Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  3 PEASANTS

  A small minority of Vietnamese who were sufficiently educated to think beyond their own villages witnessed the brutalities of the Vietminh, and welcomed the promise of foreign succour. A schoolboy in the north wrote: ‘From the books I read, I believed that the Americans might be at least better than the French … I was sure that like any other country the US must have some interest when it helped its allies, but … the Americans seemed to be generous in assisting poor countries.’ However, it is easy to understand why many Vietnamese adopted a contrary view, and supported a revolutionary movement that promised the removal of an oppressive colonial regime, together with an assault on a landowning class, French and indigenous, that had exploited the peasantry for generations.

  Such was the poverty of rural Vietnam that a man with a primary school certificate was respected as an ‘intellectual’. Some couples owned only a single pair of trousers, which husband and wife took turns to wear. Much of the peasants’ daily labour involved paddling water uphill to irrigate the paddies, often by moonlight because the days became so hot, in good times singing as they worked. The rice had to be fertilised once, weeded three or four times, cut twice. The spring crop accounted for three-quarters of the harvest, because it profited from higher rainfall. Poor villagers might supplement their income by trekking into the wildernesses to gather firewood for sale. Some migrated to towns to work. Those burdened by the worst indebtedness hired themselves out as field labourers.

  Family and village were the dominant social institutions. Beside nearly every hut stood its wooden altar, containing offerings of fruit and sweets: the richer the family, the grander its altar. Few parents felt embarrassed by establishing a hierarchy of affection for their many children, rooted in a judgement about which were the ablest and most hard-working. A father’s word was law, though mothers arguably wielded the real power. There was a popular saying: ‘Without a father you could still enjoy rice and fish, but without a mother you might expect to eat only fallen leaves.’ Beyond family, peasants said, ‘The king rules – subject to village regulations.’ Most Catholic communities had a bell tower, Buddhist ones a temple and magnolia trees. There might also be a meeting hall called the dinh, and maybe a carpenter’s and a tailor’s shop.

  Villages were subdivided into hamlets in which much of life and labour was shared: at new year people worked together to make rice cakes that were cooked overnight, then threaded on fine strands of bamboo. They gathered to wish parents long life, health and wealth: the Vietnamese, like most Asians, believed that each year conferred upon the old an additional accession of wisdom. After a pig had been slaughtered, children might beg its bladder as a plaything. They played hide-and-seek, shot ‘jute guns’ made from bamboo pipes – like Western pea-shooters – or competed at another game, ‘hitting stick’. At festivals they might taste jam, sweets, peanuts, birds’ eggs and squashes coated in sugar. For the most part, however, they knew only rice and vegetables – and were thankful to get them.

  Some Vietnamese later idealised the simplicity of peasant life before war descended. One said: ‘Everybody knew each other and never closed doors.’ She waxed lyrical about ‘the beauty of togetherness’, shared tasks and pleasures. Yet such nostalgia was rare among the vastly greater number who recalled only hardship, persecution and near-starvation. Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh was born east of Hanoi in 1948, daughter of a poor peasant who cultivated four hundred square yards of rice. Her parents and their six children occupied a thatched hut in a hamlet of some thirty families, none of which owned a radio set or bicycle. Few inhabitants could read: when an occasional newspaper reached them, people gathered under a tree, while a literate villager with a good voice perched on a branch to read aloud to them interesting items.

  Such people grew up without photographs of parents or children, because none owned a camera. Pyjamas, ba ba dress, brown in the north and black in the south, was the clothing of peasants which only incidentally became the uniform of guerrillas. Infant mortality rates were appalling, partly because it was customary to sever umbilical cords with fragments of broken glass. Villages frequently had to be abandoned because of flood or famine. Binh had no memories of childhood happinesses: life was merely an unremitting struggle for existence, in which children gathered snails to supplement the family diet. At twenty she became a lifelong member of the Communist Party, regarding Ho Chi Minh with quasi-religious fervour as ‘the indispensable, incomparable leader’.

