Losing Binh Dinh

The Failure of Pacification and Vietnamization, 1969-1971

Kevin M. Boylan

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780700623532
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Vietnam War
• Index: History

Americans have fought two prolonged battles over Vietnam—one in southeast Asia and one, ongoing even now, at home—over whether the war was unnecessary, unjust, and unwinnable. Revisionist historians who reject this view have formulated many contra-factual scenarios for how the war might have been won, but also put forward one historically testable hypothesis—namely that the war actually was won after the 1968 Tet Offensive, only to be thrown away later through a failure of political will. It is this "Lost Victory" hypothesis that Kevin M. Boylan takes up in Losing Binh Dinh, aiming to determine once and for all whether the historical record supports such a claim.Proponents of the "Lost Victory" thesis contend that by 1972, President Richard Nixon's policy of "Vietnamization" had effectively eliminated South Vietnamese insurgents, "pacified" the countryside, and prepared the South Vietnamese to defend their own territory with only logistical and financial support from Americans. Rejecting the top-down approach favored by Revisionists, Boylan examines the facts on the ground in Binh Dinh, a strategically vital province that was the second most populous in South Vietnam, controlled key transportation routes, and contained one of the nation's few major seaports as well as the huge US Air Force base at Phu Cat. Taking an in-depth look at operations that were conducted in the province, Boylan is able to uncover the fundamental flaw in the dual objectives of "Vietnamization" and "Pacification"—namely, that they were mutually exclusive. The inefficiency and corruption of the South Vietnamese government and armed forces was so crippling that progress in pacification occurred only when Americans took the lead—which, in turn, left the South Vietnamese even more dependent on US support.

CHAPTER ONE

The “Pacified” Province

In 1771, as American colonists on the other side of the world were beginning to stir into revolution against the British Empire, three brothers from the village of Tay Son in what is now Binh Dinh Province, Vietnam, led a rebellion against the corrupt Nguyen warlords who dominated the southern half of the country. With the slogan “seize the property of the rich and distribute it to the poor,” the brothers raised a rebel army that swept across the country, punishing oppressive landlords and mandarins, redistributing property, sharing out food, and freeing prisoners. By the time the American colonists finally won their independence in 1783, the Tay Son brothers had seized control of all southern Vietnam and driven twenty-one-year-old Nguyen Anh, the last surviving Nguyen heir, into exile.¹

The Tay Son brothers then came into conflict with the Trinh warlords who dominated the northern half of the country. By 1786, they had overthrown the Trinh and reunified Vietnam for the first time in two centuries. All this was ostensibly done on behalf of Le Hien Tong, reigning emperor of the Le Dynasty, whose ancestors had been reduced to figureheads by the Nguyen and Trinh in the 1530s. But the emperor felt more threatened than empowered by the rebels and fled north to seek the assistance of China’s Qing Dynasty in crushing them. The eldest of the Tay Son brothers, Nguyen Nhac, declared himself emperor, but the new dynasty was immediately challenged by a Chinese army that invaded in 1788. Nguyen Hue, the most militarily talented of the brothers, marched out to meet the invaders near what is now Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam.² Attacking during the Tet lunar New Year holiday, his troops surprised and routed the Qing army, which fled back to China.³

Nguyen Anh had taken advantage of the Chinese invasion by returning to southern Vietnam and launching a revolt against the Tay Son. Nguyen Hue, who had become Emperor Quang Trung, planned to stamp out the Nguyen warlords’ resurgence, but he died in 1792 before he could finish the job. Meanwhile, aided by arms, ships, and military advisors procured by the French Jesuit missionary Pigneau de Behaine, Nguyen Anh was embracing Western military technology. Forts, shipyards, and cannon foundries were established; troops were trained and equipped along European lines; and a dozen Western-style frigates were built to form the core of Nguyen Anh’s navy. Moving cautiously, Nguyen Anh, now Emperor Gia Long, gradually retook Vietnam from the Tay Son, who were feuding among themselves and whose armies had long since lost their revolutionary fervor. The reconquest would not be completed until 1802, but in 1799 the emperor’s armies captured the province that had been the birthplace of the Tay Son movement. Gia Long renamed it Binh Dinh (meaning “pacified”) to commemorate this victory.⁴

