Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
Who was the greatest President of the United States in history?
Seven historians put forward their nominations for the most accomplished leader to have sat in the White House
George Washington In office: 1789–97 Party affiliation: none Nominated by: Thomas Kidd, historian and author of Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh (Yale, 2022) George Washington was the first president in US history – and I’m nominating him as the best, too. I am basing this on his success as a leader, his ability to negotiate conflict in his administration, and most importantly the example he set for future presidents. Americans at the time of the Revolutionary War were enamoured with the ideal of the virtuous republican leader, in the model of the ancient Roman general Cincinnatus. Washington was no perfect man, of course, and like many elite southern Americans he was a slaveholder. But in politics he came the closest to manifesting the republican ideal of any American president. Washington became president after serving as the commander of the Continental Army during the fight for independence from the British. His leadership of the army was not uniformly positive, but his tenacity ultimately led to a successful outcome. Many suspected he might simply remain in the position as a kind of benevolent autocrat, but he resigned from the army in late 1783, returning to his Mount Vernon home in Virginia. Befitting the respect that he commanded, Washington was chosen to preside over the Constitutional Convention of 1787, where the US Constitution was drafted. Then he became the first president to be elected under that Constitution in 1789, in a unanimous vote of the electoral college. Washington dealt with major political conflicts in his administration, especially between the treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, who bitterly disagreed over economic policy and the direction of the new republic. Washington was largely (if not completely) able to rise above the partisan bickering, and always believed that the republic and its leaders needed to manifest consensus for the public good. He assiduously reached out to minority religious groups, such as Jews, to assure them of their place in the republic. Washington was not constitutionally required to step down after his second term, but he did so once again to manifest the ideal of the public servant who did not want or need to hold onto power indefinitely. Read more | Did George Washington have wooden teeth? Abraham Lincoln In office: 1861–65 Party affiliation: Republican Nominated by: Richard Carwardine, historian specialising in politics at the time of the American Civil War. His latest book is Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union (Alfred A Knopf, 2025) In his own era, Abraham Lincoln acquired a mythic status as the ‘Saviour of the United States’ and ‘Great Emancipator’. His death, from a shot fired on Good Friday, saw him canonised as the martyr of the glorious Union. Yet even stripping away the myth, most scholars still rank him the best American president. When Lincoln took office, seven slaveholding states had already launched a separate Confederacy. The American Civil War followed. Inexperienced in executive and military leadership, the wartime president faced sustained criticism but drew on formidable self-reliance and indomitable physical strength. He grew in office. Essential to his power were his tenacious nationalism, strategic wisdom, political shrewdness and skill in communication. The American republic’s unique mission, Lincoln insisted, lay in its ideological freight of liberty and equal opportunity. During the war, his nationalism fused with a deepening religious faith. He came to see that preserving the Union’s cargo demanded emancipating the enslaved, a constitutional amendment ending human bondage, and giving the vote to black soldiers. Read more | The Emancipation Proclamation: Abraham Lincoln's declaration that helped bring about the end of slavery Lincoln shrewdly calculated the Union’s strategic priorities: controlling the rich resources of the upper South; securing international support; pursuing a military plan that played to the Union’s strengths while exploiting the enemy’s limitations; and mobilising the human and natural resources of the country. Leadership demanded the deft handling of the levers of power. He controlled his party and broadened the coalition of Union loyalists. He mastered his cabinet and congress, though he was initially less confident with the military. A strong sense of self-worth meant he rarely stood on his dignity. Equally, his mental fortitude – forged through dark passages of depression – gave him resilience in extreme adversity. Sensitive to public opinion, Lincoln recognised that growing war-weariness threatened the Union cause. In the wiry prose of his memorable public addresses (he used no speechwriter), and in the skilful use of a natural sense of humour, he touched the nerve of ordinary people, believing in their educability through reason. Lincoln is the only president to have wrestled with civil war. Could any other have done it so well? Read more | Alternate history: what if Abraham Lincoln hadn't been assassinated? Teddy Roosevelt In office: 1901–09 Party affiliation: Republican Nominated by: Jennifer Wright, popular historian and author of Glitz, Glam and Damn Good Time: Mamie Fish and the Gilded Age (Hachette, 2025) There were dull presidents… and then there was Teddy Roosevelt. If he had not been the president, he would merely have been one of the most interesting men to ever live. The 26th president was a cattle rancher, a taxidermist, a Brazilian explorer, an amateur boxer, a historian who wrote The Naval War of 1812, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner for his help in bringing an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Admittedly, he did not end the American Civil War, like Lincoln. But Lincoln did not take a bullet to the chest and still finish a campaign speech, as Roosevelt did. Prior to being president, he was a war hero known for his prominent role with the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War. This group of volunteer cavalrymen were comprised of anyone who could ride a horse well. That meant that polo-playing scions of New York families served alongside coal miners and Native Americans. The notion of a country in which all people could thrive, work together and have great open spaces in which to ride would go on to become defining aspects of Roosevelt’s presidency. After succeeding to office in 1901, he increasingly promoted the idea of “a square deal for every man, big or small, rich or poor”. That meant breaking up some of the big business monopolies that had dominated the gilded age and mediating a coal worker strike to ensure the public’s interest was protected (Roosevelt was on the side of the workers). A square deal also meant protecting consumers. In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt lobbied for congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection acts — the meat portion of that perhaps a nod to the fact that Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle [which depicted unsanitary standards in the US meat-packing industry] had been serialised the previous year before being published as a book in February 1906. Read more | 8 facts you might not know about the White House, home of the president of the United States It was also at Roosevelt’s behest that the Forest Service was created. Roosevelt, who is known as ‘the Conservation President’, was passionate about nature. He used his presidential powers to establish 230 million acres of public land that could not be exploited. His presidency was defined by the notion of creating an America wherein the common man might find prosperity, safety and pleasure. It’s not essential that a president’s personality matches his accomplishments. Plenty of dull presidents have accomplished great things. But Teddy Roosevelt was a rare case where the magnetism of the man matched the grandeur of the office. And look, your kid doesn’t go to bed hugging a James K Polk bear. Franklin D Roosevelt In office: 1933–45 Party affiliation: Democrat Nominated by: Iwan Morgan, emeritus professor of United States studies at University College London, and author of FDR: Transforming the Presidency and Renewing America (Bloomsbury, 2022) In guiding the US through the Great Depression and Second World War, Franklin D Roosevelt, or FDR as he was known, transformed the presidency, hitherto a relatively small institution, into the modern office that is the fount of national leadership. Having to overcome physical disability after polio left him paralysed from the waist down at age 39 made his achievements all the more remarkable. Assuming office in 1933 amid the US’s worst slump, FDR failed to effect full recovery until war spending renewed prosperity, but otherwise enjoyed unmatched domestic success. His New Deal programme rescued the banking system from meltdown, enabled industrial workers to form unions that bargained for better pay and conditions, and created a new welfare state. It forged a working-class coalition of urban, multi-ethnic voters that helped FDR to win an unprecedented four terms in office (a two-term constitutional limit was ratified in 1951) and transformed the Democrats into the majority party for the next half-century. Roosevelt’s judicial appointments precipitated a constitutional revolution whereby the Supreme Court eventually accepted federal regulation of private enterprise as valid. An outstanding communicator, he uplifted national spirits through his speeches and broadcasts. Finally, he formed a memorable political partnership with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, whose idealism offset his pragmatism. As wartime commander-in-chief, FDR set spectacularly high production goals for America’s defence industries that ensured the Allies were far better equipped than their Axis enemies. He overruled his generals’ plans for a 1943 invasion of France as premature, then prodded a reluctant Winston Churchill into agreeing the D-Day invasion in 1944. HistoryExtra Academy | Take our four-week course, where you’ll discover everything you need to know about the Normandy landings The driving force behind the creation of the United Nations Organisation in 1945, he nevertheless regarded great power collaboration as essential for sustainable peace. Accordingly, he accommodated Josef Stalin’s demands for Soviet control of eastern Europe to maintain good relations. For critics, this encouraged Stalin’s insatiable expansionism, but FDR saw no alternative with the region already under Red Army occupation. Roosevelt’s sudden death while still in office in 1945 meant that history would never know if he could have pre-empted the wartime alliance’s rapid disintegration and descent into Cold War. FDR’s record has some significant shortcomings, notably his limited advancement of African-American civil rights and his complicity in the worst federal abuse of citizen rights in history in signing an executive order in 1942 authorising relocation of approximately 120,000 Japanese-Americans in internment camps. Nevertheless, his positive accomplishments were arguably far more significant. They justify his remembrance as America’s greatest president. Lyndon Baines Johnson In office: 1963–69 Party affiliation: Democrat Nominated by: Clifford Williamson, a lecturer in modern British and American history at Bath Spa University “Power is where power goes,” was the mantra of Lyndon Baines Johnson from his early days as a New Deal bureaucrat and teacher through to his time as president of the US. LBJ, as he was often known, was a commanding and intimidating figure who handed out the ‘Johnson treatment’ in his pursuit of power and change in America. A tall man, he loomed over whoever he was seeking to impress, frighten or cajole into supporting him or his policies. He was a member of Congress from 1937 until 1961; he graduated from the House to the Senate in 1948 and became a majority leader in 1955. His time in Congress would be key to his effectiveness as a president who used procedure, patronage and his powers of persuasion to break the entrenched opposition of, in particular, the southern Democrats. LBJ was selected as the running mate to John F Kennedy in 1960, and was raised to the presidency following the assassination of JFK in November 1963. Almost immediately he proved his effectiveness by breaking the Congressional logjam over tax cuts – and, importantly, a Civil Rights Act which was passed in 1964. Read more | US civil rights movement: 5 landmark events In May he launched his ‘Great Society’, a wide-ranging legislative programme where he claimed, “no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled”. There then followed a slew of initiatives that rivalled in scope the New Deal of his hero, Franklin D Roosevelt, and in many cases surpassed it. Following the violent attacks on the peaceful Selma to Montgomery civil rights march, he would propose the 1965 Voting Rights Act that finally ended the poll taxes, literacy tests and Grandfather clauses that had hindered African-American political participation and enfranchisement. However, following a series of riots across the US (starting in Watts, Los Angeles in 1965), a growing white backlash would soon be palpable. It was something that not even the formidable political talents of LBJ could stem. The crisis was exacerbated by the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam, where it was becoming increasingly evident that the US had become embroiled in an unwinnable war, despite sending hundreds of thousands of US troops. Then, in 1968, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese shocked the US by launching the Tet offensive, a major escalation in the conflict. In the face of spiralling opposition to the war among the American people, Johnson decided not to seek re-election in that year’s presidential election. It was a muted end to what had been a brilliant political career. Ronald Reagan In office: 1981–89 Party affiliation: Republican Nominated by: Jeremy Black, author of books including The Cold War: A Military History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and A Brief History of America (Robinson, 2024) Ability and achievement come in many forms. The innovators and the explorers of the possibilities of politics and government win the most praise. But it is also necessary to honour the stabilisers, and Ronald Reagan, the much-mocked elderly ex-Hollywood actor from California, was one of the greatest. America and the West were in grave difficulties at the end of the 1970s. The Vietnam War and Watergate had hollowed out confidence in American power and politics, and the two oil shocks of the 1970s had destabilised the economy and public finances, contributing to a sense of decline. At the end of the decade, the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan took this malaise further. What might have come next was a matter of hazard – and, indeed, in 1983, war between the Soviets and the west came very close. Detente had fallen and the Cold War reheated. Read more | Opinion: the conservative legacy of Ronald Reagan Reagan proved an adept responder. Though castigated as a warmonger for his reference to a Soviet ‘evil empire’, and for the deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles, he believed in negotiations from strength – a stance that eventually bore fruit in the move towards a reduction of tension from 1985. Just as Richard Nixon had reached out to Chairman Mao, so Reagan responded to Gorbachev. Earlier crises over Poland and Afghanistan were handled through measures short of war – so, for instance, the US supplied armaments to the Afghan resistance but didn’t commit ground troops. The same policy of subversion rather than invasion was employed in Central American countries such as Nicaragua. The fall of the Soviet system suggested that the pressure of trying to match American military expenditure and economic development was potent, more so than the repeated moves into war and use of troops frequently employed by presidents from 1991 onwards. In light of this, Reagan appears more viable as a model than contemporary criticism often allowed for. In domestic policy, Reagan pushed growth and deregulation. The American economy provided a clear contrast with the Soviet one, and was thus a more attractive partner for China. In social terms, Reagan was a libertarian, which would have jarred with the intolerance of many members of the modern Republican party. Charismatic, a great communicator, able to take the pulse of the nation, a good delegator, and a man with a heart… Reagan was an attractive head of state and an accomplished leader. Barack Obama In office: 2009–17 Party affiliation: Democrat Nominated by: Rebecca Brückmann, associate professor of history at Carleton College and author of Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood (University of Georgia Press, 2021) Barack Obama became the nation’s first African American president, 390 years after the first documented slave ship arrived in the continental British colonies. Obama’s identity should not eclipse his effectiveness: he oversaw the passage of urgent economic reforms and the first comprehensive healthcare law since Lyndon B Johnson signed the 1965 Medicare and Medicaid Act. Obama expanded civil rights, reconfigured US foreign policy, and emphasised the fight against climate change. Read more | American presidents: 9 things you (probably) didn’t know Obama’s 2008 ‘Yes We Can’ campaign centred his charisma and rhetorical skill. He tapped into widespread dissatisfaction with George W Bush’s administration amid the Iraq War and a worldwide economic recession, promoting a hopeful and inclusive vision of the country. Once elected, he confronted the longest economic downturn since the 1930s. One month after Obama took office, in addition to offering financial ‘bailouts’ for banks and the automotive industry, Congress passed an $800bn stimulus package, investing in infrastructure, education and renewable energy. By the time Obama left office, unemployment had been cut in half. The Affordable Care Act (‘Obamacare’), his landmark achievement, outlawed health insurance discrimination based on pre-existing conditions and halved the number of uninsured Americans. The Obama administration strengthened civil rights by bolstering equal pay provisions, repealing the anti-LGBTQ ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ military policy, supporting marriage equality, and offering a path to work authorisations for undocumented minors. Confronted by an obstructionist Republican Congress that rebuffed attempts at bipartisan coalition building, the Obama administration increasingly relied on executive orders to effect political change. Obama raised the federal minimum wage, designated national monuments under an Indigenous commission, and cut federal greenhouse gas emissions. Obama’s foreign policy saw the continuation of his predecessors’ military interventionism in the Middle East, which made critics question the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded in 2009. However, he re-established diplomatic relations with Cuba after 54 years, and he brokered a new agreement on nuclear weapons development in Iran. Most constructive of all was his spotlight on the climate crisis, which enabled the breakthrough 2016 Paris Agreement. In the face of racist threats, birtherist conspiracies and a conservative countermovement, Barack Obama was a remarkably effective president during socio-politically challenging times in the 21st century. Read more | Life after the White House: what the US presidents did next This article was first published in the January 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Sixties counterculture: everything you wanted to know
Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
From hippies and protests to mind-altering music, Alwyn Turner tackles listener questions on the anti-establishment movement that swept the west in the 1960s
Where did the term “hippie” originate? What music best reflected a generation’s disaffection with the establishment, and opposition to the Vietnam War? And how did the culture wars of the sixties shape attitudes to race, gender equality and sexual liberation? Speaking with Spencer Mizen, Alwyn Turner answers listener questions on 1960s counterculture.
Dien Bien Phu: the battle that split Vietnam
France’s catastrophic defeat at Dien Bien Phu in northwest Vietnam in May 1954 ended its hopes of maintaining any influence in Indochina and set the stage for the monumental Vietnam War. Julian Humphrys explains…
The French had always been rather half-hearted about the war against the Viet Minh. Whereas the brunt of Britain’s post-war military efforts was borne by National Servicemen, the French decided not to send any conscripts to fight in Vietnam. The result was that their generals were always short of boots on the ground and the ‘French’ forces that fought in the war were actually an amalgam of local forces, troops raised from their other colonies, soldiers from the French Foreign Legion and a smattering of French regulars. By 1953, the French government had faced the inevitable. Starved of men and short of popular support, they were never going to be able to force the surrender of the Viet Minh. It was now simply a case of strengthening their position at the bargaining table. To achieve that end, General Henri Navarre, their new military commander in Indochina, was instructed to improve the military situation in the country. Read more in our guide to the Vietnam War Dien Bien Phu: in context French Indochina refers to an amalgamation of colonial territories in southeast Asia ruled by France from 1887 onwards. During World War II, the colony was occupied by Japan, who ousted the French. Following the Japanese surrender at the war’s end, Vietnamese independence was declared by the Viet Minh, a communist coalition led by Hô Chi Minh. However, France quickly resumed control, causing the outbreak of a war of independence in 1946 – the First Indochina War. The battle of Dien Bien Phu extinguished French influence in the region. When? 20 November 1953 to 7 May 1954 Where? Dien Bien Phu, northwest Vietnam Who fought? Viet Minh (General Võ Nguyên Giáp) 50,000 troops, 15,000 support troops, 250,000 civilians French Republic (Colonel Christian de Castries) 2,800 French, 2,900 Foreign Legion, 2,900 Africans, 5,500 Indochinese Who won? Viet Minh victory Losses: Viet Minh c23,000 killed and wounded French c2,000 killed, 6,000 wounded, 11,000 prisoners Although Navarre planned to use the bulk of his reserves in a sweep against Viet Minh forces in the south of Vietnam, he realised that the greatest threat to French interests actually lay in the north of the country, especially as Viet Minh forces had moved into neighbouring Laos. Laos had just been granted independence from France, but it remained an ally and Navarre felt he had to defend it, particularly as there was a real danger that the Viet Minh would then head south to threaten Cambodia and southern Vietnam. Navarre had other reasons to be concerned about the north. The T’ai people of the extreme northwest corner of Vietnam were actually supporters of the French, but their base at Lai Chau was coming under increasing Viet Minh pressure. And then there was opium. The poppy fields of the northwest were a major source of income, which both sides wanted to control: the Viet Minh to raise money to purchase weapons, the French to fund special operations. Bearing all this in mind, Navarre came up with a plan. French forces would set up a fortified camp in the northwest, which could act as a base for raids and other offensive operations, block the Viet Minh’s supply route into Laos and serve as a new headquarters for the beleaguered T’ai. And if the Viet Minh tried to attack it, so much the better. They would be drawn into a conventional battle in which superior French training and firepower would prove decisive. Into the valley For his new base, Navarre selected Dien Bien Phu, a mountain valley with an airstrip, about 300km northwest of Hanoi. In choosing this site, the French made two assumptions. First, that they would be able to resupply their troops there by air and, second, that the steep wooded mountains overlooking the valley would prove an impenetrable barrier for the Viet Minh artillery. They would be wrong on both counts. On 20 November 1953, the first French troops parachuted into the valley, quickly dispersing the Viet Minh troops in the area and seizing the airstrip. Over the following weeks, a further 12,000 troops would be flown into Dien Bien Phu together with 30 artillery pieces and even a squadron of tanks, which were delivered in pieces and then assembled on the ground. The commander of the garrison was Colonel Christian de Castries, a swashbuckling cavalryman who Navarre believed would be ideally suited for the offensive operations he envisaged being launched from the base. The French set about fortifying their position