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

by Asselin, Pierre

  Initial efforts by revolutionaries to destroy strategic hamlets and otherwise undermine the program produced mixed results. “The insurgents did not usually launch frontal assaults against strategic hamlets,” Philip Catton has written. Instead, they tried to obstruct the construction of new hamlets by recruiting peasants to destroy their fortifications.133 “It was not just a question of rising up one time and destroying a strategic hamlet,” a southern revolutionary leader stated later in an assessment of the effort to destroy the program. “There were times when the masses had to rise up dozens of times and had very strong forces within the hamlet, as in Ben Tre, but the strategic hamlet continued to exist.”134 The program thus “threw the revolution off balance,” as David Elliott has written.135 For a period at least, it caused “considerable problems.”136

  COSVN CALLS FOR ESCALATION

  In response to the successes of the strategic hamlet program, COSVN met in October 1961 to address deteriorating conditions in the lower South and ponder what to do about the program. The program was so effective, it acknowledged, that it had “definite potential” to threaten the future of the revolution below the seventeenth parallel. “The enemy is actively enforcing the [military] draft, developing his intelligence [capabilities], conducting sweep and encroachment operations [among the population], and relocating the population [wherever necessary] in order to restore his oppressive control,” COSVN noted in detailing its understanding of the program and other enemy endeavors. It also noted, alarmingly, that “the enemy has switched from his policy of active preparation for an attack on the North while carrying out pacification in the South to a policy of concentration of pacification forces in the South while increasing destruction tactics against the North,” the latter a reference to the aforementioned infiltration of RVN commandos above the seventeenth parallel to foment subversion.137

  Though COSVN believed that most people in the South recognized “the just cause of the revolution,” fear of Diem’s regime made many of them hesitant to join and fight for the resistance. Besides, the southern revolution had more urgent problems. Its armed forces remained weak; the political struggle lacked uniformity; the NLF had no Central Committee and thus lacked direction; and cadres and party members still manifested “hesitancy and passiveness.”138 The party in the South remained undermanned due to Saigon’s repressiveness and the “fairly major losses” suffered recently. For all these reasons, “committees and auxiliary agencies at all levels are still weak” and “we still have too many weaknesses to be up to the task of defeating all the enemy’s schemes and changing the balance of forces between us and the enemy.”139

  Under these circumstances, COSVN surmised that it was best to intensify both political and armed struggle, calling for a “continuous offensive” to culminate in a “general uprising” in the South. It insisted that “our” forces must “attack the enemy in both the political and military fields” despite their weakness. To “speed up the process of the enemy’s disorganization and the development of our own strength,” to “change the balance of forces between us and the enemy,” and to “yield ripe conditions for a general offensive and general uprising,” there must be at least “limited offensives and uprisings.”140 In other words, to gain strength and momentum, the southern revolutionary movement must be proactive, more aggressive. The general uprising that COSVN envisaged as climaxing revolutionary success in the South would unfold gradually, in stages. Unlike the sporadic and ultimately unsuccessful rural uprisings of 1959–60, the final revolutionary upsurge was to be centrally planned and coordinated to ensure across-the-board success. It would begin “with an uprising of the rural population to eliminate the oppressive control of the enemy’s administration in the hamlets and villages.” Once consolidated in the countryside, it would “merge” with a coordinated surge in the cities to “overthrow the upper levels of the [Saigon] administration.” That overthrow would signal the triumph of the southern revolution but “will take a relatively long period to achieve.”

  These recommendations echoed previous pleas by southern party leaders as well as the language of Resolution 15 and the Politburo’s January resolution, but in stronger, more alarmist terms. COSVN was in fact asking for “a complete stepping up of the revolutionary potential of the people and our party”; it was recommending a return to the methods of the Indochina War, the resumption of combat operations. COSVN made this plea for now evident reasons. Revolutionary progress in the South was unsatisfactory despite the continuing vulnerability of the Diem regime. The regime’s supporters “possess an outlook of defeat and desperation regarding the future,” which COSVN thought the party could exploit by intensifying armed struggle. Granted, the armed forces were weak, but bold action on their part represented, in COSVN’s view, the best way to draw people to join them. As to the possibility of large-scale U.S. troop deployments in the South, it concluded that that prospect was limited since American and world opinion would never approve of such wanton violation of the Geneva accords.

