The Battle for Laos: Vietnam's Proxy War, 1955-1975

by Stephen Emerson

Overview

A history of the “secret war” in Southeast Asia in which nearly three million tons of bombs decimated a newly independent nation.
 
By 1959 the newly independent Kingdom of Laos was transforming into a Cold War battleground for global superpower competition, having been born out of the chaos following the French military defeat and withdrawal from Indochina in 1954. The country was soon engulfed in a rapidly evolving civil war as rival forces jockeyed for power and swelling foreign intervention intensified the fighting.
 
Adding even more fuel to the fire, “neutral” Laos’s geographic entanglement in the war in neighboring South Vietnam deepened in the early 1960s as Hanoi’s reliance on the Ho Chi Minh Trail for moving men and matériel through the southern Laotian panhandle grew exponentially, making it a priority target of American interdiction efforts. For almost twenty years, the fighting between the Western-supported Royal Lao government and the communist-supported Pathet Lao would rage across the plains, jungles, and mountaintops largely unseen by most of the world. Thousands on each side would die and many more would be displaced as the conflict on the ground ebbed and flowed from season to season and year to year. And in the skies above, American and Royal Laotian aircraft would rain down their deadly payloads, decimating large swaths of the countryside in pursuit of victory. Nearly three million tons of bombs would be dropped on Laotian territory between 1965 and 1973, leaving a legacy of unexploded ordnance that lingers to this day. The battle for Laos is a tale of entire communities and generations caught up in a war seemingly without end, one that pitted competing foreign interests and their proxies against each other and was forever tied to Washington’s pursuit of victory in Vietnam. This book tells the story of this so-called “secret war.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781526757050
Publisher:	Pen & Sword Books Limited
Publication date:	11/12/2020
Series:	Cold War, 1945-1991
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	51 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Stephen Emerson was born in San Diego, California into a U.S. Navy family: his father was a career naval aviator and his mother a former Navy nurse. Steve grew up on various Navy bases during the Vietnam War. His father served two combat tours as an attack pilot in Vietnam flying the A-4 Skyhawk in Operation Rolling Thunder while flying off the USS Midway in 1965 with VA-22 and later as commanding officer of VA-146 flying the A-7 Corsair II while embarked on the USS Enterprise in 1969. Steve worked as intelligence analyst covering political-military affairs in Africa and the Middle East. He served as Security Studies Chair at the National Defense University’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies and previously as an associate professor of National Security Decision-making at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. As the author of more than 100 classified and unclassified publications, Steve has written widely on subjects from American national security affairs and political instability to terrorism, African conflicts, and counter-insurgency. Chief among these are his critical assessment of U.S. counter-terrorism policy in Africa, ‘The Battle for Africa’s Hearts and Minds’, and his comprehensive military history of the Mozambican civil war in The Battle for Mozambique. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations/Comparative Politics from the University of Florida and currently resides in Orlando, Florida.

Table of Contents

Glossary 4

1 The Land of A Million Elephants 7

2 A Nation Divided 18

3 Into the Vietnamese Quagmire 36

4 Raising the Stakes 48

5 Escalation 70

6 The Beginning of the End 90

7 The Final Act 109

Notes 118

Bibliography 123

Index 125

Acknowledgements 128

List Of Maps

Map 1 Southeast Asia Theater 6

Map 2 Laotian Theater 21

Map 3 Northern Laos and the Plain of Jars 40

Map 4 Northern Battlefield 58

Map 5 Southern Panhandle 64

Map 6 Operation About Face 83

Map 7 Defending the Hmong Heartland 99

Map 8 Southern Laos Area of Operations, 1971 104