Shortly after he arrived in 1964, initially to become deputy commander of MACV, General William Westmoreland invited me to accompany him aboard a small plane on an inspection tour of bases manned by South Vietnamese troops and their supporting American units. Chatting with the general, I found him unassuming and open in stating his personal views about the course of the war. He mentioned that he had taken account of MacArthur’s warnings after the experience of the Korean War of the dangers of deployment of American troops on the Asian continent. As we flew about the country, I told him what I had observed in the field during the French Indochina War. In covering that war, I never met a French line officer who was convinced that the Expeditionary Force, as Paris designated it, even with heavy reinforcements could defeat Vo Nguyen Giap’s strategy of protracted war, adapted from Mao’s concept. France had put 150,000 troops into the field, composed of some of the ablest professional soldiers in the world, and also excellent Vietnamese troops who knew the terrain meticulously well. Yet in the jungles and on the great river deltas the “nettoyage” campaigns of the French against the Viet Minh, similar to the American-devised “search and destroy missions” being mounted against the Vietcong, had not made a decisive difference. Unopposed air power also did not give the French any decisive edge. Most critically, when I traveled along the frontier with China, I saw that it was virtually impossible for the French to halt the southward movement of Viet Minh troops who had been trained and armed in the South China safe haven. Now, with Ho Chi Minh’s forces solidly ensconced in North Vietnam since the 1954 Geneva Conference, Americans faced an even more difficult task than what confronted the French in their abortive effort to stem the infiltration into the South. Westmoreland listened patiently but then insisted that given the proper logistical base American forces could do what the French had not been able to do. American firepower was greater than what the French could muster, and that would be sufficient to defeat the Communists.
Two years later, in February 1965, I was back in Saigon at a time when it had become evident that firepower was not enough for victory in the war in South Vietnam. The Pentagon was fumbling for a new strategy to cope with the worsening military situation. The number of Vietcong guerrillas operating in South Vietnam had grown from about 5,000 in 1959 to an estimated 100,000 by the end of 1964. Efforts on the ground to block infiltration and the delivery of arms to the Vietcong from North Vietnam had failed. I was told that a decision was in the making as to whether a campaign of sustained bombing of North Vietnam should be undertaken. The stated goal would be to inflict so much damage on the North Vietnamese industrial infrastructure and military installations that Hanoi would desist from further infiltration of men and supplies into the South in support of the Vietcong.
On February 6, I lunched with a White House fact-finding mission at the home of Barry Zorthian, the public affairs officer of the American Embassy. The mission was headed by McGeorge Bundy, the special assistant for national security to President Johnson. It was Bundy’s first visit to Vietnam, and he did not seem to have much knowledge of the country. The discussion over lunch centered on whether “to bomb or not to bomb.” The mission had been sent to Saigon to confer with General Maxwell Taylor on his proposal, made with the concurrence of General Westmoreland, that a campaign of sustained bombing of North Vietnam be launched at once. Taylor had urged President Johnson to break the will of the Ho Chi Minh government by inflicting “such pain or threat of pain upon the DRV that it would be compelled to order a stand-down of Vietcong violence” in South Vietnam. It was typical Taylor rhetoric, which I had heard before. During his tenure in Saigon as ambassador, I thought his approach to the problems of Vietnam was demonstrably lacking in understanding of the native character, history, and culture of the Vietnamese. For one thousand years, the Vietnamese had successfully resisted the efforts of the Chinese and then the French to break their will and compel them to bow down. There was no reason to believe that the Americans would fare any better. Failure to take account of such indigenous factors—which often determine why, when, and how an adversary will stand and fight—had already contributed to disastrous policy misjudgments in China and Korea. When I was asked at the conclusion of the lunch my view of the central question, I replied that it was doubtful that the bombing would do anything but stiffen North Vietnamese resistance. If undertaken, I added, at that time, just as the Soviet premier Alexi Kosygin was visiting Hanoi, it would be dangerously provocative. Moscow in retaliation might increase its aid to the North Vietnamese, rather than acting as a mediator in the Vietnam conflict as Washington hoped. When I remarked to Bundy, who was sitting at my side, that the United States might eventually be confronted in Vietnam with the choice of withdrawal or accepting a protracted struggle similar to that of the British on the Northwest Frontier of India in the nineteenth century, he replied testily: “We cannot do that.” It was obvious that the mission was leaning to the bombing option. In fact, as I learned later, at a White House meeting the previous September, a consensus had been reached that a measured bombing campaign designed to force the North Vietnamese to halt their incursion into the South should probably start early in 1965.
