Vietnam

by Nigel Cawthorne

  VIETNAM

  A WAR LOST AND WON

  Nigel Cawthorne

  This edition published in 2011 by Arcturus Publishing Limited

  26/27 Bickels Yard, 151–153 Bermondsey Street,

  London SE1 3HA

  Copyright © 2003 Arcturus Publishing Limited

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person or persons who do any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Edited by Paul Whittle

  Jacket and book design by Alex Ingr

  Cover image © Getty Images

  Photographs © Robert Hunt Library, London, except pp. 8, 88, 91 courtesy of the United States Army Military History Institute

  Cartography courtesy of the United States Military Academy at West Point

  ISBN: 978-1-84858-414-3

  AD000460EN

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1 Into the 'Nam

  2 The Origins of the War

  3 The War on the Ground

  4 The Growing Commitment

  5 The War in the Air

  6 The Unwinnable War

  7 The War at Home

  8 The Collapse of Morale

  9 The Expanding War

  10 The Dominos Fall

  Epilogue

  Bibliography

  INTRODUCTION

  THE WAR IN VIETNAM was the longest war in American history. US ground troops were in Vietnam for eight long years. In all the American commitment in Southeast Asia lasted fifteen years. During that time over 50,000 US servicemen died and around 300,000 were wounded, figures which pale beside Vietnamese losses. South Vietnam, America's ally, lost over 200,000 soldiers; Communist North Vietnam lost a further 900,000. It has been estimated that over a million civilians lost their lives and much of Southeast Asia was devastated; even now Vietnamese children are being born with horrifying physical disabilities as a direct result of the US use of chemical defoliants during the war. While America in comparison was physically unscathed, the psychological damage inflicted was incalculable. Vietnam was the first war that America failed to win outright, and left the country bitterly divided. Many of the 2.7 million Americans who served in Vietnam suffered psychologically for decades to come and America discovered that, for all its might and technological superiority, it could not defeat a small and fiercely determined enemy. It is too early to say whether the country has taken that lesson to heart. Now, however, thirty years after US forces pulled out of Vietnam, from a geopolitical perspective, it can perhaps be argued that America did, in fact, win...

  An M48 tank comes ashore, Vietnam, 1965.

  1

  INTO THE 'NAM

  ON THE MORNING of 8 March, 1965, the Leathernecks of Ninth Marine Expeditionary Brigade stormed Nam O Beach – military designation Red Two – outside the port of Da Nang in South Vietnam, America's ally in Southeast Asia. This was a classic World War II amphibious assault, like that on Guadalcanal, Okinawa, or the beaches of Normandy. Indeed, Nam O had been used by the US Marines as a training beach before the outbreak of the Pacific War.

  Six weeks before, Amphibious Task Force 76 had set sail from Japan. Their arrival in the Bay of Da Nang was supposed to coincide with the end of the monsoon, but the officer commanding, General Frederick J. Karch, himself a veteran of the landings on the Japanese-held islands of Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima during World War II, said that in the last days the Marine assault force spent bobbing up and down in heavy seas off the coast of Vietnam he experienced the worst weather he had ever encountered in the South China Sea.

  Some 3,500 Marines on board the USS Vancouver, Union, Mount McKinley, and Henrico anxiously awaited the order to make a frontal assault on the undefended beach of a friendly nation. The Leathernecks – as the Marines called themselves – had been drilled from boot camp that there was no such thing as a friendly beach, but the only thing here that was unfriendly was the weather. As they prepared to disembark, a light drizzle gave way to a strong on-shore wind, creating a heavy swell which snapped mooring lines and made it almost impossible for the Marines to clamber down the nets into the landing craft. H-hour had to be postponed from 0730 to 0900hrs.

