ABSTRACT
Unlike most of the chapters in this volume that deal with the World Wars, this chapter is concerned with more recent conflicts, commemoration strategies and war heritage management, and an Asian setting – Vietnam. ln concentrating here on Vietnam’s major twentieth-century wars and some of the battlefields and memorials related to them, the aim is to show how their study might reinforce, extend or raise questions about approaches taken to the World Wars and to the study of landscapes of war generally. As is well known, Vietnam has been the scene of constant struggle for most of its 3,000-year existence as a recognisable political entity. This has involved internecine conflicts between rival war lords and their clans, battles to subdue surrounding political entities such as Champa and to take their lands, and wars of resistance and independence against the Chinese, the French and the United States, followed most recently by the 1979 border war with China that was an after-shock from the Cambodian catastrophe under Pol Pot. This chapter concentrates on Vietnam’s two mid-twentieth-century Indochinese Wars of Independence, neither of which was part of the World Wars. While the components of French Indochina – Tonkin, Annam and Cochin-China in today’s Vietnam, and Cambodia and Laos – contributed men to the French armies in World Wars I and II, no World War battles were fought on Vietnamese territory. During World War II – or at least from the Fall of France in 1940 until the Japanese coup de force in March 1945 – the French remained in charge of the administration of French Indochina.
