Black April

The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973-75

George J Veith

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781594037054
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Guerra del Vietnam

The defeat of South Vietnam was arguably America’s worst foreign policy disaster of the 20th Century. Yet a complete understanding of the endgame—from the 27 January 1973 signing of the Paris Peace Accords to South Vietnam’s surrender on 30 April 1975—has eluded us. Black April addresses that deficit. A culmination of exhaustive research in three distinct areas: primary source documents from American archives, North Vietnamese publications containing primary and secondary source material, and dozens of articles and numerous interviews with key South Vietnamese participants, this book represents one of the largest Vietnamese translation projects ever accomplished, including almost one hundred rarely or never seen before North Vietnamese unit histories, battle studies, and memoirs. Most important, to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of South Vietnam’s conquest, the leaders in Hanoi released several compendiums of formerly highly classified cables and memorandum between the Politburo and its military commanders in the south. This treasure trove of primary source materials provides the most complete insight into North Vietnamese decision-making ever complied. While South Vietnamese deliberations remain less clear, enough material exists to provide a decent overview.Ultimately, whatever errors occurred on the American and South Vietnamese side, the simple fact remains that the country was conquered by a North Vietnamese military invasion despite written pledges by Hanoi’s leadership against such action. Hanoi’s momentous choice to destroy the Paris Peace Accords and militarily end the war sent a generation of South Vietnamese into exile, and exacerbated a societal trauma in America over our long Vietnam involvement that reverberates to this day. How that transpired deserves deeper scrutiny.

1

“THE U.S. WILL REACT VIGOROUSLY”

SIGNING THE PARIS PEACE ACCORDS

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The signing of the Paris Peace Accords on 27 January 1973 did not bring the respite from war so desperately desired by millions of Vietnamese and Americans. The great hope that the agreement would forge a lasting peace within Indochina was swiftly shattered by those in the North Vietnamese Politburo who advocated conquering the South by force. Perhaps ending the conflict was beyond negotiation: too much blood, too much hatred, too many long years of terrible war. Conceivably, a vigorous American military response to violations of the Paris Accords might have restrained Hanoi, but it might also have floundered like so many previous U.S. efforts to end the fighting. What is certain, however, is that the Paris Accords would be dead within four months of their signing, but only Hanoi would know it.

For the South Vietnamese government, the accords brought more fear than relief. President Nguyen Van Thieu viewed the draft accords as deeply flawed and a dangerous threat to his country’s survival. In October 1972, Thieu balked at signing the agreement when presented with the final version by National Security Advisor Henry A. Kissinger. Thieu requested dozens of changes, but in his mind, three issues were crucial. They were the removal of North Vietnamese soldiers from South Vietnam, recognition of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) as the national boundary between the two countries, and guarantees that the formation of the National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord (NCNRC), a post-ceasefire body designed to oversee elections for a new government in South Vietnam, would not lead to a coalition government with the Communists. Since the agreement contained none of these, bitter wrangling quickly arose between the two allies. To appease Thieu, President Richard M. Nixon sent Kissinger back to Paris to amend the accords. Nixon also sought in a series of highly classified letters to allay Thieu’s fears, particularly regarding the all-important presence of North Vietnamese troops on South Vietnamese soil. Nixon promised to “react vigorously” to any ceasefire violations, which the Americans and the South Vietnamese understood to mean that U.S. aircraft would bomb the Communists if they violated the ceasefire agreement. Nixon also promised to continue large-scale military and economic aid to ensure the survival of the South Vietnamese government.

Unfortunately, for Thieu and Nixon, with no acceptable military option to force Hanoi to withdraw its troops, negotiating their removal was impossible. Le Duc Tho, a Politburo member and Hanoi’s chief negotiator in Paris, would not permit the U.S. to obtain at the negotiating table what it had been unable to achieve on the battlefield. Hanoi’s most fundamental principle was that its troops would remain, while America’s must leave. After increasingly acrimonious negotiations between Kissinger and Tho, in mid-December the North Vietnamese rebuffed any further substantive changes, and the talks broke down. To force Hanoi back to the negotiating table, on 18 December 1972 Nixon sent waves of bombers to pound the North Vietnamese capital. The so-called “Christmas bombing” generated worldwide outrage, with many demands from Congress, the U.S. media, and foreign governments to cease the attacks immediately. Yet Nixon held firm, and by the end of December, North Vietnam had agreed to resume negotiations. By mid-January, the Politburo was prepared to sign the new accords, but its bedrock strategy—refusal to remove its forces from South Vietnam—remained unchanged.

