A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

by Neil Sheehan

  The wars with the big power to the north also led the Vietnamese to elaborate a particular idea as the central concept of their military thought. The concept is that an ostensibly weaker force, properly handled, can defeat a stronger one. This idea is hardly unique to universal military thought, but in Vietnamese doctrine it became the main arch. Vietnamese military teaching emphasized historically that to bring this concept to fruition, the more powerful enemy had to be worn down by protracted warfare. The Vietnamese forces had to employ hit-and-run tactics, delaying actions, and the ravages of ambush and harassment by guerrilla bands. The enemy had to be lured into wasting his energy in the rain forests and mountains and other formidable terrain of the country, while the Vietnamese used the same terrain as shelter in which to build their strength. Finally, when the enemy was sufficiently drained and confused, he was to be finished off by sudden shock offensives delivered with flexible maneuver and maximum surprise and deception. The most famous of the early Vietnamese generals, Tran Hung Dao, used this strategy to destroy the Mongols, the warrior race that burst out of the Gobi to terrorize the world from Korea to Hungary and subdue China under Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan, when they invaded Vietnam in 1284 and again in 1287. A manual on the art of war which Tran Hung Dao wrote for the training of his officers became a Vietnamese military classic. Le Loi employed similar means to break the Ming-dynasty generals nearly 150 years later.

  Another three and a half centuries passed, and the lessons were not lost. In 1789, the year of the French Revolution, the general admired by Giap and his disciple Dung as the most accomplished Vietnamese practitioner of the swift maneuver and the surprise blow smashed the last premodern invasion out of China, this one by the Manchus. Nguyen Hue, the Tay Son leader who later ruled under the imperial name Quang Trung, advanced up the central coast into the Red River Delta by a series of forced marches and violated the sanctity of Tet, the lunar New Year holiday observed by both Vietnamese and Chinese. He caught unawares and shattered a much larger Manchu army encamped near modern Hanoi. He attacked at midnight on the fifth day of the holiday, while the Manchus were sleeping off the food and wine of the day’s feasting. His victory was henceforth celebrated on the fifth day of every Tet as the finest single feat of arms in the history of Vietnam.

  This martial prowess and tradition of resistance to outside aggression was institutionalized in precolonial Vietnam, ingrained in the folklore and mentality of the peasantry as much as it was in the heritage of the mandarin class. Colonies of soldier-farmers were an important element in the Vietnamese expansion south from the Red River Delta and the settlement by conquest of Central Vietnam and the Mekong Delta. This other victorious epic of Vietnamese history, the “Southward Advance” (Nam Tien), took place over a period of more than 450 years, from the beginning of the fourteenth until late in the eighteenth century. The ancestor worship that Vietnamese peasants practiced along with animism and Buddhism included cults devoted to the spirits of famed mandarin-warriors. Temples dedicated to these heroes were common in the village centers, and the performance of the worship rites was part of the cycle of peasant life. An office in the hero cult was one of the most prestigious positions a farmer could hold in the village. The Vietnamese peasant might appear submissive to a foreigner watching him bent over in a rice paddy. The foreigner mistook restraint and work discipline for submissiveness. Once enthused with a cause and trained, the Vietnamese peasant was a formidable combatant, and not much was required to turn him into a soldier. His farmer’s life fitted him to endure the rigors of campaigning, and the group discipline necessary for the cultivation of irrigated rice fields prepared him for the group discipline of the battlefield. He was tenacious and cunning in combat, and he was driven by the value his culture placed on physical courage to demonstrate his bravery if he wanted respect from his comrades.

  The French could overwhelm this people in the nineteenth century with superior European organization and modern technology and weapons at a time when Vietnamese civilization, like its Chinese parent, was stagnant. They could not erase the history of the Vietnamese. The rebellions, one after another, were the evidence that the French had never broken the will of this people. The symbols and patterns of the past were waiting for the moment when a new generation of Tran Hung Daos and Le Lois and Nguyen Hues could recall them to life and use them to rouse the nation.

