Book Review: Vietnam: The Australian Experience

Book Review: 'Vietnam: The Australian Experience' by John Rowe

5 / 5 Stars

I didn't realize that the Time-Life Books publishing enterprise, so ubiquitous to anyone who is a Baby Boomer, also was active outside the USA. So it was that Time-Life Books produced a 15-volume series titled Australians at War during the mid-80s. 

Like their American counterparts, these books were marketed as a monthly or bi-monthly  'subscription', that relied on a low price for the initial volume in order to entice the customer to commit to purchasing the entire series.

Some of the volumes in the Australians at War series can go for hefty prices, but I was able to get 'Vietnam: The Australian Experience' for under $10.

'Vietnam: The Australian Experience' (168 pp, 1987) adheres to the traditional format used for Time-Life Books; half-page to full-page black-and-white photographs are placed throughout the text, with multi-page segments devoted to special topics interspersed throughout the book. A section featuring full color photographs also is incorporated into the book.

Author Rowe (1936 - 2017) is about as knowledgeable about the Vietnam war as anyone; he was among the first Australian military advisors sent to South Vietnam in the early 60s. 

His 1968 novel about the war, Count Your Dead, was highly critical of the way the war was being waged by the Australian and American governments, and the backlash against it from the Australian establishment was so severe that he wound up resigning from the military. 

Rowe went on to write a number of other novels during the 70s and 80s, mainly in the thriller genre. 

'Vietnam: The Australian Experience' opens with the appointment of Australian military advisors to South Vietnam in 1962 and closes with the withdrawal of the Australian forces from the country in 1972. During that interval 50,000 Australians served in South Vietnam, 496 died, and 2, 398 were wounded.

Although the book does cover the participation by the Australians in military actions throughout South Vietnam, it focuses primarily on efforts in Phuoc Tuy province on South Vietnam's southern coast. When the Australians were deployed there in force starting in 1966, the province was heavily infiltrated by the Viet Cong; much of the narrative is devoted to the efforts of the Australians to eliminate the VC presence in Phuoc Tuy and restore control to the South Vietnamese government. 

One thing Rowe stresses - without slipping overtly into polemic - is that the Australians were well experienced at jungle warfare and counter-insurgency campaigns, and this experience colored their approach to tactics and strategy in their actions in South Vietnam. Such actions regularly contrasted with those of the Americans, who, in hindsight, could have benefited considerably from adopting the Australian 'way of war'. Whether all readers will agree with Rowe's assessment is of course open to debate, but I found Rowe's observations to have considerable merit.

'Vietnam: The Australian Experience' is a very readable book. The descriptions of the campaigns are well communicated, and the inclusion of numerous anecdotes from Australian soldiers gives the narrative additional impact.

Summing up, 'Vietnam: The Australian Experience' not only is a very worthwhile history of the Australian involvement in that conflict, but a book that addresses the deficiency in the reporting about the role of non-U.S. militaries in the Vietnam War. Copies in good condition can be had for reasonable prices from your usual online vendors.