I supported Australia’s Vietnam commitment in the decade between 1965 (when the Menzies Coalition government deployed combat forces to South Vietnam) and 1975 (when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army). As a university student and later an academic during this period, this was a distinctly unfashionable position to hold.

Robert Menzies announced the decision to despatch the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam, under the leadership of Ted Serong, in May 1962. The AATTV was withdrawn by Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in December 1972. The decision to commit combat forces was announced in April 1965; they were finally withdrawn by March 1972 during the prime ministership of William McMahon.

The Coalition won elections in 1963, 1966 and 1969 and the anti-communist Democratic Labor party did very well in the half-Senate elections of 1967 and 1970. For most of this 13-year period, the Vietnam commitment was supported by a clear majority in the Australian electorate — as was evident during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s highly successful visit to Australia in October 1966. But not in the universities, particularly the social sciences departments, where opposition to the commitment was a fashion statement. It is now almost four decades since the guns ceased firing in what was once South Vietnam. During this time, many Australians got to know Vietnamese and have travelled to Vietnam. Most of those who were prominent in the Vietnam debate have died or are in retirement. This is a convenient time to reassess Australia’s Vietnam commitment.

The task has been made easy by the publication of Peter Edwards’s Australia and the Vietnam War. Born in August 1945, Edwards was not involved in the Vietnam debate on either side of the argument during his days at the University of Western Australia and Oxford. Between 1983 and 1996, Edwards was the official historian for the South East Asian conflicts. Namely, the Malayan Emergency, Confrontation and Vietnam. Edwards wrote Crises and Commitments with Gregory Pemberton in 1992 and A Nation at War in 1997. The first book dealt with Australian politics and foreign policy between 1948 and 1965 and the second covered the period between 1965 and 1975. There were seven other volumes in the official history written variously by Ian McNeill, Brendan O’Keefe, Chris Coulthard-Clark, Peter Dennis, Jeffrey Grey and Ashley Ekins. Australia and the Vietnam War makes extensive work of all this material as well as other histories not part of the official series. The result is a dispassionate account which demolishes many of the myths about Indo-China in general, and the Vietnam war in particular, which prevailed on the campus when I was a university student and academic.

Myth one — that Australia has fought ‘other people’s wars’.

In his concluding chapter, Edwards writes: ‘Vietnam was not an example of fighting “other people’s wars”; in the minds of Menzies and his principal advisers, it was a matter of getting the United States to fight a war for Australian security.’ The left-wing chant that Australia has fought other people’s wars was popularised by the leftist journalist John Pilger. It covers the first world war, the second world war up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Korea, the Malayan Emergency, Confrontation, Vietnam, the first Gulf war, Afghanistan and the second Gulf war.

The accurate description of Australia’s involvement in such conflicts is much more mundane. Successive governments have recognised that Australia is a trading nation dependent on open sea-lanes and air-lanes. There has been a long held view that if Australia supports its traditional allies — Britain and the US — when they are involved in a conflict in an area of the world where Australia has an interest, then Britain and/or the US would be more likely to help secure Australian security and to assist in any Australian military involvements.

Edwards shows that Australia’s postwar involvement in protecting Malaya from a communist insurgency, in supporting Malaysia against Indonesian President Sukarno’s Confrontation and in backing the US in South Vietnam were all motivated by a desire to keep our traditional allies active in the region.

Myth two — that Australia had a fear of Asia and was obsessed with national defence.

In fact during the late 1940s, the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s Australia adopted a ‘butter before guns’ policy.  Edwards says that by the early 1950s ‘the view of the government and its advisers’ was that ‘a totally independent military posture was simply impossible, as it required a level of military expenditure beyond Australia’s resources’. As Edwards puts it: ‘Australia’s support for its allies was always stronger in public rhetoric and diplomatic encouragement than in military commitment.’

Myth three — that the US and its allies fought a war against a nationalist movement.

In the early 1950s, during the first Indo-China war in which France was defeated by forces loyal to Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communist party, a group of left-wing clergy and academics ran the line that the conflict was really about nationalism. The likes of Bishop Ernest Burgmann, Professor C.P. Fitzgerald and historian Manning Clark claimed that the Viet Minh were not communists subservient to the Soviet Union or China but nationalists. A decade later the Labor left-wing parliamentarian Dr Jim Cairns ran a similar line — arguing that the National Liberation Front and the Viet Cong in South Vietnam were independent nationalists and not controlled by the ruling Communist party regime in Hanoi. Edwards comments early in his book that ‘the political and military organisations that would lead the revolution in the south [of Vietnam] were designed to be seen as independent, but were created and controlled by the Communist party in Hanoi.’

Myth four — that the battle for South Vietnam did not involve an invasion from North Vietnam.

This was the constant line pushed by Cairns who spoke regularly at the University of Melbourne where I was a student and who was the leader of the first Moratorium march in Melbourne which took place in May 1970. Edwards states that around 10,000 North Vietnamese Army regulars infiltrated South Vietnam in 1964 and dominated most of South Vietnam’s rural areas. This preceded the large-scale commitment of US and other forces to South Vietnam which took place in 1965 and subsequent years.

