Singapore: NUS Press; Chicago: University of Chicago Press [distributor], 2017. x, 451 pp. (Maps.) US$42.00, paper. ISBN 978-981-4722-23-0.
The British and the Vietnam War focuses mainly on the period from November 1963, when Lyndon Johnson became president of the United States, up to March of 1967.
The British wanted to avert a massive, bloody war in Vietnam, but they did not feel they could afford to offend the United States by seeming too negative. Their position became more difficult as the United States committed itself publicly to the use of large-scale military force to avert a Communist victory in South Vietnam. Some feared that if they were openly critical, they might become scapegoats for an American failure (57, 58, 88, 91). British diplomats warned in 1961 and again in 1964 that there were Americans who claimed that it had been British negativity that had prevented the United States from winning the Korean War (26, 54).
British officials held widely divergent views on basic issues. Many operated very much within a Cold War mindset. They often assumed that the primary threat in Vietnam was Chinese aggression. Up to 1965, suggestions that the Americans negotiate an end to the conflict referred as often to negotiations with Beijing as with Hanoi. Arthur de la Mare suggested in 1967 that Hanoi had been wanting for some time to abandon the war, but had not dared defy Chinese wishes by doing so. Gordon Etherington-Smith, the British ambassador in Saigon, was especially supportive of the American view of the situation in Vietnam and its broader implications, arguing that a defeat there would have serious consequences “for the whole balance of power in Asia and indeed in the world” (230). But many others doubted that South Vietnam was the best place to hold a line against Communist expansionism, and some questioned Chinese aggressiveness. Not until 1966 was there even a coherent debate about such issues; it failed to achieve consensus.
In 1964 and into early 1965, the British tended to pessimism about Vietnam; they expected a Communist victory. This was partly because they neither wanted nor expected a major commitment of American combat forces. As Lyndon Johnson escalated American involvement, they became much more hopeful about the outcome of the war. But this was partly because they did not expect that the North Vietnamese would step up their own involvement in the struggle in the South. Indeed the British did not understand the extent to which North Vietnamese troops were already arriving in South Vietnam in the first half of 1965. By the end of 1965 British officials were recognizing and indeed exaggerating the extent to which Hanoi was matching American escalation (255), and their optimism subsided.
Early fears that if the war escalated it might run completely out of control, possibly even triggering world war, were subsiding by 1965 and did not revive. The Americans were showing they could use large-scale military force without spreading the war beyond Indochina.
The British wanted a negotiated end to the conflict. Some hoped that negotiations would lead to the neutralization of South Vietnam or of some wider area including South Vietnam. Seldom did they explain what neutralization would actually mean, or even acknowledge that the question needed to be asked. Some recognized that no such nice compromise was available. James Cable, head of the South East Asia Division at the Foreign Office, wrote a very perceptive paper in August 1965, pointing out that someone—Communist or anti-Communist—was going to end up in control of South Vietnam, so any negotiated settlement of the war would necessarily be a more or less disguised surrender by one side or the other (233–236). But this did not dim his enthusiasm for negotiations. He seemed to think there was a real chance that the United States would in the near future become willing to do what it actually did more than seven years later: sign a very unfavourable peace agreement.
Cable later suggested that British efforts to get peace talks started should not be based on any particular conception of what sort of settlement might actually be acceptable to both sides. The biggest British effort to get negotiations started, through Soviet intermediaries in February 1967, was indeed not based on any particular hopes about the shape of a possible peace.
Nicholas Tarling, a historian whose broad interests centre on Southeast Asia and British policy toward Asia, is well qualified to write about British policy regarding the Vietnam War. He has done a great deal of research, in British government files and to some extent in other sources. But The British and the Vietnam War is mostly an account of what British (and sometimes American and other nations’) officials said to one another month by month. Tarling seldom intrudes his own interpretation or analyses. Only rarely does he judge a statement, as when he brands “unrealistic” a 1964 proposal by Lord Walton, undersecretary at the Foreign Office, that if the Americans made a major military effort for two or three months, creating a momentarily strong position, they could then withdraw from Vietnam, allowing a Communist takeover, without loss of face (94).
The British and the Vietnam War will be valuable as a reference, and serious libraries should acquire it, but only specialists and advanced students are likely to read it straight through.
Edwin E. Moise
Clemson University, Clemson, USA