Indochina War

The End of the First Indochina War

The French withdrawal from Vietnam in 1954 was the product of global pressures and triggered significant global consequences. By treating the war as an international issue, this book places Indochina at the center of the Cold War in the mid-1950s. Arguing that the Indochina War cannot be understood as a topic of Franco-US relations, but ought to be treated as international history, this volume brings in Vietnamese and other global agents, including New Zealand, Australia, and especially Britain, as well as China and the Soviet Union. Importantly, the book also argues that the successful French withdrawal from Vietnam – a political defeat for the Eisenhower administration – helped to avert outright warfare between the major powers, although with very mixed results for the inhabitants of Vietnam who faced partition and further bloodshed. The End of the First Indochina War explores the complexities of intra-alliance competition over global strategy – especially between the United States and British Commonwealth – arguing that these rivalries are as important to understanding the Cold War as east-west confrontation. This is the first truly global interpretation of the French defeat in 1954, based on the author’s research in five western countries and the latest scholarship from historians of Vietnam, China, and Russia. Readers will find much that is new both in terms of archival revelations and original interpretations.

The Second Indochina War

The Second Indochina War

In the United States, discussion of the Vietnam War has tended to focus on the U.S. role, U.S. strategy, U.S. diplomacy, and the war's effects on American society. The tendency to hold U.S. domestic politics responsible for the war's outcome implies that events in Indochina were nothing more than a backdrop for an essentially American drama. In contrast, The Second Indochina War emphasizes the Vietnamese dimensions of a conflict in which all of Indochina—Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—was treated as a single strategic unit. The author contends that only from this perspective is it clear how the war began, why its scale outstripped U.S. expectations, and why the Communists prevailed. Professor Turley gives a balanced account of events in, and views from, Washington, Saigon, and Hanoi. Drawing on years of research in primary documents and interviews conducted by the author in Saigon and Hanoi, the book focuses on the experience, strategies, leadership, and internal politics of the revolutionary side. To set the scene, the author considers the legacies of colonial rule in Indochina and the origins of the U.S. commitment there. He recounts the development of the Saigon regime and explains the bases of revolution in the South, the key communist decisions, and the North's response to bombing. The major military campaigns are clearly described and analyzed, as are the negotiations that led to the Paris Agreement and its aftermath. Vietnam is the central focus, but the reader's attention is also drawn to the strategies and events that unified the conflict in all three countries of Indochina into a single war. Concise yet comprehensive, The Second Indochina War is suitable for the general reader, as a text for courses on the war, or as supplementary reading for courses on Southeast Asian politics, U.S. foreign policy, revolutionary conflict, and Asian regional security. An annotated bibliography and chronology enhance its usefulness. Original material on communist internal debates and military campaigns, based on primary documents in Vietnamese, will also make this book a valuable resource for scholars of Southeast Asia.