Tag Archive for: Vietnam War

From the bookshelf: ‘Vietnam vanguard’—a unit history of lasting value

Unit histories are usually written mainly for members of the unit and their descendants: only a few have lasting historical value. It is, as sporting commentators would put it, a big call to say that the history of a unit of one of the smaller nations in a controversial war, based largely on the memories of its members and written collaboratively 50 years after the events it relates, deserves the attention of those interested in historical and current debates about military doctrines.

But for several reasons, Vietnam vanguard, the history of the 1966 tour of the 5th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment (5RAR) in Vietnam, edited by Ron Boxall and Robert O’Neill, deserves more attention than most works of its kind.

Part of the explanation can be seen in the subtitle: The 5th Battalion’s approach to counter-insurgency, 1966. The first Australian infantry battalion to be committed to Vietnam in 1965, 1RAR, was inserted into the American 173rd Airborne Brigade. Theirs was not a happy experience. The Australians were not impressed by the American way of war, with its emphasis on massive firepower and measuring success by body counts and kill ratios. Many thought that the tactics developed by Australian and British forces in the Malayan Emergency and the Indonesian Confrontation were better suited to the Vietnam campaign, and less likely to lead to a politically unacceptable casualty rate.

The Australian government’s decision to increase the commitment to a task force of two (later three) battalions and associated units was based partly on the desire to fight with greater autonomy in a designated area. The first two battalions to be sent to Phuoc Tuy province were 5RAR and 6RAR. Without, it would seem, much guidance from higher authorities, each battalion largely fought its own war. The most famous Australian engagement of the entire war, the Battle of Long Tan, was fought principally by 6RAR, and only appears on the margins of this account.

The commanding officer of 5RAR, Lieutenant Colonel John Warr, clearly recognised that he and his men faced an intellectual as much as a military challenge. This book tells the story, not just of 5RAR’s operations, but also of the battalion’s efforts to develop an operational concept appropriate for their environment. Many of the regular soldiers in the battalion had served in Malaya and Borneo, but Warr’s own military experience was in Korea.

As intelligence officer, Warr appointed a 30-year-old Duntroon graduate, Captain Robert O’Neill, better known to readers of The Strategist as Professor O’Neill, whose curriculum vitae as military historian, strategist and institution builder would occupy the rest of this post. When 5RAR began its tour, O’Neill had recently completed his Oxford doctoral thesis, published during the tour as The German Army and the Nazi Party 1933–1939.

All contributors to the book emphasise Warr’s leadership in bringing together this range of skills and experience to define an operational concept appropriate for Phuoc Tuy in 1966. The result was a distinctive approach, with a strong emphasis on cordon-and-search operations. This was all about operating quietly, not worrying about body counts or kill ratios but concentrating on identifying and removing the opponents of the government, with minimal disruption to village life.

Vietnam vanguard thus provides a ‘bottom-up’ perspective on the development of a particular approach to counterinsurgency operations. It makes a noteworthy contribution to wider debates on military doctrine, such as those in which the US Army engaged before, during and after the promulgation of its 2006 field manual on counterinsurgency, particularly associated with General David Petraeus.

Some of the material will be familiar to readers of Vietnam task, the 1968 book based on O’Neill’s letters to his wife, as well as War, strategy and history, the 2016 festschrift in O’Neill’s honour, and the relevant volume of the official history.

The passage of time since the 1966 tour allows this book to benefit not only from further reflection but also from contributions from military historians with expertise in relevant fields. David Horner contributes a chapter on the decisions to allocate the task force to Phuoc Tuy province and, more controversially, to base it at Nui Dat. Ernest Chamberlain, an army linguist, draws on his extensive knowledge of the histories of the Viet Cong units against whom the Australians fought. There are also useful contributions from those who served in artillery and army aviation units that supported 5RAR.

To say this book deserves a place today on the reading lists of Australian officer cadets and others interested in military doctrine is not to endorse simplistic arguments along the lines of ‘Australian counterinsurgency good, American attrition warfare bad’, or ‘If the Americans had adopted the tactics the British and Australians used in Malaya, they would have won in Vietnam.’

The Vietnam War was long and complex: what worked well in Phuoc Tuy in 1966 would not necessarily have done so in other parts of Vietnam, or even in Phuoc Tuy in later years. But Vietnam vanguard melds personal experience and half a century of historical research and reflection to produce something significantly more than just another unit history.

