Vietnam

Spencer C. Tucker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135357788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A comprehensive overview of warfare in Vietnamese history from the early efforts to free themselves from Chinese control, through the Indo-China and Vietnam Wars, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, up to the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979. Concentrating on the Vietnam War, the author explores the conflict from the Vietnamese perspective, demonstrating how for many Vietnamese the war was merely one of a long series of struggles against foreign domination. Encompassing socio-political, economic, diplomatic and cultural issues, this text provides an introduction to Vietnam's military history and will be of interest to students of 20th century American and Asian history.

Chapter One
The background

Vietnamese history is characterized by two major themes. The first is the effort to preseve the national identity against foreigners. This meant a thousand-year-long struggle against Chinese control (111BCC—AAD938), followed by a long effort to preserve that independence and territorial unity against the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and then the Americans. The second theme is territorial expansionism, most notably the march to the south as far as the Cà Mau Peninsula. Wars, both international and civil, have long been a part of a tumultuous Vietnamese history. The scholar Pham Quynh noted the repeated divisions that wars have caused his country: “We Vietnamese are a people in search of a country and we do not find it.”¹

Geography

Vietnam is part of Indo-China. The term is attributed to Danish carto-grapher Konrad Malte-Brun (1775–1826) and applies collectively to Burma, Thailand, Tonkin, Annam, Cochin-China, Laos, and Cambodia. Through the centuries Indo-China has been a crossroads with India to the west, China to the north, and, through an archipelagic extension into the South China Sea, the southeast.² The political entity of Indo-China was a late nineteenth-century French creation and included Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

Vietnam, the easternmost portion of Indo-China, extends east from Laos and Cambodia to the Gulf of Tonkin and South China Sea. As a crossroads of Asia it was destined for a stormy history. It encompasses some 127,300 square miles of territory. Put in the context of the United States, it is approximately one-half the size of the state of Texas. Its coastline is shaped like an “S”. Some 1,200 miles from north to south, Vietnam has extremes in climate. North Vietnam has a noticeable winter season; South Vietnam has warm temperatures year around. The country varies in depth from as little as 33 miles to as much as 300 miles, and its shape had led to Vietnam being called “the starving sea horse”. Its extensive coastline, which has caused Vietnam to be known as the “balcony on the Pacific”, has left it vulnerable to seaborne invasion but has also provided a ready source of food. Additionally, transportation by sea and river encouraged national unity for, throughout most of Vietnamese history, water transportation has been faster and easier than that over land.³

Mountain chains running principally north—south from China provide river valleys that have been used by migratory groups entering Vietnam from the north. The most important of these is the Trúóng Són Range, with peaks as high as 10,000 feet near the Chinese border, dropping off to a steep cliff near the sea in central Vietnam. Its watershed forms the western boundary with Laos and Cambodia. There is also the high ground of the Thái Hill area in the northwest and another mountainous area in the northeast. The North Vietnamese Midlands feature terraced hills and rounded mountains north of the Red River Delta. Another important geographical region is the Southern Mountain Plateau known as the PMS (Plateaux Montagnards du Sud) to the French and the Central Highlands to the Americans. This vast plateau covers some two-thirds of all Vietnam south of the 17th parallel. These topographical divisions rule out geographical unity.

About three-quarters of Vietnam is covered by trees or brush and close to half of this is high-stand tree cover or dense jungle. The remainder of Vietnam consists of open plains or deltas. Precipitation and summer temperatures are ideal for the cultivation of rice, the region’s primary agricultural crop. Vietnam has two large rice-producing areas, the Red River Delta in the northern part of the country and the Mekong River Delta in the South, connected by narrow plains. This has led Vietnamese to describe their country as two rice baskets carried on a pole. In addition to rice, Vietnam produces a variety of other products, both agricultural and industrial.⁴

Economically, Vietnam does form something of a unit. The North possesses the bulk of the raw materials while the South boasts most of the food-producing areas. The 1954 division of Vietnam thus brought an economic burden for each half that forced them to depend on outside economic assistance.⁵

North Vietnam, named Tonkin by the French, is the centre of Vietnamese civilization and contains the 250-mile-wide Red River Delta. Bracketed by inland hills and mountains, this region is blessed with fertile alluvium produced by its numerous rivers. The agricultural heartland contains Hà Nôi, the national capital and centre of Vietnamese culture. Extremes in rainfall forced the creation there of an extensive system of dikes, canals, and dams for water control. Drawing on coal and mineral deposits in the north, Hà Nôi is also a major manufacturing centre and transportation hub. The capital is served by the port of Hai Phòng at the mouth of the Red River Delta on the Gulf of Tonkin.

