Vietnam: An Epic History of a Tragic War

(Paperback)

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THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

His masterpiece Antony Beevor, Spectator

A masterful performance Sunday Times

By far the best book on the Vietnam War Gerald Degroot, The Times, Book of the Year
Vietnam became the Western worlds most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the United States in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. He portrays the set pieces of Dienbienphu, the Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam, and less familiar battles such as the bloodbath at Daido, where a US Marine battalion was almost wiped out, together with extraordinary recollections of Ho Chi Minhs warriors. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed 2 million people.

Many writers treat the war as a US tragedy, yet Hastings sees it as overwhelmingly that of the Vietnamese people, of whom forty died for every American. US blunders and atrocities were matched by those committed by their enemies. While all the world has seen the image of a screaming, naked girl seared by napalm, it forgets countless eviscerations, beheadings and murders carried out by the communists. The people of both former Vietnams paid a bitter price for the Northerners victory in privation and oppression. Here is testimony from Vietcong guerrillas, Southern paratroopers, Saigon bargirls and Hanoi students alongside that of infantrymen from South Dakota, Marines from North Carolina, Huey pilots from Arkansas.

No past volume has blended a political and military narrative of the entire conflict with heart-stopping personal experiences, in the fashion that Max Hastings readers know so well. The author suggests that neither side deserved to win this struggle with so many lessons for the 21st century about the misuse of military might to confront intractable political and cultural challenges. He marshals testimony from warlords and peasants, statesmen and soldiers, to create an extraordinary record.

Reviews

SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON MEDAL FOR MILITARY HISTORY 2019

Masterpiece manages with great skill to combine the accumulation of strategic and political disaster with the real experience of those fighting on the ground Antony Beevor,Spectator

Will surely set the benchmark for years to come This may be his best Exhaustively researched and superbly written, it is both a balanced account of how and why the war unfolded as it did, and a gripping narrative on what it was like to take partHistory as it should be: objective, immersive and compellingDaily Telegraph, 5*

Magnificent One by one, the sacred canons of right and left are obliterated. The war is laid bare, with all its uncomfortable truths exposed The Times

Powerful and chilling Hastings is masterful at describing the conditions faced by young American soldiers [he] is second to none in his ability to describe military strategy with a clarity that makes things entirely understandable to the layman Mail on Sunday, 5*

An altogether magnificent historical narrative Tim OBrien

A masterpiece Frank Scotton

Magnificent, his best work full of extraordinary and compelling detail and thoroughly informed by his own personal experience of so much of the war. It's written in unputdownable style, with a dispassionate, liberal-minded understanding of the detail of the war, which draws on testimony from every side and doesn't favour anyone. I've never read a better history of the wars in Vietnam, and its hard to see how anyone will be able to improve on thisJohn Simpson

Neophytes and experts alike will find Hastingss book stimulating, informative and above all, rivetingNew Statesman

This fabulous work offers up a gut-wrenching glimpse of the reality of war The Sun, 5*

Impressive A fast-paced, poignant and eye-opening readLiterary Review

Author Bio

Max Hastings is the author of twenty-six books, most about conflict, and between 1986 and 2002 served as editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph, then editor of the Evening Standard. He has won many prizes both for journalism and his books, of which the most recent are All Hell Let Loose, Catastrophe and The Secret War, best-sellers translated around the world. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of Kings College, London and was knighted in 2002. He has two grown-up children, Charlotte and Harry, and lives with his wife Penny in West Berkshire, where they garden enthusiastically.