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Books > Humanities > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945 > Vietnam War
From the defeat of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam at Ap Bac to
the battles of the Ia Drang Valley, Khe Sanh, and more, Storms over
the Mekong offers a reassessment of key turning points in the
Vietnam War. Award-winning historian William P. Head not only
reexamines these pivotal battles but also provides a new
interpretation on the course of the war in Southeast Asia. In
considering Operation Rolling Thunder, for example-which Head dubs
as "too much rolling and not enough thunder"-readers will grasp the
full scope of the campaign, from specifically targeted bridges in
North Vietnam to the challenges of measuring success or failure,
the domestic political situation, and how over time, Head argues,
"slowly, but surely, Rolling Thunder dug itself into a hole."
Likewise, Head shows how the battles for Saigon and Hue during the
Tet Offensive of 1968 were tactical defeats for the Communist
forces with as many as 40,000 killed and no real gains. At the same
time, however, Tet made it clear to many in Washington that victory
in Vietnam would require a still greater commitment of men and
resources, far more than the American people were willing to
invest. Storms over the Mekong is a blow-by-blow account of the key
military events, to be sure. But beyond that, it is also a measured
reconsideration of the battles and moments that Americans thought
they already knew, adding up to a new history of the Vietnam War.
This book explores how and why Vietnam loomed so large for Humphrey
as vice president from 1964 through the 1968 election campaign
against Richard Nixon. It assesses how Humphrey's loyalty to Lyndon
Johnson, who emerges as the villain of the story in many ways,
would negatively affect his political ambitions. And it engages the
disconnect between Humphrey's principles and the intricate politics
of his convoluted relationship with the president and his
unsuccessful presidential campaign. It is a complex and frustrating
narrative, the results of which would be tragic, not only for
Humphrey's presidential aspirations, but also for the war in
Southeast Asia and the future of the United States.
By the end of the American war in Vietnam, the coastal province of
Phu Yen was one of the least-secure provinces in the Republic of
Vietnam. It was also a prominent target of the American strategy of
pacification - an effort, purportedly separate and distinct from
conventional warfare, to win the 'hearts and minds' of the
Vietnamese. In Robert J. Thompson III's analysis, the consistent,
and consistently unsuccessful, struggle to place Phu Yen under
Saigon's banner makes the province particularly fertile ground for
studying how the Americans advanced pacification and why this
effort ultimately failed. In March 1970, a disastrous military
engagement began in Phu Yen, revealing the enemy's continued
presence after more than three years of pacification. Clear, Hold,
and Destroy provides a fresh perspective on the war across multiple
levels, from those making and implementing policy to those affected
by it. Most pointedly, Thompson contends that pacification, far
from existing apart from conventional warfare, actually depended on
conventional military forces for its application. His study reaches
back into Phu Yen's storied history with pacification before and
during the French colonial period, then focuses on the province
from the onset of the American War in 1965 to its conclusion in
1975. A sharply focused, fine-grained analysis of one critical
province during the Vietnam War, Thompson's work demonstrates how
pacification is better understood as the foundation of U.S.
fighting in Vietnam.
Even if you don't know much about the war in Vietnam, you've
probably heard of "The Hanoi Hilton," or Hoa Lo Prison, where
captured U.S. soldiers were held. What they did there and whether
they were treated well or badly by the Vietnamese became lasting
controversies. As military personnel returned from captivity in
1973, Americans became riveted by POW coming home stories. What had
gone on behind these prison walls? Along with legends of lionized
heroes who endured torture rather than reveal sensitive military
information, there were news leaks suggesting that others had
denounced the war in return for favorable treatment. What wasn't
acknowledged, however, is that U.S. troop opposition to the war was
vast and reached well into Hoa Loa Prison. Half a century after the
fact, Dissenting POWs emerges to recover this history, and to
discover what drove the factionalism in Hoa Lo. Looking into the
underlying factional divide between prowar "hardliners" and antiwar
"dissidents" among the POWs, authors Wilber and Lembcke delve into
the postwar American culture that created the myths of the HeroPOW
and the dissidents blamed for the loss of the war. What they found
was surprising: It wasn't simply that some POWs were for the war
and others against it, nor was it an officers versus enlisted men
standoff. Rather, it was the class backgrounds of the captives and
their precaptive experience that drew the lines. After the war, the
hardcore hero holdouts-like John McCain-moved on to careers in
politics and business, while the dissidents faded from view as the
antiwar movement, that might otherwise have championed them,
disbanded. Today, Dissenting POWs is a necessary myth buster,
disabusing us of the revisionism that has replaced actual GI
resistance with images of suffering POWs - ennobled victims that
serve to suppress the fundamental questions of America's drift to
endless war.
In That Time tells the story of the American experience in Vietnam
through the life of Michael O'Donnell, a promising young poet who
became a soldier and helicopter pilot in Vietnam. O'Donnell wrote
with great sensitivity and poetic force about his world and
especially the war that was slowly engulfing him and his most
well-known poem is still frequently cited and reproduced. Nominated
for the Congressional Medal of Honour, O'Donnell never fired a shot
in Vietnam. During an ill-fated attempt to rescue fellow soldiers,
O'Donnell's helicopter was shot down in the jungles of Cambodia
where he and his crew remained missing for almost 30 years. In
telling O'Donnell's story, In That Time also tells the stories of
those around him, both famous and ordinary, who helped to shape the
events of the time and who were themselves shaped by them. The book
is both a powerful personal story and a compelling, universal one
about how America lost its way in the 1960s.