In the early morning hours of the day following the Zorthian lunch, I was awakened in my room at the Caravelle Hotel by the persistent ringing of the telephone. The Vietcong had mortared the compound of the U.S. Military Assistance Command at Pleiku in the Central Highlands and also an army helicopter base located four miles away at Camp Holloway. Eight Americans had been killed and 126 wounded. Ten aircraft had been demolished. Soon after dawn, I scrambled aboard the sole plane available at Ton Son Nhut airfield and flew to the hospital at Nha Trans, on the central coast, where the wounded were being brought. In touring the crowded wards of the hospital I spoke to the wounded, many of them badly hit by mortar fragments, and glimpsed the dying behind the white screens. As I emerged, I encountered General Westmoreland, who was being accompanied on his inspection by Bundy. Westmoreland told me they had been to Pleiku. Bundy looked pale and shaken as he made the rounds of the hospital with Westmoreland. It was one thing to press the buttons of war in the White House, but another to see blood on the ground. He had already telephoned President Johnson, and a decision had been taken to stage a reprisal raid on North Vietnam. By 4 P.M. that afternoon, forty-nine navy jets—A-4 Skyhawks and F-6 Crusaders from the Seventh Fleet carriers Coral Sea and Hancock—were bombing and rocketing the North Vietnamese barracks and guerrilla staging areas at Dong Hoi, forty miles north of the seventeenth parallel. Premier Kosygin was in Hanoi during these raids. Before the Vietcong attack at Pleiku he had told a cheering crowd of Vietnamese that the Soviet Union would “not remain indifferent” if acts of war were committed against North Vietnam.
Bundy returned to Saigon, boarded the president’s personal Boeing Air Force One, and as the plane headed for Washington, he prepared a thirteen-page memorandum for Johnson, which said in part: “We believe that the best available way of increasing our chance of success in Vietnam is the development and execution of a policy of sustained reprisal against North Vietnam—a policy in which air and naval action against the North is justified by and related to the whole Vietcong campaign of violence and terror in the South.” Two other reprisal raids for Pleiku code-named “Flaming Dart” came four days later. Flaming Dart initiated a sequence of events that transformed the character of the Vietnam War and the U.S. role in it. (In the 1990s during an exchange of views with Vietnamese leaders in Hanoi, Robert McNamara would be told, as he later related, that the Vietcong attack on the Pleiku barracks was taken on the initiative of a local commander, not on orders from Hanoi.) In Saigon, after the Flaming Dart reprisals, I attended a cocktail party in the home of an American general and found the military jubilant about the bombings. “We have a surgical instrument, with which we can do precisely what we want to the North,” Brigadier General William DePuy, the deputy chief of staff, told me. Two days after Flaming Dart, President Johnson ordered commencement of “Oper
ation Rolling Thunder.” The sustained air war against North Vietnam was on.
In March, when it became evident that the South Vietnamese army could not provide adequate security for the American air bases engaged in Rolling Thunder, Johnson acceded to Westmoreland’s request for the deployment of 3,500 marines. It was the start of a buildup that would ultimately put 550,000 American soldiers in Vietnam by 1969.
When the bombing started, the American public was told that the objective was to end the infiltration from the North. But this was not the case, according to a U.S. Senate study based on the revelations of the Pentagon Papers. The study said: “The rationale for the bombing was a mixture of complex and often conflicting objectives. The situation in South Vietnam seemed to be falling apart. The bombing of the North, it was hoped, would boost the morale in the South, show the determination of the United States, and break the will of the North to continue the aggression.” The study added: “Target selection had been completely dominated by political and psychological considerations . . . Relatively little weight was given to the purely physical or more directly military and economic implications of whatever target destructions might be achieved.”
