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Books > Humanities > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945 > Vietnam War
Historian and collector Michael Green shows in this fascinating and
graphically illustrated book that the two wars that engulfed
Indochina and North and South Vietnam over 30 years were far more
armoured in nature than typically thought of. By skilful use of
imagery and descriptive text he describes the many variants
deployed and their contribution. The ill-fated French Expeditionary
Force was largely US equipped with WW2 M3 and M5 Stuart, M4 Sherman
and M24 light tanks as well as armoured cars and half-tracks. Most
of these eventually went to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam but
were outdated and ineffective due to lack of logistics and
training. The US Army and Marine Corps build-up in the 1960s saw
vast quantities of M48 Pattons, M113 APCs and many specialist
variants and improvised armoured vehicles arrive in theatre. The
Australians brought their British Centurion tanks. But it was the
Russians, Chinese and North Vietnamese who won the day and their
T-38-85 tanks, ZSU anti-aircraft platforms and BTR-40 and -50 swept
the Communists to victory. This fine book brings details and images
of all these diverse weaponry to the reader in one volume.
During the Vietnam war 3500 officers and men served in the Swift
Boat program in a fleet of 130 boats with no armor plating. The
boats patrolled the coast and rivers of South Vietnam, with the
average age of the crew being twenty-four. Their days consisted of
deadly combat, intense lightning firefights, storms and many hidden
dangers. This action-packed story of combat written by Dan Daly, a
Vietnam combat veteran who was the Officer in Charge of PCF 76
makes you part of the Swift Boat crew. The six man crew of PCF 76
were volunteers from all over the United States, eager to serve
their country in a highly unique type of duty not seen since the PT
boats of WWII. This inexperienced and disparate group of men would
meld into a combat team - a team that formed an unbreakable,
lifelong bond. After training they were plunged into a 12 month
tour of duty. Combat took place in the closest confines imaginable,
where the enemy were hidden behind a passing sand dune or a single
sniper could be concealed in an onshore bunker, mines might be
submerged at every fork in the river. The enemy was all around you,
hiding, waiting, while your fifty-foot Swift Boat works its way
upriver. In many cases the rivers became so narrow there was barely
room to maneuver or turn around. The only way out might be into a
deadly ambush. Humor and a touch of romance relieve the tension in
this thrilling ride with America's finest.
During the Vietnam war, the United States sought to undermine
Hanoi's subversion of the Saigon regime by sending Vietnamese
operatives behind enemy lines. A secret to most Americans, this
covert operation was far from secret in Hanoi: all of the commandos
were killed or captured, and many were turned by the Communists to
report false information.
"Spies and Commandos" traces the rise and demise of this secret
operation-started by the CIA in 1960 and expanded by the Pentagon
beginning in1964-in the first book to examine the program from both
sides of the war. Kenneth Conboy and Dale Andrade interviewed CIA
and military personnel and traveled in Vietnam to locate former
commandos who had been captured by Hanoi, enabling them to tell the
complete story of these covert activities from high-level decision
making to the actual experiences of the agents.
The book vividly describes scores of dangerous
missions-including raids against North Vietnamese coastal
installations and the air-dropping of dozens of agents into enemy
territory-as well as psychological warfare designed to make Hanoi
believe the "resistance movement" was larger than it actually was.
It offers a more complete operational account of the program than
has ever been made available-particularly its early years-and ties
known events in the war to covert operations, such as details of
the "34-A Operations" that led to the Tonkin Gulf incidents in
1964. It also explains in no uncertain terms why the whole plan was
doomed to failure from the start.
One of the remarkable features of the operation, claim the
authors, is that its failures were so glaring. They argue that the
CIA, and later the Pentagon, was unaware for years that Hanoi had
compromised the commandos, even though some agents missed radio
deadlines or filed suspicious reports. Operational errors were not
attributable to conspiracy or counterintelligence, they contend,
but simply to poor planning and lack of imagination.
Although it flourished for ten years under cover of the wider
war, covert activity in Vietnam is now recognized as a disaster.
Conboy and Andrade's account of that episode is a sobering tale
that lends a new perspective on the war as it reclaims the lost
lives of these unsung spies and commandos.
The American war in Vietnam was concluded in 1973 under the terms
of a truce that were effectively identical to what was offered to
the Nixon administration four years earlier. Those four years cost
America billions of dollars and over 35,000 war deaths and
casualties, and resulted in the deaths of over 300,000 Vietnamese.
And those years were the direct result of the supposed master plan
of the most important voice in the Nixon White House on American
foreign policy: Henry Kissinger. Using newly available archival
material from the Nixon Presidential Library and Kissinger's
personal papers, Robert K. Brigham shows how Kissinger's approach
to Vietnam was driven by personal political rivalries and strategic
confusion, while domestic politics played an outsized influence on
Kissinger's so-called strategy. There was no great master plan or
Bismarckian theory that supported how the US continued the war or
conducted peace negotiations. As a result, a distant tragedy was
perpetuated, forever changing both countries. Now, perhaps for the
first time, we can see the full scale of that tragedy and the
machinations that fed it.
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