Author: Ellen J. Hammer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780758135445
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Author: Robert Miller
Publisher: Enigma Books
ISBN: 1936274663
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
The Indochina and Vietnam Wars followed one another over thirty-five years, from 1940 to 1975, yet these two closely related conflicts are usually treated separately. This book seeks to tell the story of those wars as a single historical event. Within days of France's defeat by Nazi Germany and Japan's military expansion into Southeast Asia in July 1940, the United States became involved in Indochina. Most histories quickly mention the colonial past, usually limited to the battle of Dien Bien Phu, to concentrate exclusively on the American war. A selection of published sources explains the context and the development of the long war while providing an overview of France's imprint on Indochina and Vietnam. The question "Why were we in Vietnam?" comes up regularly regarding the root causes for the ultimate deployment of over five hundred thousand US troops, most of them conscripts, into a virtually unknown land. When France left Indochina in 1954 it became an American problem. Weeks before the murder of John F. Kennedy came the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem and the escalation of the war in 1965–68. Finally, Richard Nixon, after extending the war into Cambodia, enacted both the Vietnamization process and negotiations in Paris between Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, until the final act in April 1975, when the US embassy rooftop with the last helicopter taking off was flashed around the world as the grand finale to the war.

Author: Ellen Joy Hammer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195206401
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Centering on the events of 1963 in Vietnam that led to the assassinations of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, Ellen Hammer's riveting in-depth study demonstrates how this military coup transformed the Vietnam War into an American war. Having visited the embattled nation many times during the period and having interviewed key characters in the drama, she chronicles the series of misunderstandings between Vietnam and representatives of Western societies that preceded the events of 1963. Hammer's compelling account will provide readers with a fuller understanding of American involvement in Vietnam.

Author: Arthur J. Dommen
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253109256
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1191

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Book Description
"Dommen's book promises to be the definitive political history of Indochina during the Franco-American era." -- William M. Leary, E. Merton Coulter Professor of History, University of Georgia This magisterial study by Arthur J. Dommen sets the Indochina wars 'French and American' in perspective as no book that has come before. He summarizes the history of the peninsula from the Vietnamese War of Independence from China in 930-39 through the first French military actions in 1858, when the struggle of the peoples of Indochina with Western powers began. Dommen details the crucial episodes in the colonization of Indochina by the French and the indigenous reaction to it. The struggle for national sovereignty reached an acute state at the end of World War II, when independent governments rapidly assumed power in Vietnam and Cambodia. When the French returned, the struggle became one of open warfare, with Nationalists and Communists gripped in a contest for ascendancy in Vietnam, while the rulers of Cambodia and Laos sought to obtain independence by negotiation. The withdrawal of the French after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu brought the Indochinese face-to-face, whether as friends or as enemies, with the Americans. In spite of an armistice in 1954, the war between Hanoi and Saigon resumed as each enlisted the help of foreign allies, which led to the renewed loss of sovereignty as a result of alliances and an increasingly heavy loss of lives. Meticulous and detailed, Dommen's telling of this complicated story is always judicious. Nevertheless, many people will find his analysis of the Diem coup a disturbing account of American plotting and murder. This is an essential book for anyone who wants to understand Vietnam and the people who fought against the United States and won.

Author: Ellen Joy Hammer
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN:
Category : Indochina
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Author: Pierre Asselin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520287495
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
"Using new and largely inaccessible Vietnamese sources as well as French, British, Canadian and American archives, Pierre Asselin sheds valuable light on Hanoi's path to war. Step by step the narrative makes Hanoi's revolutionary strategy from the end of the French Indochina War to the start of the Anti-American Resistance Struggle for Reunification and National Salvation (the Vietnam War) transparent. The book reveals how North Vietnamese leaders moved from a cautious policy emphasizing nonviolent political and diplomatic struggle to a far riskier pursuit of military victory"--

Author: Lien-Hang T. Nguyen
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807882690
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
While most historians of the Vietnam War focus on the origins of U.S. involvement and the Americanization of the conflict, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen examines the international context in which North Vietnamese leaders pursued the war and American intervention ended. This riveting narrative takes the reader from the marshy swamps of the Mekong Delta to the bomb-saturated Red River Delta, from the corridors of power in Hanoi and Saigon to the Nixon White House, and from the peace negotiations in Paris to high-level meetings in Beijing and Moscow, all to reveal that peace never had a chance in Vietnam. Hanoi's War renders transparent the internal workings of America's most elusive enemy during the Cold War and shows that the war fought during the peace negotiations was bloodier and much more wide ranging than it had been previously. Using never-before-seen archival materials from the Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as materials from other archives around the world, Nguyen explores the politics of war-making and peace-making not only from the North Vietnamese perspective but also from that of South Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China, and the United States, presenting a uniquely international portrait.

Author: Mark Atwood Lawrence
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674023710
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
How did the conflict between Vietnamese nationalists and French colonial rulers erupt into a major Cold War struggle between communism and Western liberalism? To understand the course of the Vietnam wars, it is essential to explore the connections between events within Vietnam and global geopolitical currents in the decade after the Second World War. In this illuminating work, leading scholars examine various dimensions of the struggle between France and Vietnamese revolutionaries that began in 1945 and reached its climax at Dien Bien Phu. Several essays break new ground in the study of the Vietnamese revolution and the establishment of the political and military apparatus that successfully challenged both France and the United States. Other essays explore the roles of China, France, Great Britain, and the United States, all of which contributed to the transformation of the conflict from a colonial skirmish to a Cold War crisis. Taken together, the essays enable us to understand the origins of the later American war in Indochina by positioning Vietnam at the center of the grand clash between East and West and North and South in the middle years of the twentieth century.

Author: Christopher Goscha
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691228647
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 568

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Book Description
A multifaceted history of Ho Chi Minh’s climactic victory over French colonial might that foreshadowed America’s experience in Vietnam On May 7, 1954, when the bullets stopped and the air stilled in Dien Bien Phu, there was no doubt that Vietnam could fight a mighty colonial power and win. After nearly a decade of struggle, a nation forged in the crucible of war had achieved a victory undreamed of by any other national liberation movement. The Road to Dien Bien Phu tells the story of how Ho Chi Minh turned a ragtag guerrilla army into a modern fighting force capable of bringing down the formidable French army. Taking readers from the outbreak of fighting in 1945 to the epic battle at Dien Bien Phu, Christopher Goscha shows how Ho transformed Vietnam from a decentralized guerrilla state based in the countryside to a single-party communist state shaped by a specific form of “War Communism.” Goscha discusses how the Vietnamese operated both states through economics, trade, policing, information gathering, and communications technology. He challenges the wisdom of counterinsurgency methods developed by the French and still used by the Americans today, and explains why the First Indochina War was arguably the most brutal war of decolonization in the twentieth century, killing a million Vietnamese, most of them civilians. Panoramic in scope, The Road to Dien Bien Phu transforms our understanding of this conflict and the one the United States would later enter, and sheds new light on communist warfare and statecraft in East Asia today.

Author: Shawn F. McHale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108936172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 567

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Book Description
Shawn McHale explores why the communist-led resistance in Vietnam won the anticolonial war against France (1945–54), except in the south. He shows how broad swaths of Vietnamese people were uneasily united in 1945 under the Viet Minh Resistance banner, all opposing the French attempt to reclaim control of the country. By 1947, resistance unity had shattered and Khmer-Vietnamese ethnic violence had divided the Mekong delta. From this point on, the war in the south turned into an overt civil war wrapped up in a war against France. Based on extensive archival research in four countries and in three languages, this is the first substantive English-language book focused on southern Vietnam's transition from colonialism to independence.