Talks at the Memorial

Vietnam – 30 years on

Australian War Memorial Anniversary Oration by Paul Kelly, 11 November 2005

It is an honour to deliver the Oration at the 64th anniversary of the Australian War Memorial. This is Australia’s most important building, a shrine and a museum. The home of the nation’s heart and of the tomb of its unknown soldier.

The Memorial is forever in my mind’s eye. For 17 years I worked in Old Parliament House, the companion to this building, and after each exit through its old wooden doors, my line of sight ran directly from the lake, along ANZAC Parade, to the dome. The Memorial is integral to the conception of Canberra and to its eventual evolution as a great national capital. Like many Australians I visited the building on my first trip, in 1964, and like many Canberrans I used to attend the dawn service on its grassy slopes each ANZAC morning.

This year constitutes a double anniversary – 40 years since the Menzies cabinet decided upon Australia’s substantive commitment to Vietnam and 30 years since the war ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975. There were no Australian troops in South Vietnam during its final days, but there was an Australian cameraman, Neil Davis, whose footage of a North Vietnamese tank smashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon was transmitted around the world.

After the two world wars, the Vietnam War was the most significant war in Australia’s history. It was a divisive conflict; a war amid the 1960s affluence; a war conceived in strategy yet engulfed by morality; for Australia, it was a limited war beset by its unequal sacrifices – a system of conscription in a society where rising prosperity was not to be disrupted by higher tax or lower welfare in any community-wide burden-sharing to finance the war; ultimately and paradoxically, it became a war not just about an enemy – in this case, communism in Asia – but also about ourselves, our values and our society.

Vietnam was a complex war in its origins and in its nature. At the heart of the strategic and moral appraisal of the Vietnam War lies the eternal conundrum – Western intervention in Vietnam failed and the enemy prevailed, yet the region of South East Asia was saved and domino theory had no application beyond Indochina. This gives rise to the idea, popular in many quarters, of Vietnam as a failed war with good consequences.

It is the ambivalent legacy in which Australia’s ultimate sacrifice must be seen. Between 1962 and 1972 about 50,000 Australians served in the war, with 501 killed or presumed dead and 3,131 wounded.¹

In this oration I have two main purposes – to re-evaluate the meaning of Australia’s Vietnam commitment and then to describe the terms on which the nation has reached a reconciliation over its Vietnam legacy.

It is easy to forget that the Vietnam commitment was a popular war and that our intervention retained public support for a long period. This was a Liberal Party war, initiated by Sir Robert Menzies, championed by Harold Holt, supported by John Gorton, and liquidated by Billy McMahon. It delivered Holt a sweeping victory at the 1966 election. The mass anti-war moratoriums did not eventuate until 1970 – five years after the initial commitment although there had been robust earlier demonstrations.

In Australia, the Vietnam War divided political parties from the start. Four decades later the essential political dispute remains unresolved. The Liberal and Labor parties are frozen on Vietnam into their 1965 positions supporting and opposing the commitment. The parties are unreconciled on the war. In a sense, however, this does not matter because the nation has found its own reconciliation – the Vietnam veterans are now honoured; the war is no longer an active community concern; many Australians now visit Vietnam as tourists.

It was during the Vietnam War that Australia decided it must change as a society. During the course of the war, the White Australia policy was abolished, diplomatic relations were established with China, and our Asian engagement was intensified. Australia saw the inconsistency of fighting for freedom in Asia but denying Asians the right to settle in this country. Vietnam was a catalyst for our transformation and this transformation is a key to our internal reconciliation over Vietnam. In the 1980s Australia accepted about 59,000 Vietnamese refugees. When family reunion is included about 190,000 Indochinese arrived in the 20 years from 1975, the main decisions taken under Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, who was a prominent minister during the war. This was an acceptance of Australia’s moral responsibility arising from the war and it contributed to the creation of a multicultural Australia.

Vietnam represented the great test of the ANZAC ethos and our reconciliation over the war is based upon a deeper and broader acceptance of the ANZAC story. In the 1960s and 1970s many anti-war critics and young people damned the ANZAC legend, claiming that it had helped to legitimate an immoral conflict. This testing of the national story was the challenge ANZAC had to have from a more sceptical generation. Yet three decades later, another generation makes the pilgrimage to Gallipoli and sleeps amid the headstones in a spiritual union with its forebears who gave their lives.

