The environmental history of the Vietnam War is unique in the twentieth century for the unprecedented scale of aerial bombing and use of incendiaries such as napalm, as well as the United States military’s use of tactical herbicides to destroy forest cover in combat zones. Drawing on recent trends in environmental and military history, this chapter aims to provide a more comprehensive sketch of the environmental legacies of the Vietnam War. Besides the effects of bombing and herbicides, these include inquiries into the footprints of warfare in urban and industrial development, in ethnic and demographic shifts in former warzones, in the dispersion of invasive species, and even in the creation of wilderness or conservation areas.

Most of the available statistics on the Vietnam War come from the US government. Those for US military personnel strengths in Vietnam, and US casualties, are relatively accurate. Most of the rest are problematic. Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces personnel strengths were exaggerated; more men were listed on unit rosters than were actually serving. US figures for RVNAF casualties were below the actual levels in some periods. US estimates of communist personnel strength were usually well below the actual level. In US figures for communist losses, inflated “body counts” were balanced by communist personnel who died under circumstances not allowing US or RVN forces to count their bodies, so the overall totals may not have been exaggerations. The United States used air power on a huge scale. The bomb tonnage delivered on South Vietnam was the largest for any country in history, and that on Laos the second-largest. But it was indigenous forces that did most of the ground combat and therefore suffered most of the losses. The number of RVNAF personnel who died was far larger than the number of Americans. The number of communist personnel who died was larger still.

The Nixon administration’s decision in 1969 to begin the systematic bombing of Cambodia fundamentally altered the nature of the war the US was fighting in Vietnam for all parties involved – Americans, North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, and especially the Cambodians. Cambodia had largely remained isolated from the fighting even as it escalated in 1965. North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong cadres had been using the border territory as sanctuaries, but they remained along the border and did not engage the Cambodian population in any way that substantially altered the strategic situation or affected the peasants living in the region. The Nixon administration changed all that by undertaking four actions: 1) initiating a secret bombing campaign in 1969 to disrupt North Vietnamese troops; 2) supporting the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk and his replacement with Lon Nolo in March 1970; 3) authorizing a joint South Vietnamese–US invasion of Cambodia in May–June 1970; and 4) continuing with the bombing of Cambodia until August 1973, many months after the signing of the Paris Peace agreement. The results for Cambodia led to a collapse of the government and the takeover by the Khmer Rouge in April 1975.

Through pinpointing how Churchill’s perceptions of aerial bombardment evolved across his political career, this chapter highlights the ambivalence and incongruence that dogged his bombing policy from its earliest days: ultimately arguing that his vacillating approach towards the Allied bombing campaign – and his eventual calculated detachment from it – was not out of character. The chapter begins by establishing his preliminary beliefs about aerial bombardment; next, it traces how his bombing theory converted into destructive reality, from ‘aerially policing’ the British Empire in the 1920s to the Combined Bomber Offensive; finally, it examines how Churchill attempted to reconcile his incriminating role in the German firestorms with a war-scarred Britain after 1945.

Walk into the Warsaw Uprising Museum in Poland’s capital, and it won’t be long before you’ll begin to feel the eeriness that comes with being surrounded by death.1 One exhibit allows visitors to cower inside a replica of the sewers where members of the Polish underground resistance used to hide while fighting the Nazis. Another exhibit shows original film footage of the destruction of Warsaw; by January 1945, after the Polish forces surrendered, 85 per cent of the city’s buildings had been flattened. A third is dedicated to the child soldiers and nurses who died fighting for freedom. Around 16,000 members of the resistance were killed fighting in the streets. But the actual death toll was much larger. During and after the uprising, an estimated 150,000 civilian men, women and children died, mostly in mass executions.

Ireland, a small state, and America, a great power, had little in common by 1938–9. But on the eve of the Second World War, security needs brought interaction between the two countries. Both states intensified military preparedness. But the London factor was influential again during negotiations when the American government agreement to sell arms and equipment was with British approval. The chapter concludes that the inevitable inclusion of Ireland in the US-defined war zone illustrated again de Valera’s misunderstanding of US foreign policy concerns. This gap between reality and aspiration was highlighted throughout the war also as Ireland adhered to neutrality while US neutrality was abandoned in 1941 proof also of the differing needs of a small vulnerable state and a great power and their respective leaders.

This chapter is about Allied plans to ‘wear down’ Greater Germany by strategic bombing, and to weaken its hold on occupied territory by encouraging an underground Resistance; some Allied leaders saw these methods as an alternative to a direct ground attack. Resources of the German war economy. Food production and war industry. The limited economic utilisation by the Germans of occupied territory. Forced (slave) labour as a key German asset. Albert Speer and the efforts to intensify the war economy. German technical innovation and ‘miracle weapons’. The Allied war economies in comparison. Development of strategic bombing by Britain and the USA. Relationship between strategic bombing and the ground campaigns. German missile programmes; the American the atomic bomb project. Occupation by Germany and collaboration with the occupiers. Development of the European Resistance, supported from Britain by the SOE. Role of the Communists in the Resistance. The Partisan movement in Russia and Yugoslavia. The effectiveness of the Resistance, relative to Allied conventional forces. Lack of large-scale opposition to Hitler in Germany, despite the July 1944 bomb plot. The resilience of the Nazi regime requires, in the end, occupation by ground armies; ‘wear down’ by underground movements and air bombing is not enough.

This chapter describes how the world’s first independent air force, led by Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, reacted to the threats to its existence by maximizing the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) operational utility and financial efficiency, while simultaneously contriving a credible narrative about its future strategic potential. In pursuing these twin narratives, the RAF developed a unique culture of beliefs and taken-for-granted attitudes that thrived because of the conceptually incurious nature of the men it selected to become officers. Few of these technically able "practical men" were willing to challenge their superiors’ intuitive and speculative belief that the morale of civilian populations was especially vulnerable to bombing. Instead, like their leaders, they became consciously complicit in acceding to the societal prophecies, articulated in books, films, and newspapers, that bombing would have apocalyptic effects, and that civil societies subjected to its effects would wish to sue for peace. The chapter concludes by analyzing how this culture impeded the realization that the anticipated outcomes were not being achieved and explains how this stymied options to pursue alternative strategies.