Vietnam. Black April: The fall of South Vietnam 1973–1975 By George J. Veith New York: Encounter Books, 2012. Pp. 587. Maps, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Abstract

Black April: The fall of South Vietnam 1973-1975 By GEORGE J. VEITH New York: Encounter Books, 2012. Pp. 587. Maps, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463414000526 The defining themes of politics in Southeast Asia after the Second World War were decolonisation and state building, especially efforts to construct the postcolonial state. These experiences were frequently violent: the Indonesian Revolution, the Malayan Emergency, Indonesian Confrontation, internal upheavals in the Philippines. But all states constructed in the region during this turbulent era survived, in one form or another, into our own time. Except one: the Republic of Vietnam (ROV), better known to the wider world as South Vietnam. The ROV was enabled by one international agreement, in 1954, and exposed by another, in 1973. In the end it was destroyed, in a civil war, by brute force of arms. The Ho Chi Minh Campaign, or Spring Offensive, launched in March 1975 by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), was the largest military campaign ever fought in Southeast Asia by Southeast Asians. More than one million Vietnamese fought each other, to determine whether or not a non-communist state would survive in Vietnam; at least 100,000 lost their lives, as did at least as many civilians. These two facts alone--the destruction of a state, and the nature, size and consequences of the military campaign that destroyed it--surely define the fall of South Vietnam as an event that warrants more serious study, by those interested in the modern experience of Southeast Asia. Yet this final phase of the long wars in Vietnam remains the third rail in the massive English-language scholarly literature devoted to those wars. There are a few exceptions; most noteworthy are Arnold Isaac's 1983 study Without honour: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia and James Willbank's 2004 study Abandoning Vietnam: How America left and South Vietnam lost its war. The titles indicate the problem: American intervention redefined the conflict into The Vietnam War--an American label--then and now. George J. Veith does not depart from this compulsion to weave the United States tightly into the story of the Vietnamese civil war. In fact he identifies American policies and attitudes as an integral part of this final phase of that war. But he does so by producing the first professional scholarly campaign study of the fall of South Vietnam that places agency for that campaign where it belongs: in Vietnamese hands. Veith's study thoroughly mines a large body of Vietnamese and American primary and secondary sources, memoirs and interviews. With translation help from Merle Pribbenow, Veith documents, in detail and with insight, how two Vietnamese governments and armed forces fought out their civil war on the battlefield. The argument of the book rests on four main points. First, the DRV immediately, deliberately, and systematically violated a peace agreement not only imposed on the ROV in the first place but whose very terms already compromised it. The communist government in Hanoi did so in order to terminate, by armed force, their long struggle to create a unified revolutionary state in Vietnam. …