Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965

by Asselin, Pierre

  In its tone and substance, Resolution 15 called for more aggressive action against capitalism and feudalism below the seventeenth parallel. “Only the victory of the revolution can fully end the plight of the poor and miserable people in the South, thoroughly defeat each wicked policy of the American imperialists and their puppets to divide and provoke war,” it noted. Conduct of the revolution below the seventeenth parallel “cannot deviate from the general revolutionary law” guiding liberation struggles everywhere. “The basic road to development” of the revolution there must be “insurrection,” the Central Committee asserted. While the revolution would continue to use the “strength” and “political force” of the masses, henceforth it would also rely on “armed force” to protect itself and create favorable conditions to “topple the dominant regime of the imperialists and feudalists” and “bring about a revolutionary regime of the people.” However, the wording of the resolution was careful enough to give cover to the concerns of Ho, Giap, and other leading moderates in the party, as well as to those of Moscow and Beijing: political struggle in the South would remain “primordial.”

  In authorizing armed insurrection, the Central Committee promised the formation of a “truly broad” “people’s front for reunification and opposition to Diem and the Americans.” The new front would include workers and peasants, of course, but also “representatives of all classes and segments” of the southern population, even including bourgeois “nationalist forces,” in order to form “a wide democratic people’s alliance” of everyone opposing Diem and the Americans: “We must unite all people who can be united.” To facilitate recruitment, the new front would be an organization of southerners only, “only for the southern region.” Only after a bourgeois revolution in the South—that is, after destruction of the Saigon regime, creation of a provisional coalition government, and expulsion of the Americans—would the party launch class struggle there as part of a socialist revolution. Until these intermediate goals were achieved, it was important to downplay divisions among the people. The united front would facilitate this by, among other things, making the party and its southern supporters appear to be nationalist patriots rather than communist ideologues. In effect, the Central Committee proposed to resurrect the Viet Minh under a different, southern guise.

  By party reckoning, there were in the South no less than eleven socioeconomic classes that had significance for the prospects of the new front and thus for the eventual success of the revolution. Such a class division of society defied Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy but was consistent with Chinese revolutionary understandings of class divisions as reflecting political attitudes rather than relations of production.43 The most important class by this criterion was the urban proletariat, which must be the “guiding force of the Revolution in the South” despite its minuscule size. Only by infiltrating and then dominating workers’ groups in the cities could the front achieve its political objectives, especially in Saigon. Peasants, the rural proletariat, constituted the second most important class in party calculation because of their sheer numbers. The front aimed to organize and then co-opt a peasant protest movement by joining it to existing anti-Diem movements in the countryside protesting high taxes, high rents, and other oppressive practices. Yet, however numerous the peasants were and however significant their role in the southern economy, it was essential for revolutionary purposes that they be under the leadership of workers and worker representatives committed to Marxist-Leninist principles. “Without a stable alliance between the peasants and the workers under the leadership of the working class,” the Central Committee pointed out, “the southern revolution cannot succeed.”44

  Other classes in South Vietnam would likely provide less support for the new front, but their members would be encouraged to join it nonetheless. These included the petty bourgeoisie (small capitalists who received no benefit from imperialism), intellectuals, and most religious and ethnic minorities. Catholics, many of them co-opted by the enemy as “support rear troops,” would likely provide little support, but members of Hoa Hao, Cao Dai, and Buddhist groups disaffected in varying degrees from the Diem regime by concerns of their own were promising.45 Among the remaining classes, the “national bourgeoisie,” so called because of its opposition to the American presence, might support front appeals for peace and expulsion of the Americans. The same might be true of privates in the ARVN, who bore the brunt of the fighting burden on behalf of the Americans. They were almost invariably the sons of peasants (sometimes of workers), and rarely received the least reward or recognition for their sacrifice. Recent migrants with lingering loyalties to their northern homeland might also support reunification. The “compradore,” or high bourgeoisie, and the landlords were the least likely to participate in the front since they benefited from the American presence and thus actively opposed the revolution. While the party could not know with absolute certainty who would or would not support the front, the Central Committee thought the “motive force” of the southern revolution would come from workers, peasants, and the petty bourgeoisie.46 A “general uprising” of these groups was impending, party leaders thought, not so much because of their nationalist resentment of the American presence but because the logic of Marxism-Leninism dictated that once their consciousness was raised concerning the exploitive nature of their “objective” circumstances, workers and peasants in particular would naturally rise against those responsible for their exploitation.