  According to Gareth Porter, the COSVN declaration spelling out these scenarios marked the first time since the end of the Indochina War that a Vietnamese communist body “adopted the line that the revolutionary forces in the world were already on the offensive and that imperialism was on the defensive.”141 The declaration did indeed point out that now was a propitious time to escalate armed struggle because the global balance of forces between revolutionaries and imperialists had shifted in favor of the former. That passage was consonant with the rationale behind Beijing’s denunciation of peaceful coexistence, which pointed to the inevitability of war between the capitalist and socialist camps and to the present as the time to risk that war (just not in Vietnam).142 The substance of the COSVN policy statement underscored the growing disconnect between southern party leaders and Hanoi. The statement’s language was unmistakably militant, endorsing as it did Beijing’s professed views on revolutionary change and national liberation. As such it challenged Hanoi’s moderate line, its “North-first” policy, and its apparent neutrality in the Sino-Soviet dispute. It also underscored the ripple effect of that dispute within the VWP. Hanoi’s recent initiatives to increase “unity of thought” within the party were obviously falling short.

  The potential appeal of COSVN’s policy statement in Hanoi rested on the fact that DRVN leaders now generally recognized that not only was the revolutionary struggle in the South going badly, but the successes of the Diem regime were mounting.143 Nonetheless, they resisted COSVN’s plea. In William Duiker’s estimate, key decision-makers in Hanoi “vigorously rejected COSVN’s contention that there was a rigid dividing line between a strategy leading to a general uprising and a protracted military struggle resembling the war against the French.” They agreed that the revolution in the South might “triumph by means of a general uprising” but insisted that talk of such an uprising was premature. Equally objectionable to them, Duiker notes, was COSVN’s “apparent conviction” that “victory in the South could be achieved in a relatively short time” despite its own statements to the contrary.144 To be sure, it was naïve to assume, as COSVN seemed to do, that victory was sure and not too distant, just as it was naïve to assume, as it certainly did, that Washington would not react aggressively to an escalation that threatened the Saigon regime simply because the American public opposed violating the Geneva accords.

  In the final analysis, Hanoi rejected COSVN’s recommendations because it wanted to focus on completing the socialist transformation of the North, and it continued to fear the likelihood of American intervention and the response of its allies to escalation. “As everyone knows, ever since he came to power, U.S. president Kennedy has aggressively prepared for war,” warned foreign minister Ung Van Khiem; and since Hanoi had given him no legitimate cause for war, Kennedy was anxious for a pretext.145 With such weighty considerations in mind, the National Assembly cautioned southerners to engage only in “just actions” that were “completely consistent with the UN Charter and th
e 1954 Geneva Agreements on Indochina.”146 Hanoi’s strategy thus remained cautious, as William Turley has noted, because it aimed to “reconcile conflicting requirements.” “On the one hand,” to use Turley’s formulation, “Hanoi needed to maintain good relations with a great power ally bent on ‘peaceful coexistence’ and therefore to avoid provoking the United States.” “On the other hand, the party had to save its Southern branch from extinction if it were to make progress toward reunification under party rule.” “The risk-minimizing path between these conflicting demands,” Turley continued, “was to increase the North’s involvement in gradual, deniable ways while encouraging Southern self-reliance.” Thus Hanoi prepared for military struggle but relied “so far as possible on Southern resources to achieve its objectives.”147 According to a French assessment, Hanoi not only opposed escalation of the insurgency at this point but in fact did not even envisage attempting Vietnamese reunification in the near future. The reasons for this were allegedly that the “implantation” of communist forces in the South “remained insufficient to wage a decisive campaign,” and because of its own economic problems the DRVN leadership “had no desire” to “burden itself further [à s’attacher un nouveau boulet] by assuming responsibility for a South Vietnam that survived only because of American assistance.”148

