Barber, LaurieSimes, DouglasCapon, Shane Harold2026-11-092026-11-091996https://hdl.handle.net/10289/18747Prior to the 1968 Tet Offensive, the New Zealand Government had assisted South Vietnam by providing combat units. Tet led to the Nixon Doctrine and the Vietnamisation programme, and New Zealand policy was then to provide combatant training assistance. This thesis examines the combatant training assistance that the New Zealand Government rendered to the South Vietnamese (and later Khmer) Governments, from late 1969 until December 1972. The New Zealand Government provided combatant training assistance through four separate efforts, each of which will be examined in turn. Initial training assistance was provided from early November 1969 until mid-April 1970, when Victor (hereafter ‘V’) and Whiskey (hereafter ‘W’) companies were periodically involved, for a very limited time, in training regular army units of the 18th Army of the Republic of Vietnam (hereafter ARVN) Division. In mid-1970, a small group of army personnel was deployed from New Zealand to the Republic of Vietnam and integrated into Australian Army training teams which were rendering training assistance to both regular and territorial force units. The New Zealanders remained with the Australian training effort until late 1972. In December 1970, following the withdrawal of one of the New Zealand infantry companies, a training team of twenty-eight personnel was dispatched to a training centre at Chi Lang. This team worked with South Vietnamese training staff to develop a wing which taught leadership skills to Regional Force Officers. In early 1971, a second training team of eighteen New Zealand military personnel was established at a training centre in Dong Ba Thin, near Cam Ranh Bay. These personnel were integrated into a United States (hereafter U.S.) Special Forces training team, which was providing infantry training for operational Khmer Republic infantry battalions. This thesis concentrates primarily on the last three phases of New Zealand’s training assistance, while only initially and briefly discussing the first training assistance efforts of the First Battalion of the Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment’s V and W companies. The thesis outlines the reasons for the New Zealand Government’s decision to turn from the provision of combatant forces to providing training assistance. This study is based upon oral accounts given by New Zealanders who served in a variety of training roles; and upon Ministry of Defence classified records, Cabinet papers and newspaper articles. It reviews the extent to which the training ventures were a success and a failure, both politically and militarily. To this end, several issues have been examined in detail: the training undertaken by the selected New Zealand personnel in preparation for their tasks in Vietnam; the training programmes that the teams implemented there; the types of instructional methods used and evaluations of their success; the willingness and ability of their students to learn and to absorb the instruction offered; the success of the varying levels of integration that each New Zealand team managed to achieve; and the logistical situation experienced by each team. Also investigated are the problems that faced the wives of team members, with the effects of forced separation upon both partners; and the extent to which the training teams participated in the civic action programme, particularly through the Kiwi Hoanga project. This thesis finally analyses the factors behind the withdrawal of the training teams, and the political and military conclusions that may be drawn from this gesture of military assistance to a Third World nation by New Zealand military forces. New Zealand’s training assistance to the South Vietnamese and Khmer forces began as, and was ever to remain, a token political and military gesture. Politically the training ventures were to some extent more successful, while militarily - despite the number of Vietnamese and Force Armee Nationale Khmere (hereafter FANK) troops trained - these ventures fell far short of what might be deemed a significant accomplishment.enAll items in Research Commons are provided for private study and research purposes and are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.Thesis