They blew up bridges, built road blocks, ambushed patrols and convoys, assassinated collaborators, and attacked and eliminated numerous watchtowers and small road posts set up by the French in the hope of keeping the enemy out and their own lines of communication open. The Vietminh fighters did their work chiefly by night; as a result, many regions controlled by the French during the day became Vietminh territory after darkness fell.48
The French expeditionary corps was militarily and psychologically quite unprepared for such unorthodox warfare. As the French did not have sufficient forces to engage in systematic antiguerrilla operations, the Communists gradually and with relatively little disturbance built up a "counter-state"; they levied taxes, collected rice, recruited soldiers and disseminated their propaganda. Occasional French attempts to move against the guerrillas were futile:
The French as a rule conquered only empty spaces, of which there was enough in the marshes, jungles and mountains to allow the Vietminh to become invisible. They dispersed only to reassemble again at a base five or ten miles away, and they would repeat this manoeuvre if the French continued their pursuit. Sooner or later, the French found themselves too far away from their own bases, out of supplies and ammunition, and had no choice but to return, usually followed closely and harassed continuously by the reappearing guerrillas.49
In February 1950 major units of the Communist regular army first entered battle; their aim during the next two years was first to remove the French garrisons from the Chinese border and then to drive the enemy out of Hanoi and Haiphong and to seize the Red River Delta. But Giap's forces were defeated on more than one occasion; the French suffered some seven thousand casualties but in the end the Communist "human wave" attacks failed against superior French firepower. As a result of these setbacks, the Vietminh again adopted mobile and guerrilla warfare that could be carried out by smaller units. Against this, the French forces under Navarre, Salan and Lattre de Tassigny had no answer. Dispersed over the country they lost more and more control until, by the fall of Dien Bien Phu (May 1954), only about one-quarter of northern Vietnam remained in their hands. Meanwhile (April 1953) Vietminh forces had entered Laos and Cambodia and given a strong uplift to the local insurgents, the Pathet Lao and the Khmer Rouge. The French government was no longer able to shoulder the mounting cost of the war so the Americans, somewhat reluctantly, decided to pay for the French war effort, but to avoid direct intervention. However, growing war weariness inside France made a continuation of the war impossible. From an economic and strategic point of view, Indochina was of no importance for France. At the Geneva Conference (April-July 1954), an armistice was concluded and the seventeenth parallel became the border between two sovereign states.
The outcome of the first Vietnamese war was a triumphant justification of the Communists' use of the guerrilla strategy that they had learned from the Chinese. The first to provide a more or less systematic outline of Indochinese guerrilla doctrine was Truong Chih, the secretary general of the party in 1946-1947,50 and the chief spokesman of neorevolutionary guerrilla warfare. When only twenty-two, he had been the head of an abortive peasant rebellion in 1931; in the late 1950s he became the scapegoat for the "excesses" in the agrarian reform program and temporarily fell into disgrace. Truong Chih envisaged a protracted war but this, he said, was nothing new in Vietnamese history; under the Tran Dynasty their forefathers had fought the Mongols for thirty-one years. It would be a war without fronts, carried out simultaneously by guerrilla, militia and regular army units. The people were the water, the people's army the fish; partisans and small army units would disguise themselves as civilians and thus become invisible. As he saw it, there would be four separate phases of the war. In the first stage guerrilla warfare, by tying down enemy forces, would be of decisive importance.51 But with a major effort and good leadership it might be possible to win the war during the second stage by using guerrilla and paramilitary forces without a big regular army.52 Food, money and shelter could be commandeered from the villagers; it was desirable to have the goodwill of the population but it was not a conditio sine qua non.
The views of Truong Chih's chief rival, Giap, gradually veered away from guerrilla warfare. Earlier on, Giap had been its major practitioner. His doctrine did not differ essentially from Mao's; a people's war in backward, colonial countries is "essentially a peasant war under the leadership of the working class. " Giap meant the working class in the abstract because there were hardly any working-class cadres in the top echelons of the Communist political and military leadership. Guerrilla warfare was needed especially at the outset of the struggle because it could be practiced in the mountains as well as in the Delta and it could be waged with mediocre as well as good material. If the enemy were strong, contact with him had to be avoided; if he were weak, one ought to attack him. Losses must not be incurred at this stage even if it involved losing ground.53 Giap fully accepted the Maoist concept of protracted warfare; writing as late as 1967, the victor of Dien Bien Phu expected the war to last "five, ten, twenty or more years."54 He also agreed with Mao that political activities were more important than military operations and that fighting was less important than propaganda.
