Untold Stories

British historian Sir Max Hastings reasoned that there was room for another book about the war in Vietnam because he wanted to bring the Vietnamese “back to the centre of the story”.

- Karl du Fresne

In late 1966, North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong was interviewed by New York Times journalist Harrison Salisbury. “How long do you Americans want to fight, Mr Salisbury?” the urbane Dong asked. “One year? Two years? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years? We shall be glad to accommodate you.”

Dong’s taunt underscores one of the themes running through British historian Sir Max Hastings’ Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975. The North Vietnamese emerged the victors against the United States not just because they had a stronger will to win but also, crucially, because communist North Vietnam was a totalitarian state: its leaders weren’t democratically accountable and could press on with the war regardless of the massive cost in lives.

Unlike the US Government, which had to deal with public unease at military setbacks, atrocities and casualties that were laid bare on the television news and in print, the North Vietnamese regime wasn’t inconvenienced by domestic media coverage, because there was none. Neither did it have elections to worry about.

“If you don’t have to win elections all the time and you don’t have to explain yourself to an electorate,” says Hastings, speaking from his home in the rural English town of Hungerford, “you can get away with murder, quite literally.”

In contrast, the disaster that was Vietnam destroyed one American president (Lyndon Johnson) and contributed to the downfall of another (Richard Nixon).

Hastings portrays the North Vietnamese army and its South Vietnamese allies, the Viet Cong, as dogged, patient, resourceful and extraordinarily tolerant of hardship and deprivation – qualities they first demonstrated in a battle against an incompetent and complacent French colonial garrison at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. They were also masters of camouflage and fieldcraft.