‘Britain, Australia, New Zealand, SEATO, the secret war in Laos, and counter insurgency expert Colonel “Ted” Serong’, Honest History, 13 June 2017 updated
Update 28 June 2017: Willy Bach died yesterday. Honest History sends condolences to his friends and loved ones.
This post contains extracts from Willy Bach’s Master of Philosophy thesis, ‘Collaboration of Britain, Australia and New Zealand in the Second Indochina War, with particular focus on Laos, 1952-1975’ (University of Queensland, 2016). The thesis is based on exhaustive research in government documents, many of them declassified, and hard-to-find secondary sources. Honest History believes the thesis makes an important contribution to the history of Australian and Commonwealth involvement in South East Asia in the 1960s and 1970s.
During 2016, Willy Bach sent Honest History a copy of his thesis ‘[i]n the hope that [it] could be a useful resource from which to borrow freely’. We were pleased and honoured to receive it. In the package we have now put together from the thesis there is:
- Background, containing Abstract, the first few pages of the Introduction, and Summary;
- Operations in Thailand and Laos 1962-68 (pdf of pp. 13-24);
- Australia, SEATO and Laos (pdf of pp. 25-39);
- Australian Colonel FP (‘Ted’) Serong and counterinsurgency in Vietnam (pdf of pp. 54-59).
Read more … and links to pdfs
