Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975

Discussion in 'Vietnam' started by CL1, Apr 17, 2018.

  1. CL1

    CL1 116th LAA and 92nd (Loyals) LAA,Royal Artillery

    Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975:Max Hastings
    20th September 2018

    Max Hastings chronicles Vietnam with the benefit of vivid personal memories: first of reporting in 1967-68 from the United States, where he encountered many of the war’s decision-makers including President Lyndon Johnson, then of successive assignments in Indochina for newspapers and BBC TV: he rode a helicopter out of the US Saigon embassy compound during the 1975 final evacuation. He is the author of twenty-six books, most about conflict, and between 1986 and 2002 served as editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph, then editor of the Evening Standard. He has won many prizes both for journalism and his books, of which the most recent are All Hell Let Loose, Catastrophe and The Secret War, best-sellers translated around the world. He has two grown-up children, Charlotte and Harry, and lives with his wife Penny in West Berkshire, where they garden enthusiastically.

     
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  2. Swiper

    Swiper Resident Sospan

    O no.

    Not again Hastings.

    Pls no.

    No no no.

    Retire pls.
     
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  3. Steve Mac

    Steve Mac Very Senior Member

    Vietnam, well, well...

    Here’s my take on Vietnam and bear in mind I grew-up with this going on; it was a big part of my youth.

    USA enters Vietnam War as No.1 super power. UK peaved by USA’s treatment of UK over Suez doesn’t join in (officially).

    USA gets its arse kicked, BIG time. It lost.

    Lesson learned = USA should never enter any conflict without the UK fully involved.

    We may not do things the way the USA likes, but we’ve got centuries of experience kicking arse...
     
  4. minden1759

    minden1759 Senior Member

    An interesting re-write of history.

    From a military perspective, the US did not get ‘its arse kicked’ in Vietnam. It had the handle of both the Vietcong and the NVA as witnessed by the US military success that overwhelmed the Tet Offensive.

    The US lost the war for many political reasons.

    Regards

    Frank
     
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  5. Dave55

    Dave55 Atlanta, USA

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Apr 22, 2018
  6. Margaret Ann

    Margaret Ann Junior Member


    Well, I know who needs his arse kicking on this forum.
     
  7. canuck

    canuck Closed Account

    Maybe so but this is a war I view as having no winner. To varying degrees, all the participants lost.
     
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  8. Margaret Ann

    Margaret Ann Junior Member

    I have a book by Max Hastings, "Inferno," which I began reading so long ago that I do not recall exactly when. It is still sitting on my bookshelf unread.
     
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  9. canuck

    canuck Closed Account

    At just about the halfway point of Lynn Novick and Ken Burns’s monumental documentary on the Vietnam War, an army advisor tells an anecdote that seems to sum up the relationship between the military and computers during the mid-1960s.

    “There’s the old apocryphal story that in 1967, they went to the basement of the Pentagon, when the mainframe computers took up the whole basement, and they put on the old punch cards everything you could quantify. Numbers of ships, numbers of tanks, numbers of helicopters, artillery, machine gun, ammo—everything you could quantify,” says James Willbanks, the chair of military history at U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. “They put it in the hopper and said, ‘When will we win in Vietnam?’ They went away on Friday and the thing ground away all weekend. [They] came back on Monday and there was one card in the output tray. And it said, 'You won in 1965.’”

    The Computer That Predicted U.S. Would Win the Vietnam War - The Atlantic
     
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  10. Margaret Ann

    Margaret Ann Junior Member

    Speaking of books, I also bought "The Third Reich" by Richard Overy when I was on a visit to England five years ago. Good grief, I could not get past the first chapter as it has to be the most boring book ever. It's either going down to the charity shop or in the bin.
     

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