From the bookshelf: the defeated South Vietnamese army

NathalieNguyen_SouthVietnameseSoldiersHistorians still argue about the winners and losers of the Vietnam War, but there were two undoubted losers: the Republic of Vietnam—commonly known as South Vietnam—and its army, generally known as ARVN. The soldiers of ARVN not only suffered defeat on the battlefield, but they were also treated extremely harshly by the victorious Vietnamese communists, received little respect from their allies, and have largely been written out of historical accounts of the war.

South Vietnamese Soldiers, by Monash University academic Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, is therefore an unusual and welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on the war. Dr. Nguyen’s father was the last RVN Ambassador to Japan: he and his family were among the few South Vietnamese who were given refuge in Australia immediately after the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. Much of this book is based on interviews with the South Vietnamese veterans, men and women who arrived later, often as boat people.

After the war ARVN soldiers, especially officers, were subjected by the victorious communists to even harsher penalties than civilians, including years of forced labor and indoctrination in ‘re-education camps’. Thousands died from sickness and starvation; those who survived and didn’t manage to escape to the west were treated with contempt and discrimination, which were even extended to their children and grandchildren. The main South Vietnamese military cemetery at Bien Hoa was vandalised and virtually abandoned until recent years. Even in death the soldiers were treated as puppets, not people.

Moreover, before, during and after the war the American military and the media frequently conveyed an impression of an incompetent and unmotivated army serving a corrupt regime. The regime and its army were, it was widely alleged, reluctant to fight and to take casualties, being determined only ‘to fight to the last American’. Those allegations did much to undermine support for South Vietnam in one of the war’s most crucial battlegrounds, American public opinion.

Nathalie Nguyen’s book serves as an important corrective to many of the familiar and damaging allegations. ARVN did fight, and did take casualties. We may never know the exact numbers, but around quarter of a million service personnel died and about three times that number were wounded. Compare that with the 58,000 American forces, and just over 500 Australian service personnel, officially regarded as killed in action. It’s simply not true that the South Vietnamese were shirking the battle. In the last years of the war, after the Americans and their allies had withdrawn, the South Vietnamese forces lost more casualties in a year than the Americans had for the entire war.

The South Vietnamese soldiers display pride in military achievement, such as the performance of some units when the South repulsed the North’s unsuccessful offensive in 1972. Much was said in the west about ARVN officers appointed for their political connections rather than military skill but this book reveals loyalty and pride in their brothers-in-arms (and sisters-in-arms) and in officers who commanded respect. There are no allegations of a ‘stab in the back’ by Saigon politicians. The only recrimination is directed against the US Congress, which cut off supplies to the South in 1974.

Much of the political and military drive in South Vietnam came from the million who came into the South from provinces north of the 17th parallel after the partition in 1954. Much has always been made of the fact that many of them, including Ngo Dinh Diem, were Catholics. But Nguyen shows that many of those who came south were Buddhists and other non-Catholics, equally motivated to fight the communists. They had experienced communist rule in the north, and they brought some of the north’s military skill and political motivation to the anti-communist cause.

Like the Vietnamese National Army under the French, ARVN was created along a western model. It was designed to rely on the sort of firepower, logistics and transport that the American forces used, but it wasn’t supplied with the same quality or quantity of logistic support. A recurring theme in these interviews is the frustration of the South Vietnamese forces when the US Congress cut support in 1974, while the north continued to receive massive support from the Soviet Union and China. The South Vietnamese forces had arms but no ammunition, equipment but no spare parts. When ARVN soldiers were reduced to three rounds per day, defeat was inevitable.

Like any army, ARVN units were generally as good as their officers and their training. Just as the first Anzacs were far more effective soldiers by 1918 than they had been in 1915, so too the South Vietnamese Army was more effective in the early 1970s than it had been in the early 1960s.

The South Vietnamese soldiers in this book, and the hundreds of thousands whom they represent, were people not puppets, who fought for a country and a set of ideals in which they believed, as much as any army believes in its own cause. They were defeated, but deserve not to be denigrated by both their conquerors and their allies. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan, Australians would do well to give a thought to their South Vietnamese allies.