These young Australians are not saying the war was right or wrong. I think, rather, that Vietnam and its veterans have been folded into the encompassing ANZAC story in a final act of reconciliation. This was symbolised by the popular reaction to the Welcome Home march in 1987 and the opening of the Vietnam Memorial on ANZAC Parade in 1992. ANZAC today is more de-politicised than ever; a source of transcending unity; its ownership is universal; it is being interpreted and then re-interpreted by each generation.

There is also a strategic factor that underpins reconciliation over the war. Vietnam is now seen through the prism of the West’s victory over communism in the Cold War. Official historian of the Vietnam era, Peter Edwards says: “Things have changed a lot over 30 years. It is easier now to think of Vietnam not as a war that was lost but as a losing battle within a bigger Cold War struggle that was won.”² It is a critical insight. The Soviet Union was dissolved; communist rule in Europe was vanquished; and the triumph of liberal capitalist democracy provoked Francis Fukuyama to proclaim his "end of history" thesis.

In retrospect, the strategic consequences of the US defeat were not nearly as serious as they appeared at the time. In fact, the US recovered under the Ronald Reagan presidency with his “it’s morning in America” renewal and confrontation of the Soviet Union. The lessons of Vietnam were more specific than general.

At the time, however, Vietnam was seen in America as tantamount to a national crisis – and in 1967 historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr warned that Vietnam must not poison America’s national life.³ The war was widely interpreted as a corruption of American ideals – witness the My Lai massacre – and as a convulsion within its political system – witness the resignation of Lyndon Johnson and the forced resignation of Richard Nixon over Watergate.

Victory in the Cold War transformed the meaning of Vietnam. Thirty years ago its meaning lay in American humiliation – the US was seen to be humbled militarily by a third-world nation and its intervention was widely seen to have reduced America to a moral equivalence with the communists. It was a double blow, a strategic and moral defeat. Even while he fought the Vietnam War, President Nixon said “the objective of any American Administration would be to avoid another war like Vietnam any place in the world.”⁴ The end of the Cold War, however, liberated not just communist nations; it liberated the US from its Vietnam malaise because this victory was almost universally seen as a vindication of US military resolve and of the political and moral superiority of its liberal democracy.

Vietnam, therefore, lost its original meaning as a humiliation and gained a new meaning as a template for the courage and sacrifice that won the Cold War. Twentieth century history assumed a startling clarity – the victory of liberal democracy over fascism and communism with Vietnam shrunk into a mere episode in this epic.

In summary, Australia’s national reconciliation over Vietnam is impressive. But reconciliation involves more than just incorporating the Vietnam veterans into their rightful place in the ANZAC pantheon. It is too easy to forget Vietnam as a story in its own right, a story of Australian success and failure.

A decade ago one of the war’s architects, former US Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara said: “We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why … I want Americans to understand why we made the mistakes we did, and to learn from them.”⁵ Do Australia’s current and former leaders feel any such obligation? There is, frankly, little sign of it. Yet 30 years' distance is enough time to allow Australia to assess, again, the lessons of Vietnam. It is important that we make this assessment. What is the alternative – to forget and to succumb to the great Australian amnesia? That only dishonours the troops who fought and died in Vietnam. We should, therefore, strive to remember Vietnam and to grapple with its meaning.

Let me offer five perspectives on that meaning.

First, Vietnam was commissioned by the Second World War generation. The war needs to be understood as a generational project. It came from the Democratic administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. As David Halberstam told us, the decisions were made by “the best and the brightest", symbolised by Kennedy’s intelligence and Robert McNamara’s brilliance.⁶ Yet there are limits to brilliance. After Kennedy’s first cabinet meeting Vice-President Johnson told his Texan friend Sam Rayburn how clever and glamorous they were – but Rayburn replied: “Lyndon, they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I'd feel a whole lot better if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”⁷ The war was pioneered not by US conservatives but, using the American sense of the word, by US liberals.

The resolution of the “greatest generation” was invoked by Kennedy in his first inaugural – sending the word “to friend and foe alike” that a new generation had come to power that was willing to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty”.

Wars are usually the product of powerful ideas. This is more true of Vietnam than of most wars. The two ideas at the war’s inception were that communism was the enemy and that the enemy would only be defeated by repudiating appeasement. In 1965 the decision Lyndon Johnson faced was whether to escalate the war or let the communists win in South Vietnam. These were Johnson’s real options and they make his decision more explicable. LBJ choose to take a stand. He saw the alternative as appeasement and moral failure. Johnson’s war decision had a powerful logic in its historical context.

