Western forces tried to counter these advantages with technology- fast strike mobile helicopter and armor groups, more and better surveillance, agent orange, etc. Street Without Joy tells the fascinating story of the post WW2 French in Indochina, their failures to understand or counter Vietnamese Communist forces and the eventual continuance of the same errors by the United States.Įssentially, Fall posits that French (and later US) forces failed to understand the nature of the Vietnamese Communists' revolutionary war, their support among the local population and their ability to use neighboring countries (and eventually North Vietnam) as refuges.

If you have in interest in the Vietnam war, or in strategy, insurgencies and counter-insurgent techniques this book should be on your reading list. Could be an amb-'.įall was survived by his wife and three daughters. He was dictating notes into a tape recorder, which captured his last words: 'We've reached one of our phase lines after the fire fight and it smells bad- meaning it's a little bit suspicious. On 21 February 1967, while accompanying a company of the 1st Battalion 9th Marines on Operation Chinook II in the Street Without Joy, Thua Thien Province, Fall stepped on a Bouncing Betty land mine and was killed. He predicted the failures of France and the United States in the wars in Vietnam because of their tactics and lack of understanding of the societies. He taught at Howard University for most of his career and made regular trips to Southeast Asia to learn about changes and the societies.

In 1950 he first came to the United States for graduate studies at Syracuse University and Johns Hopkins University, returning and making his residence there. Born in Austria, he moved with his family to France as a child after Germany's annexation, where he started fighting with the French Resistance at age 16, and later the French Army during World War II. Fall was a prominent war correspondent, historian, political scientist, and expert on Indochina during the 1950s and 1960s.

Street Without Joy by Bernard B. Fall