The Second Indochina War

A Short Political And Military History, 1954-1975

William S Turley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000305395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

In the United States, discussion of the Vietnam War has tended to focus on the U.S. role, U.S. strategy, U.S. diplomacy, and the war's effects on American society. The tendency to hold U.S. domestic politics responsible for the war's outcome implies that events in Indochina were nothing more than a backdrop for an essentially American drama. In contrast, The Second Indochina War emphasizes the Vietnamese dimensions of a conflict in which all of Indochina—Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—was treated as a single strategic unit. The author contends that only from this perspective is it clear how the war began, why its scale outstripped U.S. expectations, and why the Communists prevailed. Professor Turley gives a balanced account of events in, and views from, Washington, Saigon, and Hanoi. Drawing on years of research in primary documents and interviews conducted by the author in Saigon and Hanoi, the book focuses on the experience, strategies, leadership, and internal politics of the revolutionary side. To set the scene, the author considers the legacies of colonial rule in Indochina and the origins of the U.S. commitment there. He recounts the development of the Saigon regime and explains the bases of revolution in the South, the key communist decisions, and the North's response to bombing. The major military campaigns are clearly described and analyzed, as are the negotiations that led to the Paris Agreement and its aftermath. Vietnam is the central focus, but the reader's attention is also drawn to the strategies and events that unified the conflict in all three countries of Indochina into a single war. Concise yet comprehensive, The Second Indochina War is suitable for the general reader, as a text for courses on the war, or as supplementary reading for courses on Southeast Asian politics, U.S. foreign policy, revolutionary conflict, and Asian regional security. An annotated bibliography and chronology enhance its usefulness. Original material on communist internal debates and military campaigns, based on primary documents in Vietnamese, will also make this book a valuable resource for scholars of Southeast Asia.

1
Legacies of Time

On March 29, 1973, the last American combat troop boarded a plane in Saigon, marking the end of U.S. involvement in the Second Indochina War. Although the fighting continued for another two years, the outcome was never seriously in doubt. From beginning to end, U.S. allies in Indochina were less disciplined, determined, and committed—though seldom less well armed—than their adversaries. U.S. intervention was in effect an attempt to reverse historical trends that were firmly established long before U.S. troops arrived. The United States was able to slow these trends but not, without unacceptable cost to itself, to halt them. For the war was not so much a new conflict as it was the resumption of an old, unfinished one. Of course U.S. leaders perceived their involvement on the side of beleaguered regimes as intrinsically different from the preceding French involvement. But an entanglement in Vietnamese history was inescapable for both France and the United States.

As popularly told, Vietnam's history is a litany of resistance to foreign domination. Formed in the Red River Delta, Vietnam fell under Chinese rule in 208 B.C.; the Vietnamese rebelled periodically over the next millennium, achieved independence in 938 A.D., defeated a Chinese attempt at reconquest in 1077, repulsed Mongol invasions in 1283 and 1287, and successfully resisted another Chinese occupation from 1407 to 1427. Out of this experience the Vietnamese fashioned a myth of national indomitability. Reality was murkier, of course, but the fact remains that the Vietnamese forged a strong collective identity early in their history, certainly long before Europeans appeared off their shores. A key element of that identity, in addition to a single language, a shared tradition, and a united territory, was an image of heroic resistance to foreign rule. Leaders who fulfilled this image could extract intense loyalty and enormous sacrifice from a broad spectrum of the population. Those leaders who succumbed to foreign pressure, collaborated with foreign rulers, or accommodated foreigners for personal gain suffered self-doubt and weak support. No foreign power could put its imprint on the Vietnamese without provoking a strong response.

Direct colonial rule began in 1858 with a series of French military thrusts. By 1883, the whole of Vietnam was under French control and administered as part of French Indochina. The takeover was resisted at each step, first by the Vietnamese imperial army, later by popularly supported rebellions led by local leaders. A major rebellion under the putative leadership of the boy-Emperor Ham Nghi, though instigated by the mandarinate (i.e., the Confucian intelligentsia), broke out in 1885. Significantly, however, these and other uprisings led by traditional elites occurred against Ham Nghi's wishes. Not only did these uprisings fail, they lacked imperial sanction. Traditional economic and community life were also undermined by colonial taxation, an intrusive colonial bureaucracy, the commercialization of agriculture, new patterns of landholding, and urbanization. As a result, by the end of the nineteenth century, the traditional Vietnamese order was discredited.