  Once Ho Chi Minh and his followers began to rejuvenate the past and relate it in a meaningful way to the present, the scenes and figures of the French colonial period and those of the revolutionary war to come took on a different but familiar perspective to many Vietnamese. Those scenes and figures had all occurred before in Vietnamese history. Vietnamese could begin to cope with what they saw because their past told them what it was and what to do about it. The French were not a superior European race. The French were just another foreign invader who could be destroyed. The mandarins who collaborated with the French and the sundry lesser social types who had risen to positions of power by service to the colonial regime were no longer privileged people whose authority had to be obeyed. They were the same “jackals,” as Ho called them in his proclamation of the Viet Minh, who had been the pawns of the invaders from China. There had always been mandarins willing to become the native henchmen of foreign aggressors out of venality, or because they belonged to dissident factions, or because they thought that the conquest would endure and they had best accept it and find places in the new order for themselves and their families. Vietnamese history was full of such “traitors and country-sellers,” to cite two other favorite epithets the Communists adopted. The peasants and lower-class men from the towns and cities who tortured and killed their countrymen for the French in the colonial police, militia, and army were also figures with a precedent. The Chinese had recruited Vietnamese “puppet troops” to supplement their forces. In lands like China and Vietnam such men could always be hired out of the mass. The atmosphere of vice, petty intrigue, and mustiness at the court in Hue of Bao Dai and his high mandarins was the classic symptom of a decayed dynasty that could no longer safeguard the country and had to be swept away by patriotic mandarin-warriors.

  Working out of the clammy rain forests and mountains of the borderlands below China, these men expanded the Viet Minh during World War II into the nearest thing Vietnam had to a national movement. Ho named the extension of the movement into the rice farming villages of the Red River Delta “Southward Advance” to recall the epic migration. The mountain bases bore the names of Le Loi, Quang Trung, and other spirits of resistance. By the end of 1944, the Viet Minh were able to claim half a million adherents, three-quarters of them in North and Central Vietnam. These half million were directed by a Vietnamese Communist Party of no more than 5,000 members. The appeal was always to nationalism and to tactical social grievances that would arouse the peasantry, but not frighten off those rich farmers and landlords who were patriotic.

  The Japanese correctly judged in the spring of 1945 that the Vichy French were about to turn coat on them and become “Free French” now that Japan was losing the war. The ensuing coup de force loosed by the Imperial Army throughout Indochina at 9:30 P.M. on March 9, 1945, accomplished more than the dissolution of the colonial administration and the disarming of the French troops. The Japanese administered a deathblow to French colonialism in Indochina. The awe in which many ordinary Vietnamese held their European masters was dispelled by the sight of them being shot and beaten and hauled off to prison camps and their women raped by a race of short yellow men. The hold of central authority over the countryside suddenly vanished at a time when the rural areas of the North were afflicted with the worst famine in memory, a hunger in which 400,000 to 2 million peasant men, women, and children starved to death between late 1944 and the spring and early summer of 1945. (The number of deaths cannot be more accurately determined because there was no administration capable of keeping statistics after March 1945. The Japanese made no attempt to substitute themselves for the French in the coun
tryside and kept mainly to the cities and towns.) The famine resulted from the seizure of rice by the French, beginning in 1943 at the behest of the Japanese, to burn as fuel in Indochinese factories serving the Imperial Army and to ship to Japan as food. The tenant farmers, who made up the majority of the peasantry in the North, were first bankrupted by the seizures and then forced into starvation because they could neither buy seed to plant new rice nor buy food for their families. The seizures were carried out by the lowest level of French authority—the Vietnamese village and canton chiefs (a canton consists of several villages)—backed by the colonial militia. In a fascinating example of the moral corruption wrought by colonialism, these Vietnamese officials continued to seize rice for the foreigner right up until the Japanese coup de force, even though their own people were dying around them.