The emperors who succeeded Gia Long in the new Nguyen Dynasty found it increasingly difficult to resist French imperialism. In a series of wars stretching from 1864 to 1907, all of Indochina (including Cambodia and Laos) became French colonies and protectorates that would survive until the Second World War. The 1940 conquest of France by Nazi Germany ended the illusion of invincibility that had sustained French colonial rule in the Far East, and the Vichy regime’s inability to defend Indochina against the Japanese further undermined French prestige among the region’s native peoples. In September 1940 the colonial government allowed Japanese troops to enter Vietnam and establish air and naval bases within its territory. Collaboration with the Japanese continued until early 1945, when the Vichy French, recognizing that Allied victory was inevitable, planned to switch sides. The Japanese preempted them by seizing control of all Vietnam in March 1945. French colonial troops put up only slight resistance before being disarmed and imprisoned, along with the entire “European” population of Vietnam. Therefore, when Japan announced its intention to surrender after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, a power vacuum emerged in Vietnam. It was quickly filled by the Communist-dominated Việt-Nam Độc-Lập Đồng Minh Hội (League for the Independence of Vietnam)—better known as the Vietminh. On 14 August, as the Japanese stood by and the French languished in their internment camps, the Vietminh seized power and proclaimed the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. However, the French government in Paris responded by sending troops to Indochina to restore colonial rule. After a year of fruitless negotiation and skirmishing, war broke out between the French and the Vietminh in late 1946.

During the First Indochinese War, Binh Dinh formed the heart of Interzone (Liên-Khu) 5, a vast Vietminh stronghold that spanned the coastal provinces of central Vietnam from Quang Nam to Phu Yen and was headquartered in the town of Bong Son. The insurgents controlled nearly all of Interzone 5 and its population of about 3 million without interruption for the duration of the war. Lacking sufficient troops to occupy the entire country, the French concentrated their efforts on securing the Red and Mekong Deltas, which represented the wealthiest and most populous regions of northern and southern Vietnam, respectively. The only foothold they retained in Binh Dinh was an enclave around the town of An Khe, which was supplied by convoys descending from the French-controlled Central Highlands to the west.⁵ French operations in Binh Dinh were limited to amphibious raids for almost the entire war. In 1949 Operation Beta landed a task force built around the 2nd Battalion de Commandos Coloniaux Parachutistes in the northern part of the province to destroy the rolling stock and the maintenance and switching facilities at the Tam Quan rail yard.⁶ During January 1953 Operation Toulouse put French troops ashore in Qui Nhon to relieve enemy pressure on An Khe and destroy Vietminh arms factories. The French withdrew a week later, leaving much of the city in ruins.⁷

Viet Minh–Controlled Areas (July 1954). Source: The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, The Senator Gravel Edition, 4 vols., (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 1:123.

It was not until the last year of the war that the French made a concerted effort to conquer Interzone 5. In January 1954 the French commander in chief, General Henri-Eugene Navarre, launched Operation Atlante, which began with a pair of amphibious assaults in Phu Yen Province, immediately south of Binh Dinh. Joined by other troops advancing north along the coast from Nha Trang and moving down from the French-controlled Central Highlands to the west, the offensive was to be carried northward into Binh Dinh. The operation’s second and third phases envisioned a concentric attack on the northern half of Interzone 5 by the original Atlante force advancing to the north and still more troops pushing south from Da Nang. All told, thirty battalions would be involved in the first phase, thirty-nine in the second, and fifty-three in the third. It was to be a truly massive effort to clean out central Vietnam once and for all.⁸ However:

After . . . [the] initially successful landing . . . the operation bogged down completely. The Vietnamese troops who were to receive their baptism of fire in the beachhead either gave a poor account of themselves or settled down to looting. The Vietnamese civil administrators who began to pour into the liberated areas were, if anything, worse than the military units. Presently, the Viet Minh forces of the Interzone, unimpeded by the French ATLANTE beachhead, went on the offensive on the southern mountain plateau, destroying Regimental Combat Team 100 [aka Mobile Group 100].⁹

The destruction of Mobile Group 100 was the last major action of the First Indochinese War, the outcome of which had been decided by the crushing French defeat at the siege of Dien Bien Phu on 7 May 1954. Fighting was ended by the Geneva Agreement of July 1954, which stipulated that all French forces would be “regrouped” south of the seventeenth parallel, while all Vietminh forces would redeploy north of it.¹⁰ Several hundred thousand North Vietnamese civilians—mostly Catholics—fled to the south, while 60,000 to 90,000 Vietminh troops and civilian supporters moved north. About 85 percent of all Communist regroupees came from Interzone 5, and fully half were from Binh Dinh.¹¹

The Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference stipulated that elections would be held in 1956 to establish a single government to rule all of Vietnam, but this clause was a dead letter because the non-Communist State of Vietnam’s delegation refused to sign the Final Declaration. When the elections did not take place, the Communist cadres that had stayed behind in the south began agitating for a resumption of the revolutionary struggle, but their comrades in the north—distracted by the task of creating a new nation—held them back for several years. Meanwhile, the “Anti-Communist Denunciation Campaign” launched by South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem enjoyed considerable success in executing and imprisoning the stay-behind cadres, although it also swept up many former Vietminh who were not Communists.¹² The revolutionary movement survived, however, and fighting broke out anew in Binh Dinh in 1959 when primit...