The Nashos and Vietnam

Members of 8 platoon, C Company, 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (6RAR), in the battalion lines at Enoggera, Queensland, prior to deployment to Vietnam in May 1966. From left: 2781803 Private (Pte) Rodney Cox of Ganmain, NSW; 2781794 Pte Gordon Stafford of Gunnedah, NSW; 2781823 Pte Neil (Pop) Baker of Newcastle, NSW; 2781790 Pte Mark (Scrub) Minell of Moree, NSW; 2781809 Pte Graham Irvine of Coolamon, NSW. All five men were called up in the first intake of national service in July 1965. Note the protective steel helmets with camouflage netting, usually worn by Australian infantry on operations in areas known to have been mined by the enemy.Amid the attention to the various centenaries of the first world war, we should not overlook the half-centenaries of the Vietnam War. As a recent ‘Rear Vision’ program on the ABC reminded us, fifty years ago this month the first intake of ‘nashos’ was recruited into the army under the controversial 1965–72 national service scheme that sent some 15,000 conscripts to serve, and 200 to die, in Vietnam.

Although always associated with the Vietnam War, the scheme was not introduced principally with Vietnam in mind. When the legislation was introduced in November 1964, policymakers’ main concern was Konfrontasi, Indonesia’s confrontation of the new Federation of Malaysia. Australia had already committed an infantry battalion and other forces to support Malaysia. A strong, but seldom expressed, fear in Canberra was that Jakarta might not only escalate its low-level conflict with Malaysia, but also take on Australia directly across the border between the western half of New Guinea, recently incorporated into Indonesia, and the eastern half, today’s Papua New Guinea but then administered by Australia under a United Nations mandate. Read more

The changing lessons of Vietnam

Bien Hoa, South Vietnam. June 1970. The Chief of Staff of the Headquarters Australian Force Vietnam, Colonel (Col) J. Whitelaw, passes a group of prisoners of war (POWs) during his inspection of the III Corps POW cage. Col Whitelaw presented a small library to the camp. He was accompanied on his inspection by the Vietnamese commandant, Major Sanh Qui.

Australia is starting a four-year journey to mark and ponder the meaning of the centenary of World War I. During those commemorations, the national effort at remembering should also revisit a series of 50-year anniversaries for Australia’s entry and enmeshment in the Vietnam War.

Vietnam might have more to offer than Gallipoli or the Western front in thinking about Australia’s regional future, the US alliance and the diplomatic and defence choices of the 21st century. The frame of history is always shifting and the lessons drawn are forever changing in shape and taste. And as the historian Peter Edwards dryly notes, to a new generation of Australians, ‘Vietnam is as remote as the Boer war was to young people in the 1960s.’

To get around that problem, Edwards has returned to the ground he worked as the Official Historian and general editor of the nine-volume Official History of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975. The result is a new history for a new century of the one war in the 20th century where Australia was on the losing side: Australia and the Vietnam War. The book was launched by the Governor-General designate, General Peter Cosgrove.

To see why Vietnam still tears at the Australian polity, turn to the 2006 memoir by Cosgrove (who was awarded the Military Cross for actions as a Lieutenant in Vietnam) and the conclusion in his Vietnam chapter that Australia’s involvement in Vietnam was a mistake:

…in retrospect we should not have gone… I remember with sadness that over 500 Australians were killed in that war and many more wounded and maimed; … And we left. And we lost. We mustn’t do that with our men and women. Sending troops to war is without doubt the most difficult and agonising decision for any leader. My advice to leaders is never to take the decision lightly, and having done so, never stop until the outcome is worth the cost.

Cosgrove’s sentiment reflects what Edwards describes as the common view that took hold after 1975—Vietnam was at best a strategic mistake, at worst immoral.

In writing a new version of the history for today’s Australia, Edwards follows much of that familiar narrative but upends some of the old Vietnam conclusions, finding elements of Australian alliance success and regional strategic success in the losing war. While the long view offered is rosier, the Vietnam blunders are still paraded for punishment.

In entering the war, Robert Menzies thought ‘he was simply repeating a winning formula that would achieve military success in Southeast Asia, strengthen the alliance with the US and divide the Labor Party’s right and left wings.’ The Vietnam commitment was ‘imprudent and overconfident’ and put ‘blind faith’ in US military power. Whatever gains could be made in Vietnam had been achieved by 1968–69, when the US and Australia should have made an exit.  Instead, the blood kept flowing and the trauma turned to nightmare because of ‘unrealistic definitions of ‘victory’ as much as the lack of clear political and military strategies’.

