Essentially, the Politburo’s guidelines called for the expansion of terrorist activity and the beginning of small raids on enemy forces below the seventeenth parallel, thus a low-intensity conflict. They sanctioned revolutionary violence in the South for the express purpose of allowing southern revolutionary organs to defend themselves against the draconian measures instituted by Saigon but not to instigate an actual “war of liberation” to militarily defeat and overthrow the Diem regime. The Politburo’s ambivalence toward revolutionary violence was reflected in the guidelines’ characterizations of the new tactic as “armed propaganda activity” (hoat dong vu trang tuyen truyen) and of the unitsresponsible for implementing it as “armed self-defense forces” (luc luong vu trang tu ve) and “armed propaganda units” (luc luong vu trang tuyen truyen).75 These circumlocutions underscored the determination of the Politburo majority to keep political struggle as the cornerstone of the party’s southern strategy while responding to pressures to resume armed struggle. A “people’s war” in the South abetted by the DRVN, which party militants looked forward to, remained out of the question for key leaders. According to David Elliott’s history of the revolution in the Mekong Delta, “building up larger units would have required heavy weapons for combat support units.” However, such weapons “did not start arriving in quantity in the Mekong Delta from North Vietnam until 1963.”76 Implicit in all the party’s formulations was an understanding that war was too risky or simply impossible at that juncture, and it would commence when conditions were ripe for it and not a day sooner. According to Carl Thayer, those formulations meant that force could be used to “protect the party and its bases” and create the conditions for a wider armed struggle later, if necessary.77
In disseminating the guidelines, the Secretariat told southern revolutionary leaders that the fascist policies and recent successes of Diem and the Americans warranted adjustments to, not yet major revisions of, party strategy. Thus, the guidelines for implementing Resolution 15 permitted southern revolutionaries to accomplish only what was minimally necessary and realistically achievable under current circumstances: to “mobilize a political struggle movement that is broad among the masses” and “at the same time” to “isolate [Diem] politically.” This, southerners were told, would create “favorable opportunities” for preserving, consolidating, and eventually expanding the revolutionary movement below the seventeenth parallel. The guidelines also stressed political mobilization and agitation work among enemy soldiers (binh van) in conjunction with the defense and expansion of revolutionary bases, especially in remote regions such as the Central Highlands.
For the time being, then, political struggle would remain the central task.78 “What is the lesson of our victories over the previous years?” the guidelines asked, responding that only “the political forces of the broad masses can cause defeat of the reactionary policies of the enemy.” Toward that goal, “we must mobilize a broad political struggle movement with a stronger revolutionary spirit, not only among the working masses but among all the classes.” Once that was accomplished, the southern masses would no longer “fret before the terror policies of the enemy” but, on the contrary, would become “revolutionized.” Until then, the Politburo insisted, military adventurism had to be avoided.
The guidelines also instructed southern party leaders and cadres to organize small, localized uprisings in remote or critical areas, such as the Central Highlands. An official history of the VWP presents these instructions as authorizing “piecemeal uprising” to create local revolutionary regimes “on behalf of the people” and in the interests of the southern communist cause.79 But the use of force in these uprisings had to remain subordinate to “the strategy of the political struggle of the masses.” Any resort to excessively violent struggle would have “incorrect strategic implications.” Southerners had to use political struggle backed by violence to establish new “revolutionary rear bases” manned by “revolutionary armed forces” with a view to enabling the southern communist movement to regroup, reorganize, and grow. Eventually, these bases would serve as loci from which to stage a “complete triumph over the enemy.”
