River Warfare in Vietnam
A Social, Political, and Military History, 1945-1975
Robin Rielly, McFarland, 2024, 536 pages
Book Review published on: September 18, 2025
Robin Rielly is an established military historian. His previous publication, Kamikazes, Corsairs, and Picket Ships (2008), examined the campaign at Okinawa in 1945, especially the U.S. Navy's air defense. In this new work, River Warfare in Vietnam, he also addresses a naval topic—riverine warfare in Vietnam from 1945 to the fall of South Vietnam in 1975.
Rielly's approach is very broad, covering—as the subtitle indicates—social, political, and military history. One might add he also covers the organizational history of the various French, South Vietnamese, and American riverine units as they developed and evolved over time. This is the main problem of the book; it covers too much. In covering so many aspects of the conflict, including spending the first fifty pages of the book providing a mini history of French involvement in Indochina, he overwhelms the reader with information; some of this information is dated and some is just plain inaccurate. In doing so, he loses the narrative thread, especially for operations. For example, in his discussion of the initial operations by the French in 1945 after the end of the Second World War in Asia, he intermixes his discussion of the emergence of various French riverine units with his operational and tactical narrative. This becomes even more difficult to read because Rielly jumps back and forth in time, which undermines an understanding of causation.
Perhaps the chapters of most interest to American military professionals are those that look at the American period in Vietnam, especially after 1965 when Rear (later Vice) Adm. Elmo Zumwalt took command of the U.S. Navy's riverine forces and Vietnamese Navy riverine training program (chapters 8-11). Despite the importance of Zumwalt's tenure and his SEALORDS campaign, he is only mentioned twice in the text.
Another problem with the book is that there is really has no master argument; it is more of a recitation of endless facts. The final chapter ends with the fall of Vietnam but no master summary of themes occurs thereafter. The reader will come away with a general idea that riverine warfare was a key component of conflict in Indochina, but as an overall argument this would seem obvious. Rielly is correct in the sense that other narrative works on Vietnam have tended to focus too narrowly, or not at all, on the riverine aspects. In that sense, the book does fill a gap in the literature, providing "one stop shopping" as it were for the entire series of conflicts from 1945 on. The book's value is thus more as a reference work, especially given the care Rielly has taken with his exhaustive research in attempting to get as many facts right as possible. However, readers looking for a page-turning narrative of river warfare in Vietnam will have to wait or read the more focused works on river war that are already published.
Book Review written by: John T. Kuehn, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas