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A review by jimg
Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina by Marshall Andrews, Bernard B. Fall, George C. Herring
A terrific book that provides grim details about the folly of attempting to fight ideology with military technology alone. Most of Fall's book deals with the French loss of the territory that became North Vietnam. Near the end we find the US making the same errors as the French in trying to "liberate" South Vietnam.
Fall asks why it is that we need to pit elite Western forces with all manner of technically superior fire power against relatively poorly trained and only rarely equally equipped rebel troops. His answer:
"The answer is very simple: It takes all the technical proficiency our system can provide to make up for the woeful lack of popular support and political savvy of most of the regimes that the West has thus far sought to prop up."
This point could be repeated in a variety of ways -- and Fall does. He notes early on in the book that the failure of the French to insist on land reform, thus freeing the vast number of people in the country from an oppressive elite of landed gentry essentially doomed the French military efforts to certain failure despite all of their gallantry.
Fall asks why it is that we need to pit elite Western forces with all manner of technically superior fire power against relatively poorly trained and only rarely equally equipped rebel troops. His answer:
"The answer is very simple: It takes all the technical proficiency our system can provide to make up for the woeful lack of popular support and political savvy of most of the regimes that the West has thus far sought to prop up."
This point could be repeated in a variety of ways -- and Fall does. He notes early on in the book that the failure of the French to insist on land reform, thus freeing the vast number of people in the country from an oppressive elite of landed gentry essentially doomed the French military efforts to certain failure despite all of their gallantry.