by constructing about three dozen strongpoints, which were grouped together into clusters. In true Gallic fashion, each of these was given a woman’s name – Annemarie, Beatrice, Claudine, and so on. On the podcast | Christopher Goscha explores the conflict between the French empire and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnamese army that followed These strongpoints were rather hastily built and not really secure enough for a protracteds iege, but the French weren’t anticipating such an event. In any case, they were sure that they had nothing to fear from the Viet Minh guns. After all, Colonel Charles Piroth, the jovial onearmed commander of the French artillery at Dien Bien Phu, had assured them that the Viet Minh would never be able to get their guns up the mountains that overlooked the base. Even if they did, his own guns would destroy them the moment they gave away their position by opening fire. Piroth’s confident words would come back to haunt him; the French had made the fatal mistake of underestimating their enemy. The Viet Minh commander, General Võ Nguyên Giáp, has been described as one of the greatest strategists of the 20th century. Like the French, the Viet Minh leadership believed that a military victory would strengthen their hand at the conference of great powers that was due to begin in Geneva and it was down to Giáp to deliver such success. Identifying Dien Bien Phu as the place where such a victory could be won, he concentrated nearly 50,000 combat troops in the area, seizing the high ground around the base and surrounding the French garrison. It was a triumph of logistical planning. To ensure that his troops had the ammunition and supplies they needed to take on the French, Giáp mobilised a quarter of a million Vietnamese civilians to build scores of new roads and construct hundreds of bridges. Civilian porters transported supplies on animals, specially reinforced bicycles and hundreds of Russian Molotova trucks. Dozens of artillery pieces and thousands of shells were laboriously manhandled into position in the hills around Dien Bien Phu and dug into bunkers with trenches and shelters to protect their crews. By March 1954, Giáp was ready to strike. The ensuing battle has been described as taking place in a stadium with the Viet Minh in the stands and the French on the field, their every move visible unless it was made at night or during the early-morning fog that sometimes shrouded the valley. On 13 March, Giáp stunned the French by unleashing a devastating bombardment on the Beatrice position on the northeast corner of the French perimeter. Beatrice was then attacked by an entire Vietnamese division and fell after several hours of heavy fighting. Of the 550 Foreign Legionnaires, only a few dozen escaped. On 14 March, the Gabrielle position received the same treatment as Beatrice. By 23 March, both Annmarie and Huguette were in Viet Minh hands and the airstrip was virtually unusable. The last flight into Dien Bien Phu took place on 28 March. From then on, all supplies had to be dropped in by parachute. Even so, the Viet Minh anti-aircraft fire was so effective that French supply planes were forced to fly at a much higher altitude than they wanted, causing thousands of parachutes to miss their targets and drift into enemy territory. Even the bottle of champagne dropped to mark de Castries’ promotion to Brigadier-General ended up in Viet Minh hands. The angels of Dien Bien Phu The only Frenchwoman at Dien Bien Phu wasn’t supposed to be there. Geneviève de Galard was a 29-year-old French military nurse who had volunteered to serve in Indochina on aircraft evacuating wounded soldiers to hospital. On 28 March, her transport plane suffered damage to an oil tank while landing in darkness at Dien Bien Phu and was unable to take off again. At daybreak, the Viet Minh artillery destroyed the plane and damaged the runway. Galard was now stranded in the valley for the next six weeks, helping to care for the wounded. When, after a brief period of captivity, she returned to France, the media dubbed her ‘the Angel of Dien Bien Phu’. But less was said about the other women in the beleaguered garrison: the 18 Algerian and Vietnamese sex workers of the two mobile brothels accompanying the French forces into the valley. As casualties mounted, they too served as nurses and four were killed by Viet Minh shellfire. After the surrender, the Algerians were allowed to go home; the Vietnamese were sent off for ‘re-education’. Numbers game These reverses came as a devastating blow for French morale, none more so than for Charles Piroth, who retreated into his bunker to blow himself up with a grenade. Christian de Castries himself seems to have lost confidence in his own ability to handle the battle and passed tactical control over to two hard-bitten French paras, Colonel Pierre Langlais and Major Marcel Bigeard. As time went on thousands of soldiers, mainly Indochinese troops who made up a third of the garrison, gave up fighting altogether and took shelter in the caves that adjoined the river running through the Dien Bien Phu position. But the Viet Minh were suffering morale problems of their own. Every strongpoint captured, every yard gained, came at a horrific cost in human lives. So Giáp changed his tactics. The mass infantry attacks of March were replaced by a slow but steady approach. It was now classic siege warfare, with the Viet Minh soldiers inching their way in trenches towards the French positions. Meanwhile, the onset of the rainy reason added to difficulties on the ground and made French supply drops from the air even more difficult to carry out. By May, the French were running out of food, ammunition and hope. The final Viet Minh assault was launched on 6 May and the last French soldiers surrendered the following day. Around 11,000 troops, many of them wounded, marched into captivity. Fewer than half would return home. What happened after Dien Bien Phu? France’s defeat toppled its existing government and ushered in a new socialist administration determined to pull out of Vietnam. The victorious Viet Minh hoped for control across the whole country, but the Geneva Accord, which was signed just two weeks after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, divided Vietnam into two independent nations: a communist north with its capital at Hanoi and an anti-communist, US-backed south with its capital at Saigon. This partition was supposed to be temporary; the two zones were meant to be reunited through national elections in 1956, but these were never held. The tensions it caused would eventually lead to the war with the US, which would finally end with North Vietnamese victory and the reunification of the country in 1975. Julian Humphrys is a historian and author specialising in battlefields. His books include Enemies at the Gate (English Heritage, 2007) This article was first published in the May 2019 issue of BBC History Revealed
The Vietnam War: everything you wanted to know
Mark Atwood Lawrence responds to readers’ questions about the United States’ failure to stem the advance of communism in Vietnam
Historian Mark Atwood Lawrence responds to listener questions and popular internet search queries on the Vietnam War, one of the most seismic events of the Cold War, American history and the history of Southeast Asia. He explores some of the biggest debates surrounding the United States’ failure to stem the advance of communism in Vietnam. Mark Atwood Lawrence is the author of The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (OUP USA, 2021) Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones Buy now on Bookshop.org
Star Wars: why did the film make history?
Professor Nicholas John Cull explores the history of the Star Wars franchise, and explains why in 1977 thousands of people flocked to cinemas to be taken to a galaxy far, far away...
There is a moment in the first Star Wars film when the mystic Obi Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) detects across at great distance of space the destruction of a planet and remarks: “I felt a great disturbance in the Force… as if as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.” So what might the particular “disturbance in the Force” associated with the release of the first film in the series back in May 1977 mean historically? What does it say about the time in which it was made and the people who so took it to their hearts? And what does the ongoing success of the franchise say about us? A poster for the 1977 fantasy film 'Star Wars' starring Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher. (Photo by Movie Poster Image Art/Getty Images)At one level, Star Wars was – and is – a commercial commodity: a milestone in the evolution of the film industry. Its creator, George Lucas, demonstrated that films could be made for families; that spectacular effects could help film to claw back some territory from the small-screen entertainment; and profits could be swollen to astonishing proportions though tie-in merchandise. Other films of the era attempted similar synergies, but there was plainly something about Star Wars that struck a particular chord. Reports of initial audiences in the US stressed how hungry they seemed for what Star Wars offered: the film was fundamentally not like so many other elements of the culture in which it landed – a world that was only too happy to embrace the film’s escapism because it had so much that it wished to escape from. For the initial audiences in America and beyond, the experience of viewing Star Wars was a curious mixture of watching something completely new and something incredibly familiar. It was a paradox, illustrated in the film’s opening declaration that it was set “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”. Listen | Dominic Sandbrook explores how science fiction books and movies can offer insights into the past The familiar components in the film were the incorporation of multiple elements of beloved genres that were out of step with the cynical post-Watergate, post-Vietnam War, energy crisis world of the mid-1970s. Star Wars’ abstract and distant location with absolutely no point of reference to humanity or earth culture enabled favourite tropes of the screen to be revisited without the necessity of apology or self-examination or of any danger of alienating a nationality or ethnic group at home or abroad. Star Wars was the product of and for an American society yearning to be free of its own bonds of history and be good again. It was the perfect transferable product in which everyone could find themselves, not just within the US, but worldwide. It helped that the film’s heroic structure was borrowed from the myths common to all human cultures: Star Wars recovered the energy and zest of the old Flash Gordon serials; it borrowed characters and settings from the classic western, which by the 1970s was burdened in its explicit form by America’s awareness of the moral ugliness of the historical reality. Doctor Who through the ages The phantom menace: 10 milestones in science fiction Ye final frontier: the 17th-century space race Star Wars’ location allowed much play and humour at the expense of ethnic and racial differences that would have been impossible (and tasteless) in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. Various characters seemed to fill the role of the ethnic ‘other’: the droids experience segregation in the bar scene, and Chewbacca is cast as a noble, ethnic side-kick, providing heroic support and comic relief. Two genres had particular significance within Star Wars: the war film and the religious epic. Star Wars enabled the representation of a war without having to worry about that war’s consequences; the merits of its antagonists; or that any participant might be offended. Much of it channelled the Second World War with Imperial uniforms and the terminology of Storm Troopers borrowed from the Third Reich; however, it was also swiftly noticed that in Star Wars a country that had just been defeated by an army of guerillas was able to happily identify with a rebel alliance. So, much of the film’s look could be borrowed from Asia, in particular the Vietnam War, without audiences having to recall who firebombed Tokyo or dropped Agent Orange on the Ho Chi Minh trail. The elements of Star Wars lifted from religious epics functioned in much the same way: the film recovered a genre that had been an immense part of 20th-century cinema, reaching its apogee in the late fifties with wildly successful films like The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur (its chariot race scene was the