War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

An historian and political scientist, Bernd Greiner is professor at the University of Hamburg and directs the research programme on the theory and history of violence at the Hamburg Institute of Social Research.

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'Brilliantly researched and balanced in its conclusions ... a meticulous, soberly composed reconstruction of the war.' Die Tageszeitung

'An important, outstanding book ... It has taken forty years, until now - thanks also to Bernd Greiner's meticulous scholarship - for the American war crimes in Vietnam to have come to light. How long will it take until we know what is happening in Iraq today?' Die Zeit

'A deeply distressing study ... an important book.' Die Welt

'It is the everyday war, and the unrestrained violence erupting from it again and again, which is portrayed in a strictly objective, non-polemical and therefore even more impressive way ... A masterful account.' Neue Züricher Zeitung

'A splendid and at the same time deeply distressing investigation; and although Iraq isn't mentioned once, the terrifying relevance of the story is obvious ... A brilliant account.' Berliner Zeitung

'A very important contribution to the scholarly literature on the Vietnam War ... a model of a study on the history of violence. One of the best history books I have read for a long time.' International Historical Review

Aus dem Klappentext

Shortly before 8 a.m. on 16 March 1968, C-Company, First Battalion, Twentieth Infantry, Eleventh Brigade, Americanal Division, on a search-and-destroy mission in Quang Ngai Province, South Vietnam, entered the small hamlet of My Lai 4. By noon every living being the troops could find was dead - about 500 women, children and old men had been systematically murdered.

To this day, the My Lai massacre has remained the most shocking episode of the Vietnam War. Yet it is now becoming clear that this infamous incident was not an exception or aberration; on the contrary, as Bernd Greiner shows in harrowing detail, atrocities and massacres were commonplace. Based on extensive research and unprecedented access to US Army archives, War without Frontiers reveals the true extent of war crimes committed by American troops in Vietnam. In a series of case studies Greiner looks at the killing work of US Army death squads in the Northern Provinces in 1967; gives a detailed and harrowing account of the massacres at My Lai 4 and My Khe 4 on 16 March 1968; and portrays the war of attrition in the Southern Provinces between 1968 and 1971. In these chapters Greiner has created a microcosm of the Vietnam War that illustrates how the war over the population soon became a war against civilians.

Yet rather than pointing the finger at the 'grunts' fighting a dirty war on the ground, Greiner argues that the responsibility for these atrocities extends all the way up to the White House and the Pentagon. A political leadership frightened for the United States to lose its credibility and unable, against better advice, 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, lacking in motivation and interested only in furthering their careers; soldiers who realised they were utterly disposable and sought to empower themselves through random killing - all these factors lead to an escalation of violence on the ground: the torture, rape, maiming and murder of countless Vietnamese civilians.

Impeccably researched, multi-layered in its analysis, and balanced in its conclusions, this is an important book: it is the comprehensive, and arguably final, indictment of the American war in Vietnam.