Max Hastings

Vietnam (eBook, ePUB)

An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Vietnam became the Western world's 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 1968 Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam, and much less familiar miniatures such as the bloodbath at Daidowhere a US Marine battalion was almost wiped outtogether with extraordinary recollections of Ho Chi Minh's warriors. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed two million people.

Many writers treat the war as a US tragedy, yet Hastings sees it overwhelmingly as one for 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 we are given testimony from Vietcong guerrillas, Southern paratroopers, Saigon bar girls, and Hanoi students alongside that of infantrymen from South Dakota, Marines from North Carolina, and 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 Hastings's readers know so well. The author suggests that neither side deserved to win this struggle, and presents many lessons for the twenty-first century about the misuse of military might to confront intractable political and cultural challenges. In Vietnam, Hastings marshals testimony from warlords and peasants, statesmen and soldiers, to create an extraordinary record.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: HarperCollins
• Seitenzahl: 896
• Erscheinungstermin: 16. Oktober 2018
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780062405692
• Artikelnr.: 54343306

Autorenporträt

Max Hastings is the author of twenty-eight books, most about conflict, and between 1986 and 2002 served as editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph, then as editor of the Evening Standard. He has won many prizes, for both his journalism and his books, the most recent of which are the bestsellers Vietnam, The Secret War, Catastrophe, and All Hell Let Loose. Knighted in 2002, Hastings is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of King's College London, and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He has two grown children, Charlotte and Harry, and lives with his wife, Penny, in West Berkshire, where they garden enthusiastically.

Rezensionen

"Max Hastings' meticulously researched, superbly written account will now become the standard by which all other histories of the Vietnam War are judged. He leaves no stone unturned in examining three decades of conflict from the vantage points of all combatants at all levels-from offices in Washington, Hanoi, and Saigon and conference tables in Geneva and Paris, to treacherous trips down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, savage fire-fights in jungles and rice paddies, and terror-inducing air attacks. The result is a work both eminently readable and definitive." National War College Professor Mark Clodfelter, author of The Limits of Air Power: The American Bombing of North Vietnam

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 part...History as it should be: objective, immersive and compelling' Daily 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 O'Brien

'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 it's hard to see how anyone will be able to improve on this' John Simpson

'Neophytes and experts alike will find Hastings's book stimulating, informative - and above all, riveting' New 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 read' Literary Review