model for the pod-race in Episode I: The Phantom Menace). By creating its universe of right and wrong, and its religion of The Force, George Lucas was able to tell an essentially religious story of awakening, sacrifice, temptation and redemption, and it so doing he could touch his viewers’ sense of wonder and the infinite. The setting in space enabled maximum engagement with minimal alienation, and enabled visual wonders every bit as impressive as the parting of the Red Sea. In thrall to the red planet: 5 facts about our view of Mars through history 6 of history’s strangest ever theories about outer space Overall, then, in 1977 Star Wars was a mechanism to culturally have your cake and eat it at a time of great uncertainty in America and the west. It allowed its viewer to luxuriate in the triumphalism, ethnic voyeurism and religiosity without apology. Of course, it didn’t take long for people in America and many other parts of the world to outgrow the uncertainty of mid 1970s; to trade Jimmy Carter for Ronald Reagan or James Callaghan for Margaret Thatcher, and reconnect with the self-confidence that allowed triumphalism, ethnocentrism and religiosity to flourish openly. It turned out that audiences weren’t too alienated anyway. The Rambo cycle had the political sensitivity of a sledgehammer and did well around the world. By the time the original trilogy was re-released in the late 1990s (with up-dated effects), the Second World War’s Allied victory was a cause for celebration again, and did not have to be evoked by proxy. In the meantime, Star Wars itself had become a cultural reference point: Ronald Reagan could tap into its language when he called Russia an ‘evil empire’; Ted Kennedy did the same when he dubbed Reagan’s pet strategic defense initiative the ‘Star Wars program’; and the Oklahoma City bomber, Tim McVeigh, compared himself to Luke Skywalker destroying the Death Star. In the end, the cultural phenomenon struck back. Comments on the decline of democracy and evils of “with us or against us” language in the script for Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, were unmistakable barbs from the liberal Lucas aimed at the George W Bush administration. Looking back, it is plain that in its nearly 40-year (and counting) career, the Star Wars franchise has evolved. The films still turn on a twin drive to escape and to remember, but the direction of the remembrance has changed. In the beginning, audiences were remembering a film culture that had become unfashionable or untenable. Today we watch Star Wars to remember Star Wars. Given that the need for both remembrance and escapism remains undiminished, the new films should do very well indeed. Nicholas John Cull is Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School. He is the author (with James Chapman) of Projecting Tomorrow: Science Fiction and Popular Cinema (I B Tauris, 2012) which includes an extended discussion of the making and reception of Star Wars. This article was first published by History Extra in December 2015
The war that America could never win? Opposition, dissent and the Vietnam War
As GIs struggled to overcome their communist enemies in the jungle, another very different adversary brought the fight to the streets of America. Jonny Wilkes explores the hidden enemy for BBC History Revealed…
Somewhere in the line of veterans – a single file of bedraggled hair, faded fatigues, wheelchairs and crutches – as they slowly snake towards the Capitol Building is Barry Romo. The former lieutenant of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade enlisted believing in fighting communism, and wishing to emulate his father’s deeds in World War II, but now he is joining comrades to protest the war in Vietnam. Today, 23 April 1971, is the end of a week of demonstrations, street theatre, candlelit vigils, arrests and camping on the Mall in Washington DC, and there is one last act of defiance, and sacrifice, for Romo to perform. He looks down at his medals, which he will soon be rid of. He remembers when his patrol in Tam Kỳ province was ambushed by the Viet Cong and he, just 19 years old, ran out in the open rice paddy to wave down a medevac chopper. He received a Bronze Star for saving the wounded. He remembers when his platoon sergeant stepped on an American ‘Bouncing Betty’ mine and had his intestines and stomach blown out. He remembers his beloved nephew being shot in the throat and it taking 48 hours before the body could be retrieved. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/03/30b.GettyImages-120555904-d1a2490.jpg" width="1024" height="695" alt="Hippies, veterans and celebrities alike descended on the Mall, Washington, DC to protest the war." title="Hippies, veterans and celebrities alike descended on the Mall, Washington, DC to protest the war. (Photo by Don Carl STEFFEN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)" /> It is almost his turn. Romo looks at each man stepping to the microphone to say a few words before turning and hurling their medals, ribbons and dogtags at the Capitol, stood behind a quickly constructed fence to keep protestors out. Many curse the government, others apologise, and one limping man throws his cane. Rejecting these symbols of bravery is a powerful display of how the war has no meaning. Romo says of his medals: “These ain’t shit!” This day, the veterans capture the spirit of a massive movement, in which millions fight against a war America cannot win. Why was US involvement in Vietnam opposed? US involvement in Vietnam had not always been so strongly opposed, with dissent before 1965 confined to colleges. In a time of Cold War politics, the Americans held to the ‘Domino Theory’: the fear that if one country fell to communism then its neighbours would follow. In 1954, Vietnam had been divided in two and since then, the ruling communists in the North had tried to unify the country. Add that to instability in the South as the communist National Liberation Front (the NLF, but better known as the ‘Viet Cong’) looked to overthrow the government and it was inevitable that US foreign policy would dictate that assistance – in the form of thousands of ‘military advisers’ – must increase. 'Charlie': a hidden enemy The decision to deploy troops in 1965 revealed a fatal flaw in American foreign policy: hubris. By considering North Vietnam as nothing more than a pawn in their Cold War chess game with the Soviet Union, the US underestimated the enemy, with tragic and long-lasting consequences. Victory for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong meant uniting the country under a communist flag, so they fought for their very identity. Such zeal meant they endured colossal death tolls – they lost ten men for each American killed – without losing the will to drive out the imperialist invaders. Their guerrilla tactics suited the terrain far more than the US reliance on superior firepower. In the dense jungles and swamps, American grunts faced ambushes from an enemy they could not even see, who then disappeared into the vegetation or by using a complex tunnel network. These would be cleared by a lone soldier, a ‘tunnel rat’, armed with just a torch, knife and pistol. Then, if Viet Cong positions could be captured, there was the risk of ingenious booby traps, from flags rigged to explode when lowered to pits of sharpened ‘punji’ sticks. American bombing, including napalm and defoliants, failed to destroy the communists, who remained well supplied by the Soviet Union and China (along the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia). Even their rifle of choice, the AK-47, performed better than the Americans’ standard-issue M14, which jammed in the tropical conditions. Not knowing who the enemy was (Viet Cong fighters could easily hide among any supporters in South Vietnam), demoralised American troops were left carrying out search-and-destroy missions. These ‘Zippo Raids’ devastated whole areas and dehumanised the Vietnamese, leading to untold civilian deaths. A hidden enemy in a war of attrition meant the Americans sent home body bags rather than news of victory. "If we quit Vietnam tomorrow, we'll be fighting in Hawaii and next week we'll have to be fighting in San Francisco," warned President Lyndon B Johnson. Then, when two US destroyers were (allegedly) attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in August 1964, the resulting Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave LBJ authority to escalate involvement without declaring war. Although public opinion sided with the government in 1965, and stayed favourable for years, dissent became evident from the outset. People’s attitudes towards the Vietnam War differed immediately from previous conflicts, where early days were dominated by propaganda and patriotism. Instead, anti-war sentiment bloomed from, or connected with, other social movements of the 1960s. It was a time of counterculture, civil rights activism and the exploration of freedoms. So as the bombings of North Vietnam got underway (Operation Rolling Thunder), organisations like Students for Democratic Society headed marches, while ‘teach-ins’ at dozens of campuses discussed the justification and morality of the war. A similar idea would spring up later near military bases – called ‘GI coffeehouses’ – for disgruntled grunts. Mind the credibility gap How the media fought the war Vietnam is referred to as the ‘first television war’, when raw images depicting the horrors of war replaced the strictly controlled government propaganda seen in previous conflicts. Uncensored coverage of a battle’s aftermath or lines of bodies blared into American homes, most of which had TVs, every day. Yet, prior to 1968, reporting remained positive, or at least not overly negative. The armed forces recognised a need to ‘sell’ the war back home, and many contentedly believed the “good guys shooting Reds” stories. That changed with the Tet Offensive. Although the US had repelled the series of surprise attacks, the media saw Tet as a failure and the American public grew convinced the war was far from over (going against the official message from the White House). In his damning broadcast, Walter Cronkite – polled as being “the most trusted man in America” – said “We are mired in stalemate”. From then on, the media was in conflict with the government, giving more exposure to the anti-war movement and shocking images, such as the My Lai Massacre and the ‘Napalm Girl’. Presidents Johnson and Nixon failed to close the ‘credibility gap’, as Americans increasingly distrusted everything that they said. In late July, LBJ changed the war irrevocably by announcing an immediate increase of troop levels from 75,000 to 125,000, on the advice that aerial superiority had done little to hinder the communist guerrillas. Putting boots on the ground, however, meant doubling the draft to 35,000 a month, which young men refused by burning their draft cards. Opposition to the draft would intensify as anger spread at the system’s unfairness, with it affecting the poor and African American populations hardest. Those who did enlist faced a conflict of attrition – being bogged down in jungles and guerrilla assaults by the Viet Cong. Firepower caused the deaths of many North Vietnamese and VC, as well as civilians, but for the people back home, the main images in the media would be of American body bags. Listen | Lynn Novick describes the making of an epic documentary series on the conflict in Vietnam, which she co-directed with Ken Burns Flower power By 1967, as half a million men and billions of dollars poured into Vietnam, disillusionment had turned the protests into a global movement. Marches took place around the US, as well as London, Paris and Rome, and featured prominent figures. On 15 April, Martin Luther King joined 400,000 in a march in New York; the President’s trip to Los Angeles on 23 June was met by a massive riot; and on 21 October, 100,000 gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC. Here, and before clashes with soldiers at the Pentagon, the famous photo of hippies putting flowers into the barrels of rifles got snapped. For LBJ, he went from being the president who signed civil rights legislation to the man who was killing Vietnamese civilians with toxic chemicals, like ‘Agent Orange’ and napalm. He cancelled public appearances, knowing everywhere he went he would be met with the chant: “Hey, hey LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” Things only got worse the next year. On 31 January 1968, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese launched strikes against more than 100 military and civilian targets, including the Saigon headquarters of US forces commander General Westmoreland and the Embassy. Although the Tet Offensive caught the troops by surprise and ended with a bloody three-week battle for the city of Hue, South Vietnam, it ultimately became a tactical US success. But it did not matter, as Tet was a media catastrophe. How could the enemy pull off such a daring offensive? How could the war nearly be over, as the government insisted? Had the army been weakened? High casualty numbers, negative news stories and images from Tet – notably the filmed execution of a Viet Cong suspect – shocked Americans and led to major changes. Westmoreland, Time's Man of the Year in 1965, had to be replaced, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara resigned and LBJ suspended the bombing of North Vietnam. With Americans feeling betrayed by their government, the President's popularity tumbled, with one poll stating 50 per cent of Americans did not approve of his handling of the war. When broadcast behemoth Walter Cronkite described Vietnam as a "stalemate", LBJ responded: "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." Did you know? Tear gas used on protestors at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago reportedly affected the presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey while he was in the shower. Sure enough, LBJ announced he would not seek re-election that year, a huge win for the anti-war movement. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August became a target for the Yippies (a radical youth group), who put forward a pig, Pigasus the Immortal, as candidate to mock the state of politics. Clashes with police resulted in the arrests of a group of activists, the ‘Chicago Seven’, whose five-month trial created a cause célèbre. Any expectation of the new president being a ‘dove’ rather than a pro-war ‘hawk’ was lost when Richard Nixon won the election on a promise to achieve an “honourable end” in Vietnam. He even asserted that a “silent majority” of Americans still supported the war. That said, he knew public opinion had shifted, so he introduced a policy of phased troop withdrawals and started to hand over responsibility to the South Vietnamese army. President Nixon called it “Vietnamization”. Read more | Dien Bien Phu: the battle that split Vietnam Although a popular move, complete withdrawal would take three years, so morale among the men left behind collapsed. Drug abuse, desertions and ‘fragging’ (killing their own officers) rose, while racism and violence towards the Vietnamese worsened. As accusations of atrocities spread, those returning from their year-long tour of duty faced an angry public, with the more radical protestors spitting at them and calling them ‘baby killers’. Soldiers joined their own anti-war groups, like Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Did you know? Actress and anti-war activist Jane Fonda made a controversial visit to North Vietnam, earning her the nickname ‘Hanoi Jane’. The war ongoing, demonstrations not only continued, they got bigger. A couple of months after Woodstock, some 2 million workers, students and children stopped what they were doing on 15 October 1969 to participate in rallies around the country. The Peace Moratorium proved to be the largest demonstration during Vietnam – its success saw the event repeated a month later. Nixon incurred further wrath in December by introducing a draft lottery, the first since World War II. He hoped it would make the system fairer, but it inspired a new wave of protests and thousands of men either to flee to Canada or head to college for deferment. What if JFK had lived? Slaughtered support With so many groups protesting for so many reasons, the movement fragmented. Several defining events, though, served to unite people in the final drive to end the war. In late 1969, news of the My Lai Massacre – complete with uncensored photographs – broke. On 16 March 1968, Charlie Company from Americal Division’s 11th Infantry had been sent to the hamlet of My Lai, believing it to be full of VC or their sympathisers. There they raped, mutilated and slaughtered as many as 500 unarmed women, elderly and children. The atrocity only stopped when the passing Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson landed his helicopter between the troops and surviving civilians. The revelations of the massacre and its cover-up caused further outrage. Supporters of the war had long claimed moral authority over the evils of communism; the My Lai Massacre weakened that position. My Lai also galvanised many veterans, who felt just as betrayed and disgusted, into actions such as the Winter Soldier Investigations, where they gave accounts of war crimes. The most symbolic gesture they could carry out, though, would be throwing away their medals earned in what they saw as an immoral war, which almost 1,000 veterans (including Barry Romo) did in 1971. Did you know? Shortly after the Tet Offensive, General Westmoreland requested 200,000 more troops to finish the war once and for all. The media saw it as proof of the army’s weakness. My Lai was not the only secret to hit the headlines. Demonstrations erupted after news broke of Nixon’s clandestine bombing and invasion of Cambodia – far from bringing the war to a close, it appeared he had expanded operations. At Kent State University, Ohio, on 4 May 1970, members of the National Guard opened fire on a gathering of students, killing four and wounding nine. Nixon callously responded to the shooting by saying, "When dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy," which, alongside the photographs of the aftermath, again caused uproar. The following day, 450 colleges went on strike. War is over Distrust in the government's message had grown since Tet, but this 'credibility gap' turned into a ravine on 13 June 1971 when the New York Times published the first instalments of the so-called Pentagon Papers. The leaked top-secret study detailed US activity in Vietnam since the 1940s, and revealed that successive presidents had deceived the public – LBJ, for example, had planned escalation as early as 1964. Nixon tried to stop publication, but a Supreme Court decision sided with the newspapers. The movement had reached its zenith and public pressure was too great. Congress repealed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and Nixon – whose attention turned away from Vietnam as he became embroiled in the Watergate scandal – went on to end the draft and, in January 1973, he signed the Paris Peace Accords. Make love not war On the march The anti-war movement attracted millions of people, but was far from being a united group with a single voice. It brought together students, hippies, artists, clergy, celebrities, women’s rights activists and veterans, and became inextricably linked to other movements of the 1960s, such as civil rights. Early protests focussed on ‘teach-ins’ on campuses and the burning of draft cards – Muhammad Ali got stripped of his heavyweight boxing title for refusing the draft – but as death tolls rose, acts of civil disobedience began. These included preventing Dow Chemical, the makers of napalm, to hold job fairs, and guerrilla street theatre performances of mock search-and-destroy missions. The movement became more vociferous with mass marches in cities in America and around the globe. They became associated with music from the likes of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and John Lennon or speeches by leading figures, such as Martin Luther King. While mostly peaceful, gatherings occasionally spilled into violence – as well as Kent State, rioting broke out at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, which resulted in the arrests and media-spectacle trial of the ‘Chicago Seven’ protestors. Members of the anti-war movement – most notably the veterans who threw away their medals – faced accusations of treason, but momentum shifted towards them as support for the war waned. The US entered Vietnam a global superpower intent on defeating communism, invincible and righteous. They left abjectly humiliated, with more than 58,000 Americans dead and feeling the effects for decades, be it from a crippled economy, veterans suffering from psychological trauma or an established distrust in the government. The very word ‘Vietnam’ has plagued US foreign policy arguably to this day. Yet the war came to be defined in another way – by people standing up and holding their leaders to account. And they sometimes paid a terrible price to prove that a war could no longer be won without enough public support. Jonny Wilkes is a freelance writer specialising in history This article was first published in the September 2017 edition of BBC History Revealed
Your guide to the Vietnam War – plus 7 surprising facts you might not know
The Vietnam War (1954–75) was fought between the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam (known as the Viet Cong) on one side, and the government of South Vietnam and its key ally, the United States, on the other, and it defined America in the second half of the 20th century. But how much do you know about the controversial Vietnam War?
The Vietnam War came to define America in the second half of the 20th century, after America became entangled in Vietnam following a disastrous French attempt to prevent Indochina [the area of south-east Asia that contains Vietnam] from gaining its independence. So contentious was the conflict that for years afterwards the country suffered marches, riots and even deaths as a result of the turmoil. US conscripts, who had no option but to serve, returned home to be branded ‘baby killers’, and the anti-war movement was portrayed by the political right as un-American. Here's a brief guide to one of the most complicated conflicts in history, plus seven facts you might not know… What was the Vietnam war about? American interests in Vietnam went back over a decade before US President Lyndon B Johnson deployed troops. The rise of communists in North Vietnam, led by Ho Chi Minh, in the 1950s had turned the divided country into a Cold War battleground. As the US believed that if one state fell to communism, others would follow – the 'Domino Theory' – they had to get involved (albeit incrementally). Who won the Vietnam War? Certainly not the US, who withdrew in 1973 humiliated, the national psyche and economy in tatters for years to come and more than 58,000 men dead. Vietnam came out even worse as millions perished and the country had been all but destroyed. Yet North Vietnam had stood toe-to-toe against a global superpower and forced them to retreat. Was Britain involved? In terms of rhetoric, Britain proved a tepid ally. Even with LBJ pushing Prime Minister Harold Wilson for a greater show of support, – as part of his 'More Flags' policy (the President hoped to sell the war as a crusade against communism) – they offered nothing more than minor non-military assistance. Like in America, Britain witnessed plenty of anti-war action. Who was the USA's enemy? The US had to fight both the armies of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (the North) and zealous communists in the South, known as the Viet Cong. They all received substantial backing from China and the Soviet Union, too. Then as the war went on, another enemy to the American effort emerged: a vociferous anti-war movement back home. How was the war fought? A: Young, inexperienced US troops quickly became bogged down in short bursts of action against guerrilla forces deep in unbearably hot jungle and swamp terrains. They grew demoralised carrying out search-and-destroy missions or being used as bait for aerial firepower. Even though the Americans killed ten men for each of their own, they could not eradicate the communists' will to fight. Read more about the movements that opposed the Vietnam war Vietnam in numbers 19 The average age of the American soldier in Vietnam was 19 (compared to 26 in World War II). More than 35,000 of those who died were aged 21 or under. 2 When Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, there were only two dissenting votes. It passed the House of Representative 414-0 and got through the Senate 88-2. 47 The Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study of US involvement in Vietnam, was leaked to the press in 1971. The Papers consisted of 47 volumes and 7,000 pages. 258 The Medal of Honour, the highest US military decoration, was awarded 258 times to men serving in Vietnam: 172 to the Army, 57 to Marines, 15 to the Navy and 14 to the Air Force. 