McNamara in his 1995 critique said: “I want to be clearly understood – the United States of America fought in Vietnam for eight years for what I believed to be good and honest reasons. By such action, administrations of both parties sought to protect our security, prevent the spread of totalitarian Communism and promote individual freedom and political democracy."⁸ The point, of course, is that the enemy was real – the Second World War generation was right, not wrong, in identifying the communist threat.

In Australia the link between Vietnam and the Second World War generation was more direct. Vietnam was Menzies’ war; the documents leave no other view. He commissioned it and bade farewell nine months later. Menzies by the mid-1960s was part-real and part-legend, a friend of Winston Churchill, a participant in the British War Cabinet, the Prime Minister from 1939 who authorised the despatch of the second AIF. In 1964 when he visited Washington Menzies felt, probably incorrectly, he had established a rapport with Johnson, remarking after their meeting, that as professional politicians “it was a case of deep calling unto deep".⁹

Vietnam came in the "Menzian" twilight. It bears the stamp of his confidence and complacency. It also bears the stamp of External Affairs Minister Sir Paul Hasluck, a diplomat during the Second World War, the official historian of that war, a foreign policy realist and an anti-appeasement conformist convinced that the fate of middle powers such as Australia would be determined by the interaction of great powers.

The main lesson from the life experience of this generation was that appeasement of totalitarian enemies was neither the proper moral nor strategic response – the road to Vietnam began at Munich.

My second perspective is that Vietnam represented the shift in Australia’s strategic mindset and emotional loyalty from Britain to America. Vietnam was the first war Australia fought without Britain and our fourth war fought with the United States in a still unbroken sequence. This shift was driven by Australia’s conservative political leaders and its military and diplomatic chiefs.

Vietnam, therefore, is a pivotal event in the demise of the imperial outlook and the imperial imagination in Australia’s political establishment. Just as the fall of Singapore has been exaggerated as this turning point, the Vietnam commitment has been underestimated in the eclipse of our imperial ideal and the demise of our British race patriotism.

The decade from 1954 to 1964 saw a dramatic change in Australia’s mindset. During 1954, with the French facing defeat in the first Indochina war, the West was split – Britain and America were divided – Britain wanted a political settlement in Vietnam while the Eisenhower Administration’s spokesman, John Foster Dulles, advocated military intervention in support of the French at Dien Bien Phu.

The Menzies cabinet went with the British. In Geneva External Affairs Minister, R.G. Casey bluntly told Dulles and British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that “intervention would be wrong” because it would not have United Nations support, it would be unacceptable to world and Asian opinion, it would wreck the Geneva Conference, and it would not save the French position.¹⁰ When Casey reported to cabinet on the Geneva Agreements in July 1954 he seemed to accept the possibility of a communist-controlled Vietnam provided that a line was drawn at Vietnam's border and enforced by the new collective defence treaty, SEATO.¹¹

After Casey’s meeting with Chinese Premier Chou En-lai at Geneva he returned keen to establish diplomatic relations with China, a proposal that Casey took to cabinet. But Menzies was opposed and in 1955 the cabinet rejected Casey’s submission. In cabinet, Casey argued that while the Americans would not be happy, he could nonetheless mollify them. His biographer, W.J. Hudson, said that “if Casey had been given his head in 1955, he would soon have had Australian diplomats in Peking”¹² and suggested, in this situation, the Vietnam War “might have taken a different form” given that so much of the war’s causes lay in ignorance about China.¹³ Casey’s view in 1954 was that the only people who could beat the Vietnamese communists were the Vietnamese non-communists.

Between 1954 and 1964 the Menzies cabinet abandoned the British position in favour of the American position. This revision recognised Britain’s declining influence and Menzies' pragmatism in cultivating a new great and powerful friend.

My third perspective is that our political motives were more about deepening the US alliance than about saving South Vietnam. Vietnam heralded a new Australian strategy based upon the United States. For Australia, the Vietnam War was not an aberration – it was the culmination of a decade of diplomacy to bind America to Australia’s regional security needs. Its origins lay in the obsession within the Menzies cabinet during the 1960s that as a legal document the ANZUS Treaty was defective – witness cabinet’s concern about the qualifications Washington placed on its obligations to Australia in respect of our military support for Malaysia during the Indonesian Confrontation.¹⁴ In this sense the Government saw US concern about the deterioration of South Vietnam as a strategic opportunity for Australia.