  At 0903, Marine frogmen reached the beach, pulled themselves out of the surf and made a dash to the line of palms and fir trees that ran along the top of the beach. Hard behind the frogmen were eleven Marine amphibious tractors – LVTPs – carrying 34 men each. They thrust their 45-ton steel hulls through the white foam. With the ten-foot swell, this was a 'high surf' landing and smaller LCVPs had to be abandoned in favour of heavier landing craft. The LVTPs were followed by 61-ton LCM-8s, whose steel jaws disgorged 200 men at a time. Within fifteen minutes, four waves of heavily armed Marines were digging in on the sand just as their fathers' generation had on the beaches of Pacific atolls barely twenty years before.

  Fifty minutes later, 1,400 men were ashore, carrying rifles, machine-guns, and grenade and rocket launchers. They were ready for anything – except what actually happened.

  A party of pretty Vietnamese school girls came down the beach to greet them and coyly hung garlands of gladioli and dahlias around the necks of the towering Marines. The scene was recorded by the mayor of Da Nang with his new Polaroid camera and the waiting press corps. Banners were unfurled that read: 'Vietnam welcomes the US Marine Corp' and 'Happy to welcome the Marines in defence of this free world outpost'. Throughout it all the straight-backed Annapolis-trained General Karch remained unsmiling. His picture, festooned with flowers, was distributed worldwide by the wire services.

  'That picture was the source of a lot of trouble for me [he later told an interviewer]. People said: “Couldn't you have been smiling?” But, you know, if I had to do it over, that picture would have been the same. When you have a son in Vietnam and he gets killed, you don't want a smiling general with flowers around his neck as leader at that point.'

  The beach landings were supposed to send a message to the Communist North Vietnamese and their Russian and Chinese allies that the US was not prepared to stand by and watch South Vietnam fall to the Communists. Indeed, although Da Nang had a deep water port and the 3,000 yard runway which was destined to become one of the three busiest airports in the world, an amphibious assault on the beaches was the quickest way to get the maximum amount of men and machines ashore in the shortest possible time. The port had no cranes, heavy duty fork lift trucks, cargo nets, or lighterage – or even a marked channel, and the airstrip was not equipped to handle a large body of men, let alone M-48 medium tanks, 105mm howitzers, and the latest Ontos antitank weapons (tracked vehicles carrying batteries of recoilless rifles). However, the winsome welcoming committee and the prearranged photo-opportunity turned the landing into a farce.

  Although the landing had been announced in a Pentagon press release two days before, no one had thought to inform the South Vietnamese government, or even asked their advice – even though the Marines were going in at the 'request' of the South Vietnamese, the press release said. The first the South Vietnamese Prime Minister Phan Huy Quat knew of it was when he was visited by a US Army officer on the morning of 8 March and asked to draft a joint communiqué in English and Vietnamese announcing the Marine landings, which were underway at the time.

  The head of the American Military Assistance Command in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, the US commander in South Vietnam who had requested two Marine battalions to protect the airbase at Da Nang, was also appalled. He had expected the Marines to maintain a low
profile. The very public landings were the idea of US President Lyndon B. Johnson. He overruled his ambassador in Saigon, Maxwell Taylor, who had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President John F. Kennedy. Taylor warned that a Marine landing would be the first step in a growing American commitment. Not only would the South Vietnamese expect the US to do their fighting against their Communist neighbour for them, it would look as if the Americans had inherited 'the old French role of alien coloniser and conqueror'. And Taylor doubted whether 'white-faced' Americans could do any better in the forests and jungles of Asia than French troops had.

  Despite these dire warnings, there were no objections from Congress or in the American press. Although the Marine landings – America's first commitment to fight on the ground in Vietnam – was the single most significant event of the war, Johnson presented it at home as a short-term expedient. Indeed, the Joint Chiefs of Staff's order directing the landing was modestly entitled: 'Improved Security Measures in the Republic of South Vietnam'. But the military strategists in Hanoi, the capital of Communist North Vietnam, were not fooled. In their eyes the landings on the beaches were viewed as a troop build-up which would cause them new difficulties. They doubted that Johnson would authorise such an enormous expenditure on men and matériel unless he was certain of victory.

  The Marine landings on 8 March were not altogether unopposed. When more Marines from bases on Okinawa began landing at the airstrip in Da Nang that afternoon, a sniper put a bullet through the wing of one of their C-130 Hercules transports. There were no casualties.

