by Max Hastings
The Geneva Accords, as they became known, merely settled terms of truce between the departing French colonialists and the communists who were to assume governance of the North. Therein lay the basis for the later insistence of both Washington and Saigon that refusal to conduct national elections within the specified two-year time frame was no breach of anything to which either had consented. Many people around the world quickly understood that though the outcome of Geneva was distasteful, nothing more palatable was on offer. The Spectator editorialised on 23 July: ‘This is a bad peace. It is almost certainly the best peace that could, in the circumstances, be obtained.’ The magazine went on to speculate that the communist bloc had curbed its demands because of fears roused by Washington’s sabre-rattling. ‘It would seem to follow that the United States, with its wild, ugly and undisciplined grimaces, has nevertheless indirectly contributed to the conclusion of peace.’
Eisenhower and Dulles thereafter invested the new semi-nation with a legitimacy and importance rooted in the need to calm their Republican constituency at home, and to restore the administration’s self-esteem after failing to save the North. South Vietnam, said the secretary of state, might yet prosper ‘free of the taint of French colonialism’, through the instrumentality of Ngo Dinh Diem, a figure whom Washington embraced with an enthusiasm that was somewhat startling, given that the Americans knew little of him. The British saw matters differently: they had consistently refused to associate themselves with engagement in Indochina, because they saw no vital interest at stake there. They believed the West had its hands full confronting the Soviets in Europe. Meanwhile the Russians and Chinese were reflexively willing to provide some assistance to North Vietnam, now a fellow-socialist state. They would be gratified if the Americans failed in an attempt to make South Vietnam a capitalist showcase, but had no appetite for making Indochina the scene of a high noon between East and West.
The Vietminh went home from Geneva convinced that Zhou Enlai had double-crossed them, yet Ho Chi Minh accepted that hegemony over all Vietnam must be deferred for a season. When North–South elections took place, he could be confident that unification would follow. For the present, he and his comrades addressed themselves with ruthless single-mindedness to building the socialist state of which they had dreamed for so long, into which the South would soon be subsumed. Although the Vietminh had displayed a tenacious appetite for armed struggle, by 1954 its leaders must have been grateful at last to sleep on beds under roofs with their families; to eat half-decent food; to live and work without fear of interruption by bombs or shells.
No Westerner regarded Geneva as a success story, instead it was seen merely as an exercise in damage limitation, as is most Big Power diplomacy: its achievement was to extricate an exhausted colonial power from an unwinnable war. Yet what was extraordinary about the Accords was that the new Saigon government got so much, the triumphant Vietminh so little. This was because the Russians and Chinese were far less interested in the fate of Indochina, and explicitly of Vietnam, than Washington’s Cold Warriors supposed. Mao Zedong had no wish to see an over-mighty communist Vietnam on his doorstep, and appears to have been anxious to draw Laos and Cambodia into his own sphere of influence, rather than that of Ho Chi Minh.
A general ceasefire took effect on 27 July, pending the temporary partition of Vietnam. After years living at COSVN’s secret headquarters in the Mekong delta, COSVN secretary Le Duan emerged to start his travels across the South on a hand-pumped railway trolley. In the North the communists assumed control. On 9 October the French Army left Hanoi, marking the occasion with a series of defiant, vainglorious military ceremonies which caused an American spectator to think of Don Quixote. Amid a roll of drums, boomph of brass and clash of cymbals, Gen. René Cogny, ringmaster for Dienbienphu, saluted the flags of regiments that had fought – paras, Legionnaires, Marines, Senegalese, North African, together with armoured columns that chewed the soft tarmac of Hanoi’s streets. France’s departure was characterised not by nobility and generosity, but instead by a spiteful scorched-earth policy: the colonials removed or destroyed everything that might be of value to the victors.
Ten-year-old Doan Phuong Hai thought the trumpets of the French quitting Hanoi ‘so sad that they seemed to be sobbing’. Their flag was lowered for the last time over the citadel on a cold, blustery, wet afternoon. Two NCOs folded the sodden tricolor, then presented it to the presiding general, who in turn passed it to the garrison commander. Rain masked the tears of many officers and men as the band played the Marseillaise. Then the garrison boarded its trucks and drove away towards the coast. It was just seventy-five years since the colonial power had assumed governance of the city.