7 million More than 7 million tons of bombs were dropped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia throughout the conflict. 1 trillion Although only an estimate, it is thought the US spent $140 billion in the Vietnam War, which works out at over 1 trillion dollars in today's money. 500,000 In the largest anti-war rally, 500,000 descended on Washington DC for the Moratorium March on 15 November 1969. Marches took place around the world, including London, Paris and West Berlin. Here, writer Jem Duducu, author of a new historical novel set during the Vietnam War, shares seven lesser-known facts about the conflict. The Vietnam War isn’t called that in Vietnam The name itself shows a non-native understanding of the conflict. Instead, the two decades of fighting in Vietnam, from 1954 to 1975, are called “the American War”. The Vietnamese made the assumption that the foreign forces who fought in that war were all Americans, but they were not: large numbers of Thais, South Koreans and Australians, to name but a few, fought on the side of South Vietnam. American history myths: 7 things people get wrong <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/04/GettyImages-3126277-41208cb.jpg" width="4719" height="3472" alt="After receiving a fresh supply of ammunition and water flown in by helicopter, men of the US 173rd Airborne Brigade continue on a jungle 'search and destroy' patrol in Phước Tuy Province, Vietnam, June 1966. An armoured personnel carrier provides security on the landing zone in the background. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="After receiving a fresh supply of ammunition and water flown in by helicopter, men of the US 173rd Airborne Brigade continue on a jungle 'search and destroy' patrol in Phước Tuy Province, Vietnam, June 1966. An armoured personnel carrier provides security on the landing zone in the background. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> The Vietnam War had roots in 19th-century French imperialism In 1858, Tourane (modern Da Nang) was attacked and captured by French Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly. However, due to supply issues and disease, the French were forced to leave after only a few months, when they headed south and captured the city of Saigon (today’s Ho Chi Minh City) in early 1859. This started a century of French occupation, and most of the south-east Asian peninsula (including Vietnam) was renamed French Indochina. The indigenous population was never completely cowed, so rebellions and guerrilla attacks were regular occurrences. The Vietnamese rebels used the dense jungles and mountainous terrains to their advantage in order to attack French forces and escape detection. During the Second World War the region came under the control of pro-Axis Vichy forces and Japan, so the Americans armed and trained local forces to fight against them. After the war France tried to reclaim the area, but the better-trained and better-equipped guerrillas defeated France once and for all at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Listen | Lynn Novick describes the making of an epic documentary series on the conflict in Vietnam, which she co-directed with Ken Burns The Vietnam War wasn’t just in Vietnam The poor choice of name for the war fails to reflect how much of south-east Asia it affected. The French had been using Vietnam as a launch point for hostilities against both Burma (now also known as Myanmar) and Thailand (previously Siam until 1939), so it was unsurprising that fighting leaked out of Vietnam’s borders. The main reason for this was the so-called Ho Chi Minh trail, a supply line that stretched along the spine of the entire country that enabled the communist powers in the north to supply the communist guerrillas (the Viet Cong) in the south. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/04/GettyImages-51957169-0015294.jpg" width="2023" height="2500" alt="A North Vietnamese Army (NVA) patrol on the move in the forest south of the Ho Chi Minh trail, 1968. (Photo by AFP/Getty Images)" title="A North Vietnamese Army (NVA) patrol on the move in the forest south of the Ho Chi Minh trail, 1968. (Photo by AFP/Getty Images)" /> However, most of this road network was actually located in neighbouring Cambodia and also ran through parts of Laos. The regular bombing of both countries took place under the orders of American presidents Lyndon Johnson (in office 1963–69) and Richard Nixon (1969–74). Unlisted CIA plans (black ops) were also carried out. They were unofficial (and illegal), as America had never formally declared war or confirmed to the public that combat operations were taking place in either Cambodia or Laos. The instability caused by this unofficial military activity allowed the communists of North Vietnam to help support a communist revolution and civil war in Cambodia. This would lead to the formation of the Khmer Rouge regime (in power from 1975–79), which was responsible for the infamous Cambodian genocide. The Vietnam War was part of the Cold War Technically, the Vietnam conflict was a civil war, with the communist North fighting against the anti-communist South (it was not a democracy and was run by a paranoid dictator Nguyễn Văn Thiệu). The country had never been split like this before; the two areas were artificial, with no natural boundary between them, so it was highly likely that one or both sides would attempt to reunite the country by force. Did the Cold War ever really end? However, the North was backed by communist China and the Soviet Union, and the South was backed by the west. But in practical terms, with respect to both finances and equipment, it was America which supported the South. Vietnam became a testing ground for weapons. How well did the Douglas A-4 Skyhawk do against the Soviet-made S-75 Dvina surface to air missiles? Similarly, while the AK-47 had been in use for nearly 20 years, this was the first time it was used wholesale against the American M16. The AK, with the larger clip of bullets (30 versus 20) and fewer moving parts, meant that it rarely jammed and was the perfect jungle ambush weapon. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/04/GettyImages-57145418-2c07172.jpg" width="3211" height="4410" alt="American army combat platoon leader First Lieutenant Alex C Green (right) and two unidentified soldiers carry weapons as they wade through a deep stream during operations in Vietnam, late 1960s. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="American army combat platoon leader First Lieutenant Alex C Green (right) and two unidentified soldiers carry weapons as they wade through a deep stream during operations in Vietnam, late 1960s. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> America (and others) feared that after China and North Korea had fallen to communism, Vietnam might well fall, too. If it went ‘red’, where would the advance of communism end? Would Singapore or Australia fall? The concept was known as the ‘domino theory’ and hundreds of thousands of Americans were conscripted to fight in the jungles of Vietnam in order to fight against it. Listen | Mark Atwood Lawrence responds to readers’ questions about the United States’ failure to stem the advance of communism in Vietnam The Vietnam War saw technical as well as political incompetence Some of the grimmest stories about equipment malfunctions during the Vietnam War had to do with the M16. It was shipped from the US initially with incompatible ammunition, meaning that after firing only a few shots the gun would jam. Several dead Americans were found in the jungle next to their stripped-down rifles. They had attempted to dismantle, clean and rebuild their weapons under fire in order to try and shoot back. A later change of powder in the ammunition greatly improved the gun’s performance, but the large amount of plastic (rather than wood or metal) gave it a toy-like quality, which inspired the saying “you can tell it’s Mattel” – the slogan of a popular toy manufacturer in America. Similarly, the new Chinook helicopters were prone to catastrophic failures. Why? It transpired that soldiers were overloading the cargo bays. Ground staff were filling the helicopters to capacity with heavy equipment, assuming the double-rotor aircraft could take it. They couldn’t. Multiple Chinooks crashed, killing their crews, because of this fundamental fault. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/04/GettyImages-2659702-0fc0b62.jpg" width="2128" height="3168" alt="American soldiers priming shells during the Vietnam War. A Chinook helicopter flies in the background. (Photo by Express Newspapers/Getty Images)" title="American soldiers priming shells during the Vietnam War. A Chinook helicopter flies in the background. (Photo by Express Newspapers/Getty Images)" /> The Tet Offensive was not a military defeat for America Tet is the biggest holiday of the year in Vietnam, and in 1968 there was an agreed ceasefire so that everyone could celebrate. However, the Viet Cong saw this as an opportunity to infiltrate a number of key cities in the south, from which they launched attacks on 31 January. Viet Cong commandos even assaulted the US embassy in Saigon, possibly the most heavily defended compound anywhere in the world. To many in America, this seemed like a humiliating defeat for their forces in Vietnam. The Americans’ fundamental problem during this war was locating the enemy. Up until Tet, most of the fighting had been in the jungles, where Viet Cong guerrillas surfaced without warning and disappeared just as suddenly, using the cover of dense foliage and a widespread network of tunnels. Now the Viet Cong were in an urban environment with no heavy artillery, armour or anything like the numbers of combatants compared to the Americans. Within weeks, the American forces annihilated the Viet Cong. The Viet Cong were never an effective fighting force on their own again after this offensive, and all subsequent combat operations were dominated by the North Vietnamese Army. Tet was a devastating defeat for the communists, but it’s not remembered that way. The American military had been saying for more than a year that the Viet Cong were being constantly ground down. ‘Kill counts’ were reported on the US nightly news almost like sports scores. So by January 1968, America assumed the Viet Cong were on their last legs. For the Viet Cong to be able to mount such an ambitious offensive proved the American military had been either lying or caught with their trousers down. This is one of the best examples in history that winning the narrative is sometimes more important than winning the battle. How did the Vietnam War affect Britain? The Vietnam War is still going on in Vietnam While nearly 60,000 Americans lost their lives in the war, more than 3.3 million Vietnamese (both North and South including civilians) died. By the end of the war in 1975, America had dropped more than seven million tonnes of bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos – more than had been dropped during all of the Second World War. In 1971 alone, 800,000 tonnes of bombs were dropped on these countries – and that was when the war was ‘winding down’. Thousands of tonnes of defoliant, known as Agent Orange, destroyed thousands of acres and poisoned the land, killing both humans and livestock and resulting in birth defects in unborn babies. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/04/GettyImages-151429856-2198d1a.jpg" width="2164" height="1655" alt="US B-52 bombers drop bombs over a Viet Cong-controlled area in South Vietnam, August 1965, during the Vietnam War. (Photo by STF/AFP/Getty Images)" title="US B-52 bombers drop bombs over a Viet Cong-controlled area in South Vietnam, August 1965, during the Vietnam War. (Photo by STF/AFP/Getty Images)" /> Both sides used landmines, and it is estimated that these, combined with unexploded ordinance, mean there are some 800,000 tonnes of explosives yet to be made safe in a country where 20 per cent of Vietnam’s total area is still thought to contain unexploded devices. It’s been estimated that since 1975 there have been 100,000 casualties, of which there were 40,000 deaths, by these dangerous relics of the war. In conclusion, the story of the Vietnam War combines 19th-century imperialism with 20th-century communist history and late 20th-century American foreign policy. It is a rich and complex era characterised by catastrophic misjudgements, ruthless cover-ups and tragic consequences on all sides. The consequences of the Vietnam War and its aftermath are highlighted in Jem Duducu’s historical novel Echoes (2019). You can follow Jem on Twitter @JemDuducu.
