The Battle of Long Tan
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‘We have come to reclaim our inheritance’
Decolonisation – or the lack of it on the part of the French after World War II – set in motion what would result in the Second Indochina War, more commonly known as the Vietnam War.
France had begun to incorporate present-day Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia aggressively into its colonial empire in 1853, finally conquering the region in 1893 and establishing French Indochina. The region was governed solely for the benefit of Paris, with the local market flooded with French goods, and colonial administrators forcing villagers off their land to work in large plantations and mines while at the same time making them pay exorbitant taxes and high rents. The French turned the village culture into a class system with themselves at the top and the Vietnamese at the bottom. The traditional Confucian way, where education was paramount and dictated a person’s social status and position, was replaced by a class system based on economics and race. The French tried to deny the Vietnamese their identity further by imposing the French language, culture and religion (Catholicism), and suppressing indigenous political movements.1
Even so, a number of clandestine political parties were established, including the Indochina Communist Party (ICP), which was formed in 1930 by the charismatic Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh. During this period Ho was based in either China or Russia, and often eliminated his perceived political rivals within Vietnam by slipping their names to the French authorities. The main aims of the ICP were national independence and social equality. In the 1930s the party remained insignificant, with just a few hundred members scattered throughout the region. During this period a directive from Moscow to the ICP stated that the communists in Indochina were to downplay their nationalist anti-colonial campaign – and went as far as to place the ICP under the French Communist Party! This was designed to shift the emphasis from ‘anti-colonialism to the proletariat’s struggle against capitalism’.2 Not surprisingly, the directive was ignored by the ICP. World War II and the defeat of Japan would provide an important stepping stone for Ho and his anti-colonial stance.
The Japanese took advantage of France’s surrender to Germany in 1940 by helping to establish a Vichy French colonial government in Indochina that did Japan’s bidding. The Japanese were keen to stop the British and Americans (who were then not at war with Japan) from supplying Nationalist China with war material via Burma and northern Indochina. Unlike the French administrators, Ho Chi Minh became a leading opponent of the Japanese during the war, forming in 1941 the Viet Minh (Front for the Independence of Vietnam). The goals of the Viet Minh were the removal of the Japanese and their Vichy French ‘lackeys’, and the formation of a free and independent Vietnam. Many who joined the Viet Minh were not communists but Vietnamese nationalists – indeed, the term ‘Viet Minh’ became synonymous with ‘patriotism’.3 During the war, Ho focused on recruitment and organisation rather than conducting major military confrontations against the Japanese and French. Towards the end of the war, however, Japan was forced to invade Indochina after the liberation of Paris in 1944.
The Viet Minh’s main area of operations during this period was the northern mountainous provinces of Tonkin, close to the Chinese border. Ho’s revolutionary teaching had taught him that there were three distinct phases in a successful insurgency operation: the passive phase, the active phase and the counteroffensive phase. He was at that time in the passive phase, building and husbanding his forces and focusing on firmly establishing the Viet Minh organisationally at the village and township level, while minor military operations were undertaken against the Japanese with some assistance from the US. Ho’s main operational tactics were based around propaganda and assassinations.4
With the defeat of Japan in 1945, Ho Chi Minh swung into action. Viet Minh agents took control of the villages and townships in the region of Tonkin, while in Hanoi, ICP officials occupied the vacated government buildings. On 2 September, Ho declared the creation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). He tried to downplay the communist character of his regime and movement by disbanding the ICP – to be replaced in 1951 by the Lao Dong Party (Vietnamese Workers’ Party). While he had no mandate from the Vietnamese people to take control of the country, his opposition to the Japanese and French meant that many within Vietnam and beyond supported his declaration, including some in Washington.5
Earlier, as World War II was coming to a close, the Potsdam Conference of 1945 agreed that British-led Indian troops would temporarily occupy the southern parts of Vietnam to disarm the Japanese, while the nationalist Chinese would do the same in the north. This provided Ho Chi Minh with valuable propaganda material as he paraded himself as the sole representative of the Vietnamese people, sandwiched between the British and Chinese invaders. Meanwhile, with the end of the war the French had dispatched an expeditionary force to re-establish their colonial authority. French general Philippe Leclerc arrived in Saigon on 23 September 1945 and arrogantly announced: ‘We have come to reclaim our inheritance.’6 The French soon made an agreement with Nationalist China, and within months the Chinese troops were leaving Hanoi and the north. While the French initially managed to extend some authority over south and central Vietnam, the north was another matter. The Viet Minh, with a steady stream of recruits, helped to bolster Ho Chi Minh’s ‘mandate’. With the French having returned, Ho returned to establishing independence by revolutionary means, invoking the ‘active’ phase. This dictated an intensification of insurgency actions, with the establishment of areas of operations and bases; the organisation of larger guerrilla units and a corresponding increase in the targeting of government and military infrastructure; and preparing the Viet Minh as a credible alternative government.7
The French came back to Indochina to conduct conventional military operations against the Viet Minh that equated to capturing and retaining territory, and killing as many of the enemy as possible. However, Ho and the Viet Minh were conducting a political insurgency that did not require capturing and holding territory but ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of the people – winning the war by sapping the will of the French to continue the fight, forcing them to acknowledge that the cost was just too great. To the Viet Minh, political values were crucial – not military operations. Borrowing from the Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh understood that ‘to gain territory is no cause for joy, and to lose territory is no cause for sorrow’.8 Also, relying on a war of attrition meant that for every Viet Minh killed in the struggle, two or three others would take his or her place. While in traditional military terms the French had some victories, the insurgents were able to conduct successful hit-and-run operations, disappearing into the safety of their jungle and mountain strongholds and more often than not leaving the French to lick their wounds.