During 1964, Menzies and Hasluck decided that Vietnam was the key to the region and that Australia should encourage Washington’s commitment to Saigon. In his official history Edwards shows that from the end of 1964 the Menzies Government “made a consistent effort to influence American policy in the direction of strong action in order to prevent the fall of Saigon".¹⁵ In those vital early months of 1965, with President Johnson equivocal about his policy, Australia took a firm view – it wanted a US military commitment; it backed air strikes against North Vietnam; it opposed negotiations advocated by many nations, including Britain; and it supported the hawks in Washington.

Australia’s decision-makers had drawn the obvious lesson from the 1939–41 period: the main task was to get America into the war.

Our leaders in 1965 had a profound faith in American hegemony. For the Second World War generation it was inconceivable that America would lose in Vietnam. Little weight was given to any pessimistic evaluation that the US would fail to realise its objectives and what that failure would mean for Australia.¹⁶ Australia’s most prominent military hawk, Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Air Marshal Frederick Scherger said: “It was never conceivable to us that America would lose.”¹⁷ The Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General John Wilton, was told by his Director of Military Intelligence that the war was winnable.¹⁸

The army and the military chiefs wanted a Vietnam commitment and in December 1964 they recommended a battalion. Their chairman, Scherger, exceeded his brief and virtually offered his US counterparts a battalion before any final political decision.¹⁹ More than 30 years later, Hasluck’s departmental head, Arthur Tange, was still seething about his minister’s refusal to put his cautionary warnings before the cabinet. Tange said Hasluck refused to qualify “low quality” advice from the Chiefs of Staff.²⁰

But it would have made no difference. Menzies was going to war – with resolute support from Country Party leader John McEwen and Holt. In April 1965, they offered a battalion to the US before any formal request from Washington.²¹

Menzies was emphatic – we were backing the US and he believed the psychological impact on the US would be “phenomenally valuable".²² Australia’s decision was taken without any request by the South Vietnamese Government and such a request had to be procured. After reviewing the documents, former diplomat Garry Woodard says of the South Vietnamese: “The sentiment of concern for them was absent from cabinet discussion.” The documents suggest that Australia’s decision was more about securing a US commitment to the region than a serious assessment of how to defeat communism in Indochina.

A judgement, in retrospect, is that Australia’s handling of America was a tactical success but a strategic failure – the Vietnam legacy would be a US retreat from the Asian mainland given formal expression in Nixon’s Guam Doctrine.

My fourth perspective is that Australia misunderstood the nature of the Vietnam War, a serious mistake in any military commitment. For Australia, there were two Vietnam Wars: the imaginary war as conceived by the Coalition leadership and the actual war in Vietnam. In announcing the commitment, Menzies said the conflict “must be seen as part of a thrust by Communist China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans”.

This was an unfortunate over-simplification, the origins of which have been documented.²³ But it was revealing – it confirmed that for Menzies the real political threat was China; the need to carry public opinion made it essential that China be the ultimate enemy. Such a misinterpretation of the war weakened the intellectual case for intervention from start to finish.

This misinterpretation, however, drew upon the re-definition of Australian policy by Hasluck during his 1964 visit to the region. For Hasluck, the key became Hanoi and behind Hanoi was China. It was Hasluck, before the war, who began to depict North Vietnam as an agent of China’s influence. From the region he cabled: “I am still not clear to what extent Peking controls Hanoi or whether Peking is content to let Hanoi make the running, knowing that China will inevitably receive the ultimate dividend.”²⁴ Containing China became the unifying theme of Hasluck’s Asian policy and Vietnam fitted into this picture.

The more substantial misinterpretation, however, was Australia’s official view that the conflict in South Vietnam was an externally imposed threat from the North, rather than recognising it had complex origins partly as an indigenous rebellion against a South Vietnamese elite with the communists laying claim to a nationalist revolution. Australia’s official view of the war was in tension with the actual experience of the Australian Task Force in Phuoc Tuy province.²⁵

This misinterpretation highlights why Western intervention failed. Robert McNamara says, in retrospect, that before Johnson’s 1965 decision to escalate the war, the two conditions for success were not available – political stability was unlikely to be achieved in South Vietnam and the South Vietnamese, even with US training and support, were incapable of defending themselves.”²⁶ McNamara did not reach such conclusions at the time.