In May 1966, I met with Westmoreland alone in his headquarters trailer in the field during an ARVN operational sweep against the Vietcong. He was a changed personality from the unassuming officer I had traveled with in 1964 in the small liaison plane. He was confident, assertive, and spoke of achieving victory in 1967. He had become something of a hero in the United States. He’d been displayed on the cover of Time magazine in January 1966 as “Man of the Year,” and there was speculation that he might be the Republican nominee for the presidency in 1968. I asked him why he was so confident of early victory. He replied by describing what was termed by correspondents as the Westmoreland “meat grinder strategy,” more delicately described by American officials as the “War of Attrition.” The North Vietnamese, given the size of their country, would not be able to sustain the day-to-day casualties they were suffering in close combat with American forces. At that time, the United States was suffering in the range of more than one hundred fatalities each week, and in Saigon at the briefings, which the correspondents dubbed the “Five O’clock Follies,” the American military was putting forward claims based on “body count” of huge Communist casualties. The misconceptions of Westmoreland’s strategy were brought home to me vividly when I returned to a reunited Vietnam in 2005. After viewing the countless war memorials, I asked war veterans what enabled them to achieve victory despite their enormous casualties. The North Vietnamese and Vietcong suffered more than 900,000 dead compared with the American loss of 58,000 known dead. In Hue, Nguyen Van Luong, a member of the National Assembly, who commanded a force of one thousand North Vietnamese soldiers in the assaults on the U.S. Marines at the Dong Ha firebase in the Central Highlands, explained. He told me that his men fought for independence and freedom from the French and the Americans in the strong tradition of their ancestors who fought the Chinese invaders for more than one thousand years. He said the troops did not think of themselves as fighting for any political party or government. He echoed what I heard from Ho Chi Minh’s people during the French Indochina War. It was history written in blood that Westmoreland never grasped.
The optimism Westmoreland generated in the United States evaporated in 1968 after the North Vietnamese and Vietcong in late January launched the Tet offensive, during which they attacked more than one hundred cities and towns, and staged an assault on the American embassy in Saigon. The attackers suffered heavy casualties, but by demonstrating the capabilities of the North Vietnamese forces, the offensive administered a political and psychological blow to the Johnson administration from which it never recovered.
26
SMALLBRIDGE
MISSION TO HANOI
As early as February 1966, as Rolling Thunder was entering its second year without evidence that North Vietnam was buckling under the onslaught, some thought was being given within the Johnson administration to the possibility of a compromise settlement with Ho Chi Minh. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were urging added pressure on North Vietnam through bombing of the oil depots near Haiphong and Hanoi “to bring the enemy to the conference table or cause the insurgency to wither from lack of support.” Defense Secretary McNamara approved the bombing proposal of the Joint Chiefs in March, and President Johnson gave his approval in May but postponed the target date for the start of the operation to June 10. One reason for the delay was the White House reaction to a concerted effort by a number of world leaders to bring Hanoi and Washington to the negotiating table. The bombing had been creeping ever closer to the Chinese border, and there was concern that some miscalculation might spur Mao Zedong to intervene militarily in Vietnam as in the Korean War. Premier Zhou Enlai and Foreign Minister Chen Yi had warned through British and other intermediaries that any bombing of China would bring a response on the ground “without boundaries.”
The cross-border routes from South China into North Vietnam were tempting bombing targets. They were being utilized to transport large quantities of Chinese and Russian weaponry and other supplies to Ho Chi Minh’s forces, including the Soviet surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and Chinese 37-mm radar-controlled antiaircraft artillery. The maneuverable 37-mm batteries were positioned to defend important communication lines along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which were continuing prime targets of American air strikes. The Soviet and Chinese antiaircraft batteries had already brought down 400 American bombers and fighters, according to the Pentagon. Hanoi claimed that more than 1,000 planes of all types had been downed. Apart from the SAMs, the Russians were shipping tanks, artillery, and heavy infantry weapons to the North Vietnamese to supplement the small arms— mainly Chinese copies of Soviet weapons—being provided in large quantities by Peking. Soviet arms shipments to North Vietnam were transported by express freight trains from Siberia to Manzhouli in Manchuria and then on the Chinese trunk railroad south to Kunming and across the border to Hanoi. American bombers were targeting the North Vietnamese railroad segment which loops from Hanoi northwest to Kunming and northeast to Nanning, the principal transit depot for traffic down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Deliveries of war matériel were also being made through Haiphong and smaller ports.
