Certain Victory: How Hanoi Won The War

by Denis Ashton Warner

hardback

Genres: History

295 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1977

Reviews

[Liam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Late last week, as I was tidying up various listings here on GR, I belatedly discovered that the author of this book, the legendary Australian war correspondent and author Denis Ashton Warner, had passed away last July at the age of 94. He was, as far as I know, the last (not to mention one of the best) of his generation of journalists. In addition to that, he was a role model and indeed something of a hero to countless younger English-language journalists all over the world, including myself (though my own journalistic career was very brief and in another type of journalism altogether).
Denis Warner, who was born and raised in and around Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, began his career during the Second World War covering both the North African & Pacific theatres of operations. His first book ('Written In Sand', 1944), published before the end of the war, was about the battles in North Africa; for the rest of his career, however, he was primarily concerned with the Asia-Pacific region, South-East Asia in particular. Mr. Warner began his many years of coverage of the wars in Indochina in the early 1950s, during the French Indochina War, and is one of only a tiny handful of correspondents who covered all the many years of bitter struggle in that part of the world throughout the latter half of the 20th Century. Many of his colleagues (Robert Capa, Bernard Fall, François Sully, Henri Huet, Larry Burrows, et.al...) lost their lives while covering that long conflict. In 1963, the book which is probably Denis Warner's best known work, 'The Last Confucian: Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and the West' was published. One of the few of his many books to have been published in the U.S. (the majority were only published in Australia and/or the U.K.), it is a brilliantly written portrait of Viet Nam during the era of Ngô Ðinh Diệm and is still part of the indispensable canon for anyone pursuing research or study in this area of history. [12-13-12, 2:05 p.m.- To be continued...]

[Joe Sampson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is about North Vietnam's conquest of South Vietnam. It is primarily about the last few months of the war. Very detailed account. The author is sympathetic to South Vietnam, which he said was a democracy and prosperous while North Vietnam was a dictatorship and relatively poor. South Vietnam was hampered by a lack of weapons while North Vietnam had lots of weapons, many supplied by the Soviet Union.