  By the time the guerrilla formations Vo Nguyen Giap had newly organized moved into this rural world bereft of central authority, the peasants had been driven into a paroxysm of desperation and hatred by the famine. The Viet Minh made “Destroy the Paddy Granaries and Solve the Famine” a rallying cry of equal importance with “National Independence.” (Paddy is unhusked rice; when harvested in large quantities it is stored in granaries until it can be sent to a mill for processing.) The guerrillas demolished the granaries of landlords and rural agents of the French and Japanese and distributed the rice to the starving. The hungry and landless then helped them to depose or arrest village and canton chiefs and to substitute as the governing authority local Viet Minh “People’s Committees” whose writ was enforced by “Self-Defense” units of peasants armed with knives, scythes, reaping hooks, and any other handy weapons. When the surrender of Japan was announced on August 15, 1945, Giap had more than 5,000 men under arms, most of them equipped with American weapons provided by the OSS, and the famine had enabled the Viet Minh to win the unquestioning allegiance of the majority of the peasantry in the North and in the upper provinces of Central Vietnam.

  The climax came in a torrent. Two days after the Radio Tokyo broadcast, the Viet Minh “Uprising Committee” in Hanoi unfurled the flag of the revolution, a five-pointed gold star centered on a field of red, at a rally called at the municipal theater by Vietnamese colonial civil servants to express support for a puppet regime the Japanese had set up under Bao Dai. No sooner had a civil servant read the agenda for the rally than Viet Minh flags appeared all over the packed theater, including one above the speaker’s rostrum. A Viet Minh agitator, backed by others with drawn pistols, grabbed the microphone and called on Vietnamese to revolt and “win back our ancestral land.” The militia protecting the theater defected and the rally was transformed into a tumultuous pro-Viet Minh demonstration and parade through the streets which lasted well into the night. Thousands of peasants were marched into the city from the surrounding countryside over the next couple of days. Bao Dai’s viceroy fled. The garrison of the Garde Indigene was seized and the weapons in its arsenal distributed among the insurgents. The 30,000-man Japanese garrison in Hanoi, which could easily have dispersed the Viet Minh, declined to defend their puppet regime. They protected only the Bank of Indochina building and their own cantonments.

  Near the end of August, Bao Dai abdicated at the imperial capital of Hue in a ceremony that was filled with significance for Vietnamese. The emperor, the personification of the Vietnamese nation until the French had corrupted the symbol, transferred his authority and his claim of legitimacy to the representatives of Ho Chi Minh. Wearing a golden turban, dressed in his imperial robes, and standing on the battlement above the Zenith Gate to his palace within the Hue Citadel—the battlement from which his precolonial ancestors had watched captured rebels paraded by below—Bao Dai handed over to the Viet Minh delegates the dynastic seal and the imperial sword. Bao Dai’s flag was hauled down from the giant flagpole that towered above the gate and the gold-starred red banner of the Vietnamese Revolution was raised in its place. The last of the Nguyen-dynasty emperors became Citizen Vinh Thuy (he had been called Prince Vinh Thuy prior to inheriting the monarchy) and was appointed “supreme political advisor” to Ho’s government until Ho let him leave the country in early 1946.

  Contrary to the subsequent assumption of American statesmen, other Communist parties did not help the Vietnamese during the years of the war with France that truly mattered. The Chinese Communists were preoccupied in North China with the civil war against Chiang Kai-shek. Their original French allies abandoned the Vietnamese. Hoping to win power through the ballot box in 1945 and 1946, the French Communist Party was anxious to avoid any unpopular action and suppressed its historic advocacy of independence for the colonies. The Vietnamese were advised by Ho’s old French comrades not to resist the reimposition of colonial rule because a war for independence would obstruct the Soviet Union’s foreign policy.

  The French Communists were correct about the Soviet attitude. The Vietnamese got no assistance from Moscow, because Stalin was not interested in furthering their revolution. It was not because he shared the hopes of the French Communist leadership. He appears to have shrewdly assumed that the United States would not permit a Communist government in Paris, popularly elected or otherwise. Nonetheless, he wanted to increase the popularity of the French Party for the general political advantage that a strong Communist position in France would give the Soviet Union in Europe. He also wanted the right-wing politicians of France to turn their heads while he consolidated the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe, the German invasion route to Russia in two wars and Stalin’s first security concern.

