Simon Dunstan

One of the most neglected aspects of the campaigns which ravaged South-East Asia and dominated the world's news media -for thirty years after the end of World War II has been the role of the armored fighting vehicle. For many it was the 'conventional wisdom' of Western armies that in mountainous jungle or swampy terrain the limitations placed upon an armored unit's mobility outweighed its potential advantage in firepower over a lightly equipped guerilla enemy. The cliche image was that of the armored column vulnerably strung out along heavily mined and ambushed dirt roads.
In point of historical fact -as Simon Dunstan demonstrates in this fascinating study -many commanders made imaginative and effective use of armor in this theatre of operations. The involvement of French, American and Australian forces alongside the Army of the Republic of Vietnam brought a variety of different approaches, and a wide range of different tanks, personnel carriers, armored cars and self-propelled guns; but a strain of ingenious improvisation, a refusal to let the terrain and the fighting conditions dominate them, runs through the history of many of these units. This first serious review of the whole subject discusses many such initiatives, from the French Foreign Legion's use of amphibious cargo carriers as fighting 'swamp-buggies' in the 1950s, to the 'bunker-busting' of Australian Centurion tanks twenty years later.
The heart of the book is an extraordinary collection of front-line photographs which the author has assembled from many sources, both official and private, including several by the legendary combat photographer Tim Page. Accompanied by the kind of caption material which only an expert could provide, and which students of warfare too seldom find, these 200 + glimpses of armored operations over a period of thirty years bring vividly to life the accounts and quoted memoirs of veterans which illuminate Dunstan's text. The men who rode and fought in the 'tracks' faced a special kind of war; this book records their particular part in the history of the armored soldier, as well as evaluating their equipment and tactics, and laying out the organisation oftheir units.… (altro)