LEWY : America in Vietnam (fülszöveg)
America in Vietnam is the first systematic analysis of the course of the war, American strategy and tactics, the travail of Vietnamization, and the causes of the final collapse of Vietnam. The book also examines the question of American "guilt."
Did Lyndon B. Johnson trick Congress into passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution? Did General Westmoreland's war of attrition have any chance of achieving victory? What are the facts behind body count? refugees? drugs and fragging? Were the mock trials by antiwar activists indicting American performance real or staged? Did the bombing of North Vietnam violate the laws of war? These are some of the issues Guenter Lewy addresses with new insight.
Lewy is the first writer outside the government to avail himself of a rich and indispensable resource – the classified. information about the war contained in the archives of the American military services. These documents – after-action reports of military operations, command directives, field reports and staff studies of the pacification effort, intellgence reports, court-martial records, investigations of war crimes, and the like – reveal a war far more complex in motives and results than any heretofore diclosed.
Part of this book is a record of the American involvement in Vietnam, from its beginnings in the 1950s when the Freneh ábandoned Indochina, to the escalation in the 1960s, to the graduaI disengagement ánd South Vietnam's defeat in the 1970s. Lewy's investigation documents as never before the strategic and tactical failures of the American military, while giving full credit to the few leaders who saw mistakes and failures and worked to combat them.
Part of the book, however, addresses itself to the accusations against the American conduct of the war, actions which critics have denounced as indefensible if not downright criminal. Lewy deals with these charges of genocide, the issues of free-fire zones, bombardment of populated areas, use of incendiary weapons and herbicides, and atrocities committed by individuals. He concludes that "the loss of civilian life in Vietnam was less great than in World War II and Korea and that concern with minimizing the ravages of war was strong." At the same time, Lewy argues that the war was a tragic mistake, not because it was lost but because it was based on false strategic assumptions.
This is a pioneering work which clarifies an emotion-laden subject and clears away the cobwebs of mythology which have helped create the national trauma over Vietnam.
|
|
|
| KATALÓGUS | TARTALOM |
 |
 |
|
 |