~ DEBUNKING THE ARMCHAIR HISTORIAN DESCRIPTION:
Original video: [ Ссылка ]
The Armchair Historian put out a video with excellent production. It tells its narrative/story well. However, The Armchair Historian fails to keep up with the latest research on the Vietnam War - it falls into the old, orthodox narrative of the war, the same narrative built by journalists and earlier historians of the Vietnam War.
A newer, revised history has since developed, with many professional historians reviewing newly declassified documents and interviewing more Vietnamese sources. The history has changed significantly, much of it vindicating South Vietnam, and other parts of it correcting course to fit the new evidence on North Vietnamese leadership. There is so much here that has been disproven since 2008 - it should have been corrected in the Armchair Historian’s video, but has not been.
Major Video Points
00:00 Introduction
01:36 The North Vietnamese Planning for the Offensive
06:07 The NLF Relationship to North Vietnam
07:53 ARVN II Corps
10:58 The Battle of Huế Summary
15:37 Mistakes in The Battle of Huế
18:15 American and South Vietnamese Division of Labour
19:45 Communist Declaration of Tết Nguyên Đán Truce
20:53 Contemporary Communist View of the Tết Offensive
22:55 Example of Historical Correction
Unfortunately, this simply shows that the public understanding of the Vietnam War is political and emotional first, with a particularly heavy focus on anecdotal accounts of the war, as opposed to getting the basic facts straight first, then forming an opinion. The viewers of the original video seemingly do not appear to see the numerous factual errors with the video.
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~MAJOR SOURCES:
Pribbenow, Merle L. "General Võ Nguyên Giáp and the Mysterious Evolution of the Plan for the 1968 Tet Offensive." Journal of Vietnamese Studies 3, no. 2 (2008), [ Ссылка ].
Moise, Edwin. The Myths of Tet: The Most Misunderstood Event of the Vietnam War. Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2017.
Willbanks, James. The Tet Offensive: A Concise History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Villard, Erik. The 1968 Tet Offensive Battles of Quang Tri City and Hue. Washington, D.C.: United States Army Center of Military History, 2008.
Tran, Van Quang, and others. Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the
People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954-1975. Translated by Merle Pribbenow. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002.
Tran, Van Tra. Vietnam: History of the Bulwark B2 Theatre. 5 vols. Translated by George Gawrych. Fort Leavenworth: Combat Studies Institute, 1983.
Viet Cong Use of Terror. Saigon: United States Mission in Vietnam, 1966.
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