Central Vietnam, known by the French as Annam (Chinese for “Pacified South”), is interspersed by rivers and mountains, a few touching the shoreline, which have served to inhibit north—south communication. The narrow strip of Annam yields rice, salt, and fish, and has the excellent harbors at Ðà Nang (Tourane) and Cam Ranh Bay. It also contains the one-time imperial capital of Huê.

The South, called Cochin China by the French, with the wide and fertile Mekong Delta interlaced by streams and canals, is a major rice producing area despite its extensive forests, swamps, and jungle, known to Vietnamese as the land of “bad water”. Hô Chí Minh City, the former Sài Gòn, is today Vietnam’s most important urban area.⁶

Ethnology

By official count there are at least 58 distinct national groupings in Vietnam, but some 85 per cent of the total population is ethnic Kinh. Vietnam is therefore largely homogeneous ethnically and culturally. Another salient fact about the Vietnamese population, at least in modern times, is its rapid growth. The country has one of the world’s highest birth-rates; the two Vietnams numbered about 30.5 million people in 1962, but the reunited country had more than 70 million by 1996. Thus half of the national population has been born since the Vietnam War.

From earliest times Vietnam’s population has been concentrated in the coastal lowlands to cultivate rice. Even today there are striking variations in population density, from crowded coastal areas to the sparcely populated interior. Some 90 per cent of the population lives in 20 per cent of the national area.

When they settled the rich farming areas, the Kinh pushed the earlier aboriginal inhabitants into the interior. The French collectively identified these peoples, principally the Thái, Muong, and Meo, as the Montagnards (mountain people). The Kinh found the Montagnards useful as a buffer for the Siamese and Cambodians to the west, and largely left them alone. These minorities retained their separate identities into modern times, which created problems for a succession of governments.

Other important ethnic minorities, the vast majority of whom lived in the South, are the Khmers, known as the Khmer Krom, or Southern Khmer, by Cambodians, and the Chinese. In the 1960s ethnic Chinese made up some 10 per cent of Sài Gòn’s population and were influential as merchants and bankers.⁷

Traditional Vietnam

Archaeological digs in the 1920s and 1930s identified Stone Age sites in Hoa Bình and Băc Són in North Vietnam and a Bronze Age site in Ðông Són, Thanh Hóa Province. In the 1960s and 1980s several new sites were also excavated.⁸

The first peoples in Indo-China were Austro-Indonesians. These aboriginal inhabitants were pushed to the interior by Mongolian and Thai invaders from the north and Indians who came by sea from the west. Indonesian and Mongolian elements survive today in the Vietnamese spoken language. The Thais arrived about 2000 BC. The Indian migration culminated in the Khmer empire that still survives in present-day Cambodia. In Vietnam it found expression in the Kingdom of Champa, established in AD 192 and subsequently destroyed by the Vietnamese.

Vietnamese consider the founder of their nation to be Hung Vúóng or King Hung, the first of a line of hereditary kings of the Hông Bàng dynasty (2879–258 BC). Much of this early period is shrouded in legend, and it is unclear whether the country known as Văn Lang actually existed. Legend has it that this kingdom was quite large and included a large portion of south China inhabited by the Nan Yüeh (South Yüeh), as well as North Vietnam and part of central Vietnam. The word Viêt is in fact derived from the Vietnamese pronunciation of Yüeh, the Chinese term to designate the barbarian peoples living south of the Yangtze River. Nam Viêt (Vietnam) is Vietnamese for the southern Yüeh.

In 258 BC King Thuc Phán of neighbouring Tay Au invaded and annexed Van Lang, setting up a new kingdom, Au Lac, with himself as ruler. Cô Loa (about a dozen miles from present-day Hà Nôi) became the new capital, and soon a citadel was under construction there. This vast and very sophisticated defensive work is the most important historical ruin of ancient Vietnam.⁹

In 207 BC Triêu Ðà (Chao To), a Chinese warlord who had broken with the Ch’in emperor, conquered Au Lac. He combined it with his previously held territory to form the new kingdom of Nam Viêt (Nan Yüeh) or “southern country of the Viet”. Its capital was Phiên Ngu (later known as Canton and today as Guangzhou).