The guidelines stipulated that self-defense and armed propaganda units participating in the effort should be small, ideally no more than three to six people, never more than twelve or fifteen. The aim was to prepare for a subsequent larger struggle, not to pursue victory itself just yet. According to an official history, armed propaganda and self-defense units in the South in mid-1959 were so small, poorly trained, and ill equipped that they “would never be able to engage the enemy in warfare and would never be able to become an actual revolutionary army.”80 In view of such a reality, a Vietnamese scholar has explained, Hanoi hoped through the guidelines to create preconditions favorable to the growth of the revolutionary movement below the seventeenth parallel but “not completely” to challenge the Saigon regime and its American allies.81 In the somewhat different formulation of another source, the guidelines for implementing Resolution 15 “permitted the active use of armed forces only in combination with the political struggle as local circumstances required and not for the purpose of militarily defeating the Diem regime by commencing a large-scale guerrilla war or ‘people’s war.’”82 To take armed struggle to the point of striving for total victory was to risk total defeat under the present circumstances. “Tendencies to take adventurous violent actions,” the guidelines warned, risked causing a major war that the party and southern revolutionaries could not handle and the DRVN could not sustain at this time. Instructions to southerners remained basically consistent with these views until 1963–64, when the next major—and most consequential—revision of the party’s revolutionary strategy took effect.
The delay in drafting the guidelines, as well as the differences between their convolutions and the belligerent language of Resolution 15, is probably best explained by the lingering concerns of Ho and Giap, and doubts among the rest of the policymaking elite about the wisdom of instigating armed struggle in the South on any scale in the spring and summer of 1959. These concerns and doubts would also explain the injunction against immediately revealing news of the adoption of Resolution 15. To be fair, the Politburo had ample reason to reject a bolder strategy of armed struggle in the South that year. To have an impact, such a strategy would have required a substantial and immediate commitment of the DRVN’s scarce human and material resources. Above the seventeenth parallel, many important tasks remained to be completed before a military push for southern liberation and national reunification could be successful. “The most important thing for us now,” Ho Chi Minh repeated during an interview, “is to work and to improve the people’s living conditions.”83 “A socialist country needs peace to achieve national construction in all fields, to make the country powerful,” to “improve the people’s living standards,” and to ensure “the victory of the revolution,” a writer in Hoc tap later explained. “Therefore, a socialist country, immediately after coming into existence, advocates the implementation of a peaceful foreign policy.”84 In April, the secretary of the Hanoi branch of the party listed the major tasks facing the people as completing the socialist transformation of private industry and commerce, accelerating economic and cultural development, and improving daily life.85 Shortly thereafter, the National Assembly decreed that there could be no compromise or relaxation in the task for completing the socialist project in the North, for until it was completed the DRVN would never be a “firm socialist base for [national] reunification.”86 To expedite the transformation, Hanoi undertook currency reform, as well as campaigns against illiteracy and counterrevolutionary activity.87
Another source of concern at the time remained the state of the armed forces at Hanoi’s disposal. Those in the South numbered less than ten thousand. Their weapons were archaic or nonexistent, their organization poor, and their training deficient. To have any chance of success in an actual war, they would need support from the North’s armed forces. But those forces were also in no po
sition to challenge the enemy successfully in a war. The modernization of the PAVN was ongoing, as previously noted, but had thus far “led many officers to stress discipline at the expense of persuasion and education.”88 Moreover, the recent introduction of mandatory three-year conscription for all men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five had lowered the age of inductees, “straining the party’s capacity to indoctrinate them” and increasing the time needed to train them adequately.89 Until the armed forces in both halves of Vietnam overcame such challenges, political struggle had to remain the major form of struggle. That is, winning the allegiance of the southern people must be the chief objective in the contest against Saigon.
