At the Versailles Peace Conference in France in 1919 that concluded World War I, a young Vietnamese calling himself Nguyen Ai Quoc, 'Nguyen the Patriot', stood up and demanded his country's freedom. Born Nguyen That Thanh in Vietnam in 1890, he used several names during his life. He called himself Ba when he visited New York and Boston as a ship's cook in 1911. After living in London from 1915 to 1917, he moved to France, where he worked as a gardener, sweeper, waiter, photograph retoucher, and oven stoker. His 1919 appeal to the Versailles Peace Conference fell on deaf ears, but it made him a hero to many politically conscious Vietnamese. The following year, inspired by the success of the Communist revolution in Russia and Lenin's anti-imperialist doctrine, he joined the French Communists when they split from the Socialist Party. In 1923, he went to Moscow and, in January 1924, on the death of Lenin, he published a eulogy to the founder of the Soviet Union in the Communist Party newspaper Pravda. Six months later, at the fifth Congress of the Communist International, he criticised the French Communist Party for not opposing colonialism more vigorously and, in his statement to the congress, first formulated the revolutionary role of oppressed peasants, as opposed to industrial workers mentioned by the founder of Communism, Karl Marx. In 1924, he travelled to Canton, a Chinese Communist stronghold, under the name Ly Thuy, where he began recruiting fellow Vietnamese for his nationalist movement and, in 1930, he founded the Vietnamese Communist Party with former school friend Vo Nguyen Giap.
Vo Nguyen Giap was born in 1912 at An Xa, Vietnam, just north of the 17th parallel which later became the border between North and South Vietnam. While a law student at Hanoi University, he met Ngo Dinh Diem who went on to become president of South Vietnam and Giap's bitter enemy. Giap's anti-colonist views forced him to flee to China in1939, but his young wife was arrested and died with their child in a French jail three years later, while his sister-in-law was guillotined.
In 1940 Ly Thuy changed his name to Ho Chi Minh, which means 'he who enlightens'. It was under this name that he became the father of Communist Vietnam and, despite his authoritarian rule, the seemingly kindly 'Uncle Ho' became a symbol of resistance to his people. In 1941, again with Giap, he founded the League for the Independence of Vietnam, or Vietminh. Ho Chi Minh was the political leader of the Vietminh, while Giap became its military leader. Returning to Vietnam, Giap formed 'armed propaganda teams' – guerrilla bands which would later form the nucleus of the North Vietnamese Army – while Ho found himself languishing in the jail of an anti-Communist warlord for over a year. With the backing of the US, the Vietminh fought the Japanese who occupied Vietnam during World War II. When the Japanese were defeated in 1945, Giap entered Hanoi at the head of his troops. Soon after, in a speech in Hanoi where he quoted the US Declaration of Independence, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which he led as president until his death in 1969.
However, while the Vietminh held Hanoi in the North of the country, the British had liberated Saigon in the South. To legitimise the reoccupation of its own colonies in Asia, Britain returned control of the South to the French, rearming the Japanese to keep order until French troops arrived. Under the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945 which settled territorial disputes that arose at the end of World War II, the Nationalist Chinese (China only became Communist in 1949) were to disarm the Japanese in the north. A Chinese army under General Lu Han arrived in Hanoi, and began looting the city and killing all political opposition. Giap barely escaped with his life. Meanwhile the Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek agreed to hand North Vietnam – Tonkin – back to the French in return for relinquishing its old concessions in Shanghai and other Chinese ports.
For five months, Ho Chi Minh tried to get other countries to recognise his government in Hanoi. The US now backed the French. The Soviet Union would not even send an observer to Hanoi. Ho's old friends in the French Communist Party also deserted him. The party boss, Maurice Thorez, was then deputy premier in General de Gaulle's post-war government and later said that he 'did not intend to liquidate the French position in Indochina'.
