Overall I think it was fair. It was titled "There is no one truth" or something to that effect. Max Cleland was one of the first speakers. Some may not have noted it.He was the democrat mascot during the 2004 campaign (no mention of how he received his injuries).
First Episode went back to the beginning of French Imperial rule and worked its way to the early 60s. They did an interrupted flash-forward with intermittent personal accounts from some involved in the heavy years of the late 60s.
I thought the content was fair. I just didn't care for the flash-forward style. Seemed to interrupt the flow to me. That was my only negative perception. Format choice, not a content issue.
I agree. Time line was very choppy. Went forward and back way too much.
Several things. The narrator is Peter Coyote, a hardcore leftist (but not necessarily a Marxist).
The background on Ho from France in the “teens until the founding of the Indochinese Communist Party was accurate, including Ho being a Soviet Comintern agent. However, you have to know that he was a French socialist (i.e. Marxist) by 1916, long before he approached Woodrow Wilson.
He started killing off Vietnamese nationalists who opposed the French as early as 1925 with Phan Boi Chau (See: Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Sen. Judiciary Com. study “The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam”, 1972 for more on this early history of Ho. I was the creator of this study and contributed a lot of the research materials in it).
Also see Prof. Robert Turner’s masterpiece “Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development” , Hoover Institution Press, 1975. Bob was one of the few people I know who was both a soldier in Vietnam and then became a diplomat, and was one of the last American’s to leave the Embassy Annex building after helping to save many So. Vietnamese.
Re the OSS and Ho. Ho claims to have fought hard against the Japanese but some histories of that era said that his forces conducted only small hit and run raids, and might have had covert agreements with local Japanese commanders about not attacking each other (Tito did this with the Germans in Yugoslavia so that he could attack the anti-Nazi Chetniks).
Also OSS officer Archimedes Patai was smitten with Ho (aka “duped) into believing his Jefferson “rights” statement and commitment to democracy.
The film did talk a little about Ho destroying the non-communist and even the powerful Trotskyite communist movement in Vietnam (during the so-called Coalition Govt period of 1945-46 - the Lien Viet government. He used Togliatti’s “Salami tactics” to take out real and potential challengers for power, one slice at a time, until the Viet Minh was the last force standing.
Re the fight against the French. They were wrong, period, to try and retake Vietnam, and paid a horrible price for it. However, they were also betrayed by the French Communist Party, an arm of the KGB (even betrayed non-communist Resistance leaders to the Gestapo - exp. Moulin).
The discussion about Ho and his murderers killing “thousands” of people in the 1950’s (the Land Reform Program and related ones), didn’t really give the viewer the extent of that slaughter. Figures from non-communist historians put the minimum losses starting at 50,000 and some internal observers and survivors put it closer to 100,000 - 300,000) out of country (N. Vietnam) with a then population of about 10-15 Million (rough guess but they had a couple million more people than did So. Vietnam.
That leads into the totally misleading comments about the so-called “elections” of 1954. South Vietnam was not allowed to attend the Geneva meeting so it never agreed/signed them, plus the U.S. didn’t either. It was signed between the Communists and the French.
Diem was a tough bastard but he actually unified So. Vietnam into a political entity, rather than a part of the Kingdom of Vietnam. He destroyed the criminals of the Ba Xuyen (or Bihn xuyen), defeated the Cao Dai political sect, and hurt the powerful Hoa Hao to the point that they reached an agreement that allowed the HH to control over 2 provinces in the Mekong Delta (I visited them in Nov. 1970) in exchange for a pledge of loyalty to Diem and the govt in Saigon (not the regime, which is a term Coyote used several times, but it is a propaganda term that the communist have used for decades to “delegitimize” their opponents. PSYOPS terms if you will.
Dien Bien Phu was a masterstroke of military strategy. The arrogant and stupid French commanders against a smarter communist enemy with more manpower than they could ever image. The French are not militarily very imaginative (such as they “imaged” that the “Maginot Line” would stop Hitler. How did that work out for them?).
Keep an eye out of the negative tones that will appear throughout this series. We made a lot of mistakes by not listening to the men who knew Vietnam and communist guerrilla warfare, including Ed Lansdale and Sir Robert Thompson, among others.
You don’t fight a guerrilla war with main force tactics.
However, we had beaten the NVA in 1968, 1969, in Cambodia in 1970 ( I was there later that year and spoke to those who fought against the communists and interviewed several NVA POWS), hurt them in Laos in Op. Lam Som, and helped the ARVN/MArines and VNAF destroy Hanoi’s “Easter Offensive” in 1972.
Great information on this in Jay Veith’s masterwork book “Black April:The Fall of South Vietnam” which showed that some ARVN units did defeat or stop the PAVN in several key battles without much air support or artillery.
Expect the ARVN to get smeared in many of the upcoming episodes, starting with the defeat of one of their companies/battalions at Ap Bac, though it was not quite what you read in the papers. We gave the ARVN M113 armored vehicles WITHOUT GUN SHIELDS which got at least 8 of the 10 machine gunners killed in combat. The M113s hit the VC hard but the lack of protective gunshields cost them their main fire-support, and extremely bad water/rice paddy conditions limited their movements to higher ground, but they fought hard.
See if this comes up in the next episode or two.
If you want to read really well researched material on the Vietnam war by those who fought/served there, go to www.vvfh.org and take a look around. I can guarantee you that what you find is not what is in most “popular” books on the subject, from Karnow to the leftist Hanoi propagandists of Porter, Prados, Appy, Longvello, Turse (the worst) and Young.
I’ll be back with more comments as the Burns series continues. Hopefully some of the guys from VVFH will chime in to. They are among the best VN experienced historians in the U.S. and one of our supporters, Rufus Phillips, was in this first episode. He actually knew Pres. Diem and dealt with him as a Provincial Advisor/diplomat, unlike almost all of the VN critics who never met Diem.
It is kinda like the saying, “If you weren’t there, everything you get is hearsay for the most part”.
At least I can say that I was there (as a journalist) and in Cambodia too. It helps to see the country from 3,000 feet down to 50 ft over a canal or river, then then walk through some of it. Puts a lot of things into perspective.