An additional obstacle to instigating a war in the South in 1959 was, in the eyes of the Politburo, the state of the party in the South. Both organization and leadership remained poor, and membership was still extremely low, a result of the pressure brought to bear upon southern communists by the Diem regime.90 Many villages were without a party cell, and cells in many other villages amounted to only a few members. An official party history estimates that in 1957–59 more than ten thousand communists had been killed or captured in the provinces of Can Tho and Soc Trang alone. In Ben Tre, another seventeen thousand people with ties to the revolutionary movement were killed, captured, or tortured by Diem’s forces, and one hundred party cadres had been exposed.91 In all of Nam Bo, the party now counted less than five thousand members. In parts of the Central Highlands, the situation was even worse. There, 70 percent of party cell executives, 60 percent of district executives, and 40 percent of provincial executives had been killed or captured, and in twelve districts there was no party presence at all.92 As for the surviving leaders and cadres, Hanoi suspected that many of them failed to understand or to agree with Politburo thinking on revolutionary tactics and strategy. The cadres especially were deficient in their understanding of the nature and centrality of political struggle—of propaganda activity—in the communist revolutionary effort.93
International circumstances were no more propitious than those in Vietnam for a turn to war in the South. Open engagement of PAVN forces below the seventeenth parallel would validate enemy claims that Hanoi was the driving force behind the instability in the South and thus in violation of the Geneva accords. That would, as historian Douglas Pike has observed, “undercut the DRV’s legal position and its basic contention that only in the [Geneva] Agreements lay hope for a satisfactory settlement” of the Vietnam problem.94 DRVN leaders still wanted to avoid being “liable to be arraigned as violators of the Geneva Agreement,” to which they still attached importance.95 Besides, openly violating the accords by deploying PAVN units would invalidate Hanoi’s long-standing contention that the southern liberation movement was indigenous and sustained from within the South. It would also make it more difficult to retain international support for the revolutionary cause, especially in the Afro-Asian and western worlds, and thus would adversely affect the ongoing diplomatic struggle. “The current [international] propaganda campaign [of DRVN authorities] is organized according to a well-known formula,” French diplomats surmised. “The southern regime is a fascist and antipopular regime”; “favorable to war, it wants to eliminate by all means possible the patriots who love peace.” As the purported champion of those “patriots,” Hanoi had to remain cautious.96
More important than this concern with appearances was the impact a turn to war in the South might have on relations with allies, Moscow in particular. Hanoi was at the time facing mounting pressure from the CPSU to “prevent the Vietnamese Communist revolution from becoming a major issue in East-West relations.”97 Though Chinese influence and material aid were increasing in 1959, while Soviet aid had been comparatively reduced, North Vietnamese leaders were “at pains” to not “lose touch” with Moscow despite the latter’s lukewarm support for the Vietnamese revolution and its sustained commitment to peaceful coexistence.98 Although the CPSU had endorsed the 1957 Moscow Declaration acknowledging the possibility of nonpeaceful transition to socialism, Khrushchev remained opposed to anything that might increase Cold War tensions and derail peaceful coexistence, which dramatically escalating hostilities in the South would surely do. The VWP Politburo knew that, which is why it did not share the substance of Resolution 15 with the Soviet Embassy in Hanoi until the middle of May.99
Finally, Hanoi resisted a more forward strategy in the South because it still feared the prospect of American intervention and wanted to give Washington no pretext to deploy its forces in Vietnam. “In adopting the 15th Resolution on political and military struggle,” Nguyen Vu Tung of the Vietnamese foreign ministry has written, “a hope was pinned on a peaceful course” because the party “had in mind the danger of U.S. direct military intervention.”100
RESOLUTION 15 IN CONTEXT
In view of all of these factors, what was the significance of Resolution 15 in the coming of the Vietnam War? What was its meaning? Most historians in Vietnam who have written on the subject maintain that the resolution marked a turning point in the course of the Vietnamese revolution, the beginning of the comprehensive effort to liberate the South from the ever tightening grip of Diem and the Americans. They have interpreted it as signaling that the time had come for Hanoi to “push the armed struggle against the enemy” in the South, to “coordinate the political strength of the masses with armed force in order to overthrow the yoke of the American imperialists and the feudals, [and] to elevate the revolutionary regime of the people.”101 In doing so, the resolution followed “historical logic.”102 Some western historians have accepted this assessment. K. C. Chen, for example, has contended that Resolution 15 “set the general policy of the ‘liberation’ of the South—i.e., the overthrow of the Diem regime, and the establishment of a coalition government favorably disposed toward reunification with communist North Vietnam.”103