A new generation of the intelligentsia launched a search for other ways to come to terms with the West and Western colonial rule. This search led some to surrender to French tutelage, some to study abroad, and some to concoct or adopt doctrines strange to Vietnam, such as parliamentary democracy and Marxism. Though this search kept the flame of patriotism alive, it also fragmented the intelligentsia. Loosely united in a belief that Vietnam should be independent, the intelligentsia was deeply divided over which leader, party, or doctrine should reconstruct Vietnamese society in the postcolonial future.

It was against this background that Ho Chi Minh and a number of other young Vietnamese were attracted to socialism following the Soviet October Revolution. Particularly seductive was Lenin's "Thesis on the National and Colonial Question," which moved Ho to burst out: "Dear martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is the path to our liberation!"¹ What Ho found appealing was Lenin's lucid, uncompromising critique of world imperialism. The "thesis" moreover was linked to a larger body of theory on organization, strategy, and tactics as well as to the program of the newly founded Communist Third International. By comparison, other doctrines then popular in patriotic circles seemed to him muddled, incomplete, and halfhearted. Thus Ho was launched on a revolutionary career. In 1930, he helped to organize the Indochinese Communist party (ICP). A decade later, thanks to demonstrated resolve, a conscious decision (after 1935) to stress patriotic themes, a trickle of cadres trained abroad, and an escape from the French suppression that destroyed rival groups, the ICP was the most effective of all Vietnamese organizations opposed to colonial rule,

In 1941, the party determined that it would seek independence through armed struggle, and it organized a national united front known as the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh (Vietnam Independence League), or Viet Minh for short. While other "nationalist" groups ceased activities, fled to China, or collaborated with the French, the Viet Minh prepared for armed resistance. Greatly assisted by the effects of a raging famine and Japan's surrender to the Allies, the Communists rode to power on the crest of a popular uprising known as the August Revolution of 1945. On September 2, party leaders declared independence for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) encompassing all Vietnamese territory from the Chinese border to the farthest point south.

The August Revolution was a great watershed, for it signaled the collapse of colonial power, regardless of France's response. Though other groups contended for a share in the leadership, they appeared on the scene too late or with weak credentials. Like it or not, defense of Vietnam's newfound independence henceforward implied defense of the communist-led DRV. Tens of thousands of youths, many of them from the urban, educated middle classes, rallied to the Viet Minh. Membership in the party, just 5,000 before August, burgeoned, and total armed forces under Viet Minh control grew from 5,000 in August to 70,000 by the year's end.

The DRV had little time to consolidate this achievement, however, for France withheld recognition and reestablished control over Saigon, the country's largest city. France then entered negotiations with the DRV and agreed in March 1946 to recognize the DRV as a "free state" within the French Union. Further negotiations broke down, however, and fighting erupted in December. In the eight years of war that followed, the Viet Minh grew steadily in political and military strength, especially in rural areas. The victory of the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949 provided the Viet Minh for the first time with a secure rear and source of supply. China also supplied some of the equipment that made possible the Viet Minh's decisive victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954. The nine-power Geneva conference, called to end the war in Indochina, held its first session the next day.

U.S. policy meanwhile had undergone a profound change. At the end of World War II, the United States had recognized French sovereignty over Indochina but had been reluctant to support France's war effort unless progress were made toward the establishment of an autonomous Vietnamese alternative to the DRV. As U.S. relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated into the Cold War and communist forces made gains in China, however, U.S. policy became increasingly concerned with the "containment" of communism. Thus, the establishment of the State of Vietnam in 1949 under French aegis (the "Bao Dai solution") removed U.S. objection to helping France, and U.S. aid began flowing to Vietnam in 1950. Finally, the outbreak of the Korean War transformed the French effort, in U.S. estimations, into part of the "free world's" effort to stem communist expansionism. U.S. aid, $10 million in 1950, rose to $1.1 billion by 1954; in that year, the United States underwrote 78 percent of France's war expenses.² Thus, long before the trauma of the 1960s, the United States had entered the war.