The departing French were first replaced by representatives of the International Control Commission, ‘Indian Army officers with swagger sticks and bristling Guards mustaches, pale-faced Poles in their odd triangular caps, and beer-drinking Canadians speaking their own puzzling brand of French’. They in turn were followed by the victors, the first elements of Giap’s army. In Howard Simpson’s words: ‘They came forward in two files, one on each side of the street, small men in drab uniforms wearing leaf-woven, cloth-covered helmets fitted with camouflage nets. Loaded down with weapons and equipment, the Bo Doi of the 308th Division were entering an environment totally unfamiliar. Their approach was heralded by the soft shuffle of hundreds of feet in cheap tennis shoes: the Vietminh entry into Hanoi thus proved one of the most silent victory marches in the history of the world.’ Peasant soldiers gawked in wonder at the grand buildings and broad avenues, booty of their struggle. They were watched by crowds who displayed an enthusiasm that was not entirely spontaneous: cadres had for days toured the city, persuading its hesitant citizens that it would be in their interests to cheer the victors.
Among the handful of Americans present was big, clunky Major Lucien Conein – ‘Black Luigi’, ‘Lou-Lou’ or ‘Three-Finger Lou’ – an American born in France who had returned to his birthplace in 1939 to share the French defeat, then served with the OSS in Europe and southern China. As leader of Col. Edward Lansdale’s US military advisory group in North Vietnam, he was now charged with organising stay-behind teams. Conein was a caricature of a semi-secret warrior – hard-drinking, tough, outspoken, often outrageous: he once expressed his exasperation with a stalled automobile engine by emptying a .45 pistol into it. Now, in the midst of the throng of Vietminh shuffling by, he suddenly punched the air and shouted in Vietnamese, ‘Long live Ho Chi Minh!’ This won him a cheer from surrounding communists, who failed to perceive that he was mocking them – as he would continue to do through the years that followed.
Before the end came for the French, Norman Lewis mused uncertainly about ‘whether it had all been worth it – the brief shotgun marriage with the West, now to be so relentlessly broken off. Had there been, after all, some mysterious historical necessity for all the bloodshed, the years of scorn, the servitude, the contempt? Would the free Nations of Indo-China, in their coming renascence, have gained in the long run from the enforced rupture with the old, unchanging way of life, now to be replaced, one presumed, by a materialist philosophy and the all-eclipsing ideal of the raised standard of living?’
An elderly peasant who lived beside Route 1 said: ‘The happiest day in my whole life was when I saw two truckloads of French soldiers leaving Hue for the last time. They drove by my house, and looked so sad.’ France left behind the graves of ninety-three thousand of its soldiers, who had died since 1945 in the futile struggle to cling to Indochina. Those men had no Kipling to weave for them shrouds of romance. A decade later in Saigon, however, a legend was spun that the fallen of Groupe Mobile 100 had been buried beside Route 19 in the Central Highlands where they perished, standing upright in the stiffness of death, facing towards France.
5
The Twin Tyrannies
1 ‘A REGIME OF TERROR’
Northern and southern Vietnam have always been as different as are their regional counterparts in Bri
tain, the US, Italy and many other nations, even employing slightly different obscenities: the common expletive ‘fuck mother’ translates as du me in Saigon, dit me in Hanoi. In the years that followed the Geneva Accords, both fell into the hands of oppressive authoritarian regimes. That of Ho Chi Minh, however, profited from some notable political advantages. While the North was devastated by the war, subjected to a destitution rapidly worsened by communist economic policies, it became far more efficiently disciplined. Ho had spent less of his own life in Vietnam than had Ngo Dinh Diem. As victor in the independence struggle, however, he commanded immense prestige, and deployed his charisma and charm to formidable effect on the international stage. Moreover, by exercising iron control over information and access, North Vietnam veiled from foreign eyes its uprisings, purges and killings. In the South, by contrast, the follies and cruelties of the Diem regime took place in plain view: many peasants found Vietnamese landlordism no more acceptable than the French variety, and learned nothing of the worse plight of their Northern brethren. Only much later would Southerners come to look back on ‘the six years’ – the period between 1954 and 1960 – as a lost idyll, because relatively few of their countrymen killed each other.
Following the 25 July 1954 ceasefire, a vast exodus from the North took place, as a million people who feared the new rulers – businessmen, servants of the French, landlords, anti-communists and above all Catholics – fled the country by land, sea and air. It was a time of turmoil, sunderings, fears and farewells. Vietminh cadres stopped buses carrying fugitives to the port of Haiphong down Route 1, urging and sometimes compelling passengers to remain. Nguyen Duong’s modestly prosperous family, small businesspeople, suffered a disaster: in the throng at an airfield outside Hanoi, his mother briefly set down the bag containing all their portable wealth in jewellery and gold. Within seconds it vanished, never to be seen again: they started a new life in Saigon almost penniless.
Even as the Northern government-in-waiting issued a Dienbienphu commemoration mug, pathetic scenes took place in Hanoi as its more prosperous citizens stacked possessions in the streets outside their homes, for disposal at firesale prices. Some families split. Nguyen Thi Chinh’s father Cuu, head of a once-rich landlord family, told the sixteen-year-old girl and her nineteen-year-old brother Lan that they would go south – one daughter had already left, after marrying a French doctor. The night before they flew, he gave each teenager a belt containing a little money, some food and essentials. Very early next morning, however, Chinh was shaken awake by Lan, who whispered to her, ‘Come outside.’ On the road they found a friend of her brother’s holding two bicycles. Her brother said, ‘We’re going to join the revolution. Father would understand, but he wouldn’t give permission.’ Chinh was appalled. She pleaded, begged, screamed, dragged at the bikes’ handlebars, all in vain. Lan and his friend pedalled away.
Distraught, she wakened her father. He decided that she must leave as planned, while he stayed behind to search for Lan. A few hours later she found herself among a pushing, shouting, desperate mob at the airport, boarding a cargo plane. Her father at their parting gave her a gold bracelet. On arrival in Saigon she was consigned to a refugee camp, where through the weeks that followed she sobbed relentlessly. At last she encountered a kindly family friend who said, ‘Come and stay with us’; two years later she married his son. She would hear no more of her brother for almost forty years.
Tran Hoi, serving as an apprentice with the French Air Force, had no hesitation about moving to Saigon with his squadron. His mother, however, determined that she must stay behind to sell their house and the family bus company. Hoi flew south aboard a C-47: ‘I cried all the way – Vietnamese never abandon their relations.’ He would have sobbed louder had he known that he would have no further contact with his kin until 1998. He embarked on a life in the South that was always tinged with sorrow, because on holidays and feast days he could never again make the pilgrimage to a family home.
By bus, train, car and on foot, families trekked to Haiphong to board ships, mostly provided by the Americans. It was later claimed that US agents staged a propaganda campaign to frighten Northerners into flight. That there was propaganda is beyond dispute, including atrocity stories fabricated by the American conservative ‘hero’ Dr Tom Dooley, author of a mendacious best-selling memoir Deliver Us From Evil. Equally well-attested, however, are the tragedies that befell many of those who remained, accepting the false assurances of Ho Chi Minh that they had nothing to fear.
Landlord’s son Nguyen Hai Dinh was eighteen when his only sister joined the flight southward. He himself remained. ‘Why? Because I was very stupid … We had thought the French were colonial oppressors until the communists took over, then we started to think of the French as our friends.’ All those possessed of property or education became marked for exclusion, even death, under the new order. Dinh found that his class background made him ineligible to attend university, or to occupy any responsible job. His new ideology teacher said: ‘In the past this country was feudal: now it belongs to the peasants and workers. You have no country.’ His father was stripped of citizenship rights for five years as an ‘anti-social element’, and obliged to scratch a living as a cook for Party cadres. Dinh came to hate everything about his own society, above all the impossibility of saying what he thought. He dated a student named Phuong, but through the five years of their dalliance he never dared to discuss any political subject: ‘Everybody was watching everybody else. Anyone could be an informer.’ He was deemed eligible only for manual labour.
