Victory in Vietnam

The Official History of the People's Army of Vietnam, 1954-1975

Merle L. Pribbenow, Merle L. Pribbenow

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780700622313
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Vietnam War
• Index: History

What was for the United States a struggle against creeping Communism in Southeast Asia was for the people of North Vietnam a "great patriotic war" that saw its eventual victory against a military Goliath. The story of that conflict as seen through the eyes—and the ideology—of the North Vietnamese military offers readers a view of that era never before seen. Victory in Vietnam is the People's Army of Vietnam's own account of two decades of struggle, now available for the first time in English. It is a definitive statement of the Vietnamese point of view concerning foreign intrusion in their country since before American involvement—and it reveals that many of the accepted truths in our own histories of the war are simply wrong. This detailed account describes the ebb and flow of the war as seen from Hanoi. It discloses particularly difficult times in the PAVN's struggle: 1955-59, when Diem almost destroyed the Communist movement in the South; 1961-62, when American helicopter assaults and M-113 armored personnel carriers inflicted serious losses on their forces; and 1966, when U.S. troop strength and air power increased dramatically. It also elaborates on the role of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the Communist effort, confirming its crucial importance and telling how the United States came close to shutting the supply line down on several occasions. The book confirms the extent to which the North orchestrated events in the South and also reveals much about Communist infiltration—accompanied by statistics—from 1959 until the end of the war. While many Americans believed that North Vietnam only began sending regular units south after the U.S. commitment of ground forces in 1965, this account reveals that by the time Marines landed in Da Nang in April 1965 there were already at least four North Vietnamese regiments in the South. Translator Merle Pribbenow, who spent several years in Saigon during the war, has sought to render as accurately as possible the voice of the PAVN authors, retaining much of the triumphant flavor of the text in order to provide an uncensored feel for the Vietnamese viewpoint. A foreword by William J. Duiker, author of Ho Chi Minh: A Life and other books on Vietnam, puts both the tone and content of the text in historical perspective.

PART I

Building the People’s Army into a Regular, Modern Armed Force: Maintaining and Developing Revolutionary Armed Forces in the South, 1954–1960

1

Urgently Reorganizing Our Forces: Preparations to Deal with a New Enemy

A NEW STRUGGLE BEGINS

Our victory in the resistance war against the French colonialists and the intervention of the United States marked the beginning of a new phase in the development of the Vietnamese Revolution.

On 21 July 1954, the Geneva Conference on Indochina ended. The nations participating in the conference solemnly pledged to respect the independence, sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Foreign troops were required to withdraw from Indochina. A free general election would be held to unify Vietnam two years from the day the Geneva Conference ended.

While awaiting the general election, the cease-fire agreement provided that, in Vietnam, the 17th parallel would become a temporary military boundary. The forces of the People’s Army of Vietnam would regroup north of the boundary, and the forces of the army of the “French Alliance” would regroup south of the boundary. The military boundary was to be temporary and under no conditions was to be considered a political or territorial border.

To implement the agreement the High Command of the People’s Army of Vietnam ordered a nationwide cease-fire for our armed forces effective 0000 hour, 22 July 1954.

The war was over. Peace had been reestablished throughout Vietnam. On 13 May 1955, the last colonial aggressor soldier withdrew from the Hai Phong assembly area. The Northern portion of our nation, now completely liberated, began an era of the building of socialism. Meanwhile, in the South our people still suffered under the yoke of the imperialists and their puppets.

Our people’s mission of liberating the nation was not yet finished.

Although the United States had directly assisted the French during the Indochina war of aggression (1945–1954) and was a participant in the Geneva Conference, President Eisenhower announced that “the U.S. is not bound by the terms of this agreement.”¹

“Seizing the opportunity”² provided by France’s defeat and its forced withdrawal from Indochina, and concerned that “failure in Vietnam will lead to the expansion of communism in Southeast Asia and the western Pacific,”³ the United States carried out a vigorous program designed to push the French out and, using a new type of colonialism, to commit aggression against us by taking control over our nation and turning South Vietnam into an American military base. The American objectives were to maintain the division of our nation, to block and push back the tide of the people’s revolutionary movement in Asia and throughout the world, and to threaten the socialist nations.