Ho Chi Minh was quick to appreciate the political reality of the situation. If he resisted the return of the French to Tonkin, they showed every intention of reestablishing their old colony of Chochinchina in the south, while leaving the north in the hands of the Chinese who seemed to be in no hurry to leave. Ho Chi Minh was committed to national unity. He agreed to permit 25,000 French troops to garrison the north for five years, provided the French recognised Vietnam as an independent state within the French Union, the new name for the old French Empire. The question of uniting Tonkin and Chochinchina would be decided later by a referendum. Ho Chi Minh came in for severe criticism from colleagues for allowing the French back in without even setting a date for the plebiscite. At a meeting in Hanoi, he rounded on his critics.
You fools. Don't you realise what it means if the Chinese remain? Don't you remember your history? The last time the Chinese came, they stayed for a thousand years. The French are foreigners. They are weak. Colonialism is dying. The white man is finished in Asia. But if the Chinese stay now, they will never go. As for me, I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.
In 1946 Ho went to France to try and negotiate the unification of Vietnam. Again he got no help from the French Communists, whose help he sought, and the political lobby for the establishment of a separate 'Republic of Cochinchina' was so strong that he was forced to initial an interim agreement to that effect. As he left the room, he said to his bodyguard, 'I've just signed my death warrant'.
Indeed, when Ho returned to Hanoi, Giap and other militant members of the Vietminh were preparing to depose him when fighting broke out between the Vietminh and French troops in the port of Haiphong over who had the right to collect customs duty. On the morning of 20 November, 1946 a French patrol boat had seized some Chinese smugglers. The Vietminh intercepted the French boat and arrested its crew. This sparked an incident, and by the afternoon there were barricades in the streets. When these were flattened by French tanks, the Vietminh opened up with mortars, while a troop of Vietnamese actors in the Opera House held off the French with antique muskets. A ceasefire was agreed, but the French decided to use the incident as an excuse to drive the Vietminh out of the city. This resulted in hand-to-hand fighting with Vietminh positions being bombed and strafed by the French air force and shelled by the French navy. When it was all over, the Vietminh claimed there were 20,000 dead. The French say it was no more than 6,000. No one denies that there were several thousand civilian casualties.
The French then ordered Ho Chi Minh to disarm the Vietminh. This was easier said than done: Giap deployed some 30, 000 armed men in the suburbs, and on the evening of 19 December, fighting broke out again. Ho fled the city before he could be arrested while Giap issued what was virtually a declaration of war.
'I order all soldiers and militia,' he declared, 'to stand together, go into battle, destroy the invaders, and save the nation... The resistance will be long and arduous, but our cause is just and we will surely triumph'.
Thus began the First Indochina War.
The French were confident of victory to start with by dint of force of arms. But they ignored the real cause of the war which was the desire of the Vietnamese people, Communist and anti-Communist alike, to achieve independence for their country. However, the French could offer unity. In 1949, they reunited Cochinchina with the rest of Vietnam, proclaiming the Associated State of Vietnam with the former emperor Bao Dai as head of state. However, Bao Dai was seen as a schemer. Succeeding his father in 1925 at the age of twelve, he did not ascend to the throne until 1932, after completing his education in France. He cooperated first with the French colonial government then with the Japanese in World War II. In 1945 he abdicated and briefly joined the Vietminh, before fleeing to Hong Kong in 1946 where he led a playboy lifestyle. In nationalists' eyes the 'Playboy Emperor' was nothing more than a French puppet when he returned in 1949.
Meanwhile, the Vietminh waged an increasingly successful guerrilla war, aided after 1949 by the new Communist government in China. Fearful of the spread of Communism in Asia, the US began sending large amounts of aid to the French. But Giap had learned the lessons of Ngo Quyen, Tran Hung Dao and Le Loi well and, after harassing the enemy for five long years, he surprised French military strategists by moving his artillery 400 miles over rough terrain and supplying his troops over that huge distance to besiege the remote garrison at Dien Bien Phu, which fell in May 1954.
Britain, France, the US, and the Soviet Union had already called a peace conference in Geneva to negotiate a ceasefire. To separate the warring factions, it was decided that the Vietminh should stay north of the 17th parallel, while the French remained to the south. Between them would be a five-mile wide DMZ – a Demilitarised Zone. Bao Dai rejected the peace plan. However, he was defeated in a referendum by his Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem, who proclaimed himself president of a newly created Republic of Vietnam, that is, non-Communist South Vietnam. With an area of 66,200 square miles and a population of some twenty million, it was a country bigger than England and Wales put together with less than a third of the population. On the other hand, imagine the population of Texas crammed into area less than a quarter of that state's size.