In some tribal areas armed resistance persisted, using weapons provided by France’s special forces before the ceasefire. Bernard Fall claimed that several French officers serving with the tribes could not be retrieved from remote districts, and were abandoned until they were progressively rounded up or killed. He describes a Frenchman radioing desperately as late as the summer of 1956: ‘You sons-of-bitches, help us! Help us! Parachute us at least some ammunition so that we can die fighting instead of being slaughtered like animals.’ Fall asserts that nothing was done: ‘There was no “U-2” affair, no fuss: France did not claim the men, and the communists were content to settle the matters by themselves.’ The Hanoi weekly People’s Army reported in September 1957 that in the two years following the ceasefire, their forces in the mountains east of the Red River had killed 183 and captured three hundred ‘enemy soldiers’, while forcing the surrender of 4,336 tribesmen. Probably not more than a handful of these were Frenchmen, but the report confirms the persistence of resistance.
Meanwhile the new government set about implementing land reform. The Party daily Nhan Dan called on cadres to ‘banish selfish and pacifist doctrine’ and ‘resolutely lead the peasantry to crush the whole landlord class’. The Indian representative on the ICC reported that those who supposed the regime mere nationalists and socialists were naïve. Hanoi’s leadership, he said, bore an ‘indisputably communist character’. Northern media poured forth strident anti-American propaganda. Pierre Asselin, noting that all totalitarian governments require enemies, has written: ‘demonization of the United States … created a “useful adversary” that facilitated gaining and maintaining public support … for advancing the Vietnamese revolution’.
The draconian land-reform programme introduced between 1954 and 1956 pleased some peasants, who saw their old landlords dispossessed, but imposed so many hardships that despite the benefits generated by the cessation of armed strife, many Vietnamese found themselves continuing to face chronic hunger, and later near-starvation. Duong Van Mai, daughter of a former colonial official, observed: ‘The state had removed an incentive for hard work by paying peasants according to their labour’. When collectivisation was later superimposed, ‘shortages became a way of life.’
Adults were accorded rations of twenty-eight pounds of rice a month, ten ounces of meat and the same weight of sugar, and a pint of fish sauce. They received four yards of cloth a year, and two sets of underwear. Yet even in the dar
kest days, Party leaders and their families fared much better. The Northern elite enjoyed nothing like the riches that soon accrued to their Southern counterparts, but they never went hungry. In 1955, only deliveries of Burmese rice averted a famine as grave as that of a decade earlier. Hanoi’s principal sources of cash were $US200 million provided by China, and another $100 million from Russia. These sums were not gifts, however, but mere payments for commodities shipped abroad, desperately missed at home.
Credible statistics have never been published about the cruelties and executions perpetrated by North Vietnam’s rulers in the early years of revolution. Significant admissions were made in a 29 October 1956 speech by Giap, by then deputy prime minister: ‘We indiscriminately viewed all landowners as enemies, which led us to think there were enemies everywhere … In suppressing enemies we adopted strong measures … and used unauthorized methods [a communist euphemism for torture] to force confessions … The outcome was that many innocent people were denounced as reactionaries, arrested, punished, imprisoned.’ Estimates of executions range up to fifteen thousand. While Ho Chi Minh is alleged to have wrung his hands about the excesses, he never deployed his huge prestige to prevent them.
Not only were large portions of landlords’ holdings confiscated, but in many cases the new regime demanded that they should repay to their tenants money collected over years in ‘excessive’ rents. Assets and draught animals were seized at will, so that Duong Van Mai’s elderly uncle found himself attempting to till his residual patch of paddy with a plough strapped to his own shoulder. Space in another uncle’s big house was ‘reallocated’: revisiting forty years later, she found it occupied by forty people. Northerner Doan Phuong Hai’s grandmother seemed to age before his eyes as she suffered indictment as a landlord, followed by interrogation, denunciation, and property confiscation. The old woman refused her son’s offer to take her to Hanoi for medical treatment, merely coughing and wheezing to a premature grave.