Whether President Kennedy would have continued his strategy of employing the Green Berets 'theater wars' against Communism if he had lived has been widely debated. But after he was assassinated in November 1963 his successor Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not let South Vietnam go the way of China and the stage was set. For America, Vietnam was the place the Cold War finally became hot.
The North Vietnamese had already begun their struggle to reunify the country in December 1960 with the establishment of the National Liberation Front, the NLF, in the South, a front organisation that aimed to collect together all the political opponents of the increasingly dictatorial regime of President Diem in Saigon. These comprised the remnants of various cultural, religious, youth, and peasant organisations founded by the Vietminh during the war against the French: the Cao Dai, a religious and political sect founded in the 1920s by Vietnamese intellectuals; the Hoa Hoa, a Buddhist sect founded in the Mekong Delta in the 1930s; and the Binh Xuyen, a crime syndicate that had controlled much of the underworld and the police in Saigon until Diem seized power in 1955, when it retreated to strongholds in the Mekong Delta.
The chairman of the NLF was Nguyen Huu Tho, a French-educated lawyer from Saigon, who had demonstrated against the French in the early 1950s but had subsequently been jailed by Diem who considered him left-wing. He was well known and respected and attracted a large moderate following.
However, the NLF was a Trojan horse. Ostensibly a purely Southern movement, it did not violate the 1954 Geneva Accords that prohibited Hanoi sending forces into the South, but at every level of its organisation the NLF was twinned with the People's Revolutionary Party, which was the southern arm of the Lao Dong or Communist Party of North Vietnam; indeed, some of the leaders of the PRP sat on the Lao Dong Central Committee in Hanoi.
The NLF and PRP jointly formed a guerrilla army and its headquarters command structure was known as the Central Office for South Vietnam, but it was the PRP who called the shots because of its backing from Hanoi and consequent control over the arms and matériel coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail. This was the supply route from North Vietnam that ran down through neighbouring Laos, (and later Cambodia), skirting the DMZ. Begun in 1959, it was a network of trails, rather than a single route. It was hacked through the jungle by Special Youth Shock Brigades, crossing ravines and rushing mountain streams on flimsy bamboo bridges. At first men and women had to carry everything on their backs, resting at camouflaged huts and feeding themselves from vegetable patches planted along the way. Later, when cuttings had been blasted through mountains and ridges, supplies were carried on over-laden bicycles. Eventually, it became a highway.
The NLF had no external allies and no access to arms. However, it remained important as its anticommunist credentials allowed the Hanoi government to portray the war as a patriotic struggle, rather than a Communist takeover. The Buddhist monk and scholar Thich Nhat Hanh wrote:
The more American troops are sent to Vietnam, the more the anti-American campaign directed by the NLF becomes successful... Pictures showing NLF soldiers with arms tied, followed by American soldiers holding guns with bayonets, make people think of the Indochina war between the French and the Vietminh and cause pain even to anti-Communist Vietnamese. The peasants do not see the victims of the American military effort as dead Communists but as dead patriots.
The NLF/PRP's guerrilla army was dismissively dubbed the 'Vietcong' by the Diem regime. The name stuck. At its core were some 10,000 Vietminh veterans – after the partition of Vietnam in 1954, many of its seasoned soldiers who had defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu had returned home to the South. The Vietcong's campaign began with a propaganda offensive. Agitation and propaganda teams visited South Vietnamese villages at dusk, holding meetings and denouncing the Diem regime as an American puppet. Diem's repressive tactics, his corrupt tax gatherers, and the wealthy landowners who supported him had already made his regime unpopular with the peasantry. The agitprop teams would also dispose of government officials. Their heads would be left stuck on stakes to greet government troops the next morning.
One eyewitness recalled being on a bus in Long Kanh province to the northeast of Saigon when the bus was halted by six VC. They went through the bus collecting government-issue identity passes. Two men – plain-clothed policemen, apparently – were taken off the bus.
