of those who did not support them, and lack of scruples about forcible mass
“re-education”, the communist forces probably exceeded the Americans and ARVNs
in brutality. But no cameras were watching them. And what (Western) cameras did
see of them was often misleading. By all military measures, the great Tet
Offensive was a disaster for the communists, basically destroying the Vietcong
and showing the there was no possibility of a mass communist uprising in the
South. Hastings notes:
“In the aftermath of Tet, morale slumped
among the NVA and Vietcong, who acknowledged a military defeat that had cost
them twenty thousand dead. Hanoi’s official history concedes ‘the battlefield
had temporarily turned in favour of the enemy… Our posture and strength were
seriously weakened.’ By the communists’ own estimates, exposure to US firepower
had cost some guerrilla units 60-70 per cent of their strength.” (p.413)
And
yet television news showed the West images of Saigon under attack, Vietcong
breaking into the grounds of the US embassy, and firefights going on across the
city. The impression was created that the South had suffered a dreadful reverse
and was already defeated. It was at this time that terrible images showed a
police chief summarily executing a Vietcong by a pistol shot to the head. As
Hastings explains (p.403), the Vietcong in question had personally killed an
ARVN officer, his wife, his six children and his 80-year-old mother – but there
was no camera around to see these acts.
Hastings
is definitely NOT making the case, still heard from some American hawks, that “the media lost the war for us”. As a
long-time journalist himself, he applauds the skill and often courage of
journalists who penetrated official lies and brought the truth about the
darkest elements of the war to public attention. But he is aware that only one
side’s crimes were thus exposed, and that even Western journalists of high
repute were prone to accepting uncritically official North Vietnamese
propaganda. The wastefulness and
inaccuracy of many US air strikes in North Vietnam are beyond dispute, but they
had far greater effect than was admitted in the handouts from Hanoi that
Harrison Salisbury quoted as objective fact in the New York Times. (p.323)
I
spent three whole days reading Vietnam –
An Epic Tragedy 1945-75 with the same sort of horrible fascination that I
read Orlando Figes’ A People’s Tragedy [his
massive study of the whole course of the Russian Revolution - and the best
single-volume account on the subject] or Laurence Rees’ The Holocaust – a New History. It is shocking, often depressing,
and compulsive reading. It will, naturally, cause annoyance to those who wish
to see the war in more simplistic terms, whether they are unreconstructed
American “hawks” or romantic leftists with sanitised ideas of “Uncle Ho” and
how the Vietcong went about its business. I have now looked on a number of
websites and seen the diversity of reactions. On the Guardian website alone, you can find one review by Martin Wollacott
that fully endorses this book’s panoramic view; and another very grumpy review
by Jonathan Steele claiming (inaccurately, I believe) that the book’s main
purpose is to “exonerate the US military.”
In
other words, it’s a book nuanced enough to force readers to do some thinking.
Footnote: Unlike
other (American or British) chroniclers of the Vietnam War, Hastings
acknowledges that the US had a few (a very few) allies. He notes the
presence of Australian troops and remarks: “They
towed in their wake the New Zealand government, which was convinced that no
good could come out of the war, but felt obliged to follow the lead of its much
larger neighbour.”(p.239) Later he
gives ten pages to “Aussies and Kiwis” (pp.460-470) although all his informants
and interviewees for this section appear to have been Australian. His comments
on New Zealanders are only generic ones. Perhaps this is fair as, at any time,
there were over 4,500 Aussies in Vietnam and only about 500 New Zealanders.
This has a personal element for me. One of my elder
brothers, Piers, a career army officer, (see my eulogy for him here Goodbye Soldier) fresh out of military
college, served for a year-and-a-half in Vietnam, I believe mainly with a New
Zealand artillery battery at Bien Hoa. It was interesting to me, as a
youngster, to see how his attitudes to the war changed. When he first returned
to New Zeland, he was still idealistic about the war, being convinced that a
rigged “election” held by one of South Vietnam’s leaders was a real sign of
democracy. He said “I saw farmers and
peasants and middle-class people and prostitutes voting at the booths.” But
only a few years later, now out of Vietnam and learning how the war was going,
he was much more cynical and said “If the
politicians want a bloody war, they can have one.” Still later, as a senior
officer, he was, like many other former combatants, an honoured guest in unified
Vietnam, and was shown respectfully around battlefields (including Dienbienphu,
Keh Sahn and sites further south) by Vietnamese officers who were perfectly
happy to discuss their own, and their emeny’s, strengths and weaknesses in
tactics and strategy. Like communist China, communist Vietnam welcomes tourists
and their Western currencies and has accepted much private enterpise, having
ditched dogmatic collectivisation while remaining a one-party stat.
By
the way, Max Hastings points out that most US infantry served at most six
months with a company before being shifted to staff roles and then sent home. He
comments caustically: “Maybe two thirds
of the men who came home calling themselves veterans – entitled to wear the
medal and talk about their PTSD troubles – had been exposed to no greater risk
than a man might get from ill-judged sex or ‘bad shit’ drugs.” (p.249) This
crack has caused great offence among some American reviewers, but it squares
with my brother’s tales of Aussies and Kiwis doing 18-month stretches in the
field while Americans were rotated through active service at a much faster
rate.
Detective stories are one thing. I’m happy to read good
ones when I get the opportunity (see the posting on Simenon’s Maigret novels). But private eye novels
are something else. Detective stories have a beginning, middle and end –
problem, investigation, solution – and appeal to the idea of strict reason. Not
only are private eye stories limited to a particular era and place – basically
big-city USA between the 1920s and 1960s – but, even if they do have elements
of detection and mystery-solving, they rely on intuition, atmosphere and
surprise rather than orderly investigation. So private eye stories are really a
hybrid of the detective story and the straight thriller.
Remember
how The Big Sleep starts. General
Sternwood hires Philip Marlowe to 
At
the same time, there are two major elements of fudging. First, the reason General Sternwood hires Philip Marlowe in the
first place is very trivial (he wants Marlowe to follow up a basically
unthreatening, half-hearted attempt at extortion). It is hard to see why this
would in itself keep Marlowe on the case, without having the convention that
Marlowe (like the reader) simply wants to get to the bottom of things out of
sheer curiosity. Second, between
setting up the mystery and its resolution, many characters are introduced for
the momentary thrill of the confrontation or the action scene and in fact have
nothing to do with the ongoing plot.
On
watching Howard Hawks’ movie a week or so after reading the novel, I was
surprised to find how closely it followed the novel in terms of situations and
general plot. But the part of General Sternwood’s elder daughter had been built
up to make a starring role for Lauren Bacall. Also, because of the Hayes Code
and the lack of explicit mention of pornography, it would have been hard for an
unsophisticated audience to work out who was being blackmailed by whom, and
why. 
The
1946 movie may have been a tad coy and euphemistic. On the other hand, some
months after reading the novel I hired a DVD of the ridiculous (1978)
British-made remake, starring an over-aged Robert Mitchum as Marlowe. (In his
heyday he would have been great in the role, but he was simply past it.) The
remake was able to have all the explicit plot points that were pre-censored out
of the earlier version, yet it was a much duller film, lacking urgency and
nerve. A miscast Candy Clarke played the nymphomaniacal young daughter, and the
stuff concerning pornography now looked very silly, for all its explicitness.