The Government exaggerated the extent to which Vietnam could affect Australia’s security; it exaggerated the “Chinese aggression” interpretation; it underestimated the revolutionary movement in South Vietnam; and it underestimated how much Western intervention depended upon a viable Saigon administration for its success. Ultimately, the gulf between the actual war and the official war was unsustainable.

This point was made by General Peter Gration in a 1987 reflection, when assessing the situation in Phuoc Tuy province, the location of the Australian Task Force: “The truth is that we knew very little about the province when we went in – of its long history of struggle against the French, of its history as a Viet Minh stronghold in the war against the French … of the almost complete control of the province by the VC in 1966, based on a strongly entrenched political and military organisation and extensive popular support or of the numerous local accommodations between both villages and government forces and the VC. Some of our own official perceptions of the war as an invasion from the north did not fit this local situation where there was a locally supported revolutionary war in an advanced stage, albeit with support and direction from the north. Many of the people of Phuoc Tuy were the VC and despite our nearly six years of operations in which we had continual and considerable military success, we weakened the local units but never destroyed them or prevented them from recruiting and continuing to regenerate and fight.”²⁷

It is hard to imagine a greater contrast between the war depicted by our political leaders and the war described by Gration.

In his history of the Training Team, Ian McNeill said the Australian advisers found the local South Vietnamese forces to be “poorly led by officers who lacked interest and drive, to consist of troops without motivation and to be inadequately administered and supplied.”²⁸ As Frank Frost has argued in his analysis of Australia’s role, while the Task Force operated with tactical proficiency, the National Liberation Front (NLF) still maintained its political structure in the villages in Phuoc Tuy. In 1970 the Chief of the General Staff, General Daly said “the main problem” in Phuoc Tuy was the need to confront the NLF’s organisation. Despite its successes, the Task Force was unable to establish an integrated working relationship with the South Vietnamese Administration and the skills of the Australian forces were not readily transferable to the local forces.²⁹ This is why Vietnamisation was never likely to succeed in the province, a micro-demonstration of Robert McNamara’s general proposition.

My fifth perspective is that Vietnam is the most serious example of the Australian post–Second World War template of warfare. This model is defined by wars that are highly political, limited in terms of Australia’s contribution, based upon US-led coalitions of the willing, demand intense management of domestic public opinion, embody a synthesis of military and political objectives, and require for success a coherent political ally in the country of intervention able to muster both popular support and political legitimacy. It is a complex model of warfare that varies according to each location. There have now been five such wars spanning more than half a century – Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, Afghanistan and Iraq, though two other important interventions should be included under a wider umbrella – East Timor and the defence of Malaysia.

This template has become the Australian way of war, whose principles are too sensitive to be formally expressed.

Harold Holt was famous for his slogan “all the way with LBJ”, yet as Peter Edwards argues, Australia was never all the way with LBJ. The slogan was an embarrassment for its servility yet misleading about Australia’s intent. The essence of these political wars is that Australia’s commitment is calculated; by definition, it excludes any “all the way” mentality. This is apparent from our Iraq commitment and it was documented over Vietnam.

In mid-1967 Johnston sent to the region his personal envoy, Clark Clifford, to seek more military support from the allies. During his seven-hour meeting with the Holt cabinet Clifford said that extra forces were needed, that Johnson with a war-induced budget deficit had to raise taxes, and that if allies did "some more” then the US could do “a great deal more”. Holt was unbending: he said Australia had its own economic problems and he turned Clifford down.

Clifford understood – he saw to the heart of Australia’s limited war strategy. Within months he had succeeded McNamara as US Secretary of Defense and began the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam. Clifford said later of this visit to America's regional allies: “I returned home puzzled, troubled, concerned. Was it possible that our assessment of the danger to the stability of South East Asia and the Western Pacific was exaggerated?”³⁰ He noted that Australia, having sent hundreds of thousands of troops overseas in the world war, would only send 7000 to Vietnam. Clifford’s colleagues have reported that the discussion in Canberra was important in changing his mind.³¹ Clifford concluded that America must have exaggerated the danger to the region from a communist victory in Vietnam.

The irony is that Holt’s only real influence on US policy was to encourage its withdrawal from the war.³²

It is salutary for Australians to remember that in both absolute and per capita terms the US sacrifice in these wars – from Korea to Iraq – has been far greater than Australia’s. American casualties in Vietnam were 58,000 dead, exceeding Australia’s by a multiple of one hundred.