  Nevertheless, the surreal atmosphere persisted. Although the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the South Vietnamese non-Communist forces) were fighting not two miles from the perimeter of the airbase on the night of 8 March, they did not ask for American assistance. The Marines found themselves penned up in an enclave of just eight square miles around the airbase, where they were more in danger from friendly fire than from the enemy as an ARVN training range nearby often sent rounds whistling overhead. Otherwise Marine helicopters were used to ferry live chickens and cows up-country to beleaguered ARVN bases.

  A few days after the landing, officers of the 9th MEB were invited to a garden party 'replete with several orchestras and accompanying niceties' by Major General Nguyen Chanh Thi, the South Vietnamese I Corps Commander and the virtual warlord of South Vietnam's five northern provinces. Lieutenant-Colonel Herbert J. Bain, commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines and a veteran of World War II, recalled that the festivities were followed by a 'return to my foxhole and C rations'.

  When the US ground troops, or grunts as they were known, were allowed out on patrol they found that the ARVN detachments they were sent to relieve either refused to budge or ran away when they approached. But soon, the Marines took their first casualties on a patrol out in the hills to the west of Da Nang. It was night and the tropical air was full of exotic noises and it was easy to imagine strange shapes moving through the jungle all around. A three-man patrol ventured out. Two of its members lost their way and came up behind their comrade in the dark. He turned and fired, wounding the other two mortally. The war in Vietnam had, officially, claimed its first American casualties.

  Ho Chi Minh: guerilla leader who became President of North Vietnam, 'Uncle Ho' struggled for Vietnamese independence until his death in 1969.

  2

  THE ORIGINS OF THE WAR

  FOR THE VIETNAMESE, the war had begun many centuries before the Marines landed. In their minds, it started in AD 40 when the Trung sisters, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, led the first Vietnamese insurrection against Chinese rule. One woman who fought with them, Phung Thi Chinh, supposedly gave birth during the battle, but continued fighting with the infant strapped to her back. The Trungs' newly independent realm extended from southern China to the ancient city of Hué. The Chinese crushed it two years later and the Trung sisters committed suicide by drowning themselves in a river. They have been revered by the Vietnamese ever since and are venerated in temples in Hanoi and Son Tay, both of which lay in North Vietnam in 1965. But in 1962, Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, sister-in-law of South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem, erected a statue of the Trung sisters in downtown Saigon, capital of the then South Vietnam, to commemorate their patriotism and promote herself as their reincarnation.

  In AD 248 another woman, Trieu Au, Vietnam's equivalent of Joan of Arc, led another revolt. Wearing golden armour she rode into battle on an elephant at the head of a thousand men. She was just twenty-three when she was soundly defeated and committed suicide. Like the Trung sisters she was commemorated in a temple and is remembered for her words of defiance: 'I want to rail against the wind and the tide and the whales in the sea, sweep the whole country to save the people from slavery, and I refuse to be abused'.

  China referred to Vietnam as Annam, the 'pacified south'. But it was far from pacified. There were regular rebellions, often led by Chinese colonists who, like English settlers in North America, sought independence from the mother country. In 938, the Chinese sent a flotilla to put down a rebellion by the provincial mandarin Ngo Quyen. As the junks approached, Ngo Quyen ordered his men to drive iron-tipped spikes into the river bed in the estuary of the Bach Dang river so their points remained hidden just under the surface of the water. He then withdrew his own ships as the tide ebbed. When the Chinese fleet gave chase and impaled themselves on the spikes, Ngo Quyen's boats turned back and destroyed them. The Vietnamese, it seems, had already learnt how to use guerrilla tactics to defeat a superior force.

  The Mongol emperor Kublai Khan invaded Vietnam three times to take control of the spice routes of the Indonesian archipelago to the south. Each time the Vietnamese general Tran Hung Dao defeated the superior Chinese forces. Like many Vietnamese commanders since, he abandoned the cities, avoided frontal attacks, and used mobile forces to harass the enemy until they were confused and exhausted and ripe for a great defeat. In a last great battle in 1287, the Vietnamese routed 3,000 Mongol troops. Tran celebrated his victory with a poem in which he declared that 'this ancient land shall live forever'. General Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese military strategist responsible for beating the Americans, evoked Tran's memory when he attacked the French in the same area.

  At that time, Vietnam – Annam – only occupied the northern part of the country, roughly the area that became North Vietnam. After defeating the Mongols, the Vietnamese turned their attention to Champa, the kingdom occupied by the Cham people which lay to the south. The war against Champa raged on for nearly 200 years. Then in 1471, the Vietnamese captured and razed the capital Indra-Champa, leaving only its magnificent stone sculptures which can still be seen today. Even after the Vietnam War was over, the people of Laos and Cambodia, which lay to the west, feared the Vietnamese hunger for expansion – with good reason.

  The conquest of Champa left Vietnam exhausted and vulnerable to invasion by China once more, the Chinese this time imposing a brutal slavery on the country. The peasants were forced to mine for gold and other ores, while the country was looted of spices, pearls, precious stones, elephant tusks and rhinoceros horns. The Vietnamese were forced to adopt Chinese forms of dress and hair styles, issued with identity cards and forced to pay punitive taxes. The worship of Vietnamese gods was outlawed, and Vietnamese literature was suppressed and only Chinese was taught in schools.

  Vietnam's own King Arthur rose up against this oppression. According to legend, he was a young fisherman named Le Loi who cast his net into a lake one day and brought up a magic sword. In fact, Le Loi was a wealthy landowner from Thanh Hoa province in the north who served the Chinese before turning against them.

  'Every man on earth ought to accomplish some great enterprise,' he said, 'so that he leaves the sweet scent of his name to later generations. How, then, could he willingly be the slave of foreigners?'

  In 1418, Le Loi declared himself the 'Prince of Pacification', withdrew to the hills, and began a guerrilla war against the Chinese. As the insurrection s
pread, the Chinese held on to the cities, but their columns had to stick to the roads which were defended by fortified towers. Le Loi's adviser, the poet Nguyen Trai, set down their strategy in an essay that could be a handbook of modern-day insurgency. 'Better to conquer hearts than citadels,' he wrote.

  In 1426, on a muddy battlefield west of Hanoi, in a rainstorm, Le Loi defeated the Chinese. A magnanimous victor, he gave them thousands of horses and five hundred junks to carry them home. Two years later Vietnam was recognised as an independent state, though Le's descendants, known as the Le dynasty, continued to pay tribute to the Chinese emperor, just in case.

  Nguyen Trai wrote a poem celebrating the country's independence after nearly fourteen centuries of struggle:

  Henceforth our country is safe.

  Our mountains and rivers began life afresh.

  Peace follows war as day follows night.

  We have purged our shame for a thousand centuries,

  We have regained tranquillity for ten thousand generations.

  He was a little over-optimistic. There was another abortive attempt by the Chinese to take back Vietnam in 1788.

  Since the sixteenth century, the country had been divided between the Trinh family and the Nguyen family, roughly along the lines of the later division of the country into North and South Vietnam. In 1630, the rivalry became so acute that the southerners built two walls across the plain at Dong Hai, along the 18th parallel to the jungle, sealing off the north until the late eighteenth century. Meanwhile the Nguyens actively courted Chinese help in their conflict with the Trinh.

  The battle to free Vietnam from Chinese domination was not entirely won until 1802, when the country was reunited under a Nguyen emperor, Gia Long, with the help of the French. Once in power, Gia Long turned against the French, expelling his French advisers and executing French missionaries. In 1858, Napoleon III sent an army to Vietnam which established a colony in the south called Cochinchina. Central Vietnam – Annam – and the north – Tonkin – were taken over as protectorates in 1883. Along with Laos and Cambodia, Vietnam was incorporated into French Indochina and the Vietnamese struggle for independence had to begin all over again.