In June 1954 the Americans brought Ngo Dinh Diem back from the United States to establish a puppet government in South Vietnam. A U.S. military mission (the Special Military Mission) was established in Saigon. The U.S. National Security Council approved an “emergency program” of economic and military assistance and replaced the French advisors with American advisors to Diem. The United States gathered a number of imperialist nations and U.S. satellite nations to form SEATO, a Southeast Asian military alliance. In September 1954, South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were placed under the “umbrella of protection” of this Southeast Asian military group.

The Party Central Committee and Chairman Ho Chi Minh correctly assessed the aggressive nature of the American imperialists and closely monitored their schemes and actions. In mid-July 1954, even before the Geneva Conference had ended, Ho Chi Minh clearly stated that “the U.S. is not only the enemy of the people of the world, it has now become the principal, direct enemy of the people of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.”⁴ Uncle Ho said our policy was to “concentrate our forces to oppose the American imperialists.”⁵

This statement marked the dawn of a new era in the history of our nation, the era of opposing the Americans to save our nation.

Our people and our army now faced a new enemy, an aggressor, the strongest economic and military power in the imperialist camp, the largest and most dangerous counterrevolutionary power of our era. The resistance war against the Americans to save our nation would be a historic confrontation between socialism and capitalism, between the forces of the national liberation revolution and forces planning aggression and seeking to enslave all nations of the world under a new form of colonialism.

On 5 September 1954, the Politburo of the Party Central Committee met and issued a resolution to discuss “the new situation, new duties, and new policies of the Party.” The Politburo made an in-depth analysis of the new elements in our nation’s situation as we switched over from war to peace, from a situation in which our forces were dispersed to one in which our forces were concentrated and unified. The resolution placed special emphasis on two facts: that our nation had been divided into two zones with two different systems of social organization and that a new enemy had appeared—imperialist America.

The Politburo assessment declared that the American imperialists, the French colonialists, and their puppets would never leave us in peace to allow us to reconstruct North Vietnam. They would not allow us to unify our nation in a manner favorable to our side. The entire Party, the entire army, and the entire population would have to be vigilant and stand ready to deal with any possible development.

The immediate task facing our soldiers and civilians in both the North and the South was to struggle to implement the Geneva Agreement, to strive to consolidate the North, and to firmly maintain and expand the political struggle movement of the people of the South in order to consolidate peace, achieve national unification, and complete our mission of achieving independence and democracy for the entire nation.

During this new revolutionary phase, the People’s Army would be the “pillar on which we would rely for the protection of the Fatherland and the preservation of peace.” The Politburo decided to build the People’s Army into a regular, modern, revolutionary army. This would be a long-term, complicated task in which the most constant and important factor would be the need for training, and especially for the training of cadres.

Under the collective, unified leadership of the Party Central Committee, our soldiers and civilians in both the North and the South urgently consolidated and reorganized our forces to prepare to enter a new struggle.

CONSOLIDATING PARTY CONTROL IN THE NORTH

In the North, because of the long rule of the imperialists and the feudalists and because of the ravages of war, we were confronted with many difficult and complex social and economic problems. Agriculture was decentralized and farming methods were backward. Industry was small and crippled. Many businesses, water control projects, transportation routes, railroad yards, and port facilities had been destroyed during the war. Before withdrawing its forces to the South, the enemy either dismantled and shipped out or sabotaged many pieces of machinery and large quantities of supplies, creating additional difficulties for us as we began the process of restoring production. In those areas that had previously been temporarily under enemy control, tens of thousands of hectares of farmland had been left to go to seed and villages and hamlets were left in shambles and desolate. Starvation appeared in many provinces. In the large cities and the province capitals over 100,000 people were unemployed. Almost 1 million people were now illiterate. Bandit gangs still operated in a number of our northern border areas. Over 1 million people, the majority of them Catholics, had been seduced, tricked, or forced to emigrate to the South.