  “We must guard against a clash with the U.S. imperialists and their henchmen, who are armed with modern weapons,” PAVN general Le Quang Dao wrote in Hoc tap in defending Hanoi’s rejection of the COSVN proposal. Despite progress in modernizing and improving the PAVN, Dao remarked, “we are not satisfied with the achievements obtained,” and therefore they were unprepared to cope with the American threat in the South. Highlighting the dangers of southern adventurism, Dao explained that “if a new aggressive war should break out, the anti-aggression war—which we will be compelled to carry out—will be a modern war involving the use of modern weapons and combat techniques.” Such a war “will extend throughout the country and be at a much higher level than the guerilla warfare carried out during the former resistance” against France. It “will require of our army and people a very strong spirit of sacrifice and a sense of combat discipline.” It would also require “a revolutionary army having a high degree of standardization and modernization, an elevated political enlightenment and sense of discipline, and truly modern tactical and technical standards.” Finally, it would necessitate “a powerful reserve, a great militia, and a guerilla force having better equipment and higher combat standards than it had during the resistance,” as well as “a solid rear capable of supplying the front with manpower, foods, medicines, equipment, weapons, ammunition, vehicles, and so forth.” The “quantitative and qualitative” attributes of each of these requirements must necessarily be “much greater and higher” than anything ever attempted in Vietnam. “Failure to fully realize the foregoing new demands,” Dao warned, “will lead to dangerous mistakes and lack of appropriate preparation.” Until “adequate material and moral preparations have been made in peacetime,” the Vietnamese people would remain unable to “give the invaders more bitter lessons than that of Dien Bien Phu.”149 On the basis of such reasoning, both French and Canadian representatives in Hanoi concluded that DRVN leaders would not undertake “risky initiatives” in the foreseeable future.150

  RAISING THE STAKES

  In the fall, Maxwell Taylor, a senior U.S. general, and Walt Rostow, a senior adviser to President Kennedy, visited South Vietnam. In the days preceding their visit, which lasted from 18 to 24 October, a flotilla of forty American helicopters and four hundred U.S. military personnel to operate and maintain them arrived in Saigon. Hanoi complained loudly that this introduction of foreign combat troops into the South grievously violated the Geneva accords, but no one, including the ICSC, heeded the complaint.151 The introduction of this equipment and the forces to man it, plus the Taylor-Rostow mission, notably heightened the stakes in the Washington-Hanoi confrontation, and moved the two governments closer to war.152 As that reality sank in, Hanoi saw ever more clearly the perils of rash action by revolutionary forces in the South. At the same time, it understood that it must prepare for war with the United States, and it must do so sooner rather than later. American imperialism was becoming “uncontainable.”153

  In December, Hanoi welcomed a delegation of senior Chinese military officials led by Marshal Ye Jiangying. A Polish diplomat thought, no doubt correctly, that the mission was a “counter-demonstration” to the Taylor-Rostow mission to Saigon, and that Ye “might well be engaged in contingency planning with the North Vietnamese.”154 Similarly, the British Consulate believed that the “prime purpose” of Ye’s mission “seems to have been to make clear for all to see China’s strong military interest in Vietnam, and to warn the United States in particular that if she further enlarged her intervention in South Vietnam, and a clash between North and South resulted, China would go in on North Vietnam’s side.”155

  As suggestive as these speculations may have seemed at the time, a former ranking member of the VWP later said the Chinese mission actually came to urge Hanoi to continue exercising caution in the South and to impress upon its followers there the importance of limiting the scale of their activities to reduce the risk of American military intervention. Beijing’s “main worry,” this ex-ranking member has written, was that “if we provoked the Americans into counterattacks close to the Chinese border, they [the Chinese] would have to intervene as had happened in Korea.”156 This interpretation is supported by historian Qiang Zhai, who writes that economic problems in China, including mass starvation, constrained Beijing to still favor caution in South Vietnam. Not only did escalating hostilities in the South require resources the PRC did not have or could not spare, but it might draw the country into a war with the United States that it was unfit to fight.157