Admittedly, Resolution 15 meaningfully amended Hanoi’s revolutionary strategy, sanctioning as it did the onset of insurgent activity in the South backed, to a limited degree, by the North.104 Most notably, it augured the incremental deployment of thousands of “volunteer troops” (quan tinh nguyen) to the South. By one estimate, the DRVN dispatched approximately 4,600 cadres, technicians, and military advisers trained and equipped to organize guerilla squads, as well as armed propaganda brigades, to the South in 1959–60 alone.105 It also sent supplies and other personnel, including nurses and physicians.106 To facilitate the movement of these human and material resources, engineering units of the PAVN established a maritime infiltration route between North and South Vietnam, and also built or upgraded a network of roads running from the DRVN into the South via Laos and Cambodia—the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail.107
That response gave southern revolutionary organs greater tactical freedom and support for their activities. It also forestalled further deterioration of the situation in the South and in fact may have saved the revolutionary movement there from impending annihilation. Arguably the most important long-term consequence of Resolution 15 was that it ended Hanoi’s policy since 1954 of benign neglect of the South and the revolutionary situation there. Beginning with the adoption of Resolution 15, party strategy below the seventeenth parallel became, by official account, to contain reactionary forces long enough to complete the socialist project in the North while consolidating and expanding the revolutionary movement, after which a full-fledged armed struggle could be undertaken with better, surer prospects for victory.
For the time being, however, the Politburo obdurately refused to comprehensively engage the North in the liberation of the South, or even to privilege violent struggle over political struggle there. More tellingly, it committed no PAVN units to the revolutionary surge sanctioned by the Central Committee. In fact, DRVN decision-makers had for the time being “no intention of employing PAVN regular units” in a war with Saigon’s armed forces or “sanctioning a policy of all-out attack” on Diem’s regime.108 Therefore, as historian William Turley has noted, Resolution 15 encaps
ulated a party decision to extend “limited” northern support to the southern revolutionary movement, which it authorized to use violence “under restrictive conditions” mainly to protect itself.109 These limitations are important in light of subsequent party decisions concerning the South. After January 1959, Hanoi’s strategic priorities—pursuing socialist development in the DRVN, precluding American intervention in Indochina, accommodating the Cold War concerns of key allies, and encouraging international support for its revolutionary cause—remained unchanged. Resolution 15 was indeed a “relatively muted” response to the situation in the South.110 “The constant if waning hope of top [DRVN] leaders was still that the party could attain its objectives by inducing the Saigon government to crumble without having to mount a major military effort backed by the North,” Turley has written.111
In retrospect, Resolution 15 set no “general policy” for liberating the South, nor did it symbolize Hanoi’s “opening shot” in the Vietnam War.112 Similarly, the deployment thereafter of hundreds, eventually thousands, of troops did not mean that Hanoi’s “war machinery” had been set into motion.113 These were mostly PAVN troops, to be sure, but they were not actual northerners; they were almost exclusively southerners who had regrouped to the North in 1954–55, and had then been integrated into the DRVN’s regular armed forces.114 Some of them even asked to be sent back to the South, as noted in the previous chapter. And since these troops infiltrated—returned to, in actuality—the South as volunteers, they did not wear PAVN uniforms. If captured, it would be impossible for the enemy to ascertain that they indeed came from the North, unlike northerners, whose accents would betray their provenance. In that sense, their deployment posed minimal risk for Hanoi as it was entirely deniable. Sending ethnic Korean troops from Beijing’s armed forces to North Korea “did not necessarily indicate that in late 1949 and early 1950 Mao supported Kim Il-sung’s plan for reunifying Korea by means of war.”115 Similarly, dispatching southern regroupees to the South did not mean Hanoi had committed to bringing about Vietnamese reunification by force a decade later.
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