Vietnam / Edition 1

by Spencer C. Tucker

Overview

" This fascinating study provides a comprehensive overview of warfare throughout Vietnamese history, from the early efforts of the Vietnamese to establish their own state and free themselves from Chinese domination, down through the Indo-China and Vietnam Wars, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, to the present. Vietnam provides an overview of the causes, course, and effects of the numerous wars in Vietnamese history, many of them not generally known to Westerners, such as the Black Flag/Tonkin Wars and the Franco-Thai War. Concentrating on the period after the Second World War, it treats matters from the Vietnamese perspective as much as from the French and American, and seeks to clarify the missed opportunities and false perceptions that led to warfare. Encompassing socio-political, economic, diplomatic, and cultural issues, Vietnam provides an excellent introduction to Vietnamese history as well as an in-depth look at the long record of warfare in that country. The Vietnam War was a traumatic event for America and a lesson for Americans on the limits of power. For the Vietnamese, however, it was but the most recent in a series of struggles against foreign domination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813109664
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	02/25/1999
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Lexile:	1390L (what's this?)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Spencer C. Tucker, Virginia Military Institute

Table of Contents

1 The background 2 French Indo-China 3 The Indo-China War (1946–54) 4 The Vietnam War: the United States takes over (1954–65) 5 The Vietnam War: the quagmire (1965–8) 6 The Vietnam War: the US search for a way out (1968–73) 7 The Third Vietnam War (1973–5) 8 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and the war with China

Editorial Reviews

Illuminates aspects of conflicts that other surveys have ignored.

Historian

A compact overview of a country and its wars that provides insight into one of US history's most traumatic periods.

Military Review

An excellent, instructive survey of the Vietnam conflict that will provide informative commentary for anyone interested in that troubled period in American history.

KY) Daily News (Bowling Green

A concise and well organized assessment of the major military conflicts in post-colonial Vietnam.

International Migration Review

Army History A study undoubtedly richly deserving of the readers' attention.

Archiv Orientalni

"An excellent, instructive survey of the Vietnam conflict that will provide informative commentary for anyone interested in that troubled period in American history." — (Bowling Green, KY) Daily News

"Army History A study undoubtedly richly deserving of the readers' attention." — Archiv Orientalni

"Illuminates aspects of conflicts that other surveys have ignored." — Historian

"A concise and well organized assessment of the major military conflicts in post-colonial Vietnam." — International Migration Review

"A compact overview of a country and its wars that provides insight into one of US history's most traumatic periods." — Military Review

From the Publisher

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 thiswell-documented book.

Kirkus Reviews