But the change in U.S. policy at the beginning of the decade was insufficient to reverse French military fortunes. By 1954, the French sought at Geneva only to withdraw, by a face-saving compromise if possible. Fortunately for France, both the Soviet Union and China were anxious at that time to avert a confrontation with the United States, and they pressured the DRV to make concessions. DRV leaders, too, feared deepening U.S. involvement. Contrary to their own assessment of what their battlefield victories entitled them, the Communists agreed to a military truce and regrouping of forces on either side of the 17th parallel. By a series of undertakings known collectively as the Geneva Agreements, the DRV was confined to territory north of that line, its capital in Hanoi. The State of Vietnam was to occupy the territory south of the line, its capital in Saigon. An International Control Commission consisting of representatives of India, Poland, and Canada was to oversee the ceasefire and regroupment.

The Final Declaration of the conference stipulated that the 17th parallel was a provisional military demarcation line, not a political or territorial boundary. Referring to the DRV and State of Vietnam as "representative authorities of Northern and Southern zones of Viet Nam," it provided that in two years, elections should be held to resolve political issues, particularly the issue of reunification. However, of the nine countries that attended the conference, only four (France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China) gave the Final Declaration their unqualified endorsement. The Saigon regime denounced it, while the United States, in a separate statement, promised only to "refrain from the threat or the use of force to disturb" the accords and expressed a commitment to reunification through free elections supervised by the United Nations. It was a messy end to a messy war, a pause designed to let France withdraw, which weakly bound the participants to a lasting settlement.

The Vietnamese Communists for their part accepted partition with deep bitterness. The declaration gave them uncontested control of only half the country, though they had ruled it as a united one from August of 1945 to December of 1946, and the tide of battle had turned in their favor. The partition left a sizeable number of the party's loyal followers at the mercy of a vindictive, anticommunist regime in the South. Only the Communists had any genuine interest in holding the promised elections on reunification.

Meanwhile the United States moved quickly to fill the vacuum left by France's retreat. The U.S. fear, expressed in the "domino theory/' was that if the South fell to the Communists, Vietnam's neighbors would fall in succession or at least accommodate communist influence. The United States therefore took steps to make permanent the arrangements that the Geneva conference had declared should be temporary. The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), organized in September 1954, unilaterally offered protection to South Vietnam, which was prohibited by the Geneva Agreements from joining military alliances. The United States extended direct military assistance to the Saigon regime, including an advisory group whose numbers soon surpassed the limits placed at Geneva on such personnel. In June 1955, the United States asserted that it was not "a party to the Geneva armistice agreements,"³ and that it supported Saigon's refusal to consult with Hanoi about elections on the grounds that elections could never be free in the North. In October, the United States approved the proclamation of a new constitution that established the Republic of Vietnam with a president holding almost dictatorial powers. As they watched the United States stake its prestige on a noncommunist South, the Communists realized, if they had ever doubted it, that elections on reunification would never be held. They also realized that the liberation of half the country from U.S. domination, as they saw it, might well require them to resume armed struggle.

Communist leaders knew that engaging in such a straggle risked retaliation from the world's greatest military power. Some flinched at the prospect, but when the moment of decision arrived, in 1959, most communist leaders were confident. There were several reasons for their confidence: (1) their victory over France in the First Indochina War; (2) their perception that in Saigon the United States had chosen an ally that was more a liability than an asset; (3) their conviction that the growing strength of liberation movements worldwide gradually would isolate, divert, and deplete U.S. power; and (4) the faith, which the triumph over France had done much to confirm, that the sheer will of politically motivated masses could prevail over a technologically superior adversary. Lastly, the Communists believed they had no choice but to incur the risk of U.S. response if they wished to "complete" Vietnam's independence.

