Winning in Vietnam
Robert Asprey's monumental work on guerilla warfare, War in the Shadows, is really about the Vietnam War, even as he ranges across the centuries in his analysis of asymmetric methods in war. He reserves his most exacting rhetoric, and his greatest scorn, for those who ordered and conducted the failed American invasion of Indochina, for their amorality and incompetence. I was struck by how often, through the years from 1945 onwards, he was able to quote a general who confidently announced impending victory or at least great strides towards it. So I collected a few.
Source
Robert Asprey, War in the Shadows (Macdonald & Jane: 1975)
Background
We start in 1945 with British and French troops in south Vietnam, along with the defeated Japanese army.
Under the terms of the Potsdam Conference as confirmed at Yalta, Britain and China shared responsibility for occupying Vietnam: British forces moving in south and Chinese …