After Nixon repeatedly threatened to cut off all U.S. aid if Thieu did not sign, Thieu also finally agreed to ratify the agreement. Thieu told his senior officials that while he had failed to get the agreement modified in the key areas of North Vietnamese troops and the DMZ as a national boundary, the NCNRC would not become a coalition government. Moreover, he had firm commitments from Nixon on several major points. Economic and military aid would continue, the accords did not legally permit North Vietnamese troops to stay on South Vietnamese soil, and the Americans would “react vigorously” in case of ceasefire violations.

Nixon immediately sent another letter to Thieu, thanking him for signing but emphasizing that public unity between the two governments was now essential to ensure that Congress would continue to grant aid to South Vietnam. He also informed Thieu of the contents of the speech he planned to give announcing the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. Thieu, mindful of his own domestic audience, asked that Nixon include the statement that the accords also met Saigon’s goals.

Nixon announced the accords to America on the night of 23 January. “The United States,” the president said, “will continue to recognize the Government of the Republic of Vietnam as the sole legitimate government of South Vietnam. We shall continue to aid South Vietnam within the terms of the agreement and we shall support efforts by the people of South Vietnam to settle their problems peacefully among themselves.”¹ On the matter of the U.S. response to violations, his tone was muted: “We shall do everything the agreement requires of us and we shall expect the other parties to do everything it requires of them.” Dangling the carrot to Hanoi, he offered the prospect of aid to the war-ravaged Communists: “To the leaders of North Vietnam: As we have ended the war through negotiations, let us now build a peace of reconciliation. For our part, we are prepared to make a major effort to help achieve that goal. But just as reciprocity was needed to end the war, so too will it be needed to build . . . the peace.”

Although the accords mandated a halt to warfare in the South and an end to further infiltration, and committed Hanoi to withdraw from Laos and Cambodia and account for Americans still missing in action, none of these occurred. Hanoi instead responded to Nixon’s olive branch with stepped-up infiltration of men and equipment into South Vietnam, along with numerous attacks attempting to grab land and population. Counterattacking swiftly and effectively, the South Vietnamese drove the Communists out of the hamlets they had occupied.

With North Vietnam already committing serious violation, Kissinger traveled to Hanoi in mid-February 1973 to discuss the agreement. Kissinger’s main goals for the trip were to determine if Hanoi intended to keep its written pledges, and to see if a more positive relationship between the United States and North Vietnam could develop. What the principal architect of the accords wanted to learn was whether Hanoi would be “content to rest on the frenzied exertions of a lifetime of struggle and begin meeting the needs of its people? That was what Le Duc Tho had been saying.... Could Hanoi adjust its values to give building its economy a higher priority than it had in previous periods in its history?”²

Kissinger found the Politburo keen to discuss aid. The North Vietnamese leaders wanted American reconstruction money to rebuild the damages inflicted by the long aerial and naval campaign against their country, but they wanted the money without any strings attached. War reparations were always an integral part of Hanoi’s conditions for a peace agreement, and the Politburo viewed Nixon’s promise of post-war aid as a fig-leaf to cover its demand. Its interest was piqued by a 1 February 1973 letter from Nixon to Pham Van Dong, a Politburo member and the premier of North Vietnam. The letter outlined an aid program of $3.5 billion after the formation of a Joint Economic Commission to review the particular needs of each country in the region. Nixon, however, saw aid not as reparations, but as a “powerful incentive for Hanoi to keep the peace.”³ He would provide aid only if Hanoi fully abided by the accords. There was, Nixon told Kissinger, an unavoidable link between aid and Hanoi’s performance on the accords.

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In North Vietnam, Kissinger met with both Pham Van Dong and Le Duc Tho. Although the Politburo was a collective leadership in theory, in reality most policy was driven by three men. After the death of Ho Chi Minh in 1969, first among “equals” in the Politburo was Le Duan, the Party’s general secretary. Number two was Truong Chinh, the Party’s leading theoretician and a doctrinaire fanatic, even by Communist standards. Third was Pham Van Dong, the most urbane—although Kissinger found him dour—of the senior North Vietnamese leaders. Dong had been the foreign minister of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and the head of its delegation at the 1954 Geneva talks, and in September 1955, he had become prime minister. Although Dong was usually characterized as a moderate, he was not. He had worked with Ho Chi Minh since the 1920s as a dedicated revolutionary.

