Samuel A. Adams, "Signing 100,000 Death Warrants." Wall Street Journal, March 26, 1975, p. 16. A former CIA intelligence analyst, predicting, on the basis of past Communist behavior, a large number of deaths after the impending Communist victory.
Frank Baldwin, Diane Jones, and Michael Jones, America's Rented Troops: South Koreans in Vietnam. Philadelphia: American Friends Service Committee, 1975. 45 pp. I have not seen this, but I am told it contains considerable information about Korean atrocities in Vietnam.
Bloodbath?. Philadelhia: Indochina Program, American Friends Service Committee, May 1975. 4 pp. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.
Samuel Brenner, ed., Vietnam War Crimes. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press/Thomson Gale, 2006. 141 pp.
Peter Brush, "What Really Happened at Cam Ne?" Vietnam Magazine, August 2003. Reporting by Morley Safer, of CBS, showing the 1/9 Marines burning peasant homes in the village of Cam Ne, near Danang, caused a major controversy. The text has been placed online at HistoryNet.com.
John S. Carroll, "After We Get Out, Will There Be a Bloodbath in South Vietnam?" New York Times Sunday Magazine, October 15, 1972, pp. 38- . The text has been placed online in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.
Ward Churchill and Natsu Saito, eds., Confronting the Crime of Silence: Evidence of U.S. War Crimes in Indochina. AK Press, (forthcoming? I am beginning to wonder whether publication may have been cancelled). A collection of texts dating from the time of the war (I believe the texts in question are the ones listed below under Dellums, Duffett, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War), with new annotations and commentary.
Stephane Courtois, et. al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. 912 pp. (Translated by Jonathan Murphy from Le livre noir du communisme. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997. 846 pp.) Jean-Louis Margolin wrote the chapters "China: A Long March Into Night," "Vietnam and Laos: The Impasse of War Communism," and "Cambodia: The Country of Disconcerting Crimes." The book is intensely anti-Communist, as one would expect from the title.
The Dellums Committee Hearings on War Crimes in Vietnam: An Inquiry into Command Responsibility in Southeast Asia. Edited and with an introduction by the Citizens Commission of Inquiry. New York: Vantage, 1972. xiii, 335 pp. I have not seen this volume, but I believe it probably comes from hearings of an unofficial, ad hoc committee chaired by Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-CA), April 26-29, 1971.
Alexander B. Downes, "Targeting Civilians in War." Ph.D. dissertation, Political Science, University of Chicago, 2004. xv, 769 pp. AAT 3125596. A broadly comparative study of 20th century wars. The section on Operation Rolling Thunder, pp. 361-393, starts with two errors in its first paragraph (that the United States "lost over 54,000 dead in combat" in the Vietnam War, and that Rolling Thunder was "the major bombing campaign of the war"), but later gets somewhat better. The text is available online if you are browsing the Internet through an institution that has paid for a subscription to ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.
John Duffett, ed., intro by Bertrand Russell, forword by Ralph Schoenman, Against the Crime of Silence: Proceedings of the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal: Stockholm, Copenhagen. New York: O'Hare Books and Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 1968. ix, 662 pp.
Randy Herrod, Blue's Bastards. Washington: Regnery Gateway, 1989. Herrod was a Marine private who was put on trial for murdering Vietnamese peasants; Oliver North's testimony helped him win acquittal. A review of this book in Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute, November 1990, says that Herrod was guilty, and that the book is a pack of lies. (See also book on this incident by Gary Solis.)
Seymour M. Hersh, "Uncovered." New Yorker, November 7, 2003. A short comment on the revelation by the Toledo Blade in October (see below under Michael Sallah) that a platoon of the 101st Airborne Division had run amok in Vietnam in 1967, committing numerous atrocities, and on the lack of attention to this story in the major national media.
P.J. Honey, Vietnam: If the Communists Won. Issue No. 2 (June 1971) of Southeast Asian Perspectives. New York: American Friends of Vietnam, 1971. iv, 26 pp. Frienzied anti-Communist propaganda, predicting that more than a million people in South Vietnam will be "butchered" if the Communists take over.
Stephen T. Hosmer, Viet Cong Repression and its Implications for the Future. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1970. ix, 172 pp. A Rand Corporation study. Hosmer wrote (pp. 122-23) that if the Communists won control of South Vietnam, he found it difficult to believe that the number of executions alone "would be much less than 100,000. . . . it might well be considerably higher." In addition to this there might be large numbers of informal killings, and the number would be further much increased if there were to be a bloody land reform of the sort he believed (some of his sources were seriously exaggerating) had been carried out in North Vietnam in the mid 1950s.