The second stage of "people's war" (to follow Giap) would retain certain characteristics of guerrilla war but would put greater emphasis on big raids, including attacks against fortified positions. The principles of regular warfare would become more and more important even though there would still be many ambuscades and surprise attacks. It was imperative to make the transition from guerrilla to mobile warfare, otherwise the strategic task of annihilating the enemy's manpower would not be fulfilled. If the insurgents failed to make the transition, they would find it difficult to maintain and extend guerrilla warfare.55
In retrospect, Giap regarded Dien Bien Phu as a model of coordination between mobile and guerrilla warfare, a "dialectical connection and interlacement."56 Eventually, of course, the main tool in a people's war would be the regular army. Like other Vietnamese Communists, Giap correctly analyzed the main American weakness: unlike the Japanese in China, the Americans had the potential to win the war. But they could not use it because they had set definite limits on their military objectives. Neither could they afford to have the war interfere with political, economic and social life in the United States and with American foreign policy in other parts of the world.57 It was unrealistic to expect military victory over the Americans. But sooner or later the moment would be reached when, for domestic and foreign political reasons, America would no longer be able to afford to continue the war. The American public would tire of the war, and since America, in contrast to Japan in 1938, was a democracy, public opinion would prevail over the government. The war in Vietnam was, in short, a struggle for American public opinion.
Giap's works are not a major theoretical contribution to military thought. His main achievement, it has been noted, was not to commit many mistakes.58 He was no great strategist even though he did show mastery of the strategic situation in practice. His decisions in 1952-1953 to move his forces into the remote area of Tonkin and later on to give battle at Dien Bien Phu were his main successes. He learned from his costly mistakes of 1950, when he launched frontal attacks against the French army with forces then unprepared for major operations. His experience explains his ambivalent attitude during the internal disputes on Vietcong strategy in the 1960s: he was perhaps more aware than anyone else that guerrillas could not win the war. But, 011 the other hand, he feared that the comrades in South Vietnam would give up the guerrilla approach too soon. This was the background to his controversy with General Thanh (the commander in chief of the Vietcong up to his death in mid-1967) and General Truong Son. The Vietcong commanders attacked "rightist conservative thoughts" in the North, that is, the tendency to overestimate the strength of the enemy. They thought that the enemy could be defeated in an all-out assault. But the Vietcong failed to follow up their successes of 1964-1965 in the dry season of 1966-1967. Giap advised them to keep
up large-scale operations but to regard the improvement and the expansion of the guerrilla forces as their main strategic task. In the words of Le Bao (probably one of Giap's pen names) the Vietcong had been successful as a result of guerrilla attacks that had disrupted American attempts to establish base areas, lines of communication, supply depots and had, moreover, "thwarted the whole pacification pro-gram."59
These debates belong, however, to a later period. Between 1954 and 1960 there were six uneasy years of peace. South Vietnam was in a state of near anarchy; there was only the shell of a government; the civil service was incompetent and the army far from trust-worthy.60 The position of the Saigon government was further complicated by the arrival of nearly a million refugees from the North, who had to be resettled. It was widely assumed that the Southern regime was not viable and that it would collapse within a few years, if not sooner. But against expectations, Ngo Dinh Diem, Prime Minister of South Vietnam, coped better with the enormous problems facing him than could reasonably have been expected. In North Vietnam the Communists needed longer than expected to consolidate their position and, while doing so, committed various doctrinaire "deviations"; they were guided by the principle that it was better to kill ten innocent people than let one enemy escape.
Guerrilla war in the South never ceased entirely; there was little activity between 1954 and 1957 but, after that time, it gradually increased. Following the Geneva accord some 75,000 South Vietnamese Communists had been evacuated to the North; most of them filtered back after the Vietminh Communists had decided (in 1.959) to step up guerrilla warfare. Up to 1964 there were few Northerners among those dispatched to the South to fight and do political work. Later on there was open intervention by the North though, according to the official Communist version, the insurgency in the South was spontaneous, entirely self-sufficient and nationalist rather than Communist in character.
By late 1958 the Vietcong bands constituted a serious threat to the Diem government, which had lost its initial impetus and no longer provided effective leadership. Diem came to rely more and more on members of his family, excluding from power influential groups inside the country. His administration consisted more often than not of corrupt civil servants. Land reform, admirable in principle, was "notably weak in execution and frequently operated to the benefit of absentee landlords rather than of those who actually tilled the soil."61 Diem's police tried to weed out the Communists who had stayed behind in the villages after the Geneva agreements. Such repression was carried out in an indiscriminate fashion; it was neither as brutal nor as effective as the Communists' campaign against resistance to their regime in the North. There was no attempt to create any feeling of identity between the population and those governing it. Thus the Diem regime neither terrorized the villagers into submission nor attempted to gain their support and goodwill by friendly persuasion. It was maintained that Diem's "excesses" were the fault of local officials and the regional security forces. But the effect, as far as the population was concerned, was all the same: active and inactive Vietminh cadres were indiscriminately lumped together and private accounts were settled by incompetent, arrogant and venal local chieftains:
The brutality, petty thieving, and disorderliness of which they [the South Vietnam security forces] were frequently guilty was a source of great annoyance to local inhabitants and the Vietminh cadres who promised to eliminate the security forces and local officials responsible for these indignities found many sympathetic listeners.62