Myth five — that conscription for overseas service was introduced in Australia to provide personnel for the Vietnam war.

This claim was run in the recent ABC 1 documentary All the Way, which was co-written by journalist Paul Ham. As Edwards documents, the introduction of conscription was announced in November 1964 to cover certain 20-year-old males. When Menzies announced this decision, he discussed Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea at much greater length than the situation in South Vietnam. Indeed, conscription was introduced before the Menzies government decided to send combat forces to South Vietnam.

Myth six — that the introduction of conscription was contrary to Australian values.

It is true that the use of conscripted young men for service in South Vietnam from 1965 gave added focus to those who opposed Australia’s commitment but did not have much impact on support for the main political parties. As Edwards writes: ‘Only a relatively small number of voters identified Vietnam and conscription as their personal motive for voting for the first Labor government in 23 years’ in 1972. Australia and the Vietnam War contains an interesting statistic, namely, that only 65 conscripted men failed to report for duty while 442 men volunteered to undertake national service (as distinct from joining the regular forces).

Myth seven — that Australian Defence Force members returning home were ignored by their government and looked down on by fellow citizens.

As Edwards points out: ‘Out of 16 battalions who served one-year tours, 15 received welcome-home marches with the last being as welcoming as the first.’ Yet the memory of such occasions is blurred by the footage of a lone demonstrator in Sydney who drenched herself in red paint and smeared paint on the uniform of the returning commander.

Myth eight — that the opponents of the Vietnam commitment were ‘anti-war’.

Not so. Most of those who opposed the Australian commitment in Vietnam wanted the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army to win. Cairns openly welcomed the Communist victories in 1975 in both Vietnam and Cambodia. Whitlam did everything he could to prevent South Vietnamese refugees fleeing Communist forces from settling in Australia. Edwards reflects that ‘the post-1975 developments in Indo-China… discredited communism in general and Vietnamese communism in particular.’ He adds that the ‘militant critics of the war who had called for a “victory to the Vietcong” were shown to have been, at best, extraordinarily naive about the nature of the conflict and the combatants.’

Myth nine — that the US and its allies waged war against a peasant guerrilla army.

As Edwards documents, the North Vietnamese Army was supplied with long-range artillery and T-54 tanks by the Soviet Union along with surface-to-air missiles capable of destroying the most sophisticated planes in the US air force. China also supplied weapons to Hanoi. Despite attempts in 1968, 1972 and 1975, Hanoi failed to bring about a popular uprising in South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese Army finally conquered South Vietnam after the US Congress, in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation, stopped the supply of US weapons to Saigon. This is well covered in George J. Veith’s Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam : 1973-75.

Myth ten — that the 521 Australians who died in Vietnam did so in vain.

Edwards is of the view that, due to the inability of the South Vietnamese to put together a viable government and the strength of the Communist forces by the time that the Allies arrived in large numbers in 1965, ‘it is highly unlikely that any meaningful “victory” could have been achieved.’ However, he maintains that the Vietnam commitment by the US and its allies ‘delayed the Communist victory by ten years, from 1965 to 1975, and in so doing… greatly reduced the impact on the other potential “dominoes”’ — namely Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.

This was the position taken after the war by Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, who pointed out that South East Asia was better able to withstand a Communist victory in Vietnam in 1975 than it would have been a decade earlier.

Mythology aside, what about Edwards’s own views? He seems to support Australia’s Vietnam commitment but regards the cost as ‘unnecessarily high’ with respect to ‘lives, treasure, political capital and social harmony’. He believes that Australia should have had a clear exit strategy and withdrawn most of its forces by the end of 1969. However, it is not clear how this could have been done in view of the fact that Australia’s original commitment was motivated by a determination to keep the US engaged in the South East Asian region and the US was not prepared to quit South Vietnam in 1969.

Edwards is rightly critical of the inability of the Coalition governments between 1965 and 1972 to sell the Vietnam commitment to the electorate. Here he has in mind such leading Liberal party figures as Robert Menzies, Paul Hasluck, Harold Holt, John Gorton and William McMahon. This is a fair criticism although some Liberal party backbenchers did better — including Tom Hughes and Malcolm Fraser.

The author makes the point that it was anti-communist commentators who made the best case for Australia’s Vietnam commitment. He names Denis Warner, Peter Samuel, Geoffrey Fairbairn and Owen Harries in this regard but could have added B.A. Santamaria, Frank Knopfelmacher, Ken Gee and James McAuley.

As Edwards confirms, the government- funded histories of Australia’s South East Asian conflicts were ‘not subject to official or political censorship’. Australia and the Vietnam War is not a defence of the commitment like that in Michael Lind’s Vietnam: The Necessary War. But it is a dispassionate assessment of the conflict which demolishes much of the left-wing mythology about the Vietnam war.