George McT. Kahin and D. Gareth Porter, The Administration's Bloodbath Argument. Ithaca, NY: Glad Day Press, July 10, 1970. 7 pp. Includes comments on the North Vietnamese land reform of the 1950s, and on the Hue Massacre. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.
Erwin Knoll and Judith Nies McFadden, eds., War Crimes and the American Conscience. New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1970. xiv, 208 pp. Includes an edited transcript of the Congressional Conference on War and National Responsibility, 1970. There were some pretty extravagant denunciations of US behavior at that conference, by people like Hans Morgenthau and Gabriel Kolko, which I presume would be in this volume.
Docteur Jean-Michel Krivine, Carnets de missions au Vietnam, 1967-1987: Des maquis au "socialisme de marché" Paris: les Indes Savantes, 2005. 246 pp., plus unpaginated illustrations and documents at the end. Krivine was a member of the French Communist Party. pp. 17-124 are his diaries of visits to North Vietnam and the NLF-controlled areas of South Vietnam in 1967, gathering information for the Russell War Crimes Tribunal. pp. 127-235 are diaries of visits to postwar Vietnam, 1975-1987.
Mark Lane, Conversations with Americans. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970. 247 pp. Full of atrocity stories. Neil Sheehan wrote a scathing review in The New York Times Book Review, December 27, 1970, pp. 5, 19, demonstrating that many of the stories were not true.
Daniel Lang, Casualties of War. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969. 123 pp. Also published as Incident on Hill 192. London: Secker & Warburg, 1970. Originally published in the New Yorker, October 18, 1969. The story, with all names changed, of a soldier (not the author) in the 1st Cavalry Division who testified at the trials (held in mid-March 1967) of four of his buddies who had raped and murdered a Vietnamese woman in November 1966. All four defendants were convicted, though at least one later won acquittal at a re-trial. Lang says that the trial records are available at Clerk of Courts, U.S. Army Judiciary, Falls Church, VA. For a brief account by Claude Newby, an Army chaplain who helped bring the incident to light (referred to in Lang's book by the pseudonym "Gerald Kirk"), see chapter 6 of Newby's book It Took Heroes (Tribute Enterprises, 2000).
Jay Mallin, Terror in Vietnam. Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1966. 114 pp. By a journalist.
The Mariah Project, "A Study of the Use of Terror by the Viet Cong." Saigon, May 1966. 39 pp. "A preliminary study to establish the feasibility for implementation of MAC/SOG project, code name Phoenix/Phong Hoang", prepared for the United Staes Mission in Vietnam by MAC/SOG and Headquarters 5th Special Forces Group. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University. Interesting for its dating (p. 1) of the insurgency to a decision made in Hanoi March 13, 1959.
Deborah Nelson, The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth about U.S. War Crimes. New York: Basic Books, November 2008 (forthcoming). I believe this should be an important study. (See also under Nicholas Turse, below.)
Anita Lauve Nutt [a.k.a. Anita Lauve], On the Question of Communist Reprisals in Vietnam. Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1970. P-4416. 15 pp. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.
D. Gareth Porter, The Myth of the Bloodbath: North Vietnam's Land Reform Reconsidered. Interim Report no. 2. Ithaca: Cornell University IREA (International Relations of East Asia) Project, 1972. iii, 59 pp. The first serious attack on the wildly exaggerated account of atrocities in the North Vietnamese land reform of the mid 1950s. Porter's refutation of the myths is generally sound, though he makes some errors.
D. Gareth Porter, "The Myth of the Bloodbath: North Vietnam's Land Reform Reconsidered." Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, September 1973, pp. 2-15. A condensed version of the previous item. The text is available online.
D. Gareth Porter and Len E. Ackland, "Vietnam: The Bloodbath Argument." The Christian Century, November 5, 1969, pp. 1414-1417. At this point Porder was not yet as doubtful as he later became about the scale of killing in the land reform of the mid 1950s in North Vietnam; the article referred to "the harshly implemented land reform program of 1955-56" in which "zealous cadres and local grudge-bearers combined to bring about massive executions and imprisonments..." The article also includes an interesting and detailed discussion of the Hue Massacre. A reprint of this article, distributed by Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, has been placed online in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.
