Erik Durschmied (born 25 December 1930) is a cinematographer, producer, director and also an author, military history professor and a former war correspondent for BBC, CBS. Newsweek called him a "supremely gifted reporter who has changed the media he works in", while The New York Times wrote "He has seen more wars than any living general." Durschmied is best known for his book The Hinge Factor (since retitled How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History). For the sum of his literary work, (his books are published in two dozen languages) he received the honorary citizenship of Austria.
Born on 25 December 1930 in Vienna, Austria, Durschmied got his first taste of war firsthand as a child when the Germans entered Vienna, and the Allied bombers reduced his neighborhood to rubble. In 1952, Durschmied emigrated to Canada and attended McGill University. As a war correspondent, he reported on the ground during every conflict from Vietnam to Iran-Iraq and Afghanistan. He reported for BBC from 1959 to 1971. Durschmied interviewed many international figures, including John F. Kennedy, Salvador Allende, David Ben-Gurion, and Saddam Hussein.
He also worked as a cinematographer, covering thirty years of worldwide conflicts. In 1958, he shot the only film about Fidel Castro, on-site with the rebel in the Sierra Maestra mountains. In January 1959, Durschmied travelled to Moscow to interview Guy Burgess, a member of Britain's Cambridge Five spy ring, for CBC. The 9 minute film was shown once on the network's Close Up program in March, and then forgotten. Burgess defected to the Soviet Union in 1951, and it was assumed only a few photographs existed of him after this point until Durschmied's 1959 interview was rediscovered more than 50 years later. [1]
In 1964, Durschmied was part of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's documentary unit, with producer-director Patrick Watson, the first independent film crew ever allowed to shoot inside the People's Republic of China. Their 90-minute film (shot on B&W 16mm film) "The Seven Hundred Million" was released as part of the series This Hour has Seven Days, which dedicated every fourth Sunday night to a full-length documentary. The following year, he shot The Mills of the Gods: Vietnam for the CBC series Document; this episode won two Canadian Film Awards, Film of the Year and TV Information Certificate of Merit. In his ten years in Viet Nam, he produced a number of feature documentaries (BBC Panorama). In 1968, Durschmied shot the CBS Special Report Hill 943 in which he followed three soldiers in Alpha Company, 3rd Battalion, 12th Infantry of the 4th Infantry Division as they tried to capture Hill 943 in a bloody battle. In Afghanistan he followed Soviet units for CBS "Afghanistan-Under the Soviet Gun". Hanoi recalled him to Viet Nam in 1977 ("Viet Nam - Bitter Victory", for CBS), and then allowed him to follow the Vietnamese Army during their invasion of Pol Pot's Cambodia, where he reported from a devastated Phnom Penh. [2] He also developed the television series Die Welt des GEO for Germany's UFA.
Of his work, Newsweek wrote "Durschmied is a supremely gifted reporter who has transformed the media he works in" and in Le Monde : "He's survived more battles than any living general." [3] He is author of a series of highly popular books on military blunders that changed world history, translated into two dozen languages.
In later years, he has served as Lecturer of Military History at the Austrian Staff College, and has been a guest lecturer at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Durschmied lives with his family in France.
The Vietnam War was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and a major conflict of the Cold War. While the war was officially fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, the north was supported by the Soviet Union, China, and other countries in the Eastern Bloc, while the south was supported by the US and anti-communist allies. This made it a proxy war between the US and Soviet Union. It lasted almost 20 years, with direct US military involvement ending in 1973. The conflict spilled into the Laotian and Cambodian civil wars, which ended with all three countries becoming communist in 1975.
South Vietnam, officially the Republic of Vietnam, was a country in Southeast Asia from 1955 to 1975. It first received international recognition in 1949 as the State of Vietnam, a semi-independent polity within the French Union, with its capital at Saigon, before gaining independence from France then becoming a republic in 1955. It was a member of the Western Bloc during part of the Cold War, especially after the 1954 division of Vietnam. South Vietnam was bordered by North Vietnam to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and Thailand across the Gulf of Thailand to the southwest. Its sovereignty was recognized by the United States and 87 other nations, though it failed to gain admission into the United Nations as a result of a Soviet veto in 1957. It was succeeded by the Republic of South Vietnam in 1975. In 1976, the Republic of South Vietnam and North Vietnam merged to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
The Viet Cong was an epithet and umbrella term to refer to the communist-driven armed movement and united front organization in South Vietnam. Formally organized as and led by the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and nominally conducted military operations under the name of the Liberation Army of South Vietnam (LASV), the movement fought under the direction of North Vietnam against the South Vietnamese and United States governments during the Vietnam War. The organization had both guerrilla and regular army units, as well as a network of cadres who organized and mobilized peasants in the territory the Viet Cong controlled. During the war, communist fighters and some anti-war activists claimed that the Viet Cong was an insurgency indigenous to the South that represented the legitimate rights of people in South Vietnam, while the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments portrayed the group as a tool of North Vietnam. It was later conceded by the modern Vietnamese communist leadership that the movement was actually under the North Vietnamese political and military leadership, aiming to unify Vietnam under a single banner.
The First Indochina War was fought between France and Việt Minh, and their respective allies, from 19 December 1946 until 21 July 1954. Việt Minh was led by Võ Nguyên Giáp and Hồ Chí Minh. Most of the fighting took place in Tonkin in Northern Vietnam, although the conflict engulfed the entire country and also extended into the neighboring French Indochina protectorates of Laos and Cambodia.
Hamish MacInnes was a Scottish mountaineer, explorer, mountain search and rescuer, and author. He has been described as the "father of modern mountain rescue in Scotland". He is credited with inventing the first all-metal ice-axe and an eponymous lightweight foldable alloy stretcher called MacInnes stretcher, widely used in mountain and helicopter rescue. He was a mountain safety advisor to a number of major films, including Monty Python and the Holy Grail,The Eiger Sanction and The Mission. His 1972 International Mountain Rescue Handbook is considered a manual in the mountain search and rescue discipline.
CHERUB is a series of teenage spy novels written by English author Robert Muchamore, focusing around a fictional division of the British Security Service called CHERUB, which employs children, predominantly orphans, 17 or younger as intelligence agents.
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Max Arthur OBE was a military historian, author and actor who specialised in first-hand recollections of the twentieth century. In particular his works focussed on the First and Second World War.
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Charley Trujillo is a Chicano novelist, editor, publisher, and filmmaker. He is known for his novel and documentary Soldados: Chicanos in Việt Nam.
Beryl Fox is a Canadian documentary film director and producer.
The Mills of the Gods: Viet Nam is a 1965 Canadian documentary film directed by Beryl Fox and narrated by Bernard B. Fall. Made in the direct cinema style, the film documents the Vietnam War.
John Laurence is an American television correspondent, author, print reporter and documentary filmmaker. He is known for his work on the air at CBS News, London correspondent for ABC News, documentary work for PBS and CBS, and his book and magazine writing. He won the George Polk Memorial Award of the Overseas Press Club of America for "best reporting in any medium requiring exceptional courage and enterprise abroad" for his coverage of the Vietnam War in 1970.
The tradition of photography started in the 19th century in Vietnam and has since then given rise to modern photography and photojournalism into the 20th century.
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