by Max Hastings
This made no sense: even if Thieu resigned, the communists had no interest in any outcome other than their own mastery of a unified Vietnam. Clifford’s remarks reflected the understandable yet unedifying desire of many Americans not for a change of government, but for damnable and probably damned Vietnam to vanish altogether from their consciousness. Thieu could boast no significant achievement through the last two years of his partitioned nation’s existence, but it is implausible that any of his compatriots would have done better. He continued the war partly because Le Duan obliged him to do so, but also perhaps because – as Kissinger once cruelly observed – the struggle had become the sole rationale for his rackety regime.
Thieu made no attempt to reform his army, nor to place commands in the hands of competent officers rather than political placemen, despite the new reality that the steel corset of American might had been stripped from the nation’s torso. He was rash enough to believe that Washington would keep its word, repeatedly rehearsed to him by Kissinger, that should South Vietnam face renewed communist aggression, American air and firepower would once more be unleashed – this, though any half-savvy Washingtonian would have told the South Vietnamese president that no more B-52s were coming, under any circumstances whatsoever.
Following the ceasefire, advisers bade farewell to the South Vietnamese units they had mentored and – far more important – provided with access to American firepower. Lt. Col. Gerry Turley told his Vietnamese Marine counterpart that there would be no more gunfire support from the US Navy. The colonel replied: ‘Today, you have cut off my right arm.’ Watching as North Vietnamese and Vietcong flags rose over many villages, Turley felt no doubt the colonel was right, that ‘the South Vietnamese were going down the drain’. Intelligence adviser Edward Brady said: ‘The Vietnamese never felt we were selling them down the river until the … Accords. Before that they thought we were dumb, but we were with them.’ Naval commander Nguyen Tri used language since adopted by many of his former countrymen: ‘The communists did not win. The Americans simply decided to go home and let South Vietnam lose.’
Three years earlier, Creighton Abrams expressed a weary disdain for his Vietnamese allies, telling his staff: ‘I know these people have struggled with this goddamn war for twenty years. I mean, they really haven’t had a hell of a lot of peace around here. And they’re tired, and all. But … if they’re going to really come out on top of this, goddamn it, they’ve still to sacrifice and they’ve got to sacrifice a lot. And the alternative to that … is that in the next five or six years, goddamn it, they’ll be Communist.’ Here was an authentic expression of the impatience felt by a host of Americans, even more emphatic in 1973 than it had been in 1970: it would henceforward be in the hands of the South Vietnamese people, and especially of their soldiers, to determine whether they escaped subjection to a communist tyranny.
Saigon was denied the breathing space, the ‘year without war’, that Kissinger had once aspired to. He himself flew to Hanoi in mid-February for exploratory talks, and perceived that there was no basis for a working relationship. In the ‘war of the flags’ that stuttered into being across the South, the two sides fought increasingly fierce local battles to gain or hold territory. Southern commanders rotated units out of areas where they were deemed to have become too friendly with their enemies. An NVA soldier appeared one morning at a rendezvous where he was accustomed to exchange fruit with Southerners – and was nearly killed by a landmine planted by their newly-arrived replacements. On 29 March, MACV was formally wound up: most of its people folded their tents, or rather relinquished their air-conditioned quarters. The defense attaché’s office, which assumed its residual functions, employed 2,500 American civilian contract workers and four hundred local civilians, but only fifty serving US officers.
Vice-President Ky wrote bitterly later that when the Americans left, they pointed with pride to the vast South Vietnamese armed forces they had created, but ‘could never admit, even to themselves, that a million armed men were led by a group of venal toadies, with Thieu serving as the prototype’. This was true, though the airman might have admitted that he himself was cast from the same mould. A Southern captain said of the Paris treaty: ‘It was a death sentence for us.’ John Vann told an American audience shortly before his death: ‘The overwhelming majority of the population – somewhere around 95 per cent – prefer the government of Vietnam to a Communist government.’ In truth, while only a minority of South Vietnamese welcomed the prospect of Hanoi’s victory, those who recoiled from communism loved their own nation-state too little, craved peace too much, to be willing any longer to fight with conviction.
