A concise, analytical survey of Vietnamese military history that
concentrates on the French and American 20th-century wars. Former
US Army captain Tucker (Military History/Virginia Military
Institute) presents a readable, fact-filled examination of the
military history of Vietnam. He begins with a brief history of the
Southeast Asian nation, starting with its legendary founding in the
third century B.C. Tucker clearly shows that the dominant feature
of Vietnam's first thousand years was nationalist rebellion against
Chinese domination. Tucker offers detailed examinations of the
French colonization of Vietnam and the 1946-1954 French Indochina
War-two areas that most American Vietnam War histories treat
perfunctorily at best. His treatment of the American war takes up
more than half the book. Tucker sticks mainly to military matters
in his analysis of that controversial, highly political war. He
makes a case that, from the beginning, the American military
strategy was flawed because it focused on conventional warfare and
paid too little attention to counterinsurgency. The "inability" of
the American military establishment "to forecast the [guerrilla]
military threat" in the late 1950s "was the first great US military
mistake in Vietnam," he says. Tucker strongly criticizes commanding
general William Westmoreland and "officials in Washington" -
especially President Richard Nixon and his national security
adviser Henry Kissinger - for drastically underestimating the will
of the North Vietnamese. Westmoreland's attrition strategy, Tucker
says, was particularly ill suited against "the Communist strategy
of protracted warfare." Tucker uses a good deal of statistical
information throughout this well-documented book. A military
historian's approach to Vietnam's wars. (Kirkus Reviews)
A comprehensive overview of warfare in Vietnamese history from the
early efforts to free themselves from Chinese control, through the
Indo-China and Vietnam Wars, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia,
up to the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979. Concentrating on the Vietnam
War, the author explores the conflict from the Vietnamese
perspective, demonstrating how for many Vietnamese the war was
merely one of a long series of struggles against foreign
domination. Encompassing socio-political, economic, diplomatic and
cultural issues, this text provides an introduction to Vietnam's
military history and will be of interest to students of 20th
century American and Asian history.
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