I seem to be continuing along with the Vietnam theme, or rather more a wider Indo-China theme, as I have just finished listening to a "Street Without Joy". This is a book really 'of its time' (written by the French journalist Bernard B. Fall who covered the war during this time for the French papers). It describes the ill-fated, tragically French led (but American backed and bank-rolled) prequel to the more famous Second Indo-China War (which then lead into the Vietnam War). The French Indo-China war was covered by the Max Hastings "Vietnam" book, but I felt the flavour of the time really came through in trumps with Bernard B Fall's book. It is an epic story of the demise of an eighteenth century colonial adventure that had out-lived its time and purpose post World War II (see below, I can highly recommend it, being poignant in the extreme as from his privileged perspective Bernard B. Fall saw the train crash coming but could do nothing to advert it):
To me there was a frightening sting in the tail of the book, written in 1964/65. This was after the detailed description of the numerous reasons of the French defeat: be it the gradual and inevitable destruction of the of various forms of the remote defensive French outpost chains; after chronicling the one-by-one demise of the elite French mobile groups as they were continuously ambushed (each valiantly fighting a forlorn campaign to their deaths); after the tragic vulnerability of South Vietnamese citizens not being protected from Viet Minh intimidation (as the Viet Minh came as visitors in the night); after seeing the under performance of the much vaunted "American made" French air power with its inability to dominate the jungle battlefield as promised and after seeing the ability of the Viet Minh to dissipate back into the jungle when conventionally outmatched. It was the last chapter that chronicled the way that the American administration was rinsing and repeating the same pattern of behaviour. The tragedy of the next phase of Vietnam was already written in the stars.