They are among the most haunting images of our times: the whirling rotors of helicopters over brilliant-green jungle; sheets of flame from exploding napalm; screaming and terrified children; stressed-out GIs in helmets and flak jackets emptying M16 rifles into the yonder.
The 1960s Vietnam conflict was by far the most influential clash of arms that has taken place since World War II. It mobilised a young generation across the Western world in protest, inflicted a devastating blow upon both America’s moral standing and pretensions to military invincibility. It divided the U.S. as never since its 19th-century civil war, destroyed one president and contributed to the downfall of another.
For decades after its closure with the fall of Saigon in 1975, no one in America wanted to talk about it, least of all the millions of veterans who had fought there, witnessing and sometimes participating in terrible deeds of which the March 1968 My Lai Massacre of 347 civilians was only the most notorious.
Terrified children, including 9-year-old Kim Phuc, centre, run near Trang Bang after an aerial napalm attack on suspected Viet Cong hiding places in 1972
Yet now the story is being retold at epic length for TV, reopening a host of old wounds and controversies.
Ken Burns, America’s most respected documentary-maker, architect of magisterial series on the U.S. Civil War, World War II and the Roosevelts, has spent the past decade working with researcher Lynn Novick to assemble 18 hours of screen time about his country’s most divisive struggle.
The first two episodes aired last night (Monday) on BBC4. A British audience can judge for itself — mopping our brows that we were not involved — how that war seems more than half a century after the first U.S. troops began to fight and die in paddy fields and on densely vegetated mountains 10,000 miles from their homeland.
Burns’s films bend over backwards to be even-handed. The commentary speaks with respect of Vietnam’s most famous leader Ho Chi Minh, born in 1890, an ardent patriot who committed his life to freeing Vietnam from French colonial rule, and then to establishing a communist society.
Looking back from the 21st century, it is hard to believe that within the lifetime of some of us, Britain claimed a right to rule half the world, while the French dominated a substantial chunk of what was left.
U.S. Marines scatter as a CH-46 helicopter burn after is was shot down near the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam, July 1966
Bao Ninh, a former North Vietnamese soldier today turned novelist — brilliant novelist — who looms large in the Burns films, said to me last year: ‘The British were very lucky that they had the freedom in 1945 to vote out their great war leader Winston Churchill.’
I have always thought him dead right about this: I doubt that Churchill, as an old Victorian imperialist, could have brought himself to do what Attlee’s Labour government did — quit India quick, in 1947.
France was less fortunate. In 1945, licking their wounds after the humiliations imposed on them by World War II, the French insisted upon clinging to their colonial empire at any cost.
Following a Muslim revolt in Algeria in which 100 Europeans died, in the late summer of 1945 an estimated 80,000 people were slaughtered by French troops.
In March 1947, there was another rebellion, this time in French Madagascar, where 37,000 white colonists lorded it over 4.2 million black subjects. In the course of restoring control, the army killed 90,000 people.
And in Indochina — Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos — hundreds of thousands of French and colonial troops fought a murderous nine-year war against Ho Chi Minh’s Vietminh guerrillas that by 1950 no sane person could have thought winnable.
Veterans witnessed and sometimes participated in terrible deeds of which the March 1968 My Lai Massacre of 347 civilians was only the most notorious (pictured: investigations into the massacre two years later)
Yet those were the days when communists were on the march across the world — in Eastern Europe, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Malaya, Indonesia and Korea.
As France stood on the brink of bankruptcy as well as defeat in Indochina, panicky Americans in Washington convinced themselves that ‘saving’ Indochina from ‘the Reds’ was a vital Western interest.
America started paying the bills Paris could no longer afford and shipping a mass of weapons and munitions to Indochina. By 1954, with Eisenhower in the White House, the French were fighting a war they were still losing in American helmets, jeeps, fighters and trucks, while firing on the Vietminh with mostly American guns.