  Although Ho’s armed supporters in the south-west never matched the spectacular military successes achieved by Giap’s formations in the north, his movement won widespread support on the single issue of land redistribution. Even prosperous tenant-farmers craved ownership: many were hopelessly in thrall to creditors who appropriated up to half their production. Debtors could become body-slaves, enlisted to rock a landlord’s hammock. They eagerly supported the secret land-redistribution plan of the Vietminh, one of whose cadres told Norman Lewis in 1950: ‘Our enemies are slowly converting us to communism. If it is only by becoming communists that we shall achieve our liberty, then we shall become communists.’

  A historian has described Giap’s soldiers as ‘simple men whose world view was formed entirely by their own and their families’ immediate experience … coloured by oppression and hardship over generations’. The foremost strengths of Vietminh fighters were discipline, patience, ingenuity; a genius for fieldcraft and especially camouflage; tolerance of hardship and sacrifice. Above all there was motivation: they yearned to share the fruits of a political, economic and social revolution. Itinerant communist cadres launched political-education programmes and composed folk songs to help villagers learn their alphabets. There was a ‘learn through play’ programme for children. Virtuous as that may sound, it was reinforced by compulsion: cadres caused villagers to display banners decorated with flowers, proclaiming ‘Long live the fighters against illiteracy’. In some places non-readers were wantonly humiliated, forced to crawl through mud to go to market. As ever when communist doctrine was imposed, victims were reminded that this was cruelty with a purpose, for the ultimate good of The People.

  As for more drastic penalties, even an official Party history admitted later that ‘not a few innocent people were killed’. Simple country folk serving the Vietminh assumed that any man who affected blue trousers and a white shirt with a tailor’s label must be a French spy. Whereas the Mafia employed the euphemism of sending an enemy to ‘sleep with the fishes’, in the equally watery words of Vietnam’s communists he was dispatched ‘to search for shrimps’. Killings were conducted with maximum brutality and publicity: Vietminh death squads favoured burying victims alive or eviscerating them in front of assembled neighbours. ‘Better that a possible innocent dies than that a guilty man escapes,’ ran a Party catchphrase. In the ‘liberated zones’ the Vietminh established notorious punishment camps. When Nguyen Cong Luan’s father died in one of them, a cigarette lighter was the only possession his jailers grudgingly returned to the widow.

  In 1947 the Vietminh conducted an ideological ‘cleansing’ campaign, in which a large though never quantified number of ‘class enemies’ were murdered. Any landlord or government office-holder lived under threat of a death sentence which extended to his family. The Catholic religion bore the taint of foreign ownership, and thus its adherents were vulnerable. Local denunciation sessions – dau to – held in the courtyard of a pagoda or landlord’s house, inspired the dread their organisers intended. Farmers or peasants, often impelled by grudges, rehearsed landlords’ alleged crimes before people’s courts run by Vietminh cadres. If death sentences were pronounced, a victim might there and then be shot, stoned to death, hanged, or face a crueller death. At My Thanh in the Mekong delta a Cao Dai functionary, about to be buried alive, pleaded for a merciful bullet. His killers observed contemptuously that ammunition was being conserved for ‘the pirates’ – the French.

  As a peasant child, Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh remembered landowners hiding from t
heir accusers by immersing themselves in the nearby pond and covering their heads with reeds, while others adopted crude disguises. Some failed, and she stood among her fellow-villagers watching their trials. Even as a loyal Party cadre, she later admitted that ‘a lot of those people were wrongly accused’. In the north a ‘people’s court’ was often staged as a theatrical event, held at night in an area the size of a football pitch, ringed by bamboo torches. A presidium of seven judges, poor peasants, was attended by a Land Reform cadre and sometimes also Chinese advisers. Behind the stage hung portraits of Ho, Mao and Stalin, together with painted slogans such as ‘Down with the Treacherous Reactionary Landlords’.