Gareth Porter and James Roberts, "Creating a Bloodbath by Statistical Manipulation", Pacific Affairs 61:2 (Summer 1988), pp. 303-310. A good critique of a very incompetent study by Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl Jackson, which had attempted to demonstrate that there had been a major bloodbath in South Vietnam following the Communist victory of 1975. If you browse the Internet through an institution that has subscribed to JSTOR, you can access the text directly or go through the JSTOR Pacific Affairs browse page.
James Reston, Jr., Sherman's March and Vietnam. New York: Macmillan, 1984. 323 pp.
Rudolph J. Rummel, Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994. 510 pp. From what I have seen of it, the section dealing with Vietnam is dreadfully inaccurate. Examples:
p. 246, bottom, says that in the Red River Delta "98 percent of the peasants owned the land they worked." This is incorrect; Rummel has relied on careless authors who misunderstood statistics that actually (if you trace this figure back to its original source, Yves Henry, Economie agricole de l'Indochine, p. 108) said that 98% of the people who owned land worked part or all of the land that they owned.
p. 250: "The party's Politburo believed that 95 percent of the land was owned by the wealthiest 5 percent of the people." This is baloney; the Politburo neither believed nor suggested it believed in any figure even close to this.
p. 250, just below the middle of the page, says there was a quota of five landlords to be executed per village, applied to 15,000 villages. Leave aside the question of whether there was such a quota (the source, Hoang Van Chi, is grossly unreliable). The source that claimed there was a quota of five executions per village used the word "village" to mean the administrative village, xa in Vietnamese, of which there were less than 4,000 in the area covered by the campaign. The book from which Rummel got the figure of 15,000 villages was talking about a subdivision of the xa, the natural village or hamlet.
p. 252: Rummel says that there was a rebellion in the province of Nghe An in November 1956, bloodily suppressed by the Communists. "Rebellions also broke out elsewhere. The worst of these, near Vinh, involved protests . . ." The problem with this is that Vinh is the capital of Nghe An province. An author (Douglas Pike) who didn't know where Vinh was, looked at some accounts of the Communists suppressing a rebellion in Nghe An, and some accounts of the Communists suppressing a rebellion near Vinh, and didn't realize that both sets of accounts referred to the same incident. He wrote it up as two different rebellions, one in Nghe An and the other in some unnamed province that contained the city of Vinh. Rummel borrowed his error. This is about average for the level of knowledge of the people from whom Rummel gets his information.
Another example of Rummel's habit of counting the same deaths twice: His figure (p. 253) of 360,000 for the total number of people the Communists killed in the period 1953-56 was achieved partly by counting the people killed in the land reform twice. He took Gerard Tongas' estimate of 100,000 for the people killed in the land reform, and decided it was actually a figure for the number of people killed in the rent reduction campaign, so he could add it to the estimates by other authors for the number of people killed in the land reform campaign.
Bertrand Russell, War Crimes in Vietnam. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967. 178 pp.
Ginetta Sagan and Stephen Denney, "Re-education in Unliberated Vietnam: Loneliness, Suffering and Death," Indochina Newsletter, October-November 1982.
Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss,
"Rogue GIs Unleashed Wave of Terror in Central Highlands." The Toledo Blade,
October 19, 2003. This was the lead for a series of articles published by the The Toledo Blade
from October 19 to 22, 2003. They dealt with the "Tiger Force," a reconnaissance platoon
of the 1/327 Infantry, 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division. The articles said that the platoon committed
numerous atrocities from May to November 1967, first in Quang Ngai province and later in
Quang Tin province, including torture and killing of prisoners, deliberate killing of
large numbers of civilians, rapes, collection of ears from corpses, etc.
The Army launched an investigation in 1971, which went on for more than four
years before finally recommending criminal charges against some of the soldiers
involved. No criminal charges were actually filed.
The articles were extremely convincing; they had good evidence from
good sources. No important weaknesses in the evidence or the argument were immediately
apparent, and
none were discovered, so far as I am aware, in the weeks following publication. A very solid
piece of work. The series won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.
There was an article by Seymour Hersh commenting on the series (see above). For
information about the behavior and activities of the Tiger Force
in 1966, before it ran amok, see To What End? by Ward Just, About Face by Col. David Hackworth,
and Special Men by Dennis Foley.
Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss, Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War. Boston: Little, Brown, 2006. xi, 401 pp. Book-length version of the previous item. Occasionally careless about terminology and about peripheral facts (on p. 19, for example, there is an inaccurate discussion of the Tonkin Gulf incidents of 1964), but very good on the central part of the story, dealing with the actions of the Tiger Force.
Thomas R. Searle, "Targeting Civilians: When and Why U.S. Military Forces Have Deliberately Killed Enemy Civilians, 1863-1973." Ph.D. dissertation, History, Duke University, 2004. vi, 386 pp. AAT 3177306. Chapter 5, pp. 261-341, is "Counter-Guerrilla Warfare: The Phoenix Program and the Vietnam War, 1967-72." The author is or was a Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army Special Forces. The text is available online if you are browsing the Internet through an institution that has paid for a subscription to ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.
Neil Sheehan, "Should We Have War Crime Trials?" The New York Times Book Review, March 28, 1971, pp. 1-3, 30-34. This review essay (covering a long list of books) made a good argument that the United States was going to have to face questions that has been being dodged, such as the extent to which U.S. troops in Vietnam had been committing atrocities, and whether some of the systematic activities of the United States, such as the extensive use of bombing and shelling in populated areas, constituted war crimes under international law. Sheehan had written a scathing review of Mark Lane's book Conversations with Americans (see above), published in The New York Times Book Review, December 27, 1970, pp. 5, 19, saying that Lane's book was garbage but that the issue of American atrocities, with which Lane was dealing so ineptly, was a real and serious one. This led to his writing the longer review essay.
Gary D. Solis, Son Thang: An American War Crime. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1997. xix, 340 pp. A former Marine officer writes about the incident of February 19, 1970, in Quang Nam province, in which 1/7 Marines killed sixteen civilians (see also book on this incident by Randy Herrod, above).
Anthony Syme, Vietnam: The Cruel War. Sydney and London: Horwitz, 1966. 130 pp.
Ta Quoc Tuan, "The Vietnamese Communist Terrorism." n.p., January 1970. 12 pp. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project at Texas Tech University.
Nicholas Turse, "'Kill anything that moves': United States war crimes and atrocities in Vietnam, 1965--1973." Ph.D. dissertation, Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, Columbia University, 2005. 1025 pp. AAT 3174910.
Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson, "Civilian Killings Went Unpunished: Declassified papers show U.S. atrocities went far beyond My Lai." Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2006. This long and quite impressive article particularly focuses on atrocities by B Company, 1/35 Infantry, 3d Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, in late 1967 and early 1968. On the web site of the Los Angeles Times, the text is accompanied by links to .pdf images of original documents. I don't know how long the newspaper will keep this article conveniently available on its web site.
Deborah Nelson and Nick Turse, "A Tortured Past: Documents show troops who reported abuse in Vietnam were discredited even as the military was finding evidence of worse." Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2006. A follow-up to the previous item. See also under Deborah Nelson, above.
Viet Cong Atrocities and Sabotage in South Vietnam, rev. ed. Saigon: Ministry of Information and Chieu Hoi, Directorate of Psy-War Planning, 1967. 64 pp. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project at Texas Tech University.
Viet Cong Use of Terror. Saigon: United States Mission in Vietnam, March 1967. 84 pp. Revised and updated version of the paper that is listed above under The Mariah Project. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project at Texas Tech University, in two parts: pp. 1-49, and pp. 50-84.
Viet Nam Destruction: War Damage. Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1977. 66 pp. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project at Texas Tech University.
Vietnam Veterans against the War, The Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.
For Communist atrocities during the land reform of the mid 1950s in North Vietnam, see my book Land Reform in China and North Vietnam
For great exaggerations of Communist atrocities during the land reform of the mid 1950s in North Vietnam, see Hoang Van Chi, in the section Temporary Peace and Renewed War, 1954-1964
For the incident at Thanh Phong, February 25, 1969, see books by Robert Kerrey and Gregory Vistica, in the section Navy SEALs
See The Hue Massacre
See Congressional
Committee Documentation: Main List for 1972 and 1973 hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee
on Communist atrocities in Vietnam, especially the land reform of the 1950s.
Copyright © 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, Edwin E. Moise. This document may be reproduced only by permission. Revised May 23, 2008. Opinions expressed in this bibliography are my own. They could hardly be the opinions of Clemson University, since Clemson University does not have opinions on the matters in question.