With our nation temporarily divided into two halves, the Central Committee of the Party affirmed that the North was the revolutionary base area of the entire nation. The firm consolidation of the North was now our most basic duty. This duty was intimately connected with our struggle for complete independence, democracy, and the future development of our nation. “No matter what, the North must be consolidated. We must move the North forward gradually, firmly, advancing toward socialism on a step by step basis.”⁶

For the immediate future, the Party Central Committee and the Government established a policy of rapidly completing the work of land reform and implementing a three-year (1955–1957) economic recovery plan. This plan focused on the restoration and development of agriculture, handicrafts, fishing, and salt production; on the restoration of transportation routes and postal services; on providing employment and stability for people’s lives; and on strengthening security and national defense.

As the tool of the people’s government, our armed forces began to carry out new roles and new duties: to protect the work of rebuilding our nation, to actively participate in production, to participate in labor and contribute to restoring the economy, and to bind up the wounds of war.

As we transferred our forces to regroupment sites and took control of newly liberated areas, our army fought and defeated many enemy plots and actions designed to sabotage the cease-fire agreement. In the cities and large towns, our troops joined the workers in struggles against factory owners and reactionaries to protect machinery and supplies and ensure that the factories could continue to operate as usual. Division-sized Units [dai doan] 320 and 308 and units from South Vietnam that had regrouped in the areas of Nghe An, Thanh Hoa, Ninh Binh, Nam Dinh, etc., formed numerous operational teams to proselytize the people and combat enemy efforts to seduce or force our Catholic brethren to emigrate to the South. Cadre and soldiers visited each family, patiently explaining the policies of the Party and of Chairman Ho Chi Minh and exposing the insidious plots of the enemy. Even though the reactionaries used all kinds of tricks and devices to obstruct these efforts, in those areas our troops were able to reach in time, our Catholic brethren stayed behind and contributed to the rebuilding of our homeland and the building of a new life.

The High Command ordered the 148th Regiment in the Northwest [Tay Bac] Region and the 238th and 246th Regiments in the Viet Bac Interzone to work with local troops, guerrilla militia, and the civilian population of the border provinces to eliminate banditry. Our troops visited every ethnic minority tribal village, spreading the policies of the Party and the Government. They divided and isolated the reactionaries and clearly exposed their crimes. Our troops helped the local population restore production, rebuild villages, and consolidate people’s governmental structures. The work of our cadres and soldiers had a powerful effect on the masses and won over those people who had previously followed the wrong path. The ranks of the bandits disintegrated, and most of them turned in their guns and returned home to resume normal lives. Security in the border areas of the provinces of Lao Cai, Yen Bai, Lai Chau, etc., was firmly maintained. We had crushed the enemy’s plots to sow division and commit sabotage and we had strengthened the solidarity of peoples of all ethnic groups.

With regard to our efforts to rebuild the economy, our army reclaimed and cleared 64,000 hectares of farmland and helped the population in areas where military units were stationed by contributing tens of thousands of man-days of labor, plowing, harrowing, transplanting, harvesting, etc.⁷ The regular mobile divisions subordinate to the High Command and the armed forces of the Left Bank and Right Bank Military Regions contributed more than 200,000 man-days of labor, digging 500,000 cubic meters of earth and achieving high efficiency during the construction of the Bac-Hung-Hai agricultural irrigation project.⁸ In early 1955 North Vietnam experienced a severe drought. Units stationed in the lowlands contributed more than 6 million man-days of labor, dredging hundreds of kilometers of irrigation ditches, digging thousands of wells, and working with the farmers to fight the drought and save the harvest. During the autumn of 1955 the North was struck by a major typhoon. The High Command immediately dispatched a number of divisions and regiments to help save our dike systems and combat floods. In many locations our troops slogged through water day and night, using their bodies as barriers against the floodwaters so that dirt could be shoveled in to shore up the dikes. In Haiphong, soldier Pham Minh Duc (of the 350th Division) died a hero’s death while trying to rescue civilians. The National Assembly and the Government awarded Pham Minh Duc the title of Hero of the People’s Armed Forces.

