Starred review from September 1, 2024
Military history of the Indochinese conflict, prioritizing politics and strategy over battlefield fireworks. American anticommunists had long obsessed about Vietnam, writes Wawro, director of the Military History Center at the University of North Texas and author ofQuicksand: America's Pursuit of Power in the Middle East. A communist-backed insurgency there had expelled French colonialists and threatened Vietnam's southern half, which remained "free" after a 1954 treaty gave communists control of the north. President Eisenhower sent aid, President Kennedy added thousands of military advisers, and President Johnson sent fighting troops in 1965. It was no secret that South Vietnam's ramshackle, corrupt, quasi-military government couldn't get its act together. Unable to fix matters, America simply took over the war--a terrible policy, as Wawro emphasizes throughout. All too aware of China's disastrous entry into the Korean War, Johnson refused to allow an invasion of North Vietnam and strictly limited bombing. Conservatives fumed (and still fume). In the South, Americans' aggressive but ineffective "search and destroy" strategy inflicted severe casualties on Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces but even more on Vietnamese civilians, who made up 40% of the dead. In October 1968, with no victory in sight, opposition to the war increasing, and Richard Nixon (promising a secret peace plan) leading polls for the upcoming election, Johnson abruptly agreed to a withdrawal that conceded most of what Hanoi wanted. Wawro maintains that the war could have ended then if Nixon, in what was likely a treasonous act, hadn't secretly persuaded South Vietnam's president to refuse to cooperate. As a result, America "would fight on for four more years, condemn 28,000 more American soldiers to death, and end up getting the same deal that Johnson was about to get." Wawro's contempt for generations of misguided policies leaps off the page in this worthy rival to Max Hastings' brilliantVietnam: An Epic Tragedy. Among the best Vietnam War histories, and just as painful as the others.
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September 2, 2024
This comprehensive, stylishly written account of the American war in Vietnam from historian Wawro (Sons of Freedom) concentrates on military tactics and political calculations that impacted developments on the battlefield. Though Wawro lays blame for the war’s descent into quagmire at the feet of American politicians, whom he asserts intentionally prolonged what they knew was an unwinnable conflict, he also excoriates Gen. William Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, for the “waste, aimlessness and folly” of his “robotic” building of more and more bases from which to launch often fruitless and strategically dubious “search-and-destroy” missions. (The plan—mathematically impossible as well as immoral—was for “American-inflicted casualties” to outpace Viet Cong recruiting, Wawro notes.) Also skewerered are Lyndon Johnson’s hawkish war advisers—among them Robert S. McNamara and Dean Rusk—along with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for their traitorous backchannel negotiations to prolong the war. Though Wawro has little good to say about South Vietnam’s authoritarian president Nguyen Van Thieu, he likewise does not sugarcoat the ruthlessness and deceit of North Vietnamese leaders, especially the “audacious” Le Duan, who pushed aside an ailing Ho Chi Minh (“modest, affable, self-effacing”) in 1967. Written in fluid, artful prose (“Galbraith JFK... ‘We shall bleed as the French did’.... Three weeks later, Kennedy himself lay bleeding”), this is well worth checking out.