BOOK REVIEW.(Vietnam: The Australian War)(Book review)

• Author: James, Bill
• Position: 178221280
• Pages: 66(7)

VIETNAM: The Australian War

by Paul Ham

(Sydney: HarperCollins, 2007)

Hardback: 700 pages

Rec. price: $55.00

Paul Ham has not written a revisionist history of the Vietnam War. For the most part, he goes along with the majority consensus. The war was unjustifiable, badly conducted, and failed in its alleged aim to replace colonial authoritarianism with liberal political institutions. It was unwinnable from the beginning, because of the free world's self-imposed constraints of limiting conflict to Indochina, and fighting with non-nuclear weapons.

Ham is contemptuous of the arguments that the war won time for the consolidation of democracy in the rest of South-East Asia, or that it was merely a lost battle in the ultimately victorious conflict against communism, rather like Dunkirk and Singapore in the struggle against fascism.

Whether this consensus will stand the test of time remains to be seen. There are too many influential former anti-war activists--academics, journalists, politicians--for whom the Vietnam era was the most meaningful period of their lives. It is therefore still too early for any sort of disinterested historical analysis to emerge.

I lived through the Vietnam era myself. For me, it was like the rest of the 'Sixties. That is, it was all going on somewhere "out there" where I wasn't. Only one or two of its aspects impinged directly on my life.

While still at school in the mid-Sixties, I expressed admiration for draft-resister Bill White: "If he wasn't sincere, he wouldn't behave like that!" My father was a Labor Party voter, but had learned at first hand the imperative to confront totalitarianism, as a result of his experience as a World War II POW in Germany. He responded inelegantly but irrefutably that "there are ratbags out there who'll do anything to get attention".

Later at Melbourne University I allowed myself to be pressured by the ambient excitement into participating in various demonstrations, including the famous 1970 Moratorium. Nearly everyone at Melbourne either vociferously opposed the war, or kept their heads down and their mouths shut. Only a few very brave mavericks openly supported it. One was the late Frank Knopfelmacher, a brilliant if volatile product of Middle European Jewish culture. He had suffered under both Nazism and communism, and had fought in World War II. In 1970, the centenary of Lenin's birth, the student canteen was wall-papered with icons of the sainted Vladimir Ilyich. Frank was the only academic at a public Lenin seminar to take on colleagues such as Lloyd Churchward who were adulating Stalin's totalitarian predecessor.

As one of the spoilt, half-educated, suburban baby-boomer kids who made up much of the anti-war brigade, I was pulled up short by figures such as Frank, and forced to actually think about the issues for the first time. By the time I left university and commenced my inglorious stint of National Service, the last of the troops were being brought home. I was thus saved from having to exhibit my military incompetence in Vietnam as well as Australia.

There is a lot to be said for the case that the Vietnam War was hopelessly conducted. As Ham demonstrates, the Americans' heavy-handed cultural insensitivity, not to mention massive, indiscriminate shelling, bombing, defoliation, and destruction of houses and crops, resulted in their almost complete alienation from the South Vietnamese masses. At the same time, it transpired that these same peasants bore no corresponding love for the communists.

This raises the question of whether the war could have been won had it been fought differently, which in turn raises other issues. Not only is it impossible to know in advance whether a war is winnable, but it is also impossible to forecast the best way of fighting it, and whether victory is going to involve more good than harm--one of Aquinas's criteria for a just war.

Take the case of Britain, Australia and World War II. By June 1940 the rampant Nazis controlled nearly all of Europe. At that stage, the USSR was...