On these new combat fronts our army once again demonstrated its revolutionary character and its combat spirit of sacrifice for the sake of the people. The people in areas formerly occupied by the enemy grew to love “Uncle Ho’s soldiers” even more.

In 1956 our Party uncovered errors in the implementation of the land reform program and the program to revamp our organizations. In October 1956 the 10th Central Committee Session put forward timely, appropriate, and resolute corrective measures. During this same period in the South, Diem and the Americans publicly tore up the Geneva Accords and savagely suppressed the struggle movement of the masses. On the world stage there were a number of incidents of counterrevolutionary violence. Exploiting this situation, a number of reactionary elements in the North who had not been reeducated raised their ugly heads, spreading suspicion and criticizing the leadership of the Party.

In the face of these national problems, our army demonstrated its boundless loyalty to our revolutionary cause and proved itself worthy of the trust the Party and the people placed in it. The Party sent almost 10,000 cadre and soldiers to the rural areas to work with local cadre and with our peasant brethren to correct the errors in land reform and in revamping organizations. In areas where military units were stationed our cadre and soldiers went out among the masses, disseminating the policies and goals of the Party, contributing to the work of stabilizing the situation, and helping the people increase production and build a new life.

Through the efforts of the entire Party, the entire armed forces, and the entire population, the economic and social situation in the North gradually stabilized. Law and order were firmly maintained. The land reform campaign of 1956 focused on the right of farmers to own their own land and distributed 334,000 hectares of land to the farmers, thereby completely eliminating the landlord class and erasing the last vestiges of feudalism in the North. By the end of the three-year economic recovery program, the level of educational development and agricultural, industrial, and handicraft production in the North had been restored to pre–World War II levels.⁹ Starvation and disease had been pushed back. Illiteracy had been eliminated. We had taken a step forward in improving the people’s standard of living. The North had been consolidated and turned into the revolutionary base area for the entire nation, a firm foundation on which our army could build and expand.

BUILDING A PROFESSIONAL, REGULAR ARMY

In May 1955 the units of the People’s Army operating in the South completed their transfer to regroupment areas in the North. The Vietnamese volunteer units operating in Laos and Cambodia completed their international mission and returned home. From an army dispersed throughout the nation and performing international duties in Laos and Cambodia, our army was now concentrated in the North. Speaking to army units preparing for a parade on 1 January 1955 to greet the return of the Party Central Committee and the Government to the capital city of Hanoi, Chairman Ho Chi Minh said, “Previously in the North we had only northern troops. Now we have troops from throughout our nation. Northern, Central, Southern—they are all here, and we even have our volunteer troops returning from service in friendly countries. We must sincerely be united, we must love each other, we must help each other make progress.”¹⁰ Uncle Ho stated clearly,

The current duty of the armed forces is to strive to become a regular army. This is a new mission. You must not neglect your studies just because there is now peace. . . . You must study politics to have a firm grasp of the policies of the Party and the Government. You must study technical matters because, as technology is constantly advancing, we also must study in order to make progress. If we want our soldiers to be powerful, we must study politics and technology to progress toward becoming a regular army.¹¹

After ten years of building up our forces and fighting and defeating the French colonialist aggressors, our army had been tempered like steel and had matured in many areas. It had gained a great deal of experience in building a revolutionary army in a country with an underdeveloped economy and had gained combat experience against an imperialist army with modern equipment. Of special importance, our army had developed a corps of cadre capable of responding to any requirement or duty. This was a very important basis upon which to continue the development of the armed forces during this new revolutionary period. With a total of 330,000 full-time troops as of mid-1954, however, our army was still exclusively an infantry army. Its table of organization, equipment, and weapons had not been standardized and the technical and combat capabilities and levels of administration and command of each unit were different.

Our main force troops in North Vietnam (including Interzone 4) had been organized into division-sized units [dai doan] and regiments...