Australia and the Vietnam War.

• Author: Rabel, Roberto
• Position: Book review

AUSTRALIA AND THE VIETNAM WAR

Author: Peter Edwards

Published by. NewSouth Publishing and the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 2014, 338pp, $59.99.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This book provides a reflective overview of Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War by Peter Edwards, who was general editor of the nine-volume Official History of Australia's Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948-1975. Drawing on that series, Edwards offers a succinct introduction to the Vietnam imbroglio to readers for whom the controversies ignited by the conflict in Australia are largely unknown or receding in collective national memory.

Edwards's early chapters trace the dramatic convulsions after the Second World War, which reshaped the political order in South-east Asia as the Cold War intersected with the tide of nationalist decolonisation sweeping over declining European power. At the time, like New Zealand, Australia was reconciling itself to its regional location and identity, leading to a shift from the United Kingdom to the United States as its principal security guarantor. The combination of Cold War apprehensions and related alliance considerations drew Australia into military involvement in several South-east Asian conflicts: the Malayan Emergency of 1948-60, the Indonesian Confrontation of 1963-66 and the Vietnam conflict from 1962 to 1972. While the first two ended satisfactorily from a Western perspective, the third proved far more prolonged and problematical.

The core of the book recounts Australia's political and military enmeshment in the ill-fated American effort to prop up successive anti-communist regimes in Saigon from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Australia's centre-right government was initially a more energetic supporter of Washington's military escalation than its New Zealand counterpart. However, as the quagmire of Vietnam deepened, enthusiasm waned in Canberra too. On the ground, Australian forces served capably, but with little effect in what became a lost cause. At home, the conflict increasingly divided Australians, with a minority of dissenters swelling to a majority wanting withdrawal by the early 1970s--a position eventually adopted by the Labor Opposition. As President Richard Nixon grasped the fig leaf of 'Vietnamisation' to pursue a phased withdrawal and an elusive 'peace with honor', the Australian government followed suit. By late 1972, only military training teams remained and Gough Whitlam's new Labor...