Edwards recalibrates the alliance calculus in Australia’s favour and gives a fresh embrace to the domino theory—that if Vietnam had fallen to communism in 1965 instead of 1975, the other dominos of Southeast Asia would have wobbled badly or even toppled: ‘With half a century’s hindsight, the ‘domino theory’ arguments gain at least some element of credibility; but as with the ‘insurance policy’, at a cost that was unnecessarily high’.

The ‘insurance’ revision is to reject the idea that in Vietnam, Australia was fighting ‘other people’s wars’. Instead, Edwards argues the US was fighting for Australia’s regional interests and Australia gained some of its strategic objectives: ‘[I]n the minds of Menzies and his principal advisers, it was a matter of getting the US to fight a war for Australia’s security. Paying a premium for Australia’s strategic insurance with the US was not of itself wrong, but should have been handled with a great deal more care’.

Edwards’ case is that Australia should’ve been the loyal ally that asked hard questions and questioned every promise made by its large ally. And this is no mere confected counterfactual. The history gives much weight to the way Australia handled its major ally Britain, and dealt with Indonesia as temporary enemy but eternal neighbour in the Confrontation crisis from 1963 to 1966. The same Canberra cast that stumbled into Vietnam got much right in handling the diplomatic and military dramas of Sukarno’s Konfrontasi against the proposed federation of Malaysia. In his speech at the launch, Edwards contrasted Australia’s skill in dealing with Britain and Indonesia versus the unquestioning meekness applied to US operations in Vietnam:

We need to look again at a time when we were becoming embroiled in two conflicts, in two different parts of Southeast Asia, with two different allies. In one, [Confrontation] the Australian political, diplomatic and military actions were co-ordinated and nuanced; those policies emerged from robust discussions between ministers and their advisers, both civilian and uniformed; the government engaged in vigorous independent diplomacy, especially in regional capitals, deploying a competent foreign service in which the government had confidence; our political and military leaders discreetly but robustly challenged our major ally’s diplomatic and military approaches; and our servicemen were able to apply their preferred tactics, fighting alongside allies in whose approaches they had confidence.

In the other conflict [Vietnam], policy debate was suppressed; experienced advisers were sidelined or disregarded; we failed to seek adequate information about, let alone question, our ally’s strategies; our diplomacy was subordinated to alliance considerations; and our servicemen found themselves fighting a war in ways which were often at odds with their own operational concepts. It is no coincidence that, by any cost-benefit analysis, Australia gained a better outcome from the first conflict than from the second.

Edwards describes history as a never-ending conversation between the present and the past about the future. As an example of that conversation, here is the ASPI interview with Peter Edwards.

Graeme Dobell is the ASPI journalism fellow. Image courtesy of the Australian War Memorial.

The other assassination of November 1963

Ngo Dinh Diem, accompanied by US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, is greeted on his arrival at Washington National Airport in May 1957 by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower

If you weren’t living as a hermit in the desert, you’d have been well aware that 22 November 2013 marked the 50th anniversary of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy. But the wall-to-wall coverage of that event obscured the anniversary of another presidential assassination that took place just three weeks before, and had almost equally far-reaching effects on world events, not least for Australia and its region. On the night of 1 November 1963, President Ngo Dinh Diem of the Republic of Vietnam (commonly known as South Vietnam), and his brother and chief political adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were assassinated during a coup executed by a military junta, acting with the knowledge and support of the United States.

This has long been seen as one of the most important in the series of mistakes that led to massive American military intervention in Vietnam (itself seen as its greatest strategic error in the Cold War if not indeed the whole 20th century). By conspiring in the assassination of Diem, the US virtually committed itself to supporting any regime in Saigon that would oppose the communists. The junta that deposed Diem was itself rapidly deposed, leading to a rapid ‘revolving door’ succession of governments, each less credible than its predecessor. Not until the US was fully engaged did Nguyen Van Thieu emerge as the most credible of the military leaders. By this stage the US effectively trying to create a democracy rather than defend one while fighting a major war (a time when even well-established democracies often accept restrictions on their democratic processes that they wouldn’t accept in peacetime).

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