Blame for progressively destroying the ceasefire was shared between the two sides. On 3 March 1973 the ARVN launched a big offensive aimed at sealing the approaches to the enemy strongholds in the U Minh forest, in the delta’s Chuong Thien province. This met fierce resistance, and was finally thrown back. Giap later claimed that such South Vietnamese initiatives caused him to abandon his own support for observing the Paris terms. Yet it was never plausible that either side would hold back: the North, because it saw victory so close; the South, because the dispensation bequeathed by the Americans was unsustainable.
An ARVN general wrote that the war ‘had brought [South Vietnam] to the brink of moral and material bankruptcy’. Most of its people, he said, had exhausted their capacity for sacrifice; they now listened eagerly to the siren songs of Trinh Cong Son, a well-known Saigon anti-war balladeer. A captain said: ‘Most of our ordinary soldiers had no reason to hate the enemy, because they had not seen what communism could do.’ Lt. Nguyen Quoc Si said gloomily: ‘It didn’t matter who was running the Saigon government – the Americans were always pulling the levers. They fought the war so long as they thought it was in their interests, then quit and left us.’ He said of his own post-Paris combat experience: ‘People did not want to die, because they knew the war was almost over.’ In 1970–72 Southern troops had claimed a favourable ‘kill ratio’ of five enemy for each of their own losses. Whether or not this statistic was authentic, in 1973 it fell to two to one; in the following year, to little better than even. By then, as ammunition shortages hit fighting formations, soldiers were being urged to use their weapons on single-shot rather than ‘rock-and-roll’ automatic.
In the autumn of 1973 a journalist visited the South Vietnamese war cemetery at Bien Hoa, which held more than twelve thousand soldiers’ graves, a tiny fraction of the national loss. Under the new ‘peace’ dispensation, each day ten more were being added: 6,600 Southerners died in the first three months following the Paris deal. The visitor wrote: ‘The air was loud with the wailing of widows and the crying of children, and through the sobs could be heard the dull “thud-thud” of spades digging more graves for the next day’s bodies.’ Overlaid upon its battlefield travails, Thieu’s state fell prey to economic woes. For a decade, outside the rice paddies the principal profitable activity had been servicing the legions of South Vietnam’s unimaginably rich foreign visitors, sponsors, occupiers. Now, two million city folk – one-third of the workforce – found themselves unemployed. A Saigon car-dealer lamented that he sold just one car a month, compared with a hundred the previous August. TV sets, scooters, imported cigarettes vanished from shops. The price of rice doubled. The October 1973 Middle East war, and consequent soaring cost of oil and fertiliser, wreaked havoc, rendered ‘miracle rice’ an uneconomic crop. In December a communist sapper attack destroyed half Saigon’s oil-storage facilities. Inflation rose to 30 per cent, 40 per cent.
A young Southern officer said to a journalist friend, Gavin Young: ‘The argument against communism must be material or moral, mustn’t it, Gavin? But the conditions we find here now are unemployment, rising prices, and corruption, n’est-ce pas? So no moral or material argument exists; there is no real patriotism in Saigon, I mean. So how can we resist? And yet we want to resist – most of us, you know – and we cannot. Isn’t that the tragedy of it, Gavin?’
Inde
ed it was. In 1970 a rural-tenure reform programme, ‘Land to the Tiller’, had been adopted by Saigon. Three years later, at a cost of almost half a billion US dollars, this had given 1.2 million families the ownership rights they had craved for decades; absentee landlordism was almost extinct. But the radical measure had come far too late, as did early offshore oil exploration that would eventually yield 1.5 billion barrels, within a decade transforming Vietnam’s finances. It was as if a terminally ill patient was belatedly told that he would receive a fortune in a will … if he lived long enough.