  THE LOGIC BEHIND RESOLUTION 15

  The Central Committee endorsed Resolution 15 because the majority of its members concluded that the “balance of forces”—the barometer by which DRVN authorities measured progress in their revolution, consisting of the number and condition of military effectives under their command relative to those of the enemy—in the South had reached a crisis point. In some areas, revolutionary forces faced imminent eradication, allowing the Diem regime to assert its authority unopposed and claim legitimacy. In observing the shift in party policy resulting from these conclusions, western diplomats in Hanoi reported “increasing sensitiveness on the part of the DRV leadership to the international status of South Vietnam and the stability of the regime there” during the first half of 1959.47 Unless Hanoi acted, and soon, the communist movement in the South risked disappearing, as militants there had been warning.

  Militants had by 1959 long clamored for a more assertive and aggressive strategy, and their aggregate pressures on Hanoi had much to do with the Central Committee’s decision to endorse Resolution 15. By now, they were joined by noncommunist veterans of the Indochina War and other nationalists and xenophobes. “Faced with the fact that the enemy was using guns, assassinations and imprisonment to oppose the people in their political struggle,” an official history of the southern revolutionary movement remarks of this factor, “many voices among the masses appealed to the party to establish a program of armed resistance against the enemy.”48 A group of peasants from Hoa Hoi, in Tay Ninh Province outside Saigon, signed their names to a letter imploring Ho Chi Minh to help them. “The people are terrorized,” “cadres get killed,” they lamented. They implored Hanoi at the least to send back the troops who had regrouped to the North after 1954, so they could “fight the enemy and save the people.”49 Elsewhere, a meeting of village elders adopted this compelling plea: “Uncle Ho! The Americans and Diem have been wicked too much already—we ask your permission to cut off their heads.”

  In Thu Dau, a group of thirty peasants asked local party officials, “Has the [Nam Bo] Executive Committee reported on [our] situation to the Center [i.e., Hanoi], to Uncle Ho?” The officials forwarded this plea with one of their own urging a renewal of military struggle. Without that, they insisted, it was “impossible to win.” Besides, they wrote, fighting was the “birthright of the South Vietnamese people.”50 Similarly, villagers from Ben Tre importuned: “We must arm ourselves in order to survive; otherwise we’ll die.” “The Americans and Diem tore up the Geneva accords long ago. . . . If we go on like this, th
ey’ll burn down our houses and will kill us one of these days. We won’t have anything with which to fight back and it will be unbearable.”51 Implicit in some of these pleas was the belief, noted earlier, that Hanoi cared more about building socialism in the North than confronting Diem in the South and protecting the people from him, that narrow northern interests trumped pressing southern needs among DRVN leaders.52 The Central Committee indirectly acknowledged its awareness of such implications in Resolution 15, a stated objective of which was to eliminate the perception among some people that the party believed “the socialist revolution in northern Vietnam is exclusively for northern Vietnamese” without regard to the well-being of southerners.53

  According to one analyst of these developments, pressure from militant and other discontented southerners gave Hanoi no choice but to “go along” with their pleas to do something about the deteriorating situation.54 That is also the judgment of historian Philippe Devillers, who wrote of the adoption of Resolution 15 that the “initiative of action came, not from Hanoi, but from the base, literally compelled by Diem to legitimate defense and to armed resistance.”55 In a memoir, Nguyen Thi Dinh, a party cadre in the South in 1959, stated that she and her fellow revolutionaries took the passage of Resolution 15 to mean that “the higher level [in Hanoi] had followed exactly the aspirations of the lower level [in the South] in an extraordinary manner.”56 “Insurrectionary activity against the Saigon government,” according to a less nuanced view, “began in the South under southern leadership not as a consequence of any dictate from Hanoi, but contrary to Hanoi’s injunctions.”57 At a minimum, Resolution 15 was a concession by DRVN leaders to appease party militants and their sympathizers below the seventeenth parallel.