As things turned out, the United States was able to prolong and intensify the war and to strengthen the South Vietnamese regime on whose side it had intervened. But the United States was unable in a few years to reshape what a century of colonial rule had wrought. That century, by 1954, had left Southern Vietnamese society—much more than Northern—deeply divided. The part of Vietnam that embraced the Mekong Delta, what the French called Cochinchina, had been the first region to fall under colonial rule. There the colonial economy had made the deepest inroads: it had linked villages to external markets, set the commercial city against the agricultural countryside, sharply increased debt and tenancy, and exacerbated inequalities. Nowhere else in Vietnam had so many people sought security in affiliation with millennial sects. To these sectarian groups were added, in 1954, a sizeable Catholic minority drawn from all three of Vietnam's traditionally recognized regions, the north, center, and south. The enlargement of the Catholic minority deepened the cleavages in South Vietnamese society. There was no "South Vietnamese" national consciousness, only a highly fragmented society, arbitrarily divided from its other half to facilitate France's retreat.

As time passed, the diverse fragments of South Vietnamese society sorted themselves into three broad political categories. On Saigon's side stood the former civil servants, military officers, and landowning elites who had no future under communism. Some fairly sizeable portion of the South's population also preferred this group to the Communists, though never unconditionally and seldom with enthusiasm. Leading the revolutionary side was the Communist party (with its Central Committee in Hanoi), which had broad support in the North and a branch in the South. In rural areas where the Viet Minh had been strong during the war against France, the party enjoyed active support or sympathy. The revolution also appealed to those peasants who perceived themselves as victims of predatory landlords and unjust government policies. Others such as a smattering of noncommunist intellectuals, monks, and discontented ethnic minorities aligned themselves with the revolution in reaction against government repression or the U.S. presence. Between these two groups, in various postures of neutrality, stood an array of splinter groups that dreamt of alternatives to both Saigon and the Communists. These groups articulated what was perhaps the sentiment of the majority of the population, but the groups had no organizational core, no outstanding leaders, and no coherent program. Foreign observers who dubbed these groups and the populations for which they stood the "Third Force" imputed to them a unity, power, and purpose they never possessed. They were simply the amorphous middle, pushed and pulled from both sides by Saigon and the Communists.

The war likewise encroached geographically upon all of Indochina. Though Vietnam, with nearly five times the population of Laos and Cambodia combined, was the natural epicenter of conflict, the major contestants treated all three countries as a single strategic unit. This perspective had come easily to the French, the colonial masters of the region. It had come later to the Vietnamese Communists, not from determination to succeed to French power as France and the United States supposed, but because French forces based in Laos and Cambodia had attacked their mountain redoubts. From that time onward, the Communists treated Indochina as a strategic unity and regarded denial of Laos and Cambodia to their enemies as fundamental to achieving objectives inside Vietnam. Thus, U.S. efforts to attack the Vietnamese Communists through Laos and Cambodia were certain to draw the United States more deeply into war all over Indochina. All that U.S. military strategy could do was to make the war bigger.

Notes

1. Ho Chi Minh, "The Path Which Led Me to Leninism," in Ho Chi Minh on Revolution, Bernard B. Fall, ed. (New York: Praeger, 1967), p. 6.

2. Neil Sheehan et al., eds., The Pentagon Papers (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), p. 10.

3. Statement by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles at a press conference, June 28, 1955, quoted in Viet-Nam Crisis: A Documentary History, Vol. I:1940-1956, Allan W. Cameron, ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971), p. 378. Dulles was certainly correct if by "armistice agreements" he meant only the truce document, which was negotiated and signed solely by the military representatives of France and the DRV. But his position was at least debatable if he meant to include the Final Declaration, which the United States had pledged to uphold. Though not bound by formal signature, the United States did strive during the 1950s to portray its support of Saigon as consistent with the Geneva Agreements and to disguise steps that were not.

2
Vietnam Between Two Wars

The Geneva Agreements gave combatants 300 days to assemble in "regrouping zones" and civilians the same 300 days to choose on which side of the 17th parallel they wished to live. As French forces regrouped in Northern ports, nearly 900,000 Vietnamese headed for the South. About two-thirds were Catholics, led by their priests and egged on by U.S.-supplied leaflets that said "Christ has gone to the South." The remainder for the most part were businessmen and former employees of the colonial administration who, like the Catholics, feared communist reprisals. Meanwhile, an estimated 87,000 People's Army troops and 43,000 civilians moved from the ...