Meanwhile the Communist-controlled area north of the 17th parallel became known as North Vietnam, though it was still officially the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, with Ho Chi Minh as head of state and General Giap as Commander-in-Chief and Secretary of Defence. Both were committed to reunifying the country; by peaceful means at first. Under the Peace Accords worked out at Geneva, an election was to be held in 1956 with the aim of unifying the country under one government. The Communists, who had built up a powerful political organisation in both halves of the country, were confident of victory. But Diem refused to hold the elections. He was backed by the US who feared a Communist takeover. The Communists saw Diem as an American puppet and, in 1960, the government in Hanoi decided that the only way to reunify the country was by force. For Ho and Giap, the Vietnam War was part of their centuries-old war of national liberation to free themselves from the influence of foreign powers: this time the enemy was the US. While the avuncular Ho Chi Minh spent his time portraying the war as the defensive action of a backward nation bullied by a superpower, Giap took charge of the war. In 1961, Giap spelt out exactly how he intended to reunify the country. He published a manual of guerrilla warfare called People's War, People's Army. It told the US military exactly what they were up against, if anyone had bothered to read it.
For America, the war in Vietnam had entirely different origins. Since the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1917 the US had feared the spread of Communism, a fear which grew after World War II, following the Soviet seizure of Eastern Europe, and the beginning of the Cold War. In 1949, China fell to the Communists. The following year, Communist North Korea invaded South Korea, starting the Korean War. There had been Communist revolts in Malaya and the Philippines and the US feared that the rest of Asia might fall.
The US response to this was a policy of 'containment' first proposed by US diplomat George Kennan in July 1947 in an article that appeared in the magazine Foreign Affairs signed simply 'X'. He had analysed in detail the structure and psychology of Soviet diplomacy and concluded that the Russians were bent on worldwide extension of the Soviet system. However, he realised that, while they were fundamentally opposed to coexistence with the West, they were sensitive to military force and would hold back or even retreat in the face of determined Western opposition. Consequently, Kennan proposed that the US apply counterpressure wherever the Soviets threatened to expand. The result, he predicted, would be that either the Soviets would have to cooperate with the US or that this concerted counterpressure would lead to the internal collapse of the Soviet Union. This view became the core of US policy toward the Soviet Union for the next forty-five years.
Kennan's containment policy found a corollary in the 'domino theory' or 'domino effect' that was uppermost in much of US military and foreign policy thinking after World War II. The theory states that the fall of a non-Communist state to Communism would precipitate the fall of non-Communist governments in neighbouring states. It was first proposed by President Harry S. Truman to justify sending military aid to Greece and Turkey in the 1940s, but it became popular in the 1950s when President Dwight D. Eisenhower applied it to Southeast Asia, especially South Vietnam. On 7 April, 1954, in a speech about the situation in Indochina, he said, 'You have a row of dominos set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly'.
The argument here was that if South Vietnam went Communist, so would Laos and Cambodia, then the rest of the Malay peninsula. Communist revolution would then island-hop across Indonesia, Borneo, and New Guinea and, before you knew it, Communism would be knocking on the gates of Australia. The domino theory was one of the main arguments used by the Kennedy and, later, the Johnson administrations to justify their growing military involvement in Vietnam. As vice-president, Johnson remarked that if South Vietnam was lost, America would find itself fighting 'on the beaches of Waikiki'.
'The battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia with strength and determination,' he said, 'or the United States, inevitably, must surrender the Pacific and take up our defences on our own shores'.
The idea that it was better to confront Communism in Asia than 'in our own backyard' continued throughout the war. In 1967 labour leader George Meany said, 'I would rather fight the Communists in South Vietnam than fight them down here in the Chesapeake Bay'.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff regularly prefaced their war plans with an inflated version of the domino theory. South Vietnam, they said, was 'pivotal' in America's world-wide confrontation with Communism. Defeat there would not only surrender Asia to Communism, it would also erode America's anticommunist stance in Africa and Latin America.
