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    Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975
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    Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975
    Unavailable
    Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975
    Audiobook33 hours

    Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975

    Written by Max Hastings

    Narrated by Max Hastings and Peter Noble

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ‘His masterpiece’ Antony Beevor, Spectator ‘A masterful performance’ Sunday Times ‘By far the best book on the Vietnam War’ Gerald Degroot, The Times, Book of the Year

    Vietnam became the Western world’s most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the United States in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. He portrays the set pieces of Dienbienphu, the Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam, and less familiar battles such as the bloodbath at Daido, where a US Marine battalion was almost wiped out, together with extraordinary recollections of Ho Chi Minh’s warriors. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed 2 million people.

    Many writers treat the war as a US tragedy, yet Hastings sees it as overwhelmingly that of the Vietnamese people, of whom forty died for every American. US blunders and atrocities were matched by those committed by their enemies. While all the world has seen the image of a screaming, naked girl seared by napalm, it forgets countless eviscerations, beheadings and murders carried out by the communists. The people of both former Vietnams paid a bitter price for the Northerners’ victory in privation and oppression. Here is testimony from Vietcong guerrillas, Southern paratroopers, Saigon bargirls and Hanoi students alongside that of infantrymen from South Dakota, Marines from North Carolina, Huey pilots from Arkansas.

    No past volume has blended a political and military narrative of the entire conflict with heart-stopping personal experiences, in the fashion that Max Hastings’ readers know so well. The author suggests that neither side deserved to win this struggle with so many lessons for the 21st century about the misuse of military might to confront intractable political and cultural challenges. He marshals testimony from warlords and peasants, statesmen and soldiers, to create an extraordinary record.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateSep 20, 2018
    ISBN9780008296377
    Author

    Max Hastings

    Max Hastings is the author of twenty-eight books, most about conflict, and between 1986 and 2002 served as editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph, then as editor of the Evening Standard. He has won many prizes, for both his journalism and his books, the most recent of which are the bestsellers Vietnam, The Secret War, Catastrophe, and All Hell Let Loose. Knighted in 2002, Hastings is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of King’s College London, and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He has two grown children, Charlotte and Harry, and lives with his wife, Penny, in West Berkshire, where they garden enthusiastically.