Meeting with Kissinger, Dong claimed that North Vietnam wanted to establish a long-term relationship with the United States, was serious about implementing the agreement, and desired to receive American aid. Following Nixon’s instructions, Kissinger refused to discuss aid until the two sides finalized a timetable for the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from Laos and Cambodia. When aid was finally discussed, Kissinger spent considerable time outlining the congressional process for granting aid. He noted that it was often difficult to obtain money for America’s friends, let alone a country the U.S. had just recently fought. His legislative lessons fell on unsympathetic ears, as Dong was extremely suspicious of Kissinger’s explanation regarding the intricacies of obtaining aid from a recalcitrant U.S. Congress.

Regarding Laos and Cambodia, while Dong agreed to a ceasefire in Laos and a specific timetable for withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces, on Cambodia he was far less amenable. In Laos, Dong explained, the North Vietnamese could fulfill their obligations, but in Cambodia, they could not persuade the Khmer Rouge, the fanatical Communist faction in that beleaguered land, to agree to a ceasefire or a coalition government. How much Hanoi pressed the Khmer Rouge is open to debate, as Hanoi did not want to withdraw PAVN forces from their strategic locations in Cambodia alongside the South Vietnamese border. Consequently, no agreement on Cambodia was reached.

Nor was Dong forthcoming on eighty missing American military personnel who were believed captured, but for whom no information had been provided. Kissinger was further disappointed when Dong denied any ceasefire violations, blamed Saigon for all breaches, and demanded that U.S. assistance be unconditional. More menacingly, Kissinger recalled later, “less than two weeks after . . . the Paris Accords, [Dong] dropped an ominous hint of renewed warfare. If a new relationship did not develop . . . the just signed Paris accords would be ‘only a temporary stabilization of the situation, only a respite.’”⁴ Kissinger left Hanoi determined to make the Politburo choose between renewed warfare and honoring the accords.

THE FIRST TEST

While Nixon intended to defend South Vietnam if it was mortally threatened, he felt the Vietnamese needed to sort out their own political future with minimal American involvement. The strategy was simple: end the military conflict, continue to support the Saigon government, but let the Vietnamese resolve the political issues themselves. Supporting South Vietnam was important, Kissinger said, because the “impact on international stability and on America’s readiness to defend free peoples would be catastrophic if a solemn agreement were treated as an unconditional surrender.” ⁵ Both Nixon and Kissinger continually cited this potential blow to American credibility as a major factor in their resolve to enforce the agreement. In February 1973 Nixon told several senior Cabinet officials exactly that: “Vietnam was important not for itself but because of what it demonstrated in terms of support for our friends and allies and in terms of showing our will to our enemies. I could have ‘bugged out’ free in Vietnam after the 1968 elections, but we had to see it through.”⁶

Still, there were competing forces shaping Nixon’s Vietnam policy. While Nixon long claimed he achieved “peace with honor,” there is no doubt he wanted to remove the conflict as a focal point of U.S. affairs. He was “acutely aware of all the things we had postponed or put off because of the war.”⁷ Nixon’s second-term policy goals for America were ambitious: to reunite America after the angry discord over the war, and to refocus U.S. diplomacy on more pressing issues. In his second term, Nixon sought a “New American Revolution” in line with conservative values. He wanted to reduce the deficit and reform the massive federal bureaucracy. He could accomplish none of these objectives while consumed by Vietnam. Consequently, he bludgeoned Thieu into signing the accords, using a combination of threats and promises of the continuation of aid and the introduction of airpower to punish ceasefire violations. Yet the second crucial promise never materialized. Why?

Kissinger believed that a test of America’s resolve to enforce the agreements was inevitable, given Hanoi’s determination to unify the country under the Communist banner. The test soon came, with a major infiltration of men and equipment down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Truck columns over two hundred vehicles long, impossible when the U.S. Air Force patrolled the skies, now brazenly drove the trail in daylight. Kissinger and Nixon were well aware of the ongoing infiltration. When the Politburo failed to respond to American warnings transmitted by letter via the North Vietnamese delegation in Paris, both Nixon and Kissinger instantly recognized the growing threat. Kissinger recommended bombing, the sole measure he believed Hanoi respected. Nixon, however, despite his earlier promises to Thieu, was suddenly reluctant to act. Kissinger notes that Nixon ordered a bombing attack against the trail on 6 March, but canceled it the next day. On 14 March, Kissinger again recommended bombing the infiltration columns, a threat which Nixon alluded to in a 15 March speech. Nixon stated that he hoped the problems of Indochina could be “solved at the conference table,” but “we have warned Hanoi, privately and publicly, that we will not tolerate violations of the Agreement.”⁸