The Thieu regime remained chronically ineffectual, army morale sapped by worsening shortages of materiel and munitions. These reflected less congressional parsimony than the fact that the Americans had created a Vietnamese military machine in their own image, dependent on expensive technology – still consuming in 1974 fifty-six tons of munitions for every ton expended by the communists – yet less serviceable than the simpler model of their enemies. Moreover, corruption remained institutionalised: Jacques Leslie of the Los Angeles Times uncovered a scam whereby Southern commanders had been selling shell-cases – those of pre-1968 manufacture yielded scrap brass – for fabulous prices in Singapore, fortifying David Elliott’s conviction that ‘no amount of additional aid in 1973–75 would have benefited anyone save those generals’. US embassy political officer Hal Meinheit said: ‘It was a divided society with no common sense of where its people wanted to go.’ An ARVN major wrote: ‘Many fence-sitters foresaw communist victory … Popular support for Saigon dwindled quickly. Many people who had sided with the government now began supporting the communists.’
President Thieu, wrote the same officer disdainfully and not unjustly, ‘was not strong enough to be a dictator … Was there any country at war that allowed such fierce criticism of the government? How many third-world countries permitted journalists publicly to denounce corrupt ministers and generals and to castigate the president?’ Treachery was etched deep into South Vietnamese society. The CIA’s Sam Adams wrote a devastating report which concluded that the regime’s infrastructure was a Swiss cheese: an estimated twelve thousand enemy informants were serving in the government or the armed forces. Captain Phan Tan Nguu was posted to run police Special Branch intelligence operations in Tay Ninh, where he noticed that his driver, whenever off-duty, disappeared towards the Cambodian border. Surveillance revealed that he was meeting communist officers, and subsequent interrogation that he had been tasked to kill Nguu. ‘I am so sorry,’ said the driver inadequately, before being shown to a cell.
Early in 1974, State Department intelligence analysts compiled a report on South Vietnam’s prospects, drawing upon ‘bootleg’ sources in the Saigon mission – officers whose bleak views US ambassador Graham Martin, who had replaced Ellsworth Bunker the previous July, would not permit to be cabled to Washington. Hal Meinheit, one of the authors, said: ‘We concluded that unless a high level of US aid was sustained, the regime’s prospects were very poor.’ The CIA at Langley, now directed by William Colby, challenged this view, ironically arguing that State’s gloom was designed merely to justify the ambassador’s intemperate demands for more funding. As fighting intensified, on 4 January 1974 President Thieu made a speech in Can Tho, where he had once served as IV Corps commander, in which he declared: ‘We cannot sit idly by. We must take appropriate action to punish the communists’ aggressive actions. The war has begun again.’ Washington was as dismayed by South Vietnamese attempts to expand Saigon’s territory as by those of the communists to shrink it, because both alike threatened the precarious status quo.
Two big Northern strategy conferences were held in the upper-floor conference room of Hanoi’s Dragon Court in March and April 1974. Officers agreed on the important good news, that the Ho Chi Minh Trail – now dominated by vehicles rather than man-portage – was operating more smoothly than at any time in its history. An astonishing thousand-mile POL pipeline had been laid, to fuel the NVA’s vehicles in the South. On the debit side the Vietcong remained weak – indeed, had never recovered from Tet ’68: the communists thus had only a meagre presence in urban areas. Much Northern armour and heavy artillery was in poor condition. Most important, uncertainty persisted about whether the Americans would intervene if Hanoi unleashed a major offensive.
Earlier in the war, the communists paid little heed to US domestic politics. Now, however, Hanoi and the southern Provisional Government, which had established a temporary ‘capital’ in Loc Ninh, scrutinised events in Washington, through BBC and Voice of America, ‘with an almost obsessive curiosity’, in the words of a PRG minister. Analysis of these sources produced conclusions heartening for their own cause. In January 1974 the Chinese staged a naval coup, to seize and annex South Vietnam’s outlying Paracel Islands. This provoked no substantive American response. In the first eighteen months following the Paris Accords, twenty-six thousand South Vietnamese troops perished on the battlefield, yet the US Congress continued to slash military aid. Funding for Saigon was halved in 1974, from $2.1 billion to $1.1 billion, then cut again to $1 billion.