'We have been waiting for you,' said the leader of the VC cadre. 'We have warned you many times to leave your jobs, but you have not obeyed. So now we must carry out sentence'.
The two men were then forced to kneel at the roadside and were decapitated with machetes. Ready-printed 'verdicts' were pinned to the bodies. The VC then got back on the bus and handed back the passengers' identity cards.
'You'll get into trouble without these,' they said, 'and we don't want that to happen'.
Reprisals by the government forces for such atrocities helped recruit for the Vietcong, although some peasants had to be drafted at gunpoint. Added to that, some 28,000 trained men were infiltrated from the North and by the end of 1964 the Vietcong was 300,000 strong.
The Vietcong was divided into two main sections. There was the main force – some 50,000 to 80,000 men in 1965 – who operated in large formations. This was supported by irregulars, who stayed in their villages raising crops but acted as intelligence gathers and undertook reconnaissance and occasionally sabotage missions. Younger men were sometimes organised into suicide squads.
General Nguyen Chi Thanh: Vietcong Commander-in-Chief and four-star general in the North Vietnamese Army, March 1967. Note the plain dress and 'Ho Chi Minh' slippers.
Vietcong soldiers were small by American standards, averaging 5ft 3in and 120 pounds. Their uniform was a pair of black pyjamas. They kept a spare pair in a rucksack, along with a sheet of nylon which was used as a tent or a raincoat, a homemade oil lamp, a hammock and a mosquito net. They also carried a digging tool, a water flask, and a long tube, known as an elephant's intestine, filled with rice. On their feet they wore the famous 'Ho Chi Minh sandals' – flip-flops made from old tyres. Pay was $2 a month, enough to buy a toothbrush, soap, or some cigarettes from the unit's supply officer who visited a Cambodian market town once a month.
At the beginning of the war, the Vietcong were very badly equipped. Up to 1963 they made their own weapons. Shotguns and single-shot pistols were fashioned out of pipes, nails, and doorbolts, often more dangerous to the firer than the intended victim. However they gave recruits access to more effective weapons. Government soldiers who had fallen into Vietcong pits filled with sharpened bamboo spears, or punji stakes, were dispatched with a single shot and their weapons would then be taken. After 1963, the Vietcong were supplied with Soviet- or Chinese-made Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles, though they continued to sweep battlefields for enemy weapons. As the war hotted up, they were supplied with mines, grenade launchers, and rocket launchers to use against tanks, usually of Soviet origin.
Local Vietcong guerrillas were augmented by more seasoned Vietminh troops infiltrated down the Ho Chi Minh trail. At the same time, in the North, General Giap was building his North Vietnamese Army. He was a follower of the military theories developed in China in the 1930s by the Communist leader Mao Zedong who said, famously, that all political power came out of the barrel of a gun. First, political cadres would be infiltrated into remote rural areas and convince the population to support them. Next, guerrilla groups would make hit-and-run attacks on government forces. When the government troops hit back, they would find themselves overextended – they would then be vulnerable to attack by conventional forces. By 1962, the hit-and-run guerrilla phase was well underway. Meanwhile, a large new conventional army the North Vietnamese Army, the NVA, was being trained in the North, some of whom soon began to infiltrate into the South.
The NVA was organised along political lines. The officers had to understand the politics of the war and they were watched over by political commissars. The conscripts were also given indoctrination although it was not
really necessary: Marxist theory was taught in school, Ho Chi Minh was universally revered, and the idea of a war of national liberation was deeply embedded in Vietnamese culture. Vietnamese art and literature celebrated the centuries-old struggle against the Chinese and recruits had grown up with the story of the war against the French.
Although President Kennedy had increased assistance to South Vietnam in 1961 and 1962, the Vietcong defeated the ARVN at the battle of Ap Bac in January 1963. The war was unpopular and protests began in South Vietnam and South Vietnamese troops and police opened fire on demonstrators in the old imperial capital, Hué. In June 1963, a Buddhist monk burnt himself to death in protest. He was the first of many.
