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RICE WARS IN COLONIAL VIETNAM: The Great Famine and the Viet Minh Road to Power. Asia/Pacific/Perspectives. By Geoffrey C. Gunn. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. xix, 322 pp. (Tables, maps.) US$89.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4422-2302-8.
As World War II came to an end in the spring of 1945, Vietnam experienced the worst famine in its history. Resulting in one to two million deaths, this famine was preventable. As Geoffrey Gunn shows, while countless people died in north and central Vietnam, enough rice to avert the catastrophe was available in the south and, furthermore, rice exports to other parts of the Japanese empire continued unabated. Despite the magnitude of this tragedy, few historians have written on the topic. In this respect, Rice Wars is a welcome addition to the scholarship on modern Vietnamese history as well as the history of war and famine. The book sets out to understand the causes of the famine and to argue that this humanitarian disaster contributed to the Viet Minh's rise to power in August 1945.
In identifying the many causal factors and leading players of this famine, Gunn eschews the blame game and instead tries to pursue something akin to a "truth commission-style investigation" (230). In doing so, he casts his net wide, examining the actions not only of the usual suspects, the French and Japanese, but also those of the Allies during the war. According to Gunn, Allied bombing, which damaged dikes and the transportation infrastructure, had an important role in the subsistence crisis. However, while the bombing had an impact, it...