Hanoi’s first significant strategic decision of 1974 was to continue fighting through the spring wet season, traditionally a time for regrouping and resupply. In March there was heavy fighting west of Saigon, initiated by the North Vietnamese, but met by the last serious ARVN counter-offensive of the war. This bloodied the communists, but also eroded the South Vietnamese army’s dwindling will to fight. The same pattern was discernible two months later, when the Northern 9th Division launched a major attack west of Ben Cat, in the long-contested Iron Triangle, during which both sides deployed armour. Through subsequent months of heavy fighting, Southern counter-attacks regained lost ground, and prevented a communist breakthrough, but at heavy cost: Saigon’s 18th Division lost 275 men killed, a thousand wounded. The local corps commander was dismayed when he requested 150,000 rounds of artillery ammunition, yet was obliged to content himself with one-third of that allocation. By the time the Route 7 battles petered out in November, some South Vietnamese infantry battalions had lost a quarter of their strength. The NVA had suffered at least as severely, but as usual minded less. The Hanoi politburo’s sceptics grumbled: ‘Brother Ba’ – Le Duan – ‘is burning up our troops again as he did in 1968 and 1972,’ yet North Vietnam’s leader remained implacable. Down in the Mekong delta communist forces sustained a steady pressure, further weakening the ARVN and local militias.
It is an injustice to tens of thousands of Vietnamese dead that historians recount few details of the murderous 1973–74 battles. This is partly because little reliable evidence exists – published narratives seem fanciful. Partly also, soldiers on both sides were by now playing out their parts in the conviction that ultimate communist victory was almost assured. South Vietnamese forces lost 25,473 dead in 1973, almost thirty-one thousand in the following years. Lt. Nguyen Quoc Si, twenty-year-old son of a ranking Saigon police officer, was dispatched to a Popular Forces militia unit in the south-east, near Vung Tau. This had previously been a rest area, where the VC were content to live and let live. Now, however, with the rekindling of the war Si found himself in a contact on his first day in the field. His platoon seldom mustered more than eighteen men with a few M-16s, otherwise mostly old Garand M-1 rifles: ‘You can’t beat AK-47s with those. You’re dead.’
They were always short of ammunition, and in one contact he found himself engaging Vietcong with just a single grenade in his pouch. Helicopter medevac was no longer available: a wounded man had to be carried to a road, if he was fortunate enough to live so long. Si’s men were ‘a mixed bunch’ – some passionately anti-communist, because their families had suffered at the enemy’s hands; others anxious merely to stay out of trouble, to escape irrevocable commitment to either side. Local people sometimes accompanied their patrols, in hopes of thus travelling safely that were not always fulfilled. One day a pregnant woman followed Si’s soldiers, who suddenly heard a violent explosion in their rear. The girl had strayed a yard from thei
r tracks, onto a booby trap. ‘That lady just disappear, thrown into the jungle. The whole of her lower body was gone. It was unbelievably horrible – her baby come out,’ said the young officer. He added thoughtfully, ‘You see a lot of things.’
Northern sapper Corporal Vu Quang Hien was hit in the thigh in one of the battles of that period, then left behind when his unit retreated. A tiny local woman helped him to stagger into a thick clump of brush beside a pond. Hien told her: ‘Leave me here now, and if you hear a shot in the next few hours, you’ll know I’m dead. If you don’t, come back at nightfall and get me out.’ This she did, bringing her husband to assist, because Hien was a big man. The sapper said later: ‘She was not a supporter of either side – she just hated to see me lying there helpless.’
On 18 July 1974, Giap, after reviewing the General Staff’s report ‘Outline Study of a Campaign to Win the War in the South’, ordered preparations for an offensive designed to secure final victory by the end of 1976. This would commence with an assault in the Central Highlands; the timing of what followed would be determined by how events on the battlefield played out. The plan was completed on 26 August, then approved at an October politburo session. Although controversy persists about the personal role of Giap, there is a consensus that following his January 1974 return from Moscow, where he received treatment for gallstones that had seemed likely to kill him, the old general indeed directed the final offensive, as he had not done for years. The most plausible explanation for his temporary restoration to operational command is that following the communists’ 1968 and 1972 failures, Le Duan grudgingly accepted that Giap’s prestige and brilliance were indispensable for this decisive throw of the dice on the battlefield. Hanoi’s decision-making was also influenced by the change of US president. The communists found it impossible to believe that Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford, even with Henry Kissinger as secretary of state, would subject his fragile new administration, together with the American people, to the anguish of re-engagement in Vietnam.