Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam
Mark Bowden. New York: Grove Atlantic, 2017. 608 pp. Glossary. notes. $30.
Reviewed by Colonel Richard Camp, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)
Mark Bowden in his new book, Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam, has written the most definitive account to date of one of the most significant battles of the Vietnam War. Hue, the third largest city in South Vietnam, is located approximately 100 kilometers from the demilitarized zone (DMZ), which separated the two Vietnams. Bowden notes, “Hue was a city of both practical and symbolic importance. . . . As a center of Vietnamese culture, it had a significance that transcended the divide.” It was the former imperial capital and a major center of learning and worship—and a major target for the 1968 North Vietnamese Tet offensive.
Bowden masterfully describes the tactical narrative of the battle through dozens of interviews with Vietnamese (he made two trips to Vietnam) and Americans who were there to provide a griping blood-and-guts account of this decisive confrontation. At several points in the book, he interweaves both sides’ perspectives on the same fight to show the grim determination of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, the courage and bravery of the Marines and South Vietnamese soldiers, and the suffering of the civilian population.
Bowden’s vivid description of the three-week-long battle leaves the reader shell-shocked by the violence and brutality of this “storm of war.” The fighting, he writes, “blew away all semblance of law, logic, and decency” and “There were so many ways to die in Hue that it became impossible to sort causes.” The fighting men on all sides struggled to come to terms with this brutal reality, and that doing everything right was no guarantee of survival. “They became convinced,” Bowden notes, “that their commanders didn’t know what they were doing, and were, as a result, throwing their lives away.”
Bowden pulls no punches when he describes the ineffective, almost illogical leadership of the generals who piecemealed their men into the urban fight with total disregard for the situation on the ground. Initially, Task Force X-Ray ordered two understrength Marine battalions, some 1,500 men without maps and adequate intelligence, into a city swarming with thousands of North Vietnamese soldiers. The task force ignored the realities on the ground and the strength of the enemy force. Bowden writes that one company commander was simply “ordered to board trucks and head south . . . when they got wherever it was they were supposed to go . . . somebody would certainly have a map.”
Officers at the highest level, including General William Westmoreland, Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) commander, refused, despite evidence, to believe that Hue was a major North Vietnamese objective. Instead, he concentrated his efforts on Khe Sanh, believing that the base was the real objective. MACV also refused to authorize air and artillery use because of the historical and political significance of the city. It wasn’t until U.S. and South Vietnamese casualties progressively mounted that supporting arms were authorized. Bowden makes the case that “the valor of Americans . . . [was] used badly.”
The author describes Hue as “the point at which everything changed.” Walter Cronkite, the Oracle of America, visited with the Marines during the battle for Hue. A few days later, he appeared on CBS Evening News. “There is scarcely an inhabitable building in the whole of Hue,” he said. “If our intention is to restore normalcy . . . [Hue] is obviously a setback. . . . The only rational way out then will be negotiating, not as victors.” At that point, U.S. political will began to disintegrate.
In the epilogue, Bowden asserts, “From the perspective of nearly half a century, the Battle of Hue and the entire Vietnam War seem a tragic and meaningless waste. So much heroism and slaughter for a cause that now seems dated and nearly irrelevant.” Finally, Bowden reasons that Hue 1968 “deserves to be widely remembered as the single bloodiest battle of the war, one of its defining events, and one of the most intense urban battles in American history.”
Naval Warfare: A Global History Since 1860
Jeremy Black. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. 287 pp. Notes. Selected Further Reading. Index. $35.
Reviewed by Andrew G. Wilson
The sweep of naval history and technological innovation from 1860 to the present has been both grand and transformative, and Jeremy Black once again has provided an extremely readable and lucid narrative interpretation of the period’s scope and impact to benefit naval history students and seasoned professionals alike.
As noted by Black himself in the work’s preface, “the book focuses on the interplay of technological development, geopolitics, and resource issues in order to provide a dynamic account of strategy and warfare.” Spanning the naval transitions from sail to steam, from wood to iron and steel, and from gas turbine to nuclear propulsion, Black has written a thorough outline of the intersection of technological change and the corresponding moments of historical impact around the globe.
Given the broad swath of time and change covered in Naval Warfare, Black by necessity has drawn heavily on secondary source material, supported by some primary documentation. However, in doing so, the book provides readers new to the subject a wealth of information, excellent insight into the various thematic, strategic, and technological arguments, and a first-rate introduction to all the corresponding naval commentators, theorists, and historians worthy of further study and consideration.
While offering more of a survey than a seminal view into naval warfare in the post-1860 world, Black’s work provides some “interesting” views. For instance, in reference to World War I, Black contends that “the submarine appeared much more relevant than aircraft,” further adding, “the submarine was future potential turned into present reality.” He then goes on to state that “the submarine created a very distinctive and troubling image of naval conflict, one that answered to a different analysis of modernization and potential to that of the battleship.”