The American Ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, discovered that South Vietnamese army officers were planning a coup against Diem, who had already survived the bombing of his palace by the South Vietnamese Air Force. On 2 September, 1963, President Kennedy went on TV and criticised Diem, effectively giving Washington's endorsement to the coup. A month later Diem was deposed and murdered. Three weeks after that, Kennedy himself was assassinated in Dallas.
When President Johnson came to office in 1963, the Pentagon already had well-developed plans for the bombing and amphibious invasion of North Vietnam. Johnson was enthusiastic and upped US support. By the end of 1963, there were 15,000 US military advisers in South Vietnam.
Colonel Bui Tin, the NVA officer who would accept the South Vietnamese surrender in Saigon in 1975, travelled down the Ho Chi Minh trail in late 1963 to assess the military situation in the South. Already a hardened soldier of eighteen years standing, he described the journey as 'extremely arduous'. His party travelled by foot through steamy forests, fording icy mountain streams. They were plagued by leeches, mosquitoes, and other insects they could not identify. Some came down with malaria. But the jungle canopy was still intact, so they could travel undetected by the helicopters that patrolled the region from the early 1960s. They carried socks filled with rice around their waists and a knapsack on their backs, containing thirty or forty pounds of food, medicine, clothes, a waterproof sheet and a hammock. They slept in jungle clearings. There were few villages on the route and they were resupplied from lonely outposts, guarded by North Vietnamese or Vietcong soldiers, or their Communist Laotian allies, the Pathet Lao.
Bui Tin travelled back up the Ho Chi Minh trail in the spring of 1964 to report that the guerrilla war against the South Vietnamese government was failing. North Vietnamese troops had to be committed, or the war was lost. In order to conduct a conventional war in South Vietnam, the Ho Chi Minh trail had to be turned into a modern logistical system that could handle the hundreds of thousands of tons of weapons, ammunition, food, and other matériel required to fight major battles.
Colonel Dong Si Nguyen, who became minister of construction in Hanoi after the war, was brought in. Furnished with the latest Chinese and Soviet equipment, engineer battalions built roads and bridges that could handle heavy trucks and military vehicles. Do Si Nguyen anticipated the relentless American bombing of the trail and built a sophisticated system of anti-aircraft defences. Barracks, workshops, hospitals, warehouses, and fuel depots were all built underground. By the time the US committed ground troops to the war in March 1965, the Communists were ready. Motorised transport was already running down the trail using Soviet and Chinese trucks, and platoons of doctors, nurses, ordnance experts, traffic managers, radio operators, drivers, mechanics and other support personnel were already in position. When the trail was begun in 1959, transit time was six months. By the mid-1960s, the never-ending flow of traffic took just twelve weeks to complete the journey.
The Vietcong and the NVA were now ready for all-out war. Johnson was also eager to get on with it, but felt he needed a mandate from the American people.
'Just let me get elected,' Johnson told the Joint Chiefs of Staff at a White House reception on Christmas Eve 1963, 'then you can have your war'.
The Presidential election was to be in November 1964. But by then things had already got ahead of themselves. On 4 August 1964, President Johnson went on television to tell the American people that, that morning Communist gunboats had made an unprovoked attack on two American warships, the USS Maddox and the C. Turner Joy, off the coast of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin. This was the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident. As Johnson spoke, American planes were making reprisal strikes against targets in North Vietnam. Three days later, both houses of Congress showed their approval of this retaliation by passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave the President a free hand to wage war in Southeast Asia and begin the war in Vietnam in earnest.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident was one of the key events of the history of the decade. However, subsequent investigations have revealed that it probably never took place. A veteran of the Pacific war and a staunch anti-Communist, Johnson's finger was already itching on the trigger. The Communist North Vietnamese were making significant gains in US-backed South Vietnam, while nearly all of the more than eighty CIA teams sent into North Vietnam had been killed or captured. To expand the US role in Vietnam, Johnson needed the approval of Congress. However, he considered that asking Congress to declare war on North Vietnam would provoke opposition. The administration particularly feared Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, a Democrat who already opposed the administration's actions in Southeast Asia. Rather than risk a congressional row, Johnson had a resolution drawn up that stopped short of a declaration of war, but would give him a free hand. It was based on a 1955 resolution which gave President Dwight D. Eisenhower the power to deploy US forces 'as he deemed necessary' to protect Taiwan from a Communist invasion.
