War Without Fronts ebook

by Bernd Greiner

Bernd Greiner leads the 'Theory and History of Violence' unit at the Hamburger Institut fur Sozialforschung and is Professor of History at the University of Hamburg. His publications include Die Morgenthau-Legende.

Bernd Greiner leads the 'Theory and History of Violence' unit at the Hamburger Institut fur Sozialforschung and is Professor of History at the University of Hamburg. Zur Geschichte eines umstrittenen Plans (1995) and, with Heinz Bude, Westbindungen.

Издательство: Yale University Press. Army archives, War Without Fronts reveals the true extent of war crimes committed by American troops in Vietnam

Издательство: Yale University Press. Army archives, War Without Fronts reveals the true extent of war crimes committed by American troops in Vietnam. In a series of case studies, Greiner looks at the kill ing work of . Army death squads from 1967 to 1971. T. Rather than pointing the finger at the grunts fighting a dirty war on the ground, Greiner argues that the responC O N T IN U E D ON BACK FLAP. War Without Fronts The USA in Vietnam. War Without Fronts The USA in Vietnam Bernd Greiner Translated from the German by. Anne Wyburd with Victoria Fern.

In this horrifying book, Bernd Greiner, a Professor at the University of Hamburg, depicts the war crimes committed by US. .

In this horrifying book, Bernd Greiner, a Professor at the University of Hamburg, depicts the war crimes committed by US ground troops in Vietnam. War Without Fronts is naturally recommended reading for anyone with an interest in the Vietnam War. More importantly though, anyone wishing to pursue a career as a military officer should surely include this case study in their study of military leadership.

Quite how the Germans lost so often is - on the surface at least - baffling (and, incidentally, the subject of an under-regarded book . Nor does Bernd Greiner bear the coveted post-nominal letters .

Quite how the Germans lost so often is - on the surface at least - baffling (and, incidentally, the subject of an under-regarded book, Why the Germans Lose at War, by Kenneth Macksey, first published in 1996). But this most recent Teutonic tome is not prescriptive, except, as the Duke of Wellington was wont to say, in seeing how not to do things.

Bernd Greiner’s most popular book is War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam. Books by Bernd Greiner. Showing 18 distinct works. War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam by. Bernd Greiner, Anne Wyburd (Translator).

To this day, the My Lai massacre has remained the most shocking episode of the Vietnam War. Yet this infamous incident was not an exception or aberration.

Bernd Greiner's book is a definitive addition to the list, and no on. A German historian, he has relied heavily upon official archives in assembling a painstaking analysis of the barbarity that engulfed the US military. At the start he sets out the fundamental problem: in an asymmetrical war with a conventional invading army opposed by guerrillas, civilians risk becoming expendable. The army cannot readily distinguish between combatants and non-combatants and is tempted to kill both.

Professor Greiner, in this admirable translation by Anne Wyburd and Victoria Fern, scrupulously argued and carefully referenced, explains the failure of what is now known as the moral component of warfare, and therefore exactly how it was that the US lost". Allan Mallinson, The Times. an astonishing final section".

Place of Publication. Country of Publication.

A groundbreaking investigation of the true extent of American war crimes during the American intervention in Vietnam.Based on extensive research in U.S. Army archives not previously utilized by historians, War Without Frontiers reveals the true extent of atrocities and war crimes committed by U.S. troops in Vietnam. Massacres, such as the infamous incident at My Lai, were far from being exceptions or aberrations; on the contrary, as Greiner shows in harrowing detail, they were commonplace. Yet, rather than placing the responsibility for war crimes solely with the “grunts” fighting a dirty war on the ground, he points the finger at the line of command reaching all the way up to the White House and the Pentagon.A political leadership frightened for the superpower USA losing its credibility and unable to stop the war; a military that devised a strategy of attrition based on “body counts” as the only way to defeat an enemy skilled in unconventional warfare; officers who were badly trained, demotivated and interested only in furthering their careers; and finally, soldiers who realized that they were utterly disposable and who sought to empower themselves through random killing. All these factors led to an escalation of violence on the ground: the torture, rape, maiming and murder of countless Vietnamese civilians.

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Translated from the German original, this scholarly but extremely disturbing analysis deserves to sit on the same shelf as John Nagl's Learning to eat Soup with a Knife, Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie and HR McMaster's Dereliction of Duty, each of which focus on different aspects of the US military failure in Vietnam.

