The Maritime Nature of the Wars for Vietnam (1945-1975): A Geo-Historical Reflection

摘要

If the Ho Chi Minh Trail running southwards through Laos and Cambodia to southern Vietnam is well known today, we should no longer be surprised to learn of the existence of another, parallel route emerging from the South China Sea's western periphery and which was directly linked to the wars for Vietnam on the eastern part of the Southeast Asian continent. Indeed, the wars for Vietnam between 1945 and 1975 were much more than simple 'land wars in Southeast Asia'. The sea was involved from the beginning, stretching from the southern Chinese coast to Sihanoukville and extending into international waters bordering on the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand. The very fact that the Ho Chi Minh Trail got its start and its name as a coastal route during the war against the French makes this clear. That said, this essay does not try to play one up in favour of the other. The aim has been to try to show how land and sea routes intersected in complex ways both 'down below' in terms of human and physical geography and 'up above' in terms of regional and international conjunctures and the geo-strategic and diplomatic interests at stake. I have tried to suggest that war, like peace, has to be analysed in such a wider perspective in order to pick up on the complex interplays and connections cutting horizontally across national and physical boundaries, through various means of transportation and logistics, and vertically by linking decisions taken on high in Hanoi, Beijing, Moscow and Washington to how they worked themselves out on the roads, canals and waves below—and often how they just did not.164 By 'looking at the wars for Vietnam' from the South China Sea between 1945 and 1975, we can better 'see' these connections.