  During his visit, Ye publicly praised the DRVN as an “outpost” of the socialist camp in Southeast Asia, endorsed Vietnamese claims that the United States was violating the Geneva accords, and accused Washington of aggression in deploying combat forces in the South. Washington was trying to “drag the armies of subservient countries in the [SEATO] military bloc into interfering more deeply in South Vietnam,” Ye claimed, and by such “criminal acts” was making the situation in Indochina “extremely tense and dangerous.”158

  Beijing’s renewed interest in Vietnamese affairs, which Ye’s mission signaled, was both welcome and worrisome for Hanoi. On the one hand, it made Chinese assistance likely in the event of an expansion of hostilities below the seventeenth parallel, a reassuring prospect. On the other, however, it risked compromising Hanoi’s neutrality in the Sino-Soviet dispute. During his stay in the capital, Ye made no public tribute to or even mention of the Soviet Union, something that would have been standard before the dispute. In fact, he publicly alluded to China’s divergence from the Soviet Union over Albania, to the consternation of his hosts. To limit the damage and perhaps also to make clear his personal disapproval of this and other Chinese positions on international affairs, Vo Nguyen Giap stressed in a public address of his own during Ye’s visit that the “key to victory” in Vietnam was the “ever firmer solidarity of the countries of the socialist camp with the great Soviet Union as the nucleus.” Giap also referred to the Soviet army and Soviet aid ahead of the Chinese army and Chinese aid, and praised Soviet achievements in building communism.159 After reading the speeches of Giap and others on this subject, a Canadian diplomat noted that “the North Vietnamese have intended to make abundantly clear that they take a firm stand in the [Sino-Soviet] dispute—on the fence.”160 “One point that we can be certain of,” historian Ang Cheng Guan has observed more substantively, “is that the visit [by Marshal Ye] did not lead to any Sino-Vietnamese military alliance to the exclusion of the Soviet Union.”161

  Yet even that plus the flatteries of Giap and others were not enough to assuage Moscow’s pique over Hanoi’s apparent flirtation with Beijing. That at least is one way to read the fact that shortly after Ye�
�s visit the Soviet Defense Ministry failed to send a congratulatory message to its DRVN counterpart on the occasion of the latter’s Army Day. Since the sending of such messages was routine courtesy in the socialist world, some in the diplomatic corps in Hanoi interpreted the failure as “a mark of Soviet disapproval of North Vietnam for not dropping completely into line over Albania, or perhaps a sign of Soviet disapproval of North Vietnam developing closer military contacts with China.”162

  TWO STRUGGLES

  By the end of 1961, the Vietnamese revolution had developed the dual character envisioned in the final resolution of the Third Party Congress a year earlier. Northerners were building socialism and transforming their military capabilities; southerners were resisting Saigon and the Americans, more or less within parameters dictated by Hanoi and with limited support from the North. The two populations were waging separate but parallel struggles.

  Behind this overly neat formulation, Hanoi’s persistent refusal to engage the DRVN more fully in the southern insurgency disheartened increasingly large numbers of Vietnamese. “Since the day Kennedy became president of the United States,” a southern representative in the National Assembly stated in late 1961, he had “made preparations for war, created tense situations, advanced the policy of provoking war in all places in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, organized adventurist aggression in Cuba, staged coups d’état in South Korea [and] Brazil, subverted the peace treaty with Germany, waged psychological warfare in the Berlin problem [and] widened the war in Laos.” Because Kennedy had also increased American aid to Saigon, its armed forces could now “fight with modern weapons” and “kill people massively.” The result was a growing “militarization” of southern Vietnamese society, including youth and women, who were now compelled to join military and other organizations of the enemy, such as the Republican Youth Movement. With so much help from the Americans, the Saigon regime would soon be able to inflict irrevocable damage on the southern revolution, perhaps as soon as the end of 1962.163