Crises and Commitments in South-East Asia

The Official History of Australia's Involvement in South-East Asian Conflicts, 1948-1965.  Volume One
Peter Edwards and Gregory Pemberton,
Allen & Unwin

RATHER in the manner of Canning, our present Prime Minister seems to see himself as calling a new Asian World into being to redress the balance of the old.  Indeed, a Martian visitor, arriving here in 1992, might well imagine that Australia was interesting itself in Asian affairs, and conducting an Asian policy of its own, for quite the first time in its history.

To dispel such impressions, our Martian -- and not a few Australians as well -- should be required to read the first volume of The Official History of Australia's Involvement in South-East Asian Conflicts, 1948-1965.  "Crises and Commitments", written by Peter Edwards with Gregory Pemberton, examines Australia's role and policies between 1948 and April 1965 in the Malayan Emergency, Confrontation, the successive Laotian crises and the Vietnam conflict.  For completeness' sake, a discussion of Australia's strong and far-sighted support for the Indonesian revolution -- a notable example, incidentally, of the independence of judgment brought by post-war Australian governments to Asian affairs -- should have been included.  This, however, fell outside the terms of reference given to the Official Historian.  Even so, the book provides a convincing demonstration of the importance attached to South-East Asia by successive Australian governments in the pursuit of perceived national interests.

As he notes, Dr Edwards had unrestricted access to Australian official records and was also able to consult British, American, French and New Zealand archives.  The result is a highly accurate, [1] objective and balanced treatment and analysis of the factors -- domestic and international -- underlying Australian decision-making in the several South-East Asian crises during the 17-year military involvement in South Vietnam.  The competing claims of resistance to Sukarno's Confrontation of Malaysia and support for counter-insurgency in Vietnam were not always easy to reconcile, but they were managed by a government pursuing national policies of its own, and not those of great and powerful friends.

In the event, External Affairs Minister Hasluck persuaded his cabinet colleagues that the Vietnamese situation was more dangerous than Confrontation.  Hasluck's preoccupation with the Vietnamese problem sometimes verged on the obsessive -- bad news dispassionately reported from Saigon drew an imperial rebuke on one occasion.  As seen from Saigon, there were also times when, in its eagerness to commit Australian combat forces, the Menzies Government came close not only to treating the Saigon Government as an American puppet but to appearing in the same light itself.  Hasluck nevertheless established a strong rationale for the military commitment to South Vietnam, and in the circumstances of the time his assessments were soundly based.

As the authors demonstrate, Hasluck and his colleagues saw a Communist take-over in South Vietnam as posing a direct threat to the security of the rest of South-East Asia.  In the climate of the Cold War, with the Soviets and Chinese vying in their efforts to arm and influence Hanoi, and with the knowledge that the North Vietnamese armed forces were by far the strongest in the region, their fears were not illusory.  But a still more powerful factor was the concern -- most strongly held by Menzies, with memories of the lonely wartime years before Pearl Harbour -- to keep the United States committed to the security of the South-East Asia region at large.  The Johnson Administration on its side had indicated clearly enough that there was a nexus between Australian support for the American effort in Vietnam and American backing should this be required for Australia in its opposition to Confrontation.  It was not long, moreover, since Australia had found itself opposed to Sukarno over West New Guinea without prospect of American support.

In their approach to the Vietnam problem, as the Official History notes, Australian policy-makers also had in mind the precedent of successful Western military intervention against Communist insurgency in Malaya.  (A British Advisory Mission led by the late Sir Robert Thompson was still attempting at that time to apply in South Vietnam the strategies successfully adopted during the Emergency).  The far greater difficulties posed by the situation in Vietnam were not ignored, although they were certainly underestimated, but the Republic had already survived as an independent State for more than 10 years, while the Viet Cong, despite the gains made after the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, was still predominantly a guerrilla force, pursuing the same tactics of terrorism and intimidation as the insurgents in Malaya.  Nor was there any evidence that a majority of the people of South Vietnam wanted Communist rule or domination by the North, from which some 860,000 refugees had emigrated 10 years earlier.

