Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975
Max Hastings
HarperCollins: 2018
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Margaret Thatcher’s favourite journalist and a long-time editor at one of England’s more reliably conservative newspapers, Max Hastings is the kind of chap who loves to play armchair warrior. He has written a dozen books on war, most dealing with World War II, but now he has nudged the clock forward, producing a history of the Vietnam War. After declaring that America held the “moral high ground” in this war, Sir Max redeploys the troops in his 850-page tome to speculate on how the US could have won the sucker.

If the Americans had listened to Sir Robert Thompson and followed his strategy for fighting communist guerrillas, like those in Malaysia — through a good dose of violence and by moving the population into concentration camps — then they could have dried up the sea of people in which the Maoist fish were swimming. “Strategic hamlets” was the name for these concentration camps, and, as Hastings assures us, “the hamlets had significant tactical success”.

As a confirmed Thompsonite, Hastings ventures one of the more peculiar observations ever made about Vietnam, a war so bloody that it lasted thirty years and killed millions of Vietnamese (mainly in the south, among America’s supposed allies). After calling the United States the “standard-bearer for civilized values”, Hastings — oblivious to the irony — writes in the next paragraph that the US should have gone over to the dark side. “Soviet and Nazi precedent suggests that merciless occupiers can suppress resistance by force. In Vietnam, the US Army … was not savage enough to deter many peasants from supporting the communists. Americans burned enough villages to incur the world’s censure, but too few to prevent local people from sheltering guerrillas”.

• Tags: Issue 14, Max Hastings, Thomas A. Bass, Vietnam War