I think it can be easy to have a gap in one's knowledge of history in the range of stuff that happened maybe 10 - 20 years before one hits high school or college. One was too young (or not even born) to remember events personally, and yet the events aren't historical enough to have been incorporated into standard textbooks.
For me, this period covers the events leading up to and the early years of the Vietnam War. I started noticing politics and wars and things towards the end of the war, but I was too young to remember the beginnings, and our high school history book ended shortly after the start of the Cold War.
So, this is all a long-winded way of saying that I'm happy to see a highly rated (4.6 out of 5.0, with almost 200 reviews, and per the blurb, a
Sunday Times bestseller) history of the war on sale for £0.99 as part of the Daily Deal today at Kindle UK.
Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975 by Sir Max Hasting:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vietnam-Epi...dp/B07C96DX1C/
Spoiler:
Quote:
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 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 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 Minh’s 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.
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