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bobbo49's review
4.0
Although I have known of Bernard Fall's prescient books about the 1950s French war in Vietnam for many years, I hadn't gotten around to reading any of them until now. Street Without Joy is an inside look at how the French lost Vietnam, first published in 1961 and updated in 1964 with some very explicit warnings to the Americans about the nature of the war they were then entering. Would that Fall's book had been better disseminated and scrutinized by America's leadership in those years: his descriptions of political vs. military war, and the ineffectiveness of technological warfare against an indigenous and guerilla opponent, proved all too painfully accurate. History told as contemporary reportage; do we ever learn from the mistakes of others, let alone our own mistakes?
garyboland's review
4.0
A particularly strong second half eclipses a workmanlike first. The author expertly traces the common strands of successful revolutionary war and makes the case that technical superiority is useless against popular support
jimg's review against another edition
A terrific book that provides grim details about the folly of attempting to fight ideology with military technology alone. Most of Fall's book deals with the French loss of the territory that became North Vietnam. Near the end we find the US making the same errors as the French in trying to "liberate" South Vietnam.
Fall asks why it is that we need to pit elite Western forces with all manner of technically superior fire power against relatively poorly trained and only rarely equally equipped rebel troops. His answer:
"The answer is very simple: It takes all the technical proficiency our system can provide to make up for the woeful lack of popular support and political savvy of most of the regimes that the West has thus far sought to prop up."
This point could be repeated in a variety of ways -- and Fall does. He notes early on in the book that the failure of the French to insist on land reform, thus freeing the vast number of people in the country from an oppressive elite of landed gentry essentially doomed the French military efforts to certain failure despite all of their gallantry.
Fall asks why it is that we need to pit elite Western forces with all manner of technically superior fire power against relatively poorly trained and only rarely equally equipped rebel troops. His answer:
"The answer is very simple: It takes all the technical proficiency our system can provide to make up for the woeful lack of popular support and political savvy of most of the regimes that the West has thus far sought to prop up."
This point could be repeated in a variety of ways -- and Fall does. He notes early on in the book that the failure of the French to insist on land reform, thus freeing the vast number of people in the country from an oppressive elite of landed gentry essentially doomed the French military efforts to certain failure despite all of their gallantry.
petezilla's review against another edition
4.0
Really fantastic book - the author really captures well the sights, sounds, and smells of the conflict and depicts with incredible detail the strategic decisions down to the hilarious (or sad) anecdotes of the men and women involved. I wish I personally had read this book 5 deployments ago, but I only join a long list of Americans across the decades who should have done so.
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