This page was created by Michitake Aso.
Conclusion: Invasion Mapped
Path A explores charges of biological warfare leveled during the Korean War. Such charges provided a model for those formulated by the Việt Minh against the French. This path also considers what various cartographic representations of Northern Vietnam have to say about the geographical imaginations that were available to Vietnamese intellectuals and political leaders. Path B encourages users to construct an understanding of biological warfare in Northern Vietnam during the First Indochina War. While looking back we can be fairly certain that biological warfare did not take place, it was not clear that this was the case at the time. I want to unsettle module viewers and convince them that at the very least Việt Minh leaders, including Tôn Thất Tùng, took the threat of biological weapons seriously and were not merely faking charges for propaganda purposes. Path C encourages users to explore the fears surrounding biological warfare that helped motivate resistance. This path finally reviews a pamphlet that presents a history of Japanese and American imperialist's use of biological weapons and the Chinese patriotic hygiene movement launched in response.
Some historians have begun to reflect on such Cold War histories of environmental warfare. Jim Fleming's Fixing the Sky has considered the history of weather modification techniques, including those used in the skies over Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, there has been much scholarship on the American and South Vietnamese use of herbicides, including books by Ed Martini and David Zierler. David Biggs's recent Footprints of War has considered how the landscapes of central Vietnam have been shaped during decades of war. Yet, there has been little work done on the local perspectives on, and experience of, environmental warfare. This includes the fear of biological weapons, and environmental warfare more generally, explored in this module. You can see a partial list of references and websites cited in this module.
Focusing on Vietnamese responses to biological warfare reveals that mapping and mobilities (of the geobody and body) were key to this warfare and responses to it. These two processes may seem to exist in tension: maps define and solidify, while mobility destabilizes. Yet, the two processes have depended on each other. On the one hand, maps could not be created without movement and exploration. There was the physical movement of the explorer and the material and symbolic flows that happened through knowledge networks. Airplanes have helped this mapping and created aerial views that, as Sakura Christmas and David Fedman note, elided the violence they enabled. On the other hand, understanding, and therefore engaging in, movement was difficult if not impossible without some kind of map. These maps could be official, state created maps or they could be unofficial and personal, from individual mental maps to communal song lines to airplane routes. So mapping and movement have been two complementary, intertwined processes.
TBC...