A critical moment came early in 1954, when an 11,000-man French garrison found itself besieged in a remote valley 150 miles west of Hanoi called Dien Bien Phu.
Paris told Washington that without direct American intervention, the camp would almost certainly fall. Eisenhower was willing to act but only if the British would come in too.
It is often suggested that Churchill, in his last period as prime minister, was totally senile. Yet one of his wisest decisions in those days — which infuriated the Americans — was to decline to send troops or aircraft to Indochina.
He said: ‘If we could not save India for ourselves, I do not think we can save Indochina for the French. The loss of the fortress must be faced.’
Dien Bien Phu capitulated to the Vietminh on May 7, a huge triumph for Ho Chi Minh and Giap, his general. Following a tense, bitter Geneva summit conference chaired by Britain and France, a deal was struck whereby Vietnam was partitioned at the 17th Parallel.
First Air Cavalrymen and a Vietnamese interpreter attached to the American unit waterboard a Viet Cong suspect, 1968
The communists were left to do as they chose in North Vietnam, which meant killing landlords and ‘class enemies’ with a ruthlessness that accords ill with the foolish popular image of a benign ‘Uncle Ho’.
The French went home, leaving South Vietnam in the hands of their appointed ruler, the puppet emperor Bao Dai, who appointed Ngo Dinh Diem as prime minister. Diem made himself a dictator, though his people were never reduced to anything like the same depth of hunger as Ho Chi Minh’s.
He soon became Washington’s client, and almost its favourite son, beneficiary of vast sums in American cash and — as communist guerrilla war escalated — of military aid, then from 1965 of a U. S. Army.
Many wise people saw from an early stage that for all the horrors of Ho’s rule, his victory over the French had given him an unchallengeable claim to become the voice of the Vietnamese people.
They have never liked foreigners, and most did not much care for the big, noisy, brash Americans who came into their country in ever-growing numbers, swelling by 1968 to an army of over half a million men.
U.S. President Lyndon Johnson urged, cajoled, bludgeoned British Prime Minister Harold Wilson to send even a token contingent of soldiers to support the Americans — ‘a company of Gurkhas would be enough’ — but arguably the best service Wilson ever rendered was stubbornly to refuse.
U.S. President Lyndon Johnson urged, cajoled, bludgeoned British Prime Minister Harold Wilson to send even a token contingent of soldiers to support the Americans, but he refused
Partly, his own Labour Party was violently opposed to the war. Partly also, most people who knew Asia and understood guerrilla insurgencies reckoned that the vast juggernaut of U.S. armoured might was merely plunging ever deeper into a quagmire.
Burns and Novick are wizards at assembling archive film to make works of art. Many sequences in their series show hapless soldiers in ‘the boonies’ — the boondocks — soaking wet, weary, hungry, bewildered, leeches clinging to their body crevices.
Suddenly, there is the violent explosion of a booby-trap that, if a man is lucky, merely blows off his leg. Or a burst of fire from an invisible enemy precipitates a small battle that may last three minutes or three hours, but always ends with men dead and wounded.
Many American vets describe their rage and frustration at encountering peasants who must know that guerrillas are waiting for them, or that there is a tripwire across their path linked to explosives. Yet those people hoeing their rice or leading their water buffaloes stayed mute.
This was what often provoked Americans to do terrible things, to shoot down innocent civilians: the fact that these people had allowed their buddies to walk into the arms of death, without lifting a finger to warn them. And as Ho Chi Minh and his comrades knew so well, every atrocity, every village torched by angry Americans, won new adherents for the Revolution.
A U.S. soldier hurries away after setting fire to a thatched house somewhere in South Vietnam
The horrors at My Lai made headlines, but meanwhile the U.S. Army’s 1969 Operation Speedy Express in the Mekong Delta claimed to have killed 10,889 Vietcong … yet recovered from their bodies only 748 weapons. The explanation, almost certainly, was that a host of those shot down were innocent peasants.
About that time, Gen. Edward Lansdale, a highly influential American ex-advertising man who had been an adviser to Diem since the early Sixties, said: ‘There is only one means of defeating an insurgent people who will not surrender, and that is extermination.
‘There is only one way to control a territory that harbours resistance, and that is to turn it into a desert. Where these means cannot be used, the war is lost.’
What are the weaknesses of these films? For a start, they seem to accept what has become conventional wisdom in America — that every veteran who fought in Vietnam remains psychologically scarred, though in truth a majority, thank goodness, have successfully moved on.
Though the films contain many Vietnamese voices, which are hard for a Western ear to attune to, they are inevitably so dominated by the American story that it is easy to forget that 40 Vietnamese died for every one of the 58,000 U.S. soldiers who perished.
The commentary asserts that the U.S. went into Vietnam with the best of intentions: yet the fundamental flaw of Washington’s policy was that successive U.S. governments cared nothing for the interests of the Vietnamese people. They fought and spent £120 billion because they fooled themselves that they were containing Chinese expansionism.
Men of the 3rd U.S. Marine Regiment’s 3rd Battalion sit silently during Roman Catholic and Protestant memorial services at Da Nang Air Base, August 1965
In my own research, I interviewed a wonderful man named Doug Ramsey, who spent seven years as a prisoner of the communists in a bamboo cage in the jungle on the Cambodian border.
He told me that during one of his innumerable interrogations, a Vietcong asked why the U.S. was in Vietnam. He told him: ‘Mostly to contain China.’ This seemed to puzzle the communist, who said: ‘But in that case, why do you not go and fight in China? We do not like the Chinese either.’
The funereal solemnity of the commentaries for all Burns’s documentaries makes the tone appropriate for a memorial service, and indeed this series is designed as a memorial: to the follies of statesmen, the savageries of communists, the madness of entrusting solutions to complex social, political and economic problems to generals.
One American critic of the series has written gloomily about ‘the tenacity with which the U.S. has forgotten the lessons of Vietnam’. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the West and its armies have repeated many of the disastrous mistakes made by the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations in Vietnam.
The programmes should precipitate the toppling of Henry Kissinger from the great American statesmen’s pantheon, in which the old man currently resides.
Burns uses extracts from 1970s White House audio-recordings, which lay bare the devastating cynicism with which Kissinger — first as National Security Adviser, then as Secretary of State — conspired with Nixon to deceive the American people.
As architect of the peace agreement signed with the North Vietnamese in Paris in January 1973, Kissinger and his chief pretended that they believed South Vietnam could prosper after U.S. troops had left the country. In reality, all they cared about was keeping the Saigon regime afloat until the Republicans could triumph in the 1974 U.S. mid-term elections.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, where the names of the 58,256 Americans are inscribed
Kissinger warned Nixon within weeks of signing the deal — for which, absurdly, he was given a Nobel Peace Prize — that he was terrified the North Vietnamese would launch an almost immediate offensive to complete unification.
Nixon confided to his chief of staff: ‘Well, Henry’s exactly right. We’ve got to do everything we can to see that [the Paris agreement] sticks for a while, but as far as a couple of years from now, nobody’s going to give a goddamn what happens in Vietnam.’
Nixon was right, of course. In March 1975, when the North Vietnamese launched a full-blown invasion of the South, flagrantly breaching the Paris Accords, nobody lifted a finger to stop their triumphal sweep to Saigon and final victory.
Both sides deserved to lose the Vietnam War. Contrary to the ludicrous 1960s enthusiasm of a generation of Western adolescents for dear old ‘Uncle Ho’, the North Vietnamese communists were an ugly, brutal force that inflicted dreadful suffering on their people and sustain a totalitarian dictatorship to this day.
But they were Vietnamese, and the Americans were not.
The Burns-Novick series is scarcely perfect, but it provides what one American critic calls ‘an introduction to 20 years of American arrogance and overreach’.
Many British viewers will find it compelling viewing.
- Max Hastings’ history Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975, will be published in 2018