Black’s research scope also includes commentary concerning the assessed superiority of U.S. interwar leadership development (i.e., war colleges, etc.) as having a direct correlation to U.S. naval successes in the Pacific against the Empire of Japan, and to the vital role of carrier-based aviation in the Korean conflict, accounting for approximately “one-third of the United Nations air effort.”
Though the historical compendium presented in Naval Warfare is impressive, and valuable in terms of perspective, perhaps the book’s most important chapter is its final one—“Into the Future.” In an era of rising research and production costs, trends in global naval yard consolidation, in combination with the political need to justify to taxpayers the rising expenses associated with naval development, the issue of national defense, and in particular naval power, becomes a volatile subject. However, given the uncertainty ahead, especially in terms of a potential new race for global resources (e.g., in the Arctic), perhaps the navies of the world are best placed to assist in keeping the “race” an orderly one.
When read in conjunction with Black’s previous work, Naval Power: A History of Warfare and the Sea from 1500 Onwards, readers will gain a solid foundational grasp of the issues, leading actors, and critical organizational and technological advances within the field of naval warfare in the Western world. While Naval Warfare boldly aims to cover a great deal of dramatic change and technological advancement in its 250 pages, it does so in a manageable, organized, and well-written manner. A copy of Black’s work is a solid investment in increasing one’s understanding of an extremely complex issue, an issue that needs to be well understood in today’s ever more interesting world of expanding potential conflict in the Pacific. As goes the old adage, knowledge is power—and Black has provided the knowledge.
Paradise in Chains: The Bounty Mutiny and the Founding of Australia
Diana Preston. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. 352 pp. Illus. Biblio. Notes. Sources. Index. $30.
Reviewed by Andrew C. A. Jampoler
The greatest virtue of Diana Preston’s newest book, Paradise in Chains: The Bounty Mutiny and the Founding of Australia, is its compact, scholarly, and yet fluid retelling and recombination of three more-or-less familiar stories. These include those of Captain James Cook’s three voyages between 1768 and 1780 (the last fatal to him); the establishment in January 1788 of a British convict colony at Sydney Cove on the coast of New South Wales, which dodged starvation to somewhat improbably germinate into modern-day Australia; and Captain William Bligh’s generally calamitous career in command at sea—beginning with his notorious, scant 16 months atop His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty that ended abruptly in April 1789—and in civil government ashore.
The ligature tying all three of Preston’s tales together is Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820), Cook’s botanist on board HMS Endeavour 1768–71 and that expedition’s generous private investor. It was Banks, who in 1779, on the strength of what he saw sailing with Cook, identified New South Wales’ Botany Bay as the ideal place for a convict colony, replacing the former American colonies as the dumpsite for Britain’s feared criminal class. It was Banks, too, who later proposed breadfruit as the ideal foodstuff for slaves in the Caribbean, launching the Bounty and Bligh on their fateful mission. Preston’s sketch of Banks is brief but colorful (who knew of his night naked in a canoe with a Tahitian beauty?) and fully adequate to flesh out this most influential figure, one permitted by his great wealth to move from amateur and dilettante to become a serious figure in the 18th century history of natural science.
Tucked comfortably into her larger narrative, and limned in the otherwise beautifully illustrated book’s only map, are Preston’s colorful retellings of three heroic stories of survival in open boats on warm water. All three, Bligh’s after the mutiny, Captain Edward Edwards’ (he of HMS Pandora, sent by the admiralty in pursuit of the Bounty’s mutineers and wrecked in August 1791 on the great Barrier Reef), and escaped convicts Mary and William Bryant’s, end up in Portuguese Kupang, on the southern tip of Timor. Arguably, until 1916 and Ernst Shackleton’s desperate crossing between Elephant and South Georgia islands, one of these three had to stand as maritime history’s best survival story.
Preston’s last two chapters and her postscript bring her stories to a tidy, albeit in the case of the mutineers, a somewhat incomplete, conclusion. As to Bligh, Preston concludes that he was an “outstanding navigator, surveyor and chart-maker,” but one crippled by a “narcissistic self-regard” that made all his tours in command tension-wracked and several end in mutiny. In comparison, Arthur Phillip, first governor of the convict colony, receives high marks for his leadership; Fletcher Christian, the chief mutineer, gets what amounts to a pass; and Joseph Banks gets the encomium of being described as “the epitome of an Enlightenment man.”
Some of Preston’s best storytelling describes the predictable tragedy that played out at the Bounty mutineers’ hideout on Pitcairn Island during its first two decades, an entirely artificial tribal society, locked in place once their ship was put to the torch and then wracked by sexual tensions between the white mutineers and the Tahitian men and women of the Bounty that ended in multiple murders. Preston continues her story of the island into the 21st century, to include a tragic postscript in 2004–5 that saw many of the men in the isolated, tiny (47 residents) island community go on trial for child abuse.
I heartily recommend this book.