The main reason Nixon refrained was bombing was that the growing Watergate affair was now absorbing most of his attention. In mid-April, Kissinger told his staff that, “In these circumstances, it would be reckless to urge Nixon to put his diminishing prestige behind a bombing campaign . . . that he was clearly reluctant to undertake. I therefore suggested . . . that we wait for an unambiguous direct challenge.... Up to then our strategy had been to prevent a major challenge rather than wait for it to occur. The decision meant we were postponing a preemptive strike indefinitely. Thus, sooner or later, South Vietnam would have to cope with the full fury of the unimpeded North Vietnamese buildup.”⁹

Given Nixon’s demonstrated ability to take harsh military measures, Kissinger’s plan to “prevent a major challenge” rather than reacting to one was a sound policy, but the Watergate scandal and the anti-war mood in Congress destroyed that policy. The growing political crisis and congressional constraints, however, were not the only restraining factors. Nixon was also well aware that American public opinion had soured on South Vietnam. The “Christmas bombing” had spent what little political capital Nixon had left to prosecute the war militarily. Bombing North Vietnam to bring the Communists back to the conference table, a decision he called the “loneliest of his presidency,” had worked, but it had emptied his hand for when he needed military force to enforce the accords.

With the bombing option withering fast, Kissinger hoped to leverage economic aid and a gradual normalization process to restrain the Politburo’s adventurism. Kissinger’s carrot soon became useless, however, when Congress, upon learning that American POWs had been brutally tortured, passed an amendment in early April 1973 barring any aid to North Vietnam. With military action and economic aid both out of the question, whatever influence the U.S. government had possessed disappeared. Since all of Hanoi’s post-war writings have cleaved to the Party line that it was Saigon’s and Washington’s “massive violations” of the ceasefire that caused North Vietnam to resume the offensive, it is impossible at this point to ascertain whether either option would have worked. Still, given the Politburo’s nervous watching of American military moves, an obsession that went well beyond a prudent respect, the suspicion remains that a forceful and early bombing of the infiltration columns would have prompted a more serious effort to adhere to the ceasefire.

THE SOUTH VIETNAMESE STAND ALONE

The last American troops left Vietnam on 29 March 1973. The next day, Thieu flew to the United States to meet Nixon at the Western White House in San Clemente, California. The visit was the fulfillment of another promise made by Nixon as an enticement to sign the accords. While Thieu remained deeply dependent on U.S. largesse, namely aid and firepower, and despite the looming threats from the ongoing infiltration, in the spring of 1973, he was at the pinnacle of his power. His base was the army, the police, and the Catholic minority; his mandate was that he was the man the all-powerful Americans wanted in power.

Nguyen Van Thieu was born on 5 April 1923 in a small hamlet near Phan Rang, a city on Vietnam’s coast northeast of Saigon. He had a hardscrabble childhood, but he attended a French high school in Saigon. In the late 1940s, after a year-long fling with the Viet Minh, he came to abhor Communist doctrine. Like many Nationalists—as the non-Communist South Vietnamese called themselves—he disliked the French, but he hated Communism. To him it was a choice of the lesser of two evils.

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In December 1948, he joined an officer training class of the fledging Vietnamese National Army. His record was excellent, and over time, he held a variety of military positions. By 1963, he commanded the 5th Division near Saigon, which he used to participate in the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Witnessing the bloody corpses of Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, instilled in him a permanent fear of a coup. After Vietnam had endured a series of inept military governments, in 1967 he was elected president. Air Force General Nguyen Cao Ky was his running-mate. In 1971, he ran without Ky and won in a controversial and uncontested election.

For most Americans, Thieu remains the archetypal tyrant—dictatorial, corrupt, and incompetent. That is a caricature. He was an extraordinarily complicated man, nothing like the one-dimensional despot portrayed by his implacable critics. The charge that he was dictatorial stems from his retention of all decision-making authority, although few realized that by historical precedent and constitutional authority the Executive Branch wielded vastly greater power than any other arm of the South Vietnamese government. The accusation of incompetence came from Thieu’s penchant for moving glacially. Before committing himself, he subjected problems to long, slow study. He rarely let people other than his closest aides know his position on various issues. The Vietnamese people called him “the old fox” (cao gia), indicating a willingness to wait and watch, a sense of keeping one’s counsel while others moved prematurely. Yet Thieu was cognizant that his deliberate pace and retention of power enabled a sluggish bureaucracy that was generally unresponsive to the people’s needs. On 10 July 1973, he announced on TV and radio an “Administrative Revolution” designed to shake up the stubborn civil service. The goal ...