  While southern pressure was instrumental in prompting the Central Committee to approve Resolution 15, calls for revision of southern strategy from party members in the North were also likely weighty influences. Circumstantial evidence suggests that by 1959 there existed within the party in the North a growing number of individuals who frowned upon the privileging of political struggle and believed in “the transforming power of violent revolution.”58 Le Duan’s presence in Hanoi undoubtedly played a part in this, as did the presence of Nguyen Chi Thanh, Le Duc Tho, and other hard-liners recently returned from the South. The Central Committee recognized the existence of this minority and was evidently sensitive to its charges that Hanoi refused to sanction armed struggle in the South because it was afraid of the reaction of the Americans and their Saigon “puppets.” In the lexicon of the day, the militants believed the party leadership was subordinating itself to “revisionist” Soviet thinking at the expense of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxies concerning wars of national liberation and world revolution.59 An official history of the party indirectly acknowledges this belief and insinuates that the adoption of Resolution 15 was a response to critics with “deviationist inclinations” within the VWP in the North.60 The British Consulate thought it was not “unreasonable” to attribute the Central Committee’s approval of Resolution 15 to pressure from northern militants who were “tiring” of the moderate strategy the party had pursued even after “it became plain (in 1956) that the South would not fall to them through elections.”61

  The alleged mass murder by food poisoning of perhaps a thousand political dissidents, including communists, at a detention camp at Phu Loi, on the outskirts of Saigon, added to the pressure on Hanoi for increased militancy in the South.62 This event, which occurred on 1 December 1958 but was not announced in the DRVN until 18 January 1959, provoked “the most violent anti-Diemist, anti-American campaign ever mounted” in the North. For a week, “the streets of Hanoi resounded to cries of ‘Down with the American-Diemists’ and ‘Americans Go Home’” while “well-organized companies of citizens were paraded up and down.” The mass protest ended on 25 January in “a day of mourning and mass meetings,” for which more than half the people of Hanoi were mobilized. State organs exploited the occasion and the protests for various purposes. After news of the murders broke, for example, the secretary of the Government Workers’ Trade Union urged unionists to “avenge the murdered by outstanding achievements, by overfulfilling the Three-Year Plan, by taking the North toward socialism and by building it into an unshakable base of the struggle for national reunification.”63 The “Phu Loi massacre” and its aftermath may well have been decisive in prompting the Central Committee to authorize armed struggle below the seventeenth parallel.64 The massacre not only galvanized northern opinion concerning the need to do more for southerners, but it also emboldened militants in both halves of Vietnam to press DRVN leaders to take a bold step to placate their critics. Whatever actually happened at the detention camp, according to an official history of the southern revolution, after the Phu Loi massacre “the situation truly ripened for an armed movement against the enemy.”65

  Deterioration of the situation in the Central Highlands, an area of strategic importance to the southern revolution, may also have been a factor behind the Central Committee’s decision to sanction armed struggle. In March 1959, two months after the passage of Resolution 15, the Politburo expressed concern that the “crisis” in the Central Highlands could spread. Accordingly, the Politburo directed southern revolutionaries to reverse the recent gains of ARVN forces in the region and hold their position until they secured revolutionary bases there.66 The document relating this information reveals that the enemy’s gains in the Central Highlands alarmed Hanoi, and it suggests that another immediate concern behind the adoption of Resolution 15 was this portentous demonstration of Diem’s ability to project his power into an area of critical importance to the revolution and to the DRVN specifically.

