Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 552 pp. Moyar endorses Ngo Dinh Diem's leadership, and the American decision to go to war in Vietnam. He criticizes the Americans who turned against Diem, and/or turned against the war. I have looked at only a few pages of this book. While Moyar should be commended for his use of Vietnamese sources, in other respects his research seems to have been careless.

One problem is factual errors. I noticed these especially in the section dealing with the Tonkin Gulf incidents of 1964. Almost everyone who writes about Tonkin Gulf makes some errors--I have done so myself--but the number of problems in these pages seems excessive:

p. 310, lines 7-8, refer to "six South Vietnamese commando boats that were speeding southward" on the morning of July 31, 1964. There were only four commando boats, not six.

p. 311, lines 15-16, describing the attack of U.S. aircraft against North Vietnamese torpedo boats on August 2, 1964, says "The aircraft hit two of the boats with nine-foot long Zuni rockets and 20mm gunfire,..." It is very unlikely that even one boat was hit by a Zuni rocket; certainly not two. The pilots firing the Zuni rockets did not believe they had scored any hits with them.

p. 311, lower down, describes how on the evening of August 4, "the Maddox decrypted enemy messages suggesting that unspecified North Vietnamese vessels would soon attack it and the Turner Joy, and one hour later, radar operators on board the Maddox spotted what appeared to be surface vessels advancing toward the two destroyers at speeds of 35 to 40 knots. . . . When the fast-moving radar blips had closed within 7,000 yards of the Turner Joy and the Maddox, both destroyers began firing salvos. Their fire control radar indicated that they were hitting the targets." Difficulties with this include:

• The North Vietnamese vessels were not "unspecified" in the enemy messages; three vessels were clearly identified.
• The enemy messages were not decrypted by the Maddox; they were decrypted by American listening posts at San Miguel (in the Philippines) and Phu Bai (in South Vietnam). It was not the actual decrypted text of the intercepted messages, but a misleading summary of one of them written at Phu Bai, that gave officers on the Maddox the impression they were likely to be attacked. There had been very little in the actual messages to suggest that any attack on anything was contemplated.
• The radar contacts detected shortly after the enemy messages were decrypted were not "advancing toward the destroyers." The record of their movements does not suggest they were trying to approach the destroyers, and they eventually disappeared from the radar without ever having gotten within twenty miles of the destroyers. The two contacts at which the Turner Joy and the Maddox eventually opened fire (one of which was tracked on the radar of the Turner Joy but was invisible to the radar of the Maddox, and the other of which was tracked on the radar of the Maddox but was invisible to the radar of the Turner Joy) had popped up on the radar suddenly at ranges of less than 5 miles, almost an hour after the original contacts had disappeared from the radar at very long range.
• The Maddox had trouble achieving a lock-on with fire control radar. Its main armament (five-inch guns) therefore did no firing against the radar blip that had come in to 7,000 yards, and fired only five shells against one or more other targets over the following two hours. The Maddox did somewhat more firing with its secondary armament, a three-inch gun, apparently considered more appropriate for use without the assistance of fire-control radar. It would be a stretch to call any of the Maddox's fire "salvos", and the Maddox did not claim any hits. The Turner Joy did fire something a bit closer to salvos, and did claim hits.

p. 311, 6th line from bottom: The incident ended two hours nine minutes after the first shots were fired, not four hours.

pp. 312-313: the American retaliatory airstrikes on August 5 did not hit "the North Vietnamese torpedo boat bases." There was only one North Vietnamese torpedo boat base, Van Hoa, and the American airstrikes did not go anywhere near it.

Moyar eventually acknowledges that in hindsight, it appears there was not actually an attack on the two American destroyers on the night of August 4. But he gives an impression that this is only hindsight, and that the evidence available at the time strongly supported the reality of the attack. I am a bit annoyed by Moyar's "cherry-picking" of the evidence, selecting only facts that support this impression. This is conspicuous in note 9 on pp. 477-78, discussing what appeared on the radar of the destroyer Turner Joy during the imaginary battle on the night of August 4, when the Maddox and the Turner Joy believed they were under a PT boat attack. It begins: "The radar operators on the Turner Joy were firmly convinced that their ship had engaged and destroyed enemy sea craft. The contacts had not behaved like phantom contacts would, they observed, a conclusion supported by a subsequent investigation. Moïse, Tonkin Gulf, 125, 135, 137, 203-4;..." While it is true that those pages of my book Tonkin Gulf do quote men who said or wrote, after the incident, that the radar contacts had been continuous and consistent, looking like real vessels, my book pointed out that the detailed records they had kept during the incident, of what was appearing on their screens, very strongly contradicted these later statements. The records written during the incident are of numerous objects appearing on the radar screens and then disappearing very quickly, like phantom contacts. The "later investigation" to which Moyar refers had taken some of these brief contacts, and linked them together to create a spurious picture of prolonged ones.