The Australian technique is to limit the military cost and to maximise the political gain. Vietnam offers insights into this technique – it was proactive, calculating and political. The reality about Vietnam, however, is that it did strain our resources and cost more than 500 lives in the pursuit of political objectives. Our military performance was limited but superior. Our commitment was more valuable for the US in political terms since Australia, a respected middle power, went to Vietnam when most other US allies declined to attend.

Let me now address the historically challenging question about Vietnam that re-occurs with each generation.

Did Australia have a choice?

Our choices on Vietnam were limited if upholding the alliance is the working assumption. Given this reality it was difficult for Australia to excuse itself when the US took a military stand backed by more than 50,000 casualties to halt communism in our region. The critics of the war have never explained how Australia could have upheld the alliance yet absented itself from Vietnam. This was the test at the time, as Gough Whitlam conceded. Whitlam accepted that as ALP leader his challenge was to reconcile Labor opposition to war with its support for the US alliance. Given this task, Labor is fortunate to have been in opposition during the 1960s. In 1972, when he came to office, Whitlam was helped immeasurably because virtually all Australian personnel had been withdrawn.

On the other hand, if opponents of the war believe the price of opposition was the sacrifice of an effective US alliance, then they lose the argument. Australia’s political culture would not accept this trade-off and Australia’s strategic culture would be decoupled from its central organising principle.

The Australian scholars most familiar with the decision-making believe that Australia had to make some commitment. Peter Edwards says: “I don't think in the context of 1965 that any Australian Government could have avoided making some commitment to the war without endangering the American alliance.”³³ A critic of the war, Garry Woodard, argues that Australia’s extra battalion in 1965 could have gone to Malaysia. This would have maintained the Indonesia–Malaysia arena as Australia’s priority, thereby setting up a strategic “division of labour” with the US – America would focus on Indochina while Britain and Australia would handle the Indonesian Confrontation. This would have permitted Australia in 1965 to have made a more modest contribution to Vietnam. Woodard suggests Washington would have been satisfied for the time being.³⁴

My own view is different. Once that irresistible political giant Lyndon Johnson turned the heat on any Australian Government over troops, the game was up – we had to be in or out. Clever ideas about the “division of labour” would not suffice. Given the pace of US escalation from early 1965, it is inconceivable that Johnson would not have sought Australian combat troops and it is unrealistic to think some combat forces would not have been provided. In his retirement Sir Arthur Tange told me: “I don’t think we had any choice.” This view carries weight because Tange, head of the Department of External Affairs until just before the final decision, also said: “I avoided the commitment when I was in a position to offer any advice.”³⁵

It is convenient 30 years later to ignore that in 1965 Indonesia and China represented significant challenges to the region and to Australia. The Second World War generation had seen the spread of communism in Europe in a country-by-country, falling domino effect. It became typical post-Vietnam to see the 1950s and 1960s “forward defence” concept as discredited, yet this is a flawed judgement.

Forward defence was sensible in its time given the instability in the region and the willingness of the US and UK to make substantial contributions to regional stability. It would have been a self-defeating act of introspection if Australia had declined a forward defence strategy. The successes of forward defence are easily forgotten – the 1950s Malayan Emergency sparked by a communist-inspired insurgency and the defence of Malaysia against Indonesia in the 1960s. A Whitlam Government White Paper described forward defence as “a policy developed in Australia independently of any outside pressure.”³⁶ It was a policy for a region in transition. Its success depended, ultimately, on case-by-case judgements. But the policy came undone on Vietnam.

The process by which Australia took its Vietnam decision, was that of imperfect knowledge leading to unsatisfactory results.

The justification for the war was put best by Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew – it helped to shield South East Asia and convert the region into a success story. There is no gainsaying this proposition. It is, of course, difficult to predict how adventurous Asian communism would have become if Vietnam had been reunited in 1965 instead of 1975 and whether insurgencies would have claimed other nations for the communists. It is a fact, however, that when Saigon fell in 1975 the rest of the region was not destabilised. Would the domino theory have been obsolete a decade earlier? There is no conclusive answer.

Yet the notion that any of Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore or Indonesia would have gone communist in the 1960s because Vietnam fell strains credibility. It also overlooks that it was Vietnam’s special history, tying nationalism and communism together, that made a successful US intervention so improbable. And Vietnam’s history was not replicated elsewhere.