This is not to say that the Vietcong behaved like early Christian martyrs. They had already engaged in individual terror on a massive scale in the first phase of the fighting (1949-1954). Systematic assassination of village leaders, local teachers and other "dangerous elements" played a more important role in Vietnam than in other Asian guerrilla wars; the contrast with China has already been noted. Bernard Fall relates that he returned to Vietnam in 1957 after the war had been over for two years and was told by everyone that the situation was fine. He was bothered, however, by the many obituaries in the press of village chiefs who had been killed by "unknown elements" and "bandits." Upon investigation he found that these attacks were clustered in certain areas and that there was a purpose behind them. But hardly anyone paid attention at the time; these activities were considered a minor nuisance, not a military danger. The attacks increased in scale until President Kennedy announced in his State of the Union message in May 1961 that, during the past year alone, the Communists had killed some four thousand small officials in Vietnam. Altogether the Communists had "liquidated" by that time about ten thousand village chiefs in a country with about sixteen thousand hamlets and thus had methodically eliminated all opposition. South Vietnam was subverted, not in the sense that it was out-fought but in the sense that it was "out-administered."63
To counteract this danger, the South Vietnamese government, with American help, established strategic hamlets. This limited the Vietcong's freedom of maneuver, but only temporarily. The Communists still had the original bases that they had administered ever since the expulsion of the Japanese. On the other hand, there were the hostile villages, those, for instance, in which Catholic influence was strong. Most of the Vietcong's terrorist activities were concentrated against the third and most numerous group of villages, those in which there was (in Duncanson's words) "symbiotic insurgency," in which both the government and the Communists levied taxes, collected food and recruited young men for their armies.64
The Vietcong put great stress on political propaganda and indoctrination. Most Western observers tended to underrate these factors in the early phase of the war, and some tended to exaggerate their importance later on. It was asserted that only men and women with the strongest political convictions and firmly implanted revolutionary attitudes could possibly continue so long a struggle and bear such suffering.65
A high degree of political awareness and sophistication was attributed to the people of Vietnam by pro- and anti-Communist observers alike. Thus, in the words of one sympathetic observer; "When I was in North Vietnam during the winter of 1966-67,1 got the feeling that every Vietnamese was indeed an internationalist."66 On the other hand, there were the political science advisers of the American government who installed political reeducation centers for Vietcong prisoners only to realize much later that their proteges were altogether untouched by the intricacies of Marxism-Leninism let alone proletarian internationalism.
It is, of course, perfectly true that the leadership of the Vietcong was more deeply politically motivated than its enemies and that what has been said about the Chinese Communists in comparison with the Kuomintang applies a fortiori to the situation in Vietnam. But despite all the indoctrination of the rank and file, there is every reason to believe that politics played a lesser role than was generally assumed. This is not a novel phenomenon: the fighting qualities of the German soldiers in the Second World War were second to none, yet subsequent research has established that their political convictions were only involved to a slight extent.67 The history of guerrilla warfare, too, is replete with examples showing that men fight for many years and face great hardships with little apparent political motivation. Throughout history it has been strong leadership, the personal example of the commander, the ethos and the esprit de corps which have kept guerrilla movements going and not just ideological motivation. When the shooting was over, a French observer watching the Khmer Rouge enter Phnom Penh in May 1975 noted:
The common soldier did not appear to be very concerned about politics, Cambodia's future or other ideological questions. I had the impression that a lot of them didn't know which group they belonged to. I felt that their fighting spirit and ability came more from the rough discipline rather than from convictions. I radier admired them, but they often seemed like animals being led into the field by the master.67
Of decisive importance to the conduct of the struggle was the small elite which formed the backbone of Vietnamese Communism in both the North and South. It was this cadre which was t
old: "On your shoulders rests the entire burden of the revolution."68 Through its courage, persistency and frugal habits this cadre made the Vietcong a supreme fighting force.
The guerrillas were poor, which made it all the more important to share what little they had between themselves, and also with the peasants.
While there was abundance in South Vietnam, the Viet Cong had to impose austerity on its members: in a psychological environment conditioned by Western materialism versus Eastern spirituality, social levelling made the burdens of "protracted war" a little lighter to bear. The less one has to lose the less hardship one will feel. There is no immediate hope of laying down one's personal burden anyway. . . .69
The Vietcong cadre came to the village "barefooted and dressed in black like every other peasant. He made tax demands, but they were not excessive ... he did not talk Communism or Marxism, but exploited local grievances." He had the habit instilled in him to keep away from the corrupting influence of the cities; he had replaced the Confucian mandarins — but was closer to the people than the mandarins had ever been.70
The official Communist version of the war rested on a twofold fiction: that it was a spontaneous revolt, which received no outside aid, and that it was led, not by the Communists, but by a leadership that was in the hands of a coalition, the NLF (National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam). Like the Chinese Communists the Vietcong deliberately played down their basic ideological tenets and put heavy emphasis on their patriotic inspiration. It was widely argued at the time that this was just a case of political camouflage. But it is also true that, with all the invocations of proletarian internationalism, nationalist feeling was very strong in Indochinese Communism (and apparently even stronger in Laos and Cambodia) from the beginning and it became even more pronounced the longer the war lasted. The rift in world Communism further strengthened the trend towards national Communism, and what was in the beginning, at least partly, mere make-believe, became in the end the alter ego.
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