Another element, not apparently mentioned in official documents but one which underlay and coloured the hopes for a successful outcome in South Vietnam, was the Korean example.  Analogies between the two situations were, of course, misleading, for South Korea -- unlike South Vietnam -- was not vulnerable to infiltration by land across the porous frontiers of a neutral neighbour, but some encouragement was drawn from the fact that in the 1950s invasion from the North had been successfully resisted in Korea, and an independent state preserved in the South with the ultimate acquiescence of Moscow and Peking.  (Memories of Chinese intervention in Korea also served to moderate enthusiasm for all-out action against Hanoi.)

Fundamental to the Australian decision, of course, was confidence that American power would be decisive.  But few could foresee in April 1965 that the war would drag on for 10 years more and that American public support for the commitment would collapse as the prospect of quick victory disappeared.

The final chapter, in which Dr Edwards offers "reflections" rather than conclusions, contrasts the successful outcome of Australian policies in the Malayan Emergency and Confrontation -- an outcome due to a mixture of good luck and good management -- with the "disastrous" commitment to Vietnam.  But disasters, like blessings, can be mixed.  Edwards suggests that the failure of the commitment was due largely to an assessment that American and Australian intervention could go forward without a politically stable base in Saigon but "would somehow help create" stability.  It is true enough that South Vietnam was dangerously unstable in 1965, with deep divisions among the "nationalist" forces which continued well into 1966.  But in subsequent years a substantial degree of governmental stability was in fact achieved, elections were held, the NLF all but disappeared as a significant force, and the war effort on the ground was taken over by the South Vietnamese army.  The success of the North Vietnamese invasion in 1975 -- an earlier all-out offensive had been fought off in 1972 -- was due not to political instability in Saigon but to the shameful denial of American air and logistic support during Watergate, in breach of American undertakings to Saigon and at a time when the North was still receiving massive supplies of sophisticated weaponry from the Soviet Union.

Dr Edwards concedes, however, that the domino theory was neither a truism nor a "groundless folly".  Interestingly, he reveals that Prime Minister Menzies' description of the Communist threat to South Vietnam as part of "a thrust by Communist China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans" should have been qualified by the phrase (included in the departmental draft) "exploiting weaknesses in the multi-racial and economically under-developed countries of the region".  The dominoes in Cambodia and Laos fell, of course, along with the fall of South Vietnam, but, Edwards observes, had the North Vietnamese won in 1965, the active Communist insurgency in north-east Thailand would also have become "a focus of the East-West struggle".  At that time, too, the political and economic fabric of Malaysia and Singapore was much weaker than today, and Confrontation was unresolved.  In Indonesia itself, the powerful PKI, indulged by the erratic Sukarno and actively supported by Maoist China, was preparing its forces for a trial of strength with the Army which culminated in the nearly successful Gestapu coup.  The abandonment of South Vietnam in 1965, if ever an option, would have led, not to overt invasion of South-East Asia by China or North Vietnam, but almost certainly to the emergence of Communist-dominated, anti-Western regimes throughout the region at a time when the Cold War was a hard reality.

The long conflict in South Vietnam, initiated as it was by the leadership in Hanoi and renewed by Hanoi in violation of the Paris Agreements, led to immense suffering and destruction in Vietnam and Cambodia -- a human disaster on a massive scale.  The collapse of the Western commitment to South Vietnam bore all the marks of a major strategic disaster as the victorious North Vietnamese divisions smashed into Saigon in 1975.  But looking in 1992 at the stability and prosperity of the region beyond Indo-China and the peaceful and secure environment which Australia now enjoys, we can conclude that the price paid by this country was a small one and that the sacrifices made by our soldiers were not in vain.

1. One minor error of fact appears on page 307.  General Nguyen Khanh was not the nominal head of the Saigon Government at the end of 1964.  Khanh was still a powerful, if tarnished, figure but the Chief of State was Phan Khac Suu and the Prime Minister was Tran Van Huong.