The French had earlier appealed to the US to support their operations in Indochina, but American politicians and military strategists found themselves in a bind. While they were keen to support a European ally, particularly with the escalation of the Cold War in the late 1940s, most US policy-makers were opposed to the re-establishment of colonialism. Before the outbreak of the Korean War and the entrenched mindset of the ‘domino theory’, the conflict in Vietnam was seen as a small Asian nation striving for independence from its French masters. Indeed just years earlier, in 1943, President Fraklin D. Roosevelt had written to his secretary of war that he had seen the British ambassador to Washington and told him that ‘it was perfectly true that I had for over a year expressed the opinion that Indochina should not go back to France . . . [which] has had the country . . . for nearly one hundred years, and the people are worse off than they were in the beginning’.9
However, all this changed when in 1950 the newly established communist regime in China and the Soviet Union both recognised the existence of the DRV, which Ho Chi Minh had proclaimed in 1945. While the western powers, including the US and Australia, recognised the independent states of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, they did not recognise the DRV
as a legitimate government and feared a communist international alliance out for world domination.
By the early 1950s the counteroffensive phase of Ho’s insurgency had begun, with overt attempts to topple the French colonial administration, including conventional warfare. During this time, General Vo Nguyen Giap emerged as the pre-eminent leader of Viet Minh forces. He soon had the French on the back foot, not only in terms of insurgency operations but with large-scale conventional military operations, finally resulting in the battle of Dien Bien Phu.
While peace talks were taking place in Geneva to settle the First Indochina War in late 1953, the French sought to bolster their bargaining position and foolishly sent paratroopers deep into Viet Minh territory, close to the Laotian border, at Dien Bien Phu. Completely underestimating the Viet Minh, the French knowingly occupied an isolated position in a valley, which enabled the Viet Minh to surround their position and occupy the high ground. The only way the French could be reinforced and resupplied was via a small airfield. They had wanted to bring on a decisive battle to bleed the Viet Minh white, but General Giap knowingly took the French ‘bait’ for what it was: a gift. He later wrote: ‘The landing by the enemy of his airborne troops on Dien Bien Phu was advantageous to us. It laid bare the contradiction of the enemy between occupation of territory and concentration of forces.’10 In essence the French had established an Asian Stalingrad, where they willingly played the role of the doomed German 6th Army. Giap did not attack immediately but prepared his positions and brought up sufficient heavy weapons, ammunition, supplies and reinforcements to help assure victory.
The battle for Dien Bien Phu commenced on 12 March 1954. It was not long before the Viet Minh artillery batteries (supplied by Communist China) made the French airfield inoperable; the garrison could be resupplied only by airdrops into an ever-shrinking French perimeter. It was now, with a likely communist victory about to occur, that the US considered a possible intervention on the behalf of the French. American policy had recently shifted back towards the French, with the creation of Communist China in 1949 and its involvement in the Korean War. However, any military intervention would require a coalition including Britain, Australia and New Zealand.11 President Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Dulles, towards the end of the Dien Bien Phu crisis failed in a last-ditch effort to arrange air strikes against Giap’s forces. He went so far as to declare the operation would extend into China if the US intervened on the behalf of the Viet Minh. Not surprisingly, the US allies baulked at this. Two weeks later, France suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of General Giap. On 7 May the French surrendered the garrison, with over 12 000 French troops taken prisoner.12 Ho Chi Minh ensured that the surrender was captured on film, with the sight of thousands of French prisoners marching into captivity being flashed onto cinema screens around the world.