  As for summary executions, one peasant retained an indelible childhood memory of the Vietminh visiting his northern village in 1952, seizing two unarmed soldiers in French service who had called to wish friends a happy new year, and beheading them behind his family’s house. This twelve-year-old said later: ‘I can still hear the sound of their necks being cut through.’ Then the guerrillas left, and French troops arrived. They accused neighbours of responsibility for the men’s death – and burnt every surrounding house. In 1953 the Vietminh sentenced the child to spend two weeks in re-education camp, conducting self-criticism: ‘Everything that I did wrong, or my parents or grandparents did wrong, had to be written down. Everybody had to think hard what to write.’ When Stalin died, all prisoners were obliged to assume black mourning bands. Soon after, a French offensive forced the guerrillas to flee, liberating the boy. He and his family briefly returned to their house, then fled to Hanoi.

  The struggle’s seesaw fortunes imposed continual strain. A poor peasant in the Mekong delta expressed his delight during a period of Vietminh reverses, when their economic blockade was lifted and he was for a time free to sell his produce: ‘The people were very happy … I myself said many times, “I hope that just one side will control us – no matter which one. Living under the control of both is too much.”’ Anh, a daughter of landowning parents, joined the Vietminh because she sought the expulsion of the French, married a fellow-fighter, gave birth to a son, and shared the hardships of life as a guerrilla in the Mekong delta. In 1952, however, she quit: ‘I saw too many frightening things. The communists were grabbing all the power and killing off the nationalists.’ She attributed her own survival merely to the fact that she was too young to pose a threat.

  In the ‘liberated zones’ of the north, rather as some British people in old age became nostalgic for the legendary ‘blitz spirit’ of 1940, Vietminh later looked back on wartime as a halcyon era. Guitarist Van Ky, who became a guerrilla strolling minstrel, enthused, ‘The spirit was marvellous! We imagined that we were all part of one big family.’ Volunteer canteens were formed, known as ‘soldiers’ mothers’ restaurants’, at which local women provided free food for fighters. Ky and his trio walked hundreds of miles to perform: ‘There was something very interesting and wonderful about this. Even though we were in a war zone where the fighting was very fierce, every night we would organise a show, and draw big crowds. The songs I sang weren’t very good, and we did not harmonise well, but we would tell stories, recite poetry.’ Often the lights around the stage had to be masked, to escape French attention. Ky performed as far south as Hue, where he slept on the bank of the Perfume River, ate food brought out from the city, smoked Philip Morris cigarettes and briefly fell in love with a girl in one of his audiences.

  Ky persuaded his English-speaking fellow-performer Hai Chau to read aloud to them from the Reader’s Digest, to help him learn English phrases, in preparation for life after the war. Some of these were unexpected, such as ‘I have a surprise for you in my pocket.’ Periodically on their travels they would be abruptly awakened by a voice shouting ‘Tay can!’ – ‘French sweep!’ As the enemy approached, Vietminh fighters would say wearily, ‘The buffalo are out.’ Hai Chau wrote a song with that title, which soldiers loved, satirising the occupiers. Ky was one among many revolutionaries who discovered romance in their shared experience. It offered Vietnamese what the French had for a century denied them: self-respect. Moreover the passage of each month, then of each year, increased the belief of millions of Vietnamese that the best reason to support the communists was that they were destined to win. A little peasant girl sat up far into the night with her mother and sisters in their hut near Hue, making Vietminh flags, ‘red with the yellow star, because we knew that the people would want them to celebrate … victory’.

  Yet it seems mistaken uncritically to accept Van Ky’s picture of the war years as a romantic idyll: the privations and sacrifices were terrible. Tensions increased between the revolutionary movement’s peasant supporters and its bourgeois ones. Nguyen Duc Huy, born in 1931 the son of a poor farmer, was sent to study at the new Vietminh military academy in China, where he found the atmosphere poisoned by class struggles and relentless self-criticism sessions. A cadet who had been decorated for bravery in battle killed himself under ideological interrogation. Huy was variously accused of running a French spy network and a nationalist assassination team, then imprisoned for seven months in an underground cell. He wrote in his memoirs: ‘The injustice of it all is impossible to describe.’ What seems extraordinary is that after such experiences he served as a company commander against the French, then led a battalion against the Americans, without losing faith in the Party.

