australias involvement in viet
Australia had reasons for wanting to join the Vietnam War, quite apart from considerations of South Vietnamese sovereignty. It was considered necessary to maintain good relations with our alliance partners the United) and constituted a critical step in maintaining a defense. Initially, Australia provided financial support to the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), and when widespread conflict became more widespread, Australia provided military advisers. The United States, who had been keen "observers" of the conflict, soon committed itself to military intervention and Australia wished to show her support. The problem was, that the South Vietnamese government was not so convinced of the utility of Australia's presence. How was Australia to solve this dilemma? The official and propagated account of Australia's decision to enter the Vietnam War holds that Australia, at the behest of the South Vietnamese government, and together with the noble American nation entered (reluctantly) into war, to safeguard the world from communist peril.Vietnam constituted Australia's longest involvement in a war, and the first confrontation in which involvement was not always viewed as a simple logical process. The Austral
This chain reaction was said to be reminiscent of dominos, the momentum of the first toppling the second, and the second, through its momentum toppling the next in an unstoppable journey. It should also be noted that Australia made virtually no attempt to integrate herself in the South-East Asian region, perhaps as a relection of the "white Australia policy" or memories of the Japanese attacks against Darwin. Eventually, the French colonisers were defeated. In September 1954, the Minister for Defence, Sir Philip Mc Bride, outlined the Australian government's fears upon which Australian foreign policy was predicated for the following twenty years. Australia became uneasy at the outbreak in 1948 of communist-led revolts and insurgencies in several South-east Asian countries, including Burma, Indonesia, Malaya and the Philippines. In 1949, a period known as the Malyan emergency commenced, whereby Indonesia made repeated forays into Malayan territory. We have had to come to terms with the domestic crisis caused to one of our South-east Asian neighbours, occassioning huge refugee outfluxes, defioliation and social disintegration. It must be seen as part of a thrust by communist China between the Indian and Pacific OceansChina would continue to blamed by Australia for the region's instability, even after the US "rapprochement" with China in 1971. The strongly visual domino metaphor, whose chilling image struck fear into the hearts and minds of millions across the Western world, was originally stated in a speech of President Eisenhower in 1954. This perception was built up through political campaigns, including that of Harold Holt who ran on a slogan of "all the way with LBJ" (US president Johnson), stressing the communist phenomenon which gained the appellation the "yellow peril". Additionally, Australian military leaders had virtually no influence in the policy decisions of the wider conduct of the war. In 1950, the First Indo-China War began. The middle of that year also saw the outbreak of the Korean War (1950-1960). Lastly, Vietnam should be investigated because its legacy still resonates in the Australian forum. Additionally it was predominantly located in an area which was perceived as being of critical strategic importance for the overall war.
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