The day after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, peace talks between France and the Viet Minh in Geneva took on a new urgency. The First Indochina War was coming to a close. The Geneva Accords of July 1954 merely represented an armistice and importantly did not approve a political or territorial boundary – there was no agreement for elections. However, while elections were listed as an addendum to the document, along with a military demarcation line designated at the 17th parallel, no party signed the addendum.13 Even so, Vietnam was ‘partitioned’ along the 17th parallel. With the formation of the two ‘nations’, it was estimated that over a million people relocated north or south; the majority were Catholic Vietnamese, who fled south.14 As stated in the Pentagon Papers, the actions of the Viet Minh were ‘widely and genuinely feared, and many refugees took flight in understandable terror. The refugees were the most convincing support . . . that free elections were impossible in the DRV.’15 The day after the Geneva Accords were signed in Paris, Dulles announced: ‘the remaining free areas of Indochina must be built up if the dike against Communism is to be held’.16
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‘. . . whose heads they nailed to the nearest bridge’
While the north was now firmly under the control of Ho Chi Minh, the south was governed by the strident Catholic prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, who was seen by many as a proxy for the West. While the Viet Minh had established some legitimacy in coming to power by fighting the French and Japanese occupiers, the government in the south had been established by the French just before they left, using the Vietnamese emperor, Bao Dai (living in Paris), to appoint Diem, with the support of the US. It was not long before Prime Minister Diem removed the absent emperor and appointed himself president. The battlelines were drawn, as the US did not want to risk the desolation of South Vietnam (officially known as the Republic of Vietnam, or RVN) by an election that Diem would almost certainly lose. President Eisenhower was aware of the likely result, writing: ‘I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochina affairs who did not agree that had elections been held . . . possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh.’1
The US had escaped the dilemma of trying to stop communism without serving the stench of French colonialism in Vietnam – indeed, the French had been a surrogate army for US ambitions to stop the spread of communism in South-East Asia. The US now set a policy course of financial and military assistance to the increasingly corrupt, inefficient and brutal Diem regime that would ultimately lead to the Vietnam War. At first, Diem succeeded in smashing the armed gangs that had been raised by the French and were masquerading as military units, and managed to bring some parts of the south together as a more unified force, but soon he began to believe in his own infallibility and ignored his advisers, relying solely on his brother Nhu and Nhu’s wife, who was known for good reason as the ‘Dragon Lady’. The US increasingly needed to help legitimise the government of South Vietnam and its subsequent actions, supporting the inept and corrupt regime in the eyes of the domestic and international communities.2
In September 1954, the US was largely responsible for establishing the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), which comprised itself, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines. SEATO was viewed as a collective defence organisation in South-East Asia, a southern version of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Geneva Accords, however, meant that South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were not eligible to be signatories. The US made it clear that the role of SEATO was to stem the growing tide of international communism in South-East Asia, which was aimed directly at China and North Vietnam. Indeed, it was during this period that Viet Minh insurgents in the south become known by the derogatory name ‘Viet Cong’ – meaning ‘communist traitors to Vietnam’. Unlike NATO, SEATO was not overly significant in military terms: important states such as Indonesia and Malaya did not sign up; Pakistan was using SEATO against India with no real interest in supporting the organisation’s aims; while France was a signatory, there was no way it would become embroiled in another war in South-East Asia; and, critically, it did not tie the US down to any joint military planning or operations.3 The real achievement of SEATO was that it provided the US with an international coalition that was calling for a stop to communist infiltration into South-East Asia – the Americans were seen not to be standing alone on this issue.4
Meanwhile, Diem’s government was seemingly going out of its way to isolate large segments of the population and the international community. By January 1956, the south was effectively a police state, directing brutal measures against anyone who disagreed with the prevailing edicts of the president and forcing all opposition into ‘the agonizing choice of self-imposed exile (if rich), total silence (if less fortunate and thus forced to remain in Viet-Nam), or armed resistance’.5
The regime also reinstated some of the most hated policies of the French. Truong Nhu Tang, who would later become the minister of justice in the Provisional Revolutionary Government in the south, recalled how in the countryside Diem ‘destroyed at a blow the dignity and livelihood of several hundred thousa
nd peasants by cancelling the land-distribution arrangements instituted by the Vietminh in areas they controlled prior to 1954 . . . Farmers who had been working land they considered theirs, often for years, now faced demands for back rent and exorbitant new rates. It was an economic disaster for them.’6 The growing stench from Diem’s government, with its nepotism, incompetence and corruption, managed to isolate large segments of the population; only a small number of Catholic elites benefited from his power.
However, things were no better in the north – indeed, they were arguably far worse. Ho Chi Minh continued to summarily eradicate anyone who held different political views from his own. This included land ‘reforms’ that were based on the intimidation and suppression of landholders, which resulted in major crop failures. Land was confiscated, and peasants who owned just small parcels of land were branded ‘landlords’ – which was often a death sentence. After the unification of the country, the Vietnamese government would admit that about 172 000 people in the north were executed during this period.7 General Giap said:
We attacked the landowning families indiscriminately, according no consideration to those who had served the Revolution and to the families with sons in the [northern] army. We showed no indulgence towards landlords who participated in the Resistance, treating their children in the same way as we treated the children of other landlords. We made too many deviations and executed too many honest people. We attacked on too large a front and, seeing enemies everywhere, resorted to terror, which became far too widespread . . . Worse still, torture came to be regarded as a normal practice during party reorganization.8