Another problem is some rather strange logic that I noticed in Moyar's argument that the United States did not really have cause to fear that China would intervene in the war if the United States went too far against North Vietnam. He takes items that look to me like evidence of Chinese willingness to fight, and interprets them as evidence of Chinese unwillingness to fight.

(a) In late 1964, after the Tonkin Gulf incidents, the Chinese began a very expensive programs to move industries away from the coast, to make them less vulnerable to American attack in the event of war between the United States and China. I have always regarded this as very strong evidence that the Chinese leaders who were talking about defending North Vietnam against American attack were serious about this. They didn't just think it was possible that Chinese military actions to defend North Vietnam against American attack would trigger a war between China and the United States that spread beyond Vietnam, they thought it was likely enough so it was worth spending big money preparing to cope with such an event. China didn't actually put substantial numbers of military personnel into North Vietnam until American escalation made the need for them acute, toward the middle of 1965. But I take the Chinese preparations for war, which began in 1964, as evidence that the Chinese had decided they would fight to defend North Vietnam if necessary.

Moyar treats the Chineses preparations against the possibility of war as evidence that the Chinese were so afraid of the United States that they were unwilling to take any action in Vietnam that might carry the risk of triggering a conflict with the United States.

China's fear of the United States during and after the Tonkin Gulf incidents was, in fact, even greater than the North Vietnamese suspected, of such magnitude as to make the Chinese put self-preservation ahead of international hegemony, solidarity with other Communist states, and all other concerns. The Chinese military leadership issued orders to prepare against an American invasion of mainland China, and Mao initiated an enormous program of industrial development in western and southwestern China so that his government and armed forces could retain some industrial assets if an American invasion compelled them to retreat inland. (Triumph Forsaken, pp. 320-21)

(b) The May 1965 issue of the Chinese Communist Party theoretical journal Hongqi (Red Flag) published an article by Luo Ruiqing (Lo Jui-ch'ing), Chief of Staff of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), stating:

The Chinese people resolutely support the Vietnamese people's struggle to resist U.S. aggression and save the nation and the struggle of the people of all other countries against U.S. imperialism. We not only fully support these struggles politically and morally and help them materially to the limit of our capabilities, but are also prepared to send our men to fight together with the people of Viet Nam when they need us. This attitude of ours is firm and unshakable. We will go on supporting and aiding the Vietnamese people whether or not U.S. imperialism bombs our country and whether or not it enlarges the war. We are not frightened by the U.S. imperialists' bombing threats or their clamour for enlarging the war. Our opposition to U.S. imperialism has always been clear-cut. Our principle is: We will not attack unless we are attacked; if we are attacked, we will certainly counter-attack. We shall wipe out anybody who dares to attack us. On whatever scale the United States attacks us, we will reply on the same scale. We always mean what we say. We are fully prepared for war. The Chinese people and the Chinese People's Liberation Army are fully prepared. If U.S. imperialism should insist on imposing war on us, together with the people of the whole world we will resolutely crush its counter-revolutionary war by a revolutionary war and do our part in thoroughly destroying U.S. imperialism, the arch-criminal of contemporary aggression and war." (Lo Jui-ching, "Commemorate the Victory Over German Fascism! Carry the Struggle Against U.S. Imperialism Through to the End!", Peking Review, May 14, 1965, p. 14 [translation of an article from Hongqi, 1965, no. 5.])

This looks to me like a statement of Chinese willingness to fight the Americans in Vietnam, and within weeks after it was published, PLA troops were pouring over the border from China into North Vietnam. But Moyar's summary of Lo's statment reads simply, "In the middle of May, the Chinese said that they would not fight the Americans unless unless they attacked China. New York Times, May 11, 1965; Peking Review, May 14, 1975." He treats Lo's statement as a signal the the United States could invade North Vietnam without fear of triggering a conflict with China (Moyar, p. 500n54). Moyar seems to be interpreting Lo's statement "We will not attack unless we are attacked" as meaning that Chinese troops in North Vietnam would not fight if the Americans invaded North Vietnam, but would flee into China and fight only if the Americans followed them across the border. The rest of Lo's statement makes this interpretation dubious.

Opinions expressed in this page are my own. They could not very well be the opinions of Clemson University, since Clemson University does not have opinions on this subject.

Edwin E. Moïse 

Revised July 21, 2008.