Erawan War Volume 3

Best known by their French acronym for Forces Armées du Royaume – FAR – the Royal Lao Armed Forces were the official defence force of the Kingdom of Laos – what is now the Lao People's Democratic Republic – from 1949 until 1975. Founded in 1947, when King Sisavang Vong declared Laos an independent nation (and a Kingdom from 1949), the FAR originally included a collection of pre-existing Lao police and militarised constabulary units, regular indigenous colonial troops and locally raised irregular auxiliaries. While the latter two were described in the first two volumes of this mini-series, the emphasis in The Erawan War, Volume 3 is on the FAR, the build-up of which was constantly hampered by the developments in the First Indochina War in neighbouring Vietnam.