When Fidel Castro, who had seized power in Cuba in 1959, declared his allegiance to Communism in 1961, it seemed to many people in Washington that the spread of Communism was coming a little too close for comfort. It also vindicated the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as Castro's charismatic sidekick Che Guevara did indeed attempt to export revolution to Africa and Latin America. The takeover led to an abortive CIA-backed invasion of the island at the Bay of Pigs. Hard on its heels came the Cuban missile crisis. In 1962, the Soviet Union deployed nuclear missiles on the island. President Kennedy demanded that they be removed. For ten days, the world seemed to teeter on the brink of nuclear war until a peace deal was worked out. The Soviets would remove their missiles, provided Kennedy promised never to invade Cuba and, secretly, to remove US missiles from Turkey.
Although Kennedy claimed victory in the Cuban missile crisis, he knew that this eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation had brought humankind close to nuclear annihilation. He knew that it must not happen again. He also knew that confrontation between the Communist world and the free world was inevitable. What the world needed was a safety valve, a theatre war where the battle between the superpowers could be played out. Vietnam would be it. The Soviet Union and China backed Communist North Vietnam and President Eisenhower had already given military aid to the Diem government in South Vietnam. Kennedy increased it. He also sent a new elite corps of frontline troops who would wage the war against Communism: the Green Berets.
A designated Special Forces unit had been set up at Fort Bragg, North Carolina as early as 1952. From 1953, Special Forces troops wore the distinctive green beret – borrowed from the British Royal Marine commandos – when they went into the field, although the army refused to authorise its official use. However, when President Kennedy visited Fort Bragg on 12 October, 1961 he sent word to the Special Warfare Center commander, Brigadier General William P. Yarborough, that all Special Forces soldiers should wear their green berets during his inspection. Afterwards the president told the Pentagon that he considered the gree
n beret to be 'symbolic of one of the highest levels of courage and achievement of the United States military'. Soon, the green beret became synonymous with Special Forces and the two terms became interchangeable.
There were already three Special Forces groups, one based at Bad Tolz in West Germany, one in Fort Bragg, and one in the Far East. A then unofficial Green Beret, Captain Harry G. Cramer Jr. of the 14th Special Forces Detachment, had become the first American soldier to die in Vietnam on 21 October, 1956. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, the number of Special Forces military advisers in Vietnam increased steadily. Their job was to train South Vietnamese soldiers in the art of counter-insurgency and to mould minority tribes into anti-Communist forces. In September 1964, the Green Berets' 5th Group set up its headquarters in Nha Trang, where it remained until it returned to Fort Bragg in 1971, although some Special Forces teams stayed in Thailand from where they launched secret missions into Vietnam. By the time the Fifth left Southeast Asia, its soldiers had won sixteen Medals of Honor, one Distinguished Service Medal, ninety Distinguished Service Crosses, 814 Silver Stars, 13,234 Bronze Stars, 235 Legions of Merit, forty-six Distinguished Flying Crosses, 232 Soldier's Medals, 4,891 Air Medals, 6,908 Army Commendation Medals, and 2,658 Purple Hearts.
During the 1960s, other Special Forces training teams were operating in Bolivia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Columbia and the Dominican Republic. Counter-insurgency groups in Latin America carried out some 450 clandestine operations against guerrilla forces between 1965 and 1968. In 1968, the Green Berets were involved in tracking down and capturing the notorious Cuban revolutionary, Che Guevara, in the wilds of south-central Bolivia. They took their place in American mythology when Barry Sadler's 'The Ballad of the Green Beret' went to number one in the US in 1966 and John Wayne starred in the movie The Green Berets in 1968. The Green Berets' A-teams – twelve-man teams comprising two officers, two operations and intelligence sergeants, two weapons sergeants, two communications sergeants, two medics, and two engineers, all trained in unconventional warfare, cross-trained in each other's specialties, and speaking at least one foreign language – were later celebrated in a long-running TV series.
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