In regard to Keegan's The
Second World War, published by Viking, 1989 being compared to others on the subject of Midway:
I can’t recall whether I read that book but I can’t find
it in my library – which unfortunately doesn’t mean that it isn’t there.
I don’t know how much space Keegan gives to Midway, but The Shattered
Sword, is devoted just to the battle of Midway, is about as long as the
one by Keegan uses to cover the entire Second World War. Time
passes. Toll is taking three volumes to do what Keegan did in one.
I don’t know if Keegan had much access to Japanese records and writings.
In The Shattered Sword, published in 2005 it seems that Parshall
and Tully are breaking new ground: providing significant Japanese records about
Midway, in English, for the first time.
But I do like Keegan. He argued that Vietnam was a
righteous war – that it was right for us to fight it. It was popular in
his day to say the opposite, but the military strategy devised by Acheson
comprising the Truman doctrine resolved that we would oppose Communism in
whatever nation the USSR was advancing it, and since we had more resources than
the USSR, it was believed, we would eventually run them out of theirs. We
would defeat the USSR by outspending them.
It was bold of Keegan to take that view (if that was his
view as well). My own view at the time was that we should have dealt
directly with Ho Chi Minh when he was giving us an olive branch before that
war. We didn’t understand at the time that all communists and communist
countries were not under the control of the USSR. Ho Chi
Minh did go to Russia at one time, but he also showed up at a number of
international political events. He was open to dealing with us at the
time. IMHO.
If I was a dumb 17-year-old at the time the Vietnam War
started (as I was when the Korean war started) I probably would have still
enlisted in the Marine Corps. In my case the Korean war was winding
down before I got to Korea. That wouldn’t have been the case in
Vietnam.
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