Meanwhile the Han dynasty was unifying China, a task it accomplished in the third century BC. In the second century the Han pushed south and in 111 BC they sent an expeditionary corps into Nam Viêt and added it to their empire. For the next thousand years present-day northern Vietnam was, save for a few brief periods, a Chinese province.¹⁰

Chinese rule (111 BC–AD 938)

Geography has forced Vietnam into a close political relationship with China, and Chinese and French historians have tended to treat Vietnamese history during this period as a branch of Chinese history. They see Vietnam as little more than a frontier province, blessed with Chinese civilization but always struggling to be independent. Vietnamese historians, on the other hand, have looked on their country as endeavouring to preserve its own identity; they have taken great pride in its ability both to resist Chinese imperialism and to survive Sinicization.

Chinese rule bred in the Vietnamese a resistance and hatred of all foreign political interference. Vietnamese could admire Chinese philosophy and civilization while at the same time resisting the presence of Chinese soldiers in their midst. As historian Keith Taylor has noted,

Over the past one thousand years, the Vietnamese have no less than seven times defeated attempts by China to assert its influence by armed force. No theme is more consistent in Vietnamese history than the theme of resistance to foreign aggression.¹¹

During the first hundred years Chinese rule was loose and indirect with almost no change in indigenous policies. The Chinese organized their new conquest into the two provinces of Giao Chi (northern Tonkin) and Cúu Chân (southern Tonkin) but they continued the practice of native Vietnamese lords governing at the local level. But gradually Chinese functionaries replaced the indigenous local officials and many settled in Vietnam on a permanent basis. The Vietnamese had both to pay imperial taxes and to maintain the local administration and the military.¹²

The Chinese tried to assimilate Vietnam culturally, for the Han sought a unified empire in all respects. They regarded their great Celestial Empire as the centre of the universe, and they assumed that all people could aspire to nothing better than to become thoroughly Chinese. Their “civilizing mission” was not unlike that of the French in the nineteenth century.

Sinicization included veneration of the emperor, the use of Chinese ideographic writing, and Confucianism. The latter taught a hierarchical social structure with a tightly woven system of obligations that bound subject to ruler, son to father, and wife to husband. The key element was absolute loyalty to the emperor. Buddhism and Taoism also made major inroads in Vietnam.¹³

At the same time Chinese officials seized land from local nobles for Chinese immigrants. This, and the sense that they were losing their national identiy, led Vietnamese nobles to revolt.

The Trúng Sisters

In AD 39 Thi Sách, a Vietnamese nobleman, and his wife Trúng Trăc, daughter of another noble, led a revolt against the Chinese. In the spring of 40 their armed forces carried out a series of successful sieges and defeated one Chinese garrison after another. Much to their surprise, the Vietnamese found themselves free of Chinese control for the first time in 150 years. Trúng Trăc established a court at Mê-linh, northwest of present-day Hà Nôi, and many of the Vietnamese nobles recognized her as queen.

Trúng Trăc and her sister Trúng Nhi, apparently her constant companion, are revered in Vietnamese history as Hai Bà Trúng (the Two Trúng Ladies or the Trúng Sisters). Although Vietnamese tradition has it that Chinese authorities provoked the rebellion by executing Thi Sách, there is no evidence of this. One historian of this period speculates that this came from “the patriarchal bias of later centuries, which could not countenance a woman leading a rebellion and being recognized as queen as long as her husband still lived”. Chinese sources indicate that Thi Sách merely followed his wife’s leadership; indeed, many Vietnamese women were leaders in the rebellion.¹⁴

The Han Court was slow to react, but in 41 it appointed one of its best generals, Ma Yüan, to command an invasion army. He invaded with 8,000 regular troops and some 12,000 militiamen gathered from south China. The Chinese did not encounter resistance until they reached the region of present-day Hà Nôi. In the spring of 42 the Vietnamese stopped the Chinese advance and Ma Yüan withdrew his forces eastward to Láng Bac, overlooking the southern shore of Lake Láng Ba.

The rainy season had begun and Ma Yüan apparently decided to wait for dry weather before resuming the offensive. But with her supporters losing heart and fearful that waiting would only encourage further disaffection, Trúng Trac ordered an attack.

In the subsequent Battle of Láng Bac the Chinese easily defeated the poorly disciplined Vietnamese. Some 10,000 Vietnamese surrendered and thousands more were beheaded. Later Trúng Trac and her sister were captured. According to Chinese sources the sisters were subsequently executed and their heads sent to the Han court. Vietnamese tradition holds, however, that they committed suicide after the battle by leaping into the Ðáy (Hát) River.¹⁵

General Ma Yüan spent most of 43 establishing direct Han rule in the Red River Delta. Near the end of that year he led a sizeable force in some two thousand ships to attack the south, where he successfully reestablished Chinese control. In the ...