The strategic irony that surrounds Australia’s involvement is that the alarm that provoked the war – the perceived threat from China, from Asian communism, and from an aggressive regime in Jakarta – was in retreat long before the war finished. President Sukarno was replaced by an anti-communist government; Richard Nixon and Gough Whitlam were pioneering détente with China; and South East Asian regionalism began to grow. This changing dynamic meant that Vietnam was seen increasingly as the product of a strategic alarm that no longer existed. In Australia the fear of Asian communism, palpable in 1965, faded with remarkable despatch and, as it faded, so did support for the war.

However, this dynamic also undermined the argument of the anti-war forces that Australia had to choose between the war and good relations with the region. Such zero-sum fatalism is usually misleading. The Vietnam war did not cripple Australia’s ties with the region and successive governments pursued simultaneously both the war and such closer ties. Indeed, the reverse can be argued – that Australia’s stake in the region was enlarged because of the commitment.

At home Vietnam left a damaging legacy. It diminished the reputations of Menzies, Holt, and Gorton. At the 1972 election the war was a negative for the Coalition. Malcolm Fraser, long a defender of the intervention, finally changed his mind and after his retirement from politics told me: “Judging some of the things that I now know about the United States’ conduct of the war, I guess I wish we weren’t part of it … at the end of it, the whole war was a failure.”³⁷ While conscription was introduced before the war, the combination of Vietnam and conscription proved a double negative. As Prime Minister John Howard has observed, the method of conscription – a random process based on birthdays – was a mistake. It is unlikely to be repeated.

The substantive Vietnam legacy has resided in two ideas, one permanent and other transitory. They are a deeper Australian maturity and a strategic doctrine based upon the defence of Australia.

Vietnam turned Australia into a more grown-up nation. It was the catalyst towards true maturity which I define as accepting responsibility for our own fate in the world. Bob O’Neill said: “I think Australia became a much more mature international actor after the Vietnam War.”³⁸ Kim Beazley said Australia’s maturity was “instructed” by Nixon’s Guam Doctrine and that Australia now knew it had “to make its own way.”³⁹

The war was a learning experience for Australia. We learnt that America could quickly change its mind; that its forces were not unbeatable; that America had no monopoly of wisdom about other nations; that Australia had to make its own judgements based on its own intellectual resources; and that the US alliance, a national asset for Australia, could also be a liability. These were important lessons 30 years ago in the craft of alliance management and, presumably, they are not forgotten.

This maturity is embedded in our national strategy. The 2000 Defence White Paper says of the ANZUS Treaty that our undertakings to the US are as important as the US undertakings to Australia. Our assumption is that while we expect US support in the case of an attack upon Australia, we no longer assume that US combat forces would be provided to compensate for our own deficiencies. The deepest sign of national maturity, however, has been Australia’s bipartisan "engagement with Asia" project. This recognises that integration into our region is the ultimate security guarantee.

For the generation beyond the war, Vietnam was the dominant political and strategic influence. Whitlam, the first post-Vietnam Prime Minister, sought to purge Australia’s racist and colonialist traditions and to abandon any military role in Asia. The politicians concluded that Australia had offered America too much uncritical support and that a corrective was essential. This was the view of each prime minister from Whitlam to Paul Keating.

This sentiment was given formal strategic expression in the 1980s when the Hawke Government embraced the doctrine of defence self-reliance, as propounded by our most prominent strategist, Paul Dibb. This was an exercise in post-Vietnam rationality. Defence self-reliance focused on the permanence of Australia’s geography and not the dynamics of its region. It was a repudiation of the Vietnam mentality. Its declaration of defence self-reliance was a threshold event in the nation’s life.

The Dibb doctrine offered defence policy a new anchor, finding in geography and technology a means of defeating an enemy en route to the continent. The Australian tradition of expeditionary forces from Gallipoli to Vietnam was thrown into retreat and the Army into relative decline.

Twenty-five years after Vietnam, the Hawke Government’s first Gulf War decision was dominated by the Vietnam legacy. Our leaders and our military had Vietnam in their heads; the shadow of the 1960s had extended into the 1990s. We avoided any combat troop presence; the resort to military force was highly qualified; and the political speeches were fixated on the Vietnam analogy. The obsession seemed ludicrous, an impression validated by the brevity and success of the war. The Gulf War was the final genuflection before the ghost of Vietnam. Sometime in the 1990s it was finally laid to rest.