On November 30, 1965, I reported in the dispatch to the Times from Hong Kong that American bombers had attacked six bridges and two segments of the North Vietnam rail line. I also reported the presence of thousands of Chinese engineering troops at work on maintaining the rail system and repairing its bombed-out segments. U.S. intelligence services had become aware in June 1965 of the presence of the Chinese engineering troops. Reconnaissance aircraft had tracked the operations of the troops, easily identified because they wore their Chinese uniforms. In addition to performing engineering tasks, the Chinese were manning antiaircraft batteries and sweeping mines laid by the American navy in coastal waters. According to a study of Chinese archives recorded by Qiang Zhai in his book China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975, the total number of Chinese service troops rotated into North Vietnam between June 1965 and March 1968 was more than 320,000, a force which peaked in 1967 at 170,000. The last contingent of engineering troops was withdrawn in August 1973. Chinese casualties, presumably by American bombing, totaled 1,100 killed and 4,200 wounded.
The Johnson administration apparently decided not to make an issue of the presence of Chinese troops in keeping with a policy of avoiding open confrontation with Peking. When I reported the presence of the Chinese troops in North Vietnam, the State Department reprimanded the consulate general in Hong Kong, accusing the staff of having leaked the information to me. Specialists in the consulate, concerned about the growing presence of the Chinese in North Vietnam, had, in fact, shared with me the intelligence information. In 1965 and 1966, the administration repeatedly conveyed to Peking through diplomatic channels that it was not contemplating an invasion of North Vietnam or any military action against China. Johnson’s personal concern was r
egistered in a conversation in July 1965 with General Harold Johnson, the army chief of staff. When the general discounted the possibility of a Korea-type incursion into Vietnam by the Chinese, the president retorted: “MacArthur didn’t think they would come in either.”
Among the notables counseling restraint in the bombing of North Vietnam were Secretary General of the United Nations U Thant, President Charles de Gaulle of France, and the prime ministers of Britain and Canada. Lester Pearson, Canada’s prime minister, was under more pressure than the others to seek a peace settlement. Pearson had been supportive of President Johnson’s Vietnam policies. Canada had been providing material support to the war effort, the nature of some of it unbeknownst to the public. Between 1965 and 1973, Canadian companies sold about $2.5 billion of war matériel to the Pentagon, including ammunition, aircraft parts, explosives, and napalm, much of it destined for the war in Vietnam. The herbicide defoliant “Agent Orange” was tested for use in Vietnam at the Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Gagetown in New Brunswick. American bomber pilots practiced carpet-bombing runs over Suffield, Alberta, and North Battleford, Saskatchewan, before heading out to Southeast Asia. In early January 1966, when his secretary of external affairs, Paul Martin, proposed a Canadian peace mission to Hanoi, confronted by the mounting unease among many Canadians about their government’s involvement in Vietnam, Pearson proved very amenable. The mission, code-named “Smallbridge,” was cloaked in secrecy. For the mission, Pearson selected Chester Ronning, Canada’s most distinguished diplomat. At seventy-one, vigorous and active, Ronning had retired only several months prior to being recalled by Pearson. His last posting was in New Delhi as high commissioner to India. A close friend of both Pandit Nehru and Premier Zhou Enlai, he had been a key intermediary in defusing the dispute between India and China over rival claims to the border territory of Aksai Chin which had ignited armed clashes in 1962. Ronning was considered particularly suitable for the mission not only because of his connections to the Chinese, who were urging North Vietnam to fight on, but also because of the contacts he had made with Vietnamese diplomats at the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina as well as the 1961 Geneva Conference on Laos.
On the Front Lines of the Cold War Page 31