From the Napoleonic Wars to Vietnam and Iraq: a history of war trauma
From the mental anguish of survivors of the Napoleonic Wars to Vietnam veterans' 'PTSD blues', historians Emma Butcher and Hannah Partis-Jennings explore humanity's evolving attitudes to war trauma
Writers have recorded the traumatic effects of war for thousands of years. Nearly three millennia ago, in Homer's Iliad, Achilles describes how the death in battle of his friend Patroclus caused him to have nightmares, and to isolate himself. Around 1200 BC, in Mesopotamia, soldiers wrote of being visited by the "ghosts they faced in battle". In his account of the battle of Marathon (490 BC), the historian Herodotus recorded that, in the midst of fighting, the warrior Epizelus "suddenly lost sight in both eyes, though nothing had touched him". Fast-forward to Tudor England, and allusions to war trauma appear in the works of Shakespeare. In Henry IV, Part I, Lady Percy frets at her husband Hotspur's sorrowful state after he returns from war: "Tell me, sweet lord, what is't that takes from thee / Thy stomach, pleasure and golden sleep? / Why dost though bend thine eyes upon the earth / And start so often when thou sit'st alone? / Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks / And given me treasures and me rights of thee / To thick-eyed musing and cursed melancholy?" As the writings of Shakespeare, Herodotus and Homer attest, soldiers and civilians alike have been aware of the psychological impact of war for centuries. But, as the following examples prove, it would be a long time before this recognition was reflected in medical diagnosis or treatment. REVOLUTIONARY AND NAPOLEONIC WARS The trauma with no name Shakespeare’s histories may have alluded to war trauma but it would be another two centuries before the British public would experience vicariously the horrors of combat – courtesy of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the birth of the military memoir. More than 200 British veterans of the conflicts published their tales of life on the front line, and these autobiographies increasingly addressed the emotional impact of war. In one, Captain Howard chronicles his hallucinations in the catacombs of Paris, when touring the capital after 1814’s battle of Toulouse: "Cold perspiration broke over my whole body; I stood fixed to the spot in a trance of horror and despair… the skulls with their eyeless sockets, seemed to scowl upon me – my head became dizzy… my brain reeled, and I fell against a crashing pile of mortality, where I swooned away." Despite many soldiers reporting disturbed post-battle mental states, there was still no medical recognition of war trauma. Instead, the condition was given a number of vague labels. One was le vent du boulet, translated as 'wind of a cannonball'. Another was 'nostalgia', derived from the Greek words nóstos, meaning 'homecoming', and álgos, meaning 'pain' or 'ache'. Medical records described soldiers with nostalgia to be gripped with fantasies about returning to their homeland. These terms sparked a wider interest in bodily and mental suffering, which was communicated through the arts. Romantic poets like Wordsworth wrote of the returning soldier who had a "strange half-absence". In his caricature John Bull's Progress, James Gillray depicts a veteran returning home to his family, who cower in horror as he walks through the door. Although war trauma still had no name, it rippled through Britain's cultural landscape. 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Napoleonic Wars What is the significance of Waterloo? AMERICAN CIVIL WAR Undying pain for a broken infantryman The American Civil War is often remembered through song. Its stirring anthems aimed to unify through patriotism, but many songs linger on the traumatic undercurrent of war. One such was Walter Kittredge’s ‘Tenting on the Old Camp Ground’: "Many are the hearts that are weary tonight, Wishing for the war to cease; Many are the hearts that are looking for the right To see the dawn of peace." Yet despite war’s traumatic cultural resonance, medical practitioners in late 19th-century America still struggled to distinguish between mental and physical illness. Da Costa’s Syndrome, named after the American Civil War physician Jacob Da Costa, was known informally as ‘soldier’s heart’. It was thought that post-battle mental states were brought on by a weak heart or overexertion. Like the Napoleonic Wars half a century earlier, we can draw a picture of soldiers’ mental states from the letters and diaries they left behind. The Union soldier Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “Eaten nothing – suffered the most intense anxiety and everything else possible --…[Y]ou cannot conceive of the wear and tear.” One of the most tragic stories of the war lies with the men of the 16th Connecticut Infantry regiment fighting for the Union. Barely trained, they took part in some of the bloodiest battles of the war, with most ending up in a Confederate prison camp. Some died in what were inhuman conditions, while those who did survive to be reunited with their families were described as “broken”. One of them, Wallace Woodford, continued to cry out in his sleep after his return: he died just a few weeks later, at the age of 22. His headstone reads: “Eight months a sufferer in Rebel prison; He came home to die.” Although still undefined, it is clear that war trauma haunted the lives of many of the men who fought in the American Civil War, and that its effects were becoming widely recognised as the dawn of modern war approached. The American Civil War: 7 facts and fictions The story of the American Civil War: 32 key moments in the landmark conflict FIRST WORLD WAR How shell shock led to “dottyville” It was the British psychologist Charles Myers who first coined the term ‘shell shock’, in 1915, at the height of the First World War. Hysteria had previously been understood as a female malady; now shell shock was framed as a ‘male hysteria’, implying a lack of masculine stoicism. Given that soldiers were expected to adhere to masculine ideals of bravery and resilience, shell shock – of which 80,000 cases were recorded in the First World War – was not always treated with sympathy. For example, while he was working at London’s National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, Dr Lewis Yealland applied electric shocks to men with mutism until they started to speak again. There was a class dynamic in the symptoms and the treatment of shell shock, mirroring the structure of prewar society and its military hierarchies. Privates allegedly tended to exhibit more psychosomatic symptoms than officers, for example mutism or bodily contortions. Mutism may have been linked to the psychological pressures of constantly following orders without being able to speak your mind or articulate fears. Some shell shock sufferers were treated humanely at institutions like the famous Craiglockhart in Scotland. Among them was the soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon, who referred to Craiglockhart as “dottyville”, and spoke fondly of the place and his close relationship with his therapist WHR Rivers. However, Sassoon also wrote about the horror of shell shock: “By night each man was back in his doomed sector of horrorstricken front line, where the panic and stampede of some ghastly experience was re-enacted among the livid faces of the dead. No doctor could save him then, when he became the lonely victim of his dream disasters and delusions.” Wilfred Owen was also a patient at Craiglockhart, and his treatment, and friendship with Sassoon, were catalysts for him to write his famous poetry. In fact it was in the hospital's magazine, The Hydra, that Owen produced some of his most deeply haunting pieces – ones that helped shape our cultural memory of the conflict. Listen | Dan Snow discusses war trauma over the past century, the subject of his upcoming BBC Two documentary THE VIETNAM WAR Protesting the ‘PTSD blues’ The Vietnam War was a watershed in the recognition of war trauma as a mental health condition. Some veterans, mirroring the civilian antiwar movement, became activists, protesting the war itself as well as a lack of mental health support. In 1971 at ‘The Winter Soldier Investigation’, 100 veterans met in Detroit to discuss war violence they had witnessed or participated in. “I am here because I have nightmares about things that happened to me and my friends,” one of them declared. Another landmark moment arrived in 1980, when Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was listed in the third edition of the American Psychological Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In the mid-eighties, a state-mandated study recognised the prevalence and long-term impact of the condition upon veterans, citing depression, substance abuse, poor physical health and social problems. Max Hastings on Vietnam Many veterans struggled to adapt to civilian life once the fighting was over. One of them, Louis A Griffiths, communicated his enduring torment via a poem, PTSD Blues: "You'll never know how many times I have to see him die / The thing that hurts the most / It took 30 years to cry" In all, around a quarter of American soldiers who served in Vietnam required psychological assistance as veterans. Their experiences undoubtedly drew attention to the gravity and long-term impact of military mental health issues. IRAQ AND BEYOND When car exhaust becomes mustard gas Contemporary studies suggest that as many as one in six veterans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan have symptoms of PTSD, including flashbacks, anxiety, depression and irritability. In his 2015 book The Evil Hours, former soldier David J Morris writes: "In the traumatic universe the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas." Iraq veteran Kevin Powers portrays a soldier's guilt and trauma in his novel The Yellow Birds: "It felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing." Research in Australia and the US suggests that rates of suicide for male veterans are twice as high as for civilian men; rates for female veterans are at least two-and-a-half times higher than their civilian counterparts. For some female soldiers, the trauma of war is compounded by the threat of sexual harassment. Many veterans suffer with alcohol and drug addiction, and homelessness linked to poor mental health. The nature of modern conflict has, in many ways, exacerbated these problems. Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), common in Iraq and Afghanistan, dominate the experience of being ‘beyond the wire’ outside of large bases. For soldiers on patrol, every step is potentially lethal. Hypervigilance is a fact of everyday life; feelings of powerlessness widespread. Drone pilots are also suffering from PTSD, proving that you don’t need to be in a close physical proximity to the violence to experience its psychological impacts. Nor do you have to be a soldier to suffer the negative consequences of war trauma: rates of domestic violence are significantly higher than average in the homes of veterans with PTSD. And we shouldn’t forget civilian populations living in countries ravaged by conflict. In all too many cases, these have few resources to recognise or to treat the symptoms of war trauma. Dr Emma Butcher is a BBC New Generation Thinker, based at the University of Leicester. Dr Hannah Partis-Jennings is a lecturer in international relations and security at Loughborough University. They will be discussing war trauma on our podcast historyextra.com/podcast This article was first published in the September 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
Half a century ago, as a young reporter, Max Hastings witnessed the horrors of the Vietnam War at first hand. He has now produced a major new history of the conflict and speaks to Rob Attar about some of the big questions arising from his research
America became entangled in Vietnam following a disastrous French attempt to prevent Indochina gaining its independence. Was the French campaign doomed from the outset? One of the most extraordinary aspects of postwar French history was the fact that they fought these ferocious battles in Indochina [the area of south-east Asia that contains Vietnam] – and then in Algeria – to try to hang on to an empire that it was obvious to most people was doomed. You could only sustain these European empires in faraway places with some degree of popular acquiescence and this was completely destroyed by the experience of the Second World War [where Vietnam had been administered by Vichy France at the behest of Japan]. George Orwell memorably said the quickest way to end a war is to lose it and in Indochina the French took eight years to do so in what was a messy, bloody, murderous business. I don’t think that the French would have tried it but for the fact that they had been so humiliated by their experience of occupation and defeat by the Nazis that they were desperate to restore La Gloire. De Gaulle foolishly overruled the views of some of his advisors in 1945 that they would have to talk to the Viet Minh. Instead, he decided to fight it out. The result was a disaster. Having seen what happened to the French, why did the Americans still decide to get involved militarily? The Americans have always had a deep belief in their own exceptionalism. They came to believe that the French had lost their war to the communists because they were French, while they, as Americans, were imbued with this virtue that they wanted to introduce democracy and bring good things to the people of Indochina. Yet underlying everything that the Americans did from 1954 onwards was their desire to contain China. They were absolutely convinced – completely wrongly, as I show in the book – that the Russians and Chinese were pulling the strings on Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese nationalists as their puppets. One of the huge ironies is that all through the war, with all their vast intelligence machine, the Americans never really understood that the Russians, especially, loathed the Vietnam entanglement but felt that, as the leaders of the so-called socialist world, they had to go on supporting the North Vietnamese. As for the Chinese, they had just gone through the Korean War and the last thing they wanted was another big war on the Asian continent. The Americans didn’t understand this and thought that staying in Indochina was about containing communist aggression, whereas it was overwhelmingly a nationalist cause. Why was it that the Americans couldn’t overwhelm a poorly resourced foe? The fundamental reason that the communists won in Vietnam was because they were Vietnamese. After 1945 Ho Chi Minh achieved ownership of Vietnamese nationalism, and he maintained this for the following 25 years. Even after Ho died in 1969, nothing the Americans did was able to shake that. What was extraordinary was that, even in 1965, the Americans understood that the so-called Saigon government they were supporting was paper thin. It wasn’t a real government: it was a load of crazy generals. It was terribly unpopular. But the Americans believed that, with their military superiority, it didn’t matter that they were supporting a rotten regime. They were wrong. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/11/GettyImages-500893026-3aaa3e6.jpg" width="5087" height="3444" alt="A South Vietnamese soldier and an American military advisor communicate with sign language, 1963. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)" title="A South Vietnamese soldier and an American military advisor communicate with sign language, 1963. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)" /> It was like trying to use a flamethrower to weed a flower border. They were using completely the wrong tools. The Americans could go on killing Viet Cong, they could go on killing North Vietnamese, but they didn’t have a coherent strategy, and that was always the problem. And although Americans always professed to loathe colonialism, in a way their approach was profoundly colonialist. One veteran who made a great impression on me was a former medic called David Rogers who told me about a time when he and his infantry company were out on a sweep north of Saigon with some Vietnamese soldiers. They stopped somewhere and on the radio the Vietnamese’s American advisor said over the radio, in front of everyone: “OK, guys I’ve got to go now, I’m with the little people.” David Rogers heard that and he saw the reaction among the Vietnamese. A little while later, a Vietnamese officer who had become his friend said: “David, we must go now because we are only the little people.” Now if you treat people like that, then it ain’t too surprising that you lose your war. How do you rate the military ability of the North Vietnamese? There is no doubt that the communists were better soldiers. They knew the country and a lot of them were far more experienced than the Americans, who typically only spent a year there, whereas they had been fighting for years on end. Even though they didn’t have anything like the Americans’ firepower, they were extraordinarily skilful. One thing the communists did have was the AK-47 and it was really in this war that it became the most famous gun in the world. The Americans had the M16 rifle, which is a terrific bit of kit if you are on a firing range – far better than an AK-47. But if you drop an M16 in the jungle, or it gets mud in it, the whole thing will seize up. In contrast, the AK-47 was designed in the Soviet Union for use by ignorants and it was so simple and brilliantly machined that even if you dropped it in a river, and it got covered in mud and sand, it would go on shooting. For jungle warfare it was a far better gun than the M16 and a lot of the Americans got a sort of inferiority complex about that. They found themselves going into battle with cleaning rods taped to the stocks of their guns because they knew they were going to jam and the only way to clear them was by – in the middle of a battle – pushing a cleaning rod up the barrel to try to get the spent case out. Was the Vietnam War unusually savage or is its reputation due more to the media coverage it received? If you had lived through the Thirty Years’ War, or a lot of the Second World War, then you would have seen just the same terrible things happening. But in the Second World War, nobody showed newsreels of the thousands of hookers hanging around Piccadilly Circus to pick up Americans, or British or American soldiers shooting prisoners. What was different about Vietnam was that, in the new mood of revelation in the 1960s, the realities of war were brought brutally home. The communists had a policy of silence and they wouldn’t let anyone into North Vietnam who wasn’t a known sympathiser. So when they buried landlords alive, for example, they did not record it on camera. But all the dreadful things – and they often were dreadful things – that the Americans and South Vietnamese were doing were all recorded. There are some of the most notorious photographs from history [see right]. These images forced the western public to face up to the horrors of war, but it was a very selective view because it didn’t show the horrors inflicted by the other side. I myself always remember one moment when I was working in Vietnam. I used to find it absolutely thrilling to fly around in ‘Huey’ helicopters – I thought it was all very exciting. And when you are 24 years old and an ambitious journalist, you are thrilled that someone is paying you to do this, and you don’t think too much about having your head blown off. But one day in 1972 or ’73, I was in a jeep driving north of Saigon, trying to look at a battle we came across, when we had to stop because there was a South Vietnamese army patrol dragging onto the road a group of communists whom they had killed in an encounter during the night. I remember watching them dragging one half-naked corpse whose guts were spilling out about 10 feet behind him. And, as they dragged this corpse, I thought that if I got shot in the guts and I was being dragged, then that’s how I would look. It was the beginning of a sort of growing-up process for me. I went on doing a lot of war reporting, but I made a personal journey from an ignorant teenager thinking there might be something romantic about war to someone who understands that it is actually unbelievably ghastly. Why do you think the Vietnam War stirred up so much opposition in the US and around the world? One has to remember that this was in the sixties, which was a time of revolt against capitalism and imperialism, and all sorts of other things that the war seemed to represent. It was also a time of extraordinary naïvety among the young. They convinced themselves that people like Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were great heroes but were oblivious to the fact that, even in those days, a lot was known about Castro’s extraordinarily repressive regime in Cuba and the fact that Stalin and Mao were the greatest mass murderers in the 20th century, after Hitler. So it was a time of great naïvety, it was a time of generational revolt – and Vietnam seemed a symbol of everything the older generation was getting wrong. But while the anti-war movement was incredibly naïve, one thing they were right about was the simple fact that the war was a catastrophe, it was crazy. Passions were also stirred by the fact that a lot of the people doing the fighting were draftees, whereas nowadays, not only are the casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq much smaller, these wars are all being fought by professional soldiers who want to be there. That creates a different mood from the fact that the kids in Vietnam didn’t want to be in Vietnam, and felt miserable about risking their lives. Max Hastings is an author, journalist and former newspaper editor whose numerous books include the bestselling All Hell Let Loose, Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 and The Secret War Book: Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975 by Max Hastings (William Collins, 2018)
Seymour Hersh on the US civil rights movement and the Vietnam War
Seymour Hersh recalls his career as a journalist covering the political and social stories that defined 20th-century America
Born in 1937, Seymour Hersh began his career as a journalist in Chicago in the late 1950s. Across the ensuing half-century he reported on major episodes in US history, including the evolution of the civil rights movement, military atrocities in the Vietnam War and, in 2004, the torture by US personnel of detainees in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. His writing has appeared in leading publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Times, and has been recognised with awards including the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. My parents came to the United States from eastern Europe, Jewish immigrants – that’s a very bad word these days, but I can assure you they weren’t in any gangs – and they didn’t communicate much. Neither of them spoke much about what led them to come to the US. My father got cancer when I was 15, and I took over the running of the family business, a cleaning store in Chicago’s black ghetto, until I was 22. That experience meant that I knew the African-American world well and had some empathy for the fact that, if your colour was ‘wrong’ in the 1950s, there was nowhere to go. Things are still bad for black people in the United States now, but nothing like they were then. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/10/US-civil-rights-movement-and-the-Vietnam-War-2-b569ecd-e1690298662159.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Seymour Hersh pictured in 1982, won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his work reporting on the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at Mỹ Lai by US troops" title="Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, pictured in 1982" /> Eventually, after dropping out of law school because I hated it, I got a job in 1959 as a street reporter for City News. It was a crime newspaper agency, set up in 1890, that later reported on the heyday of gangsters such as John Dillinger in the 1920s and 1930s. That was a period during which newspapers and radio stations simply couldn’t cover all of the crime that was being committed in Chicago. We covered the police and the courts, and I worked on the street as a reporter. That’s when I first fell in love with the newspaper business. There were strict rules on reporting crime in Chicago in the early 1960s. You did not report on cops killing black people, which happened a lot, and you did not report on cops taking care of the mafia. I learned two things about reporting in that period – the first about tyranny, the second about self-censorship, which is all over my profession. As an example, I heard a cop radio in the fact that he had shot a black suspect as he fled. I ran down to the underground parking lot of the police headquarters to talk to the cop about what had happened. As I was walking towards his car, he got out and started talking to one of his friends, who was also a policeman. He said: “Nah, I told the nigger he was okay, told him to beat it – and then I shot him.” When I called the story in to my editor at City News, he said to forget about it – it would just be my word against the cop’s – and if I pushed it, I’d have to be moved out of that station. Eventually I left and, in 1963, became a correspondent for the Associated Press news agency. This was the period during which the civil rights activist Martin Luther King led marches in Chicago. The fact that he was standing up and doing something about institutional racism terrified many white people: they thought it would lead to violence, or to black people taking their jobs. People threw stones at him, but he kept on walking even though he was frightened. There’d be news conferences where we’d be so worried that somebody was going to hit him in the head with a stone. He’d finish the conference, and because I was the guy from the Associated Press – at that time you had the AP in every newspaper around America – he’d give me a look, crook his finger at me, and I’d know to wait for ten minutes before dutifully following him around the corner. He’d give me a lot of good quotes – something that he hadn’t said previously. I used to get great stories from him. I guess you could call it love at first sight. After about six to eight months at the Associated Press, my job was simply to come to work and find something to write about every day. I didn’t have to edit stories; I didn’t have to work on a particular ‘desk’. I owned the city! I wrote about civil rights, I wrote about the Vietnam War – which by then had been going on for a decade – and, eventually, they transferred me to Washington to cover the Pentagon. I soon got into a lot of trouble there because I felt my job was not to let people such as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara dictate our policy as journalists. Our job was to go beyond. I was new to the Pentagon, new to Washington, and I was just cheeky. For instance, I phoned up the vice president, Hubert Humphrey, when he was at home in Minnesota for Christmas in 1965. He’d had a few drinks, and talked about a peace agreement with the North Vietnamese. That was particularly amazing because nobody else was even talking about anything like it at that time. Even though I’d been assigned to cover the Pentagon, I had been reading up a lot about the Vietnam War. By this time, various church groups had started to write about the underside of the war, talking to kids coming back from fighting, that kind of thing. So I began writing critically about it – began nipping at McNamara’s heels. That didn’t go down too well. Eventually I was reassigned to write about social issues, which are fine – but the move came as something of a message to me. The managing editor of the AP, particularly, didn’t like what I was doing, and thought I was taking a stand against the war. I tried to explain to him that the only stance against the war was that it was crazy. I always had a streak of not wanting to accept the diktat of editors! So, in 1967 I left to become a freelance journalist. In the fall of 1969, I got a phone call tipping me off that a GI was being court-martialled for killing civilians in South Vietnam the previous year. Even though there was not much to go on, and no public mention of the scale of the massacre the source spoke about, I thought it was worth following up on because other people wouldn’t. Once I got the story – and that’s a story in itself – I just worked my head off. Despite reports that just one young officer, Lieutenant William Calley, did all the killing, in the village of Sơn Mỹ in Quảng Ngãi Province, I still couldn’t make sense of it. I tracked Calley down, indirectly via his lawyer, along with other people in the unit who had shot and killed people and admitted to it. In total, hundreds of people had been killed in what became known in the west as the Mỹ Lai Massacre. Once I’d done all that, I thought the story was in good shape, but nobody wanted it. I couldn’t get anyone to buy the story, so eventually I gave it to a news service. I wrote five stories in five weeks, won various prizes, and convinced the public I had something to say. Today, the fact that the media underestimates Donald Trump as president worries me. He knocked down 16 candidates during the nominations, ended two presidential dynasties – the Bushes and the Clintons – and all with no political experience. That’s a pretty amazing feat. He tweets stupid, ridiculous things, but the press are caught up following that. They let him lead them by the nose. Just publishing everything he says is a stupid way to run a newspaper business. Seymour Hersh is an investigative journalist and political writer. His autobiography, Reporter: A Memoir is out now, published by Allen Lane Interview by Matt Elton This article was taken from issue 12 of BBC World Histories magazine