Sheehan's tragic biography of John Paul Vann is also a sweeping history of America's seduction, entrapment and disillusionment in Vietnam.
At Easter 1972, North Vietnam invaded the South, and there were almost no US ground troops left to stop it. But air power reinforcements could be rushed to the theater. Operation Linebacker's objective was to destroy the invading forces from the air and cut North Vietnam's supply routes – and luckily in 1972, American air power was beginning a revolution in both technology and tactics.
Most crucial was the introduction of the first effective laser-guided bombs, but the campaign also involved the fearsome AC-130 gunship and saw the debut of helicopter-mounted TOW missiles. Thanks to the new Top Gun fighter school, US naval aviators now also had a real advantage over the MiGs.
This is the fascinating story of arguably the world's first “modern” air campaign. It explains how this complex operation – involving tactical aircraft, strategic bombers, close air support and airlift – defeated the invasion. It also explains the shortcomings of the campaign, the contrasting approaches of the USAF and Navy, and the impact that Linebacker had on modern air warfare.
This new, extensively researched volume (volume two in the series)
is a comprehensive guide to the history, development, wear, and use
of uniforms and equipment during American military advisors
involvement in the Vietnam War. Included are insignia, headgear,
camouflage uniforms, modified items, Flak vests, boots, clothing
accessories, paper items and personal items from the years
1957-1972, all examined in great detail. Using re-constructed and
period photos, the author presents the look and appearance of
American Army, Navy, and Marine Corps advisors in Vietnam. ARVN
Ranger, Airborne, and ARVN infantry advisors, all have their own
chapter, along with Junk Force, RAG Force, and South Vietnamese
Naval and Marine Corps advisors.
In late March 1975, as the Vietnam War raged, an Australian
voluntary aid worker named Rosemary Taylor approached the
Australian Embassy seeking assistance to fly 600 orphans out of
Saigon to safety. Rosemary and Margaret Moses, two former nuns from
Adelaide, had spent eight years in Vietnam during the war, building
up a complex of nurseries to house war orphans and street waifs as
the organisation that built up around them facilitated
international adoptions for the children. As the North Vietnamese
forces closed in on their nurseries, they needed a plan to evacuate
the children, or all their work might count for little ... Based on
extensive archival and historical research, and interviews of some
of those directly involved in the events described, Operation
Babylift details the last month of the Vietnam War from the
perspective of the most vulnerable victims of that war: the orphans
it created. Through the story of the attempt to save 600 children,
we see how a small group of determined women refused to play
political games as they tried to remake the lives of a forgotten
generation, one child at a time.
Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War opens in 1954 with the signing of
the Geneva accords that ended the eight-year-long
Franco-Indochinese War and created two Vietnams. In agreeing to the
accords, Ho Chi Minh and other leaders of the Democratic Republic
of Vietnam anticipated a new period of peace leading to national
reunification under their rule; they never imagined that within a
decade they would be engaged in an even bigger feud with the United
States. Basing his work on new and largely inaccessible Vietnamese
materials as well as French, British, Canadian, and American
documents, Pierre Asselin explores the communist path to war.
Specifically, he examines the internal debates and other elements
that shaped Hanoi's revolutionary strategy in the decade preceding
U.S. military intervention, and resulting domestic and foreign
programs. Without exonerating Washington for its role in the advent
of hostilities in 1965, Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War
demonstrates that those who directed the effort against the United
States and its allies in Saigon were at least equally responsible
for creating the circumstances that culminated in arguably the most
tragic conflict of the Cold War era.
Published for the fortieth anniversary of the final days of the
Vietnam War, this is the suspenseful and moving tale of how John
Riordan, an assistant manager of Citibank's Saigon branch, devised
a daring plan to save 106 Vietnamese from the dangers of the
Communist takeover.Riordan,who had served in the US Army after the
Tet Offensive and had left the military behind for a career in
international banking,was not the type to take dramatic action, but
once the North Vietnamese Army closed in on Saigon in April 1975
and it was clear that Riordan's Vietnamese colleagues and their
families would be stranded in a city teetering on total collapse,
he knew he could not leave them behind. Defying the objections of
his superiors and going against the official policy of the United
States, Riordan went back into Saigon to save them.In fifteen
harrowing trips to Saigon's airport, he maneuvered through the
bureaucratic shambles, claiming that the Vietnamese were his wife
and scores of children. It was a ruse that, at times, veered close
to failure, yet against all odds, the improbable plan succeeded. At
great risk, the Vietnamese left their lives behind to start anew in
the United States, and now John is known to his grateful Vietnamese
colleagues and hundreds of their American descendants as Papa. They
Are All My Family is a vivid narrative of one man's ingenious
strategy which transformed a time of enormous peril into a display
of extraordinary courage. Reflecting on those fateful days in this
account, John Riordan's modest heroism provides a striking contrast
to America's ignominious retreat from the decade of conflict.
Karen Coates and Jerry Redfern spent more than seven years
traveling in Laos, talking to farmers, scrap-metal hunters, people
who make and use tools from UXO, people who hunt for death beneath
the earth and render it harmless. With their words and photographs,
they reveal the beauty of Laos, the strength of Laotians, and the
commitment of bomb-disposal teams. People take precedence in this
account, which is deeply personal without ever becoming a polemic.
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