  Indeed, the French Communists did worse than refuse to help. They too connived in the French venture of reconquest. Maurice Thorez, the French Party chief at the time, was a vice-premier in the coalition government that embarked on full-scale conflict with the Viet Minh in December 1946. He saw to it that his deputies in the National Assembly did not block, as they could have, the voting of emergency measures and military appropriations to make war on the Vietnamese.

  These conditions were to change under the influence of the Cold War and the arrival of Mao Tse-tung’s armies on the frontier of Indochina at the end of 1949, but during the first four years of the war against France the Vietnamese were, as Ho said, “quite alone.” The building of their Viet Minh army was an act of military ingenuity in keeping with the feats of their ancestors. They had already progressed a substantial distance when Ho despaired of negotiating a compromise with the French and the Viet Minh commandos stormed the central power station in Hanoi on the night of December 19, 1946. In the year and four months since the August 1945 revolt, Giap and his associates in the military leadership had turned 5,000 guerrillas into a force of 100,000 men. This array varied in quality from guerrilla bands in the Mekong Delta to self-styled “regular” battalions in Central Vietnam and the North. The arms the troops carried would have delighted a weapons collector and driven to desperation a U.S. Army quartermaster charged with supplying the bewilderment of ammunition required. The Viet Minh had French arms of sundry vintages and calibers from the colonial arsenals, Japanese weapons seized from the Imperial Army, American Lend-Lease arms bribed out of the Nationalist Chinese to expand the nucleus of OSS weapons, and rough-hewn copies of American carbines and British Sten submachine guns made at arsenals that had also been improvised with machine tools from French factories and railway repair shops. They had even sent divers down to the hulks of Japanese ships sunk during World War II in the Gulf of Tonkin to retrieve weapons and equipment from the cargo holds. Several thousand Japanese officers, soldiers, and technicians deserted to the Vietnamese rather than be shipped home. They provided most of the staff for the arsenals and the instructors to drill the aspiring regulars and train them in combat tactics. The Japanese deserters were supervised by Giap and those few Viet Minh leaders who had acquired experience in the Chinese Communist army or were graduates of the military academy the Comintern mission had set up at Whampoa in China in the 1920s. However motley the result, the Vietnamese had a national army. The F
rench had to battle for three weeks to regain control of Hanoi and for nearly three months to relieve all of their besieged garrisons in the North and in Central Vietnam.

  The recruiting, training, and experience of battle never ceased after that decisive night in Hanoi. More and better weapons came steadily through capture from the French and purchase in China and Thailand. The Nationalist warlords in southern China and on Hainan Island in the Gulf of Tonkin were always ready to exchange for cash more of the weapons the United States gave them to fight their own Communists. The Viet Minh maintained an arms-purchasing mission in Bangkok on the same street as the USIS office right up to the Korean War. Money exuded no unpleasant political odor for Thai officialdom. Much of the arms buying was financed by trading opium from the hill tribes of Laos to the Chinese merchants in French-held Hanoi for hard currency. The weapons were transported by pack animals, bicycles, and ox carts over the roads and trails into the Viet Minn’s redoubt in the northern borderlands. Others were smuggled by junks and fishing trawlers from Hainan to the innumerable bays and inlets of the northern coast or to the Viet Minh stronghold in the 225-mile stretch of Central Vietnam, where Ev Bumgardner was to observe Diem’s visit to a “liberated zone” at Tuy Hoa. Giap actually began forming his regulars in the North into division-size units before the Chinese Communists reached the frontier at the end of 1949 and opened the prospect of extensive help. This man who had earned his living as a history teacher at a lycée in Hanoi, lecturing on the French Revolution and the campaigns of Napoleon, demonstrated that he was a classic Vietnamese scholar-general who could employ the classic Vietnamese strategy against the French.