OFFICIAL - YET CRITICAL - HISTORY

Do not let your antiestablishment or antimilitary convictions keep you away from this first volume of the United States Army's official history of the war in Vietnam. Not only is this book written with admirable candor and detachment by a historian who has amply established his credentials in writing unofficial history (since writing the book, Ronald Spector has left the Center of Military History to take a teaching position in the History Department of the University of Alabama); in addition, it will serve as an indispensable guide to any subsequent historians who may wish to go exploring among the primary sources on the beginnings of the American involvement in Vietnam. It so well supplements what we already know about France's Indochina War from 1945 to 1954 with insights drawn from various official American observers' reports on the French experience that it may well stand for a considerable time to come as the most comprehensive (from an American perspective) history of the last years of France's Asian empire, as well as of the beginnings of the American effort to succeed where France had failed in preserving Western influence on the shores of the Gulf of Tonkin and the South China Sea. Since World War II, United States Army official histories have set a high standard for the genre in terms of accuracy, completeness, and objective analysis by civilian historians.1 Yet Ronald H. Spector's book excels the army's usual standard. It is characteristic of the candor of Spector's judgments, and indeed of the larger independence of judgment permitted to historians by the Army's Center of Military History, that one of Spector's principal lines of interpretation collides directly with the views of an influential and growing, if not predominant, school of military criticism among active army officers. Exemplified best and most importantly by On Strategy: A Criticial Analysis of the Vietnam War (1982), by Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., of the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College,2 these views hold that the