  Another incentive for adopting a more forward strategy in the South was, possibly, the second Taiwan Strait crisis. In August of the previous year, Beijing had resumed sustained bombardment of the Jinmen (Quemoy) Islands, controlled by the rival Nationalist regime in Taiwan, raising Cold War tensions in the region. Truong Chinh, partially rehabilitated by then and serving as vice premier, promptly condemned “provocative acts” by the United States that he said caused the crisis, and expressed his government’s support for the “resolute action” undertaken by Beijing. Pham Van Dong also announced that the leaders and people of the DRVN would “stand at the side” of the Chinese in the event the situation escalated, while Ho Chi Minh and other DRVN leaders expressed their support for the “liberation” of Taiwan from the clutches of American “imperialists” and Chinese “reactionaries.”67 In Hanoi, this episode plus the concurrent second Berlin crisis, resulting from Khrushchev’s demand that western powers withdraw from that city, underscored the perils of prolonged national partition. It thus may have impressed upon the Central Committee the merits of, if not the necessity for, more “resolute action” in dealing with counterrevolutionary forces in southern Vietnam.

  Finally, the Central Committee may have feared that the party would suffer a crisis of legitimacy if it failed to recommend more forceful action below the seventeenth parallel. By 1959, new mass-based fronts and organizations independent of the VWP were emerging across the South, some of them aspiring to organize and lead the “national” opposition to Diem and the Americans. Among these were the religious sects, which attracted to their militias party sympathizers and members, even cadres, as well as workers, students, and others from “progressive” classes.68 Unless Hanoi acted, such organizations might hijack the anti-Diem resistance the VWP aspired to lead. In the estimate of one historian, by 1959 “various parareligious sects” and nationalist organizations were also vying to lead the resistance movement in the South. “Exasperated by the dictatorship of the ruling [Ngo] family,” some people “began to see that only the nationalists were willing to take a stand, while Communists and leftists, who had formerly been leaders in the struggle against colonization, were now temporizing.”69 According to historian Ang Cheng Guan, Hanoi adopted Resolution 15 because it “understood that it could no longer continue to advocate restrain
t without losing the control and allegiance of the Southern communists as well as the reunification struggle to Diem.”70

  POLITBURO RESERVATIONS ABOUT RESOLUTION 15

  Unsure of the impact implementation of Resolution 15 would have domestically and internationally, the Politburo delayed spelling out the tactical details for its execution. As an official source put it, Resolution 15 considered the “responsibilities and strategic aims of the South Vietnam revolution,” but it failed to explain how to achieve these responsibilities and aims. Though it outlined some of these elements, the details were “not sufficient” to “formulate a precise program.”71 While the Politburo and the Secretariat worked out those details, the latter instructed regional party heads to reveal news of the adoption of Resolution 15 to no one except cadres with executive responsibilities.72

  The operational guidelines to implement the resolution took no less than four months to finalize and were communicated to southern communist leaders by the Secretariat only on 7 May 1959. As it turned out, the guidelines were significantly more subdued than what Resolution 15 itself called for. They stipulated that southerners could now “use a quick-minded method of armed propaganda” to “help the political struggle.” In practice, that tortured language authorized escalation of the campaign to assassinate “the most dishonest and cruel part of the enemy” that was already under way and to conduct intermittent, small-scale guerrilla operations against ARVN forces.73 Thus news of the “historic resolution” adopted in January 1959 reached revolutionaries in the Central Highlands in early summer as directives giving them “the green light for switching from political struggle alone to political struggle combined” not with armed struggle but with “armed self-defense and support activity.”74 This ironic statement had the virtue of highlighting the top leaders’ reserve. It was inconsistent with the letter if not the intent of Resolution 15, calling as it did for insurgent activity but under highly restrictive conditions.