Missing Pieces: - Royal Australian Navy

7. Propping up a domino: Vietnam,
1967—71
Australian involvement in the Vietnam War was a logical consequence of the country’s
decisions on collective security arrangements made in the aftermath of WWII. 711 It
will be recalled from previous chapters that Australia had first committed itself to an
enhanced position in British Commonwealth defence arrangements in the Pacific region.
Second, Australia had assigned and deployed forces to the British Commonwealth
FESR based in Malaya/Malaysia. Third, it had acceded to the Manila Treaty in 1954,
which established the SEATO alliance, dedicated to the defence of coalition interests
in Southeast Asia against a perceived expansionist Communist threat from China and
its allies. Australia provided staff resources and earmarked forces to be committed to
the new alliance based in Bangkok. 712
For Australian governments, these commitments in pursuit of a policy, later titled
‘Forward Defence’, created a dilemma. The United States was reluctant to signal any
interest in an involvement in ANZAM, while the British Government exercised a studied
ambivalence about its willingness to become involved in Southeast Asia outside the
area around the Malay Peninsula and North Borneo. Australia had strategic interests
in the whole region and strove unsuccessfully to act as a bridge between the positions
of the two major powers. The forces committed to the FESR were also seen as being
available for SEATO contingencies, and from 1957 onwards Australia appears to have
put emphasis on its SEATO obligations. 713 There are two cogent reasons to explain
Australia’s backing of SEATO. First, Australia remained cautious about the depth and
extent of British interest in the Far East, and its ability to play a military role there.
Second, SEATO had a wider geographic span than ANZAM, one more representative
of Australia’s long-term interests in the region. 714 Map 24 depicts the area of SEATO
strategic concern.
Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, national and coalition intelligence
assessments portrayed an increasingly assertive communism, from which the major
threat was the People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLA-N) as well as China’s growing
Air Force. 715 On three occasions (1959, 1962 and 1964), SEATO looked set to intervene
militarily in Laos when it seemed the government of that ‘protocol state’ was about to
fall to a Communist-led insurrection. Both Australia and the United States deployed
forces for such an intervention, but the crises were resolved by negotiation, in which
Britain took a key role. 716 The Australian response to these Laotian crises, and a request
for assistance by Thailand in the same period, signalled that Australia clearly saw
its way of achieving the Forward Defence it desired as being in partnership with the
United States.