Like Nagl and others, Greiner demonstrates how the US military was institutionally incapable of fighting a war on other than a massive conventional basis and its response to any situation was simply 'more', (bombs, artillery, troops, chemicals, Phoenix), to a stage where its doomed and blind approach to the Vietnamese insurgency (Nagl's term) and its approach to 'asymmetrical war' (Greiner's definition) led to strategic, tactical and moral bankruptcy and eventual widespread and massive murder of civilians, of which My Lai, Tiger Force and Operation Speedy Express were mere exemplars.

Greiner's hypothesis (comprehensively researched, footnoted and indexed) is unique in that he states that the use and escalation of massive force became indiscriminate and reached such a stage that the international rules of war (of which the US was a signatory) and the US military's own Rules of Engagement were effectively ignored and flouted, not just by GIs and junior officers, but all the way to the top of the US military hierarchy in Vietnam. He demonstrates how the obsession with body-count eventually led to the state of moral degeneracy where South Vietnamese civilians (the US's nominal clients after all)were regarded initially with disdain, then with contempt (universally 'gooks' and 'slopes' and worse) and then finally dehumanised altogether as 'if they are dead they must be VC', leading to widespread atrocities such as torture, rape and murder.

Greiner demonstrates that the US military collectively and institutionally lost its way (and its moral compass) in Vietnam and the obvious military and moral degeneration which reflected an unwinnable war being fought incorrectly and immorally resulted in indiscriminate, frequent and widespread slaughter of innocent civilians by infantry, artillery (e.g. indiscriminate 'Free Fire Zones') and air power (helicopter attacks as well as carpet bombing). Greiner's analysis is thorough and I think unarguable, especially in the confirming context of Nagl, Sheehan et al. Some of the translation is over-literal and a little ponderous(e.g. 'M16 storm weapons' (sic)), but that may also be a feature of the original German text, not always easy to translate without losing the original meaning.

A disturbing but necessary read and a vivid counterargument to the notion that the US always fought 'good' (i.e. moral) wars as well as
the increasingly prevalent notion that the war could have been won but the military were somehow 'prevented' from doing so.

Uncomfortable but necessary reading for serious students of the conflict and a significant addition to the literature on the Vietnam conflict.

Nahn

The professional historian Bernd Greiner analyzes not only painstakingly the war atrocities committed in Vietnam, but also their national and international political and military context.
South-Vietnam was considered as an outpost of the Free World and had to be defended at all cost against the enemy, communism, which the US government depicted as a monolithic bloc. If one domino fell in the Far East, all dominoes would fall.
The US army saw Vietnam as an opportunity to enhance its prestige and institutional weight. But the soldiers in Vietnam were the youngest and the poorest in the US society, of which a part was even mentally deficient (Category 4). They were poorly trained and inexperienced. On the other hand, the officers saw the war only as an opportunity for promotion.
The efficiency of the war machine was measured by the number of dead enemy soldiers (the body-count syndrome). The top level of the Pentagon even fixed monthly and weakly targets. But the enemy hid or took the bodies of their fallen soldiers from the battlefield as much as they could.

This book centers on war time atrocities and war crimes. Those atrocities were not collateral damage, but violence outside the direct war zones. The war operations were extended to the civilian population with the explicit authorization of the top of the Pentagon. It was a kind of political cleansing (`Search and Destroy' at random) by death squads. It showed blatantly the US contempt for international military law.
The horrible massacres of My Lai, My Khe and in the Southern provinces were not aberrations, but clear examples of the US strategy of `conquer at any price' (e.g., throwing prisoners from flying helicopters, peasants used for target practices, premeditated annihilation of all means of livelihood).
Where those `directly' responsible for the massacres heavily sanctioned? The judges were exceptionally lenient under the pressure of the public opinion.

For Bernd Greiner, the trial of My Lai unveiled painfully the illusion that the US was a `redeemer nation' chosen by God to fight for salvation.

This book was written by a German. Where are the objective American professional historians? As for other major recent events, they seem to be paralyzed. The rest is silence.

This all important book gives an appalling face to mankind.
It is a must read for all those who want to know who we, humans, really are.

Dellevar

There are two major problems with this book. One is the bias, although it is at least a sort of impartial bias. Greiner does not seem to like wars, or people who fight wars, so he is biased against both sides in the Vietnam War. He makes both the Americans and the Communists look considerably more atrocious than they actually were.

The other is that the book is inaccurate in a lot of ways, even some that do not spring from his bias. I was particularly struck by one remarkable self-contradiction. On p. 22, he wrote that American soldiers found that "superior weaponry yielded no advantage, they suffered casualties without being able to inflict significant loss" on the Communists. Later in the same chapter, on p. 39, he mentions that the loss rate suffered by the Communist forces was huge, one of the highest loss rates in all of history. He does not appear to notice that both of these statements could not be true.