Vietnam: The Australian War by Paul Ham

Vietnam: The Australian War,
by Paul Ham;
HarperCollins, 2007, $55.

This is an extremely good book. We probably had to wait thirty years for someone to do it, in order for them to be able to read some more of the often damning archives. Also, it had to be written by someone young enough not to have been compromised by the events it relates, but old enough to understand what they mean.

Ham fits the bill. I doubt a single academic in Australia does. Certainly not me.

I taught with and to soldiers going to Vietnam at Duntroon in the 1960s and worked with soldiers who had been there at the Joint Services Staff College in the 1980s. In between, I was secretary to the Vietnam Moratorium and “peace visited” Hanoi the week after Jane Fonda in 1972. There are a lot of people I know in these pages. Many of them are dead.

Ham has read a lot, travelled a lot and interviewed plenty to come up with a very thorough and wide-ranging account of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Apart from brave soldiers and suffering Vietnamese civilians, almost nobody comes out with any credit.

Around 1946 the leadership of the Vietnamese Communist Party decided to take over the country by whatever means necessary, and finally did so by military conquest of the south in 1975. The rather foul French failed to stop them. The Americans, for no very good reason, also tried to do so in the late 1960s and also failed.

The eager Australian Coalition government decided to help and in 1965 sent an uninvited task force which it steadily expanded while the war was popular until 1968, when it began to reduce its size as support for the war waned. By 1972 it had been transformed into a training mission—and Whitlam then withdrew even that.

In April 1975 North Vietnamese regular forces took Saigon and in 1976 the country was unified under a communist dictatorship.

Ham tells the story of the Australian military mission in considerable and harrowing detail, unrestrained by the limitations of official military history. Nonetheless, it emerges as matter-of-fact heroic. The Australians were given a discrete mission and their own province, Phuoc Tuy. By 1970 it was effectively “pacified”, despite the efforts of at least one of the Australian commanders and several ministers.

The narrative of this achievement is one of Australians, many conscripted, carefully winning territory, hearts and minds, several pitched battles (which are extremely well described) and civil security, while facing near permanent and harrowing mortal danger. Around 500 died and they are listed in an appendix.

Their civilian masters are also listed in the text and it is hard to find one with a record of which to be proud. Menzies is depicted as a bungling opportunist; Holt, Gorton and McMahon as competitors for coining the most obsequious phrase to deliver to the Americans; Whitlam as an appeaser of ruthless Hanoi. The story of the disgraceful evacuation of the Australian embassy in 1975 reads as badly as that of the better-known US flight by helicopter. Fraser is earlier a buffoon, but partly redeems himself by his refugee admissions and his later apology for the war.

The peace movement fares little better with its too ready acceptance of the independence of the National Liberation Front. Hanoi fed the NLF’s troops to the brutal American meat grinder and then summarily abolished it in 1976. After that the Vietnamese faced massive deprivation and a police state until some alleviation came with the liberal reforms of the mid-1980s.

There are some nice photos of the peace marches, attacks on the stock exchange (by a later president of the New South Wales upper house and a financial journalist) and Patrick White signing a peace petition in front of the secretary of the Communist Party of Australia (and one of my fellow “peace delegates”). And then some stories of the disgraceful treatment given to returning servicemen—and not all of it by leftists.

The Americans are seen as mightily equipped, high-tech incompetents, at first ready to kill widely and then happy to cut and run. The southern regime is given some more credit than usual. The Vietnamese population is depicted as stoical, patriotic and long-suffering. The Soviets and Chinese were clearly happy to fight the USA to the last Vietnamese.

The only clear winner from all this, for Ham, was the communist state apparatus which is, even now, trying to catch up to the modern world. The task was not made easier by the massive destruction of the natural environment undertaken by the USA.

The legacy for Australia was less severe but still disastrous. In the short term: military defeat, 500 dead, many more traumatised. In the long term: a political culture of anti-Americanism among the intelligentsia, 1960s New Leftism, and modest Marxism. We are still living with that.

Bob Catley’s most recent book is The (Strange, Recent but Understandable) Triumph of Liberalism in Australia (Macleay Press).