  Throughout Nguyen Thi Ngoc Toan’s early years with the Vietminh she was harassed about her background in a wealthy dynasty. Her father was a member of the royal family who had served in the emperor’s cabinet. With Giap’s army, at first she was merely described dismissively as ‘bo doi nhoc’ – ‘a kid soldier’. Later, however, despite her passion for the cause, comrades said scornfully, ‘This girl went to a French school – why have they sent her here? How can a mandarin’s daughter live with the Resistance?’ Toan said later: ‘They made things hard for me. I was very unhappy.’ She herself remained nonetheless loyal to the Vietminh, but the enthusiasm for the guerrillas of another bourgeois, sixteen-year-old Nguyen Cao Ky, waned: ‘For them the Resistance movement was not merely about expelling foreigners. It was about turning the tables, becoming rulers, revenge.’ Ky eventually took an army commission with the French, becoming a pilot.

  Despite heavy losses in clashes around Hanoi, the Vietminh continued to expand their northern ‘liberated zones’. By 1952 they were estimated to control a quarter of the south’s population; three-quarters of the people of central Vietnam; over half in the north. The French wasted immense resources on fortifications. The so-called ‘De Lattre line’, created to protect the Red River delta, poured fifty-one million cubic yards of concrete into 2,200 pillboxes, each one of which was allotted a number prefaced by ‘PK’ – poste kilométrique. This suited the Vietminh strategy of grignotage – gnawing away at French strength: they progressively eliminated such isolated positions, always in darkness. The first that defenders knew of their nemesis was the explosion of a pole charge in the barbed wire, followed by cries of ‘Tien-len!’ – ‘Forward!’ – from attacking communist infantry. By dawn the Vietminh would be gone, leaving only corpses, often mutilated, and blackened patches where mortars or rockets had exploded on earth or concrete. And in Hanoi or Haiphong, one French staff officer would mutter to another, ‘Did you hear what happened to PK141 last night?’

  The war threw up many larger-than-life French leaders, such as the huge, red-bearded Col. Paul Vanuxem, a fifty-year-old intellectual warrior, qualified to hold tenure as a professor of philosophy. Maj. Marcel Bigeard had gone into World War II as a sergeant, and parachuted into France in 1944. Col. Christian de Castries was a cavalryman and a dandy, never without his silk scarf, who cherished his reputation as a ladies’ man. There were famous women, too – the likes of Valérie André, a doctor who was also a helicopter pilot, and the highly decorated airborne nurse Paule Dupont d’Isigny.

  In the autumn of 1952 Giap concentrated three divisions on the east bank of the Red River, tasked with seizing Nghia Lo, a
strategically important ridge. Thanks to night marches and brilliant use of daylight concealment, each man looking to the backpack camouflage of the soldier in front of him, they deployed unnoticed by the French. Then, in a series of assaults that began on 17 October, they overran a chain of posts. Marcel Bigeard’s para battalion covered the retreat of the surviving detachments towards the Black River, in a series of actions that became a nightmare legend. They were obliged to abandon their wounded, and local people later reported finding Bigeard’s trail adorned with the severed heads of those left behind, set on stakes by the Vietminh. The major and those of his men who survived were greeted as heroes when at last they reached the French lines, but the Nghia Lo battles had been a significant disaster.

  In April 1953 the communists opened a new front in Laos, to disperse French strength. By June, Chinese deliveries of supplies and munitions had risen from 250 tons in the same period the previous year to two thousand tons a month, together with Molotova trucks and bulldozers. Meanwhile French forces were running short of officers and NCOs, many of the North African troops were scarcely trained, and nobody retained much confidence in the spirit of 110,000 locally recruited soldiers. Gen. ‘Iron Mike’ O’Daniel, senior US Army officer in the Pacific, visited Saigon in the summer of 1953, soon after Gen. Henri Navarre became commander-in-chief. With characteristic bombast the American urged the French to stir their stumps – adopt a more aggressive military posture. The Korean experience had shown that when lightly-armed Chinese troops caught Americans in the open, they sometimes prevailed. But where circumstances were contrived in which US forces held prepared positions covered by air- and firepower, they became almost invincible. Why could not the French exploit the same realities? Navarre agreed. He cast about for a battlefield on which French strength and Vietminh weakness could be laid bare before the world. He chose Dienbienphu.