Britain’s Secret War in Vietnam

The years between 1961 and 1963 are the years in which Britain learned how to be present in Vietnam without appearing to be there. The instruments of that presence were an advisory mission, a defoliation programme it declined to condemn, a handful of soldiers moved into the country under civilian cover, and a squadron of aircraft flying from Singapore. None of it was announced. Much of it was denied. What follows is an account of what the files record, set against what the UK Parliament and the public were told at the time, and the distance between the two. The decision to send it was a British initiative rather than a response to American pressure. London had to overcome real reluctance from the American military, which did not obviously want a second set of foreign advisers competing for the ear of the South Vietnamese president. The Macmillan government pressed ahead because it believed that Britain's recent experience of defeating a communist insurgency in Malaya was a genuine asset, and because a visible contribution in South East Asia served Britain's wider standing at a moment when that standing was contracting almost everywhere else. It was all a big dark secret = until now