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    Reviews for Vietnam

    4.5/5

    96 ratings11 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This is a mammoth historical account of a terrible war that had it’s roots in colonialism. The tragedy lay in the failure of Vietnam to achieve self determination and independence after the defeat of the French. This book is truly gripping. Despite the grotesque nature of the story, it is beautifully written. This surely must be the author, Max Hasting’s masterpiece. The period 1945 to 1975 coincides with the first 30 years of my life growing up in New Zealand and in Australia where I was involved with the big Vietnam moratorium marches of 1972 - 4. Our anti-American passions were then high. Destiny is a strange thing, and these days I find myself living in Hanoi for 6 months every year. For there, I have two lovely little Vietnamese-Australian granddaughters and a daughter-in-law who studied economics at Da Nang university in 2010 -2013. It is a generalization, but nobody in Vietnam wants to talk about the war with me. They want to forget it. Most were not born when it finished in 1975. Now we can see the Vietnamese people in the North and the South as victims of the Cold War. Also we can see, in hindsight - as a result of Iraq, Libya, Syria - that the people of Vietnam were also victims of US imperialism. And the cause of this imperialism? Maybe it is this thing called Empire, the phenomenon that has been with humanity since the Roman times and earlier. It is the “way of the world” as spoken about by Jesus of Nazareth, crucified for his political neutrality in the face of imperial power.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Brilliant narrative from a non - belligerent's perspective, great literature
    • 5/5
      Excellent history of Vietnam war by Max Hastings with insights that are more than relevant to todays world.
    • 5/5
      Great book covering many parts of the Vietnam conflict .
    • 4/5
      A majestic work, 74 chapters covering nearly every aspect of the war in North and South Vietnam. One trap it does not fall into is to think of the war as only about America. The information on North Vietnam is excellent, some of which I have not seen anywhere else. I wish that it was as good in covering South Vietnam as it does the north. The author is very pessimistic about the south's changes of winning. But he never really dives into why that was. We learn a lot more about Le Duan, the leader of North Vietnam than we do about Theiu the leader of South Vietnam, that is a recurring issue.The book is a popular history and this is a very good one, however that means that it concentrates on peoples stories. They are interesting, even at times insightful, but it can get in the way of understanding whats happening in the war. For example a chapter is about a particular campaign and we hear from people who were there but not the bigger picture. Things either work or do not work, but why that should be can be missing.A final point is that this is strictly about the Vietnam war, Laos and Cambodia are neglected. In reality, Laos, Cambodia, North and South Vietnam were intimately connected. In the index President Eisenhower has 17 entries, Laos has 13 and Cambodia has 10. North Korea has 2 entries and South Korea 3, although the information on North Korea is hard to find elsewhere. Australia gets a chapter and I know Neil Smith and have heard a number of his accounts from him. Overall I recommend this this book.
    • 4/5
      A very comprehensive and fair, balanced assessment of the terrible tragedy to befall Vietnam after the Second World War, when the French colonial empire was dismantled. It deals with the quagmire and increasing immersion of American and Australian military force that seemed powerless to overcome a nations contempt for the people that were there to save them from a so called Communist threat. The promises of a communist nirvana though, were not met and their harsh and brutal regime is also documented. Excellent reading for the general reader.
    • 5/5
      Excellent book recounting the sad story of Vietnam from the end of WW2 thru the end of American involvement and beyond. A genuinely tragic story with few winners. Max Hastings is as fine as there is at the telling of history and he really outdid himself on a contentious subject. My family were part of the military during the war and, sadly, one never came home. This book neither glorifies not denigrates and does a very good job of creating context to aid understanding. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      I read this non-fiction history tome immediately after having read a similar work, Normandy ’44. I say similar, because they were of similar length and scholarship. Both were meticulously researched and presented, however the reading experience could not have been more different. Whereas Normandy ’44 was exceedingly dry and frequently bogged down in mind numbing detail, of little interest to any but a minute few, Vietnam was fascinating while being equally informative.Perhaps the target audience for the two works is completely different, but I can safely say that a huge percentage of people with an interest in either warfare, or history in general, will have a much more pleasant reading experience reading Vietnam. In addition to a detailed chronicle of the American involvement in Indochina, a significant investment is made in the French colonial period, which, of course, set the stage for all that followed.I have read perhaps half a dozen works on the various aspects of the Vietnam War. For those looking for a comprehensive treatment of both the politics and the warfare itself, I can unreservedly recommend this book.
    • 4/5
      5617. Vietnam An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 by Max Hastings (read 28 Mar 2019) This is a book published in 2018 so it has the advantage of having some perspective on its subject. It is the fourth book by its author (he has 24 books published) I have read. It is a massive study, having 757 pages of text, 57 pages of notes, a 24 page bibliography, and a 30 page index. He covers the whole story, and some of the detailed account of battles is not overly interesting, but his account of the of the escalation of American involvement is well-done. The escalation is told of in detail and the years of Nixon's mishandling of the war from 1969 till 1974 (21,000 Americans died when Nixon was president and when he knew the war could not be won)--Hastings is pretty even-handed in assessing blame for the tragic events, and shows that there was indeed evil to be resisted and, and while spme South Vietnam leaders were corrupt many of the South Vietnamese people greatly and justifiably feared the Communist effort to take over the entire country. One cannot rejoice over the way so many people who trusted in American help were bitterly disappointed in the outcome. All in all, the book tells the whole story well.
    • 5/5
      This book took me two months to read and it is such a relief to have finished it. That is NOT to say that it is a bad book: it isn't. It is an excellent piece of work. Hastings presents facts. He never judges as to whether the Americans should have invaded South Vietnam but, he comes down very heavily upon some of their actions. He is equally robust in his disgust at the antics of the North Vietnam Army; a side of the story which is rarely told.The book is not a difficult read due to poor use of English or historical confusion. I found that I had to pause, every 20-30 pages, simply to clear my head of the depressive inevitability of all around failure. Like so many wars, this was a conflict that was never going to provide either side with a joyous victory. America went into the country without any clear target as to what would represent success - a trait that seems to continue through Iran and Afghanistan. The Vietcong similarly, did not have any desire to win the hearts and minds of those that they were "rescuing from American imperialism".This book manages to give the overall story of the conflict and include personal stories. It shows the evil that is done by any army upon the civilian population caught in the fighting. Were our leaders to read this, they might be a little more reticent to call upon a military solution so quickly.
    • 5/5
      I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in how the USA ever got involved with South Vietnam. I personally served a one year tour of duty at Camp Bearcat in South Vietnam. But it was not until I read this book that I finally understood why America got involved with South Vietnam in the first place and how badly we handled this war.