The resolution was ready by the beginning of June 1964, but on 15 June Johnson changed his mind. With the presidential election coming up in November, he did not want to appear a warmonger. However, offensive actions were being taken against North Vietnam regardless. To probe the North's coastal defences, the US had bought a fleet of foreign-made high-speed patrol boats. Manned by South Vietnamese commandos who had been trained by the CIA, these were used to harass Communist radar installation and naval bases. US warships were on hand in the Gulf of Tonkin to collect electronic intelligence from the coastal radar installations as the patrol boats went in.
In July, these operations were stepped up. The US aircraft carrier Ticonderoga was sent in, and on 10 July, the destroyer Maddox sailed from Japan. On 30 July, a major attack began. The destroyer was ordered to sail up to eight miles from the coast of North Vietnam, just four miles from its islands, on the pretext that the North Vietnamese maintained the three-mile limit set by the former colonial power, the French. However, Naval Intelligence knew that the North Vietnamese had extended their territorial waters to twelve miles, like the Chinese and other Communist countries.
On the morning of 2 August, the Maddox encountered a fleet of Vietnamese junks. Captain John Herrick sounded general quarters and radioed the Seventh Fleet that he expected 'possible hostile action'. A North Vietnamese message was intercepted, saying the Communists were preparing for 'military operations'. At 11.00 a.m, the Maddox was within ten miles of the Red River delta when three Communist patrol boats emerged from the estuary. The Maddox turned out to sea and the high-speed patrol boats gave chase. At 10,000 yards, Herrick opened fire. At 5,000 yards, two of the gunboats fired a torpedo. Both missed. A torpedo fired by the third gunboat turned out to be a dud.
The Maddox hit one gunboat and sank it. The other two were crippled by strafing from US warplanes from the Ticonderoga. Herrick wanted to go in and finished them off, but was ordered back. There had been no US casualties. The Maddox had been hit by only one bullet. That one bullet was enough to start a war.
The Republican presidential candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, was a rabid right-winger and urged tougher action against the North Vietnamese. Using the 'hot line' to Moscow for the first time, Johnson warned of dire consequences for the North Vietnamese if US vessels were attacked again in what he main
tained were 'international waters'. A second aircraft carrier, the USS Constellation, and a second destroyer, the C. Turner Joy, were dispatched to the Gulf of Tonkin.
About 8 a.m. on 4 August, the Maddox intercepted a message that gave Captain Herrick the 'impression' that the North Vietnamese were preparing to attack. Sonar operators reported twenty-two incoming enemy torpedoes, none of which hit the ship. The Maddox opened fire. Gunnery officers reported sinking two or perhaps three Communist craft. But US warplanes circling overhead saw nothing. When the shooting had stopped, Herrick questioned his men. None of them had actually seen an enemy vessel. The sea was rough and Herrick concluded that the blips his inexperienced sonar operators had interpreted as torpedoes were, in fact, waves. Even Johnson, a navy veteran, did not believe that the Maddox was under attack.
'Hell, those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish,' he said.
It hardly mattered. In the White House, Johnson's advisers decided he was being put to the test. If he wanted to defend himself against Goldwater and the Republican right wing, he could not be seen to be a vacillating or indecisive leader. Congressional leaders and ambassadors of allies, such as Britain, were briefed. Air strikes were ordered and Johnson went on television to explain the situation to the American people.
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