Over the last decade the matrix of Asian engagement, the US alliance, support for UN multilateralism, and the so-called war on terrorism has driven a series of military commitments that represent a re-assertion of the Australian expeditionary tradition within a more independent framework. Somalia, Cambodia, Bougainville, and the East Timor intervention showed that military policy needs the mobility to reinforce an international foreign policy. This view reached a contemporary zenith in the commitments to Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is tempting to see in John Howard a synthesis involving the more mature Australia and the return to the expeditionary instinct within a philosophy of self-reliance. Howard’s political judgments about Iraq seem to be acute. They are the refinement of the Australian template of warfare – minimum military cost for maximum political gain. Howard seems to have absorbed the lessons of Vietnam.

However, any such judgement is far too premature, and this brings me to my final point.

Is our internal reconciliation over Vietnam based upon a true understanding of that war or a desire to forget? Iraq is a very different war to Vietnam. However, the principles in this intervention are similar to the principles in the Vietnam intervention. Let us consider them: the critical factor in the Iraq war lies in the viability of US aims; in an understanding of the true nature of the conflict; in a proper appreciation of the enemy in Iraq; in the extent of popular support enjoyed by our Iraqi allies; in a recognition that military power is not enough; and, for Australia, in a prudent assessment of the consequences if the US fails to realise its aims.

The check-list is almost identical with the Vietnam check-list that was so badly misread in 1965. As I have argued, Australia is reconciled with its Vietnam legacy. But is this reconciliation based upon a wisdom or a compulsory to denial? Have we learnt from Vietnam or have we repeated the mistakes? This is the question that hovers over the bridge between Vietnam and Iraq.

 

¹Jeffrey Grey, A military history of Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 241

²Refer my interview with Peter Edwards, The Australian, 30 April 2005

³Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, The bitter heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy, 1941–66, Sphere Books, London, 1967, p. 117

⁴Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol, The war over Iraq, Encounter Books, 2003, p. 66

⁵Robert S. McNamara, In retrospect, Times Books, 1995, p. xvi

⁶David Halberstam, The best and the brightest, Barrie & Jenkins, London, 1972

⁷ibid, p. 41

⁸McNamara, op. cit., p. 318

⁹Garry Woodard, Asian alternatives: Australia’s Vietnam decision and lessons on going to war, Melbourne University Publishing, Carlton, 2004, p. 325

¹⁰David Lee, "The Liberals and Vietnam", Australian Journal of Politics and History, Volume 51, Number 3, 2005, p. 432

¹¹ibid, p. 433

¹²W.J. Hudson, Casey, Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 253

¹³ibid, pp. 252–53

¹⁴Peter Edwards, Crisis and commitments, Allen and Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1992, Sydney, Chapter 14

¹⁵ibid, p. 335

¹⁶ibid, pp. 374–75

¹⁷ibid, p. 375

¹⁸David Horner, Strategic command, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2005, p. 230

¹⁹Edwards, op. cit., pp. 351–75

²⁰Woodard, op. cit., p. 206

²¹Peter Edwards, op. cit., Chapter 18

²²ibid, p. 362

²³ibid, pp. 372–73

²⁴Woodard, op. cit., pp. 158–160

²⁵Refer Frank Frost, Australia’s war in Vietnam, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1987. The view of the Vietnam War is complicated because the nature of the war changed as it became more protracted. The role of North Vietnamese conventional forces become more pronounced, particular after the Tet offensive that weakened communist forces in the South and the final 1975 offensive that ended the war was a North Vietnamese operation.

²⁶McNamara, op. cit., p. 306

²⁷Refer Frank Frost, "Conflict and withdraw", in Gregory Pemberton (ed), Vietnam remembered, Lansdown, 1996

²⁸ibid

²⁹ibid

³⁰Gregory Pemberton, All The way: Australia’s road to Vietnam, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1987, p. 327

³¹See the assessment of former Under Secretary of the Air Force, Townsend Hoopes, in Pemberton, ibid, p. 327

³²Peter Edwards, A nation at war, Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1997, pp. 150–56

³³Paul Kelly, "A war lost, a peace won", The Australian, 30 April 2005

³⁴Woodard, op. cit., pp. 314–28

³⁵Sir Arthur Tange, personal interview with Paul Kelly in 2000 for the ABC television series “100 years – the Australian story”

³⁶Paul Kelly, 100 years – the Australian story, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2001, p. 236

³⁷ibid, pp. 45–46

³⁸Bob O’Neill, personal interview in 2000 for the ABC television series "100 years – the Australian story"

³⁹Paul Kelly, 100 years – the Australian story, op. cit., pp. 257–68