I was told recently by an Australian friend that Australians suffered more casualties (deaths?) than Americans per capita in the Vietnam War.
My first response: there were Australians in the Vietnam War?
Aside from those two new facts, new to me, I know nothing, which made me feel kind of bad.
Anyway, is the statement at top true? Before I go google it, any anecdotes, comments from the crowd here?
forces on the USA side were
South Vietnam
United States
South Korea
Australia
Thailand
New Zealand
Khmer Republic
Kingdom of Laos
It was before my time, but my dad was drafted to serve in the Australian Army in Vietnam. He got good at other stuff (driving boats on Sydney Harbour, apocryphally) and wasn’t deployed.
There were 500 Australians killed in Vietnam from 1962 to 1972, and 3,129 wounded/injured/ill, for a total of 3,629 casualties.
U.S. casualties were 58,300 KIA, 153,303 wounded in action, 1,641 MIA, and 63 to 116 who died in captivity, for a total number of casualties of between 213, 307 and 213,360.
Numbers were just grabbed off the web, and different sources may vary. Still, they should be close.
So all you need is to find the population of Australia and the population of the U.S. (averaged for the 10-year involvement?) and do a little division.
We weren’t directly involved, but 30,000 Canadians enlisted in the US army to fight in Vietnam.
If those numbers are right, Americans died at a higher rate than Australians during the war, in terms of overall national population numbers.
But it depends what the stat referred to by the OP is actually counting. It could be counting casualties as a percentage of troops deployed, rather than a percentage of overall population.
According to stats here and here, a total of 2,709,918 Americans served in Vietnam, and about 61,000 Australians. Based on those figures, casualty rates for American troops were still higher than for Aussie troops.
BTW, if you want to see a good, and in places rather funny, cinematic look at Aussies in Vietnam, see if you can track down a copy of The Odd Angry Shot.
Is that the one where they give the padre a ‘wanker’?
My dad was an Air Force Photo Interpreter, and while assigned to Tan Son Nhut, his unit commander and a few coworkers were Ausies. He had fond memories of them, and thought they were fine fellows.
The Ausies flew in large quantities of Fosters, which they shared liberally, painted red kangaroos on everything, sang Waltzing Matilda at almost every occasion, and in general made the best of a bad situation.
One regular occurrence, when they would be walking about (mostly on the way to or coming back from getting drunk) would be for the MPs to stop them, and among other things note that the Ausies mustaches were not (USAF) regulation, which prompted the reply “damn it, Yank, I ain’t in your fuckin’ Air Force”.
When dad left, his commander gave dad his hat, which I understand is a sign of respect. I still have the insignia.
That’s the one. Here’s the scene.
My dad was in the Army, 1st Cav. 70-71. He said they loved the Aussies. Those guys were tough as nails.
Hence Dobbs story of them being hammered all the time. 
The raw stats have already been addressed. I would comment that Australia had a large involvement in Vietnam.
Our government of the time decided that we should hitch our wagon to the States instead of England, which ultimately resulted in a significant contribution from Australia to the Vietnam war. Lyndon Johnson was the first ever US President to visit Australia and as part of that visit support for the war was touted in a cringeworthy (in hindsight) slogan being sold to the Australia people of “All the Way with LBJ”.
In terms of the actual war itself, after a few initial operations together it was realised that the Australian way of doing things didn’t mesh with the US way. Under General Westmoreland, the US approach was all about aggressive actions, massive firepower and tracking results by body counts. The Australians by contrast had learned a lot about counter-insurgency work during the Malayan Emergency which was a guerrilla war fought from 1948 - 1960. Aussie tactics were more about patrolling, ambush, counter-ambush, searching villages without destroying them, and what would come to be called much later ‘Hearts & Minds’. These differences led very quickly to the Australians being assigned a province of their own, Phuoc Tuy Province, in which they were relatively free to wage the war as they saw fit.
The seminal engagement of the war for the Australians was the Battle of Long Tan, which saw a single company of infantry (~100 men), engage and defeat (with artillery and later APC support) a regiment of mainly North Vietnamese regulars (somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 men.) Depending upon if you believe some historians, the story is that after Long Tan, the NVA high command issued orders that the Australians were not to be engaged in large scale battles. Certainly there were no further engagements of that scale from the North Vietnamese for the rest of the Australian deployment.
Billy Connolly did a TV show where he traveled around New Zealand on a motorcycle, touring the country and doing standup shows along the way. In one episode, he hung out with a motorcycle club made up of Kiwi Vietnam vets. It was the first I’d heard of this, and it was really quite moving to hear about these guys going through all of the same difficulties that so many American vets had to deal with.
Thanks to all.
There’s a song to y’all:* I was only nineteen* by Australian band Redgum.Find out and enjoy!
Not to disparage what anyone involved, underwent; but my understanding is that New Zealand contributed to the Vietnam war, a very small all-volunteer, basically “token” force – or am I misinformed here?
That’s probably fairly accurate. At the peak, there were 548 NZers fighting in Vietnam. Check thissite, which says they were mostly integrated with the Australian forces for most of our involvement.
A total of about 3000 NZ armed forces personnel served, out of which there were 37 deaths and 187 wounded.
Thanks – interesting site. My basic impression, confirmed. I would have been (born 1948) in the prime demographic for conscription for Vietnam, had I been born in a country where that applied. Call me whatever you like, but that’s a hypothetical prospect which fills me with horror – mercifully, I’m British, so it passed me by: if I’d been a Kiwi, I’d likewise have been OK.