Academic literature on the topic 'Battle of (Hûé, Vietnam : 1968.)'

In the most difficult moments of the war against America, the Central Propaganda Committee’s Department for South Vietnam undertook the mission of “fire holding” and “heat transferring” to the battle of the South of Vietnam. From the requirement of the resistance, the Central Propaganda Committee’s Department for South Vietnam organized many activities on propaganda, training, personnel organization and political fighting movement for the Southerners. The paper presents the activities and achievements in the field of propaganda of the Central Propaganda Committee’s Department for South Vietnam in the 1965-1968 period, and at the same time, confirms the important contribution of this work in the resistance war against American.

This research explores the interconnection between oral history, documentary film and the emerging field of interactive documentary as an interdisciplinary creative strategy for telling factual stories of war and trauma. In doing so, it recognises the problematic nature of broadcast television documentary where uneven power structures can negatively affect authorship and story. The objective of this research was to ease this tension with the development of a new creative practice model in the field of documentary story telling, as an alternative form of representation. The immediacy, polyvocality and accessibility offered by this new form of communication and technology, when coupled with oral history and documentary film, is particularly suited to projects where marginalised communities seek to make sense of their experience, and to challenge existing histories. I have developed an innovative synthesis between the three approaches to factual storytelling, which I call Oral History Interactive Documentary (OHID). As a means of factual, multi-narrative storytelling, this approach is designed to meet participants’ need to speak and be heard on their own terms and in their own words, rather than through ‘hierarchical media as a forum for privileged voices’ (Mitchell 2015, p.9). My development of OHID is based on a dataset of 150 audio-visual original oral history interviews conducted with returned Australian Vietnam War soldiers, who fought at the Battle of Coral Balmoral in May 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. It was the biggest and bloodiest battle fought by Australians, with more Australian soldiers killed in this engagement than at any other time during the Vietnam War. However, the Coral Balmoral soldiers’ repatriation back to Australia in 1969 was troubled as it coincided with major historical, social and cultural shifts in Australian society. The re-casting of the previously secure Australian national identity, largely founded in the legend of Anzac, resulted in the soldiers’ exclusion from imperatives linked to nationalism and masculinity. Instead, the returned Coral Balmoral soldiers found themselves in an uneasy relationship with an Australian society unable to reconcile a gallant military history with the contentious war in Vietnam. It is within these warfare and post-war socio-cultural experiences that the oral history interviews I conducted sought to record the veterans’ memories. To better understand the relationship between telling stories of war and trauma, oral history, documentary film and its potential interconnection with interactivity, Sandra Gaudenzi’s (2013) taxonomy of four modes of interactivity was critically applied and tested against a range of conflict themed interactive documentaries. Critical analysis of these i-docs helped shape ideas of how interactive documentary enables authorship and agency. Rethinking ideas of authorship and inviting co-creation collaboration, opened new possibilities in digital space for multiple and layered storytelling. Importantly for the Coral Balmoral community, it allowed for the emergence of contradiction leading to new interpretative possibilities. Making obvious the synergies between interactive documentary, oral history and documentary film enabled me to design a creative strategy and practice model for authentic telling of stories of war and conflict. As a result, I have developed and tested the first contemporary single battle post-conflict oral history interactive documentary prototype, 26 Days: The Battle of Coral Balmoral. This practice-led inquiry shaped my own professional practice as a screen media artist. The synergy between oral history, documentary film and interactive documentary has enabled me to bridge a gap in current factual broadcast storytelling, that suffers from a lack of informed, documented strategies. This research also looks beyond linear, hierarchical television documentary as a favoured factual storytelling platform to a new model of communication by offering a strategy that transcends some of the limitations of time-based storytelling. By offering a collaborative and three-tiered storytelling system, operating in a spatial and temporal environment, the OHID strategy provides a multi-tiered, organic framework through which witness accounts are recorded, organised, cohesively presented and engaged with by a user audience. In this way, the OHID strategy provides a framework that builds storytelling arenas for ideas and plots to unfold freely, run parallel to each other, or be completely contradictory. In so doing, OHID breaks authorial codes, whether political, social, geographical or institutional. Finally, the OHID strategy encourages collaboration that empowers marginalised communities to present many and alternative versions of experiences, in a way that opens opportunities for new knowledge and understanding. The Interactive Oral History Documentary 26 Days: The Battle of Coral Balmoral can be found at www.fsbcoral.org Please note that all active oral history interviews are marked with a white star in a green circle.
Thesis (PhD Doctorate)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Griffith Film School
Arts, Education and Law
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Abstract The trigger for these historical events was Giap’s Tet offensive of late January 1968, an event long planned by the Politburo and for a short period expected by the Americans. By the beginning of 1968, both sides had completed their preparations for what each knew would be a large, and probably decisive, battle. The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were positioning men and supplies to launch their Great Offensive. In mid-January, specially trained commando units called sappers began to infiltrate into the cities and towns with their weapons concealed under loads of farm products. At the same time, Main and Local Force units began to move toward their objectives, the towns and cities of South Vietnam.

Abstract This chapter analyzes the pessimistic tendency in CIA’s reports of the Vietnam War, in which the assumption was that the war was unwinnable. However, the chapter discusses how the CIA embraced the principle of “intelligence to please” and showed itself vulnerable to manipulation. It recounts how the CIA loyally helped the Johnson and Nixon administrations to prosecute the Vietnam War, in which it did not believe, and how it killed people contrary to its own counterinsurgency principles. It discusses the intelligence dimensions of the Gulf of Tonkin incident that drew America into the war, the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign, the order-of-battle controversy that preceded the Tet Offensive of 1968, and Nixon’s Vietnamization program.

The book’s epilogue explores the post-centennial transition from the twin foci of civil rights and the Cold War to the Vietnam War as the lens through which the Battle of Gettysburg’s meaning was refracted. It examines the ways in which both support of and opposition to US actions in Vietnam was expressed through various commemorative activities. Special attention is paid to the 1969 antiwar march to the Eternal Peace Light Monument, affiliated with the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam; Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 Memorial Day speech at Soldiers’ National Cemetery; and C.T. Vivian’s “Second Gettysburg Address,” delivered during a 1972 rally on behalf of the Harrisburg Seven. The epilogue also reflects on the similarities and differences between the 100^th and 150^th anniversary commemorations and Gettysburg National Military Park’s shift from framing the battle as “the High Water Mark” to portraying it as “A New Birth of Freedom.” Finally, it details continuing efforts to utilize Gettysburg’s historical landscape and iconic status for the purpose of crafting a usable past suiting contemporary needs.