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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817978532 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hoover Institution Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
From the Tet Offensive to the Communist Takeover
Prelude to Surrender
After having unsuccessfully launched the 1968 Tet general offensive to seize power in South Vietnam, the Vietnamese Communists agreed to enter into negotiations, first with the United States and later with South Vietnam as well, to end the war by diplomatic means. The peace talks began in Paris in May 1968. Early in 1969 the talks were expanded to include delegates from both the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), as South Vietnam was officially known, and the communist-run National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF).
It had taken the delegates nine months to arrive at a decision regarding the shape of the conference table. Not until May 1969 did the NLF set forth a ten-point plan, of which the main points were:
1. The United States should withdraw its troops from South Vietnam and renounce all encroachment on the sovereignty, territory, and security of South Vietnam and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, DRV (North Vietnam).
2. The United States should respect the Vietnamese people's fundamental national rights.
3. The United States should accept responsibility for the losses and devastation inflicted on the Vietnamese people in both zones (north as well as south).
Communist Designs
The NLF's peace plan was proposed with four objectives in mind. First, the Communists wanted to separate the United States from South Vietnam in order to make it appear as if the Americans were the aggressors who had sent their troops to Vietnam and encroached on Vietnamese territory, and that the South Vietnamese government was just an American lackey. In addition, these aggressors who had caused damage to the country had to bear full responsibility for the war losses. Once the United States was out of South Vietnam, the Communists would take power by force. (This actually occurred in April 1975.) Second, the Communists wanted to raise the NLF's status to the same level as the South Vietnamese government's. The United States and South Vietnam had hitherto considered the NLF a clandestine, insurgent, illegal organization. This objective was therefore very important. Once the United States and South Vietnam agreed to negotiate with the NLF, it would automatically become a legal entity — recognition that the Vietnamese Communists had long aspired to and indeed fought for. Third, the Communists were seeking authorization for North Vietnam to become a necessary outsider at the conference — an outsider who, however, had a strong interest in solving problems between the NLF on the one side and the United States and South Vietnam on the other. In such a role, North Vietnam would be able to negotiate with the United States on equal footing. Finally, the Communists were determined to consider the United States as the master to be dealt with and to neglect the South Vietnamese government, though the NLF's plan did allude vaguely to the need for national concord between Vietnamese on both sides in South Vietnam.
In June 1971 North Vietnam put forward a peace plan that was essentially the same as the NLF's. However, the plan emphasized that the United States must stop supporting the South Vietnamese government (which it carefully refrained from referring to as a government). In July 1971, the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) of South Vietnam repeated in its new plan the main points of the North Vietnamese one. In a clarification made on February 2, 1972, the PRG proposed to dissolve the South Vietnamese government on the grounds that "Nguyen Van Thieu and his machine of oppression are instruments of the U.S. Vietnamization policy which constitutes the main obstacle to the settlement of the political problem in South Vietnam." Only when Thieu was eliminated would the PRG enter into discussion with the "new administration" in order to form a tripartite Government of National Concord that would be composed of members of (1) the NLF, (2) the so-called Third Force, and (3) the South Vietnamese regime (minus Thieu).
On the U.S. and South Vietnamese sides, there were two proposals:
1. In May 1969, President Nixon proposed that all non-South Vietnamese forces should be withdrawn from South Vietnam. This meant that the North Vietnamese army had to go back to the North just as the U.S. army would return to the United States.
2. In October 1971, an eight-point plan was proposed by the United States and South Vietnam in which the U.S. forces would withdraw from South Vietnam and the remaining problems in Indochina would be solved by all parties on the basis of mutual respect. No further infiltration of outside forces would be accepted, and all outside forces would have to be withdrawn from Indochina.
The second proposal, by stating that "all outside forces" had to be withdrawn, and that there should be no further infiltration of such forces, implicitly required North Vietnam to withdraw its troops to the North and to keep them there. But the proposal also tacitly recognized the PRG as having equal footing with South Vietnam, since all parties were to solve matters "on the basis of mutual respect."
The Paris Agreement
In mid-1972 Hanoi was still maintaining the position that, before there could be an agreement, the Thieu regime would have to be removed. Early in October 1972, however, Hanoi submitted a draft of a peace agreement on the basis of which a mutually agreeable document was developed. Both sides agreed that the document would be signed on October 31, 1972, but the signing was called off when President Nixon announced that the agreement "would not bring a lasting peace" because the language of the draft could not ensure it. Negotiations were resumed in order to modify the language. During the negotiations, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's chief delegate, asked for a recess in order to consult with Hanoi. On his return Tho presented a totally new set of documents with new provisions. After an extended series of negotiations, during which the U.S. delegation tried without success to convince Hanoi to comply with the original agreement, President Nixon ordered very heavy bombing of North Vietnam starting on December 18, 1972. The bombing continued for twelve days. It destroyed major military installations, electric power plants, and other vital targets, in Hanoi and Haiphong. After sustaining such heavy losses, the North Vietnamese soon had to come back to the Paris conference.
The conference resumed on January 8, 1973; Hanoi signed the peace pact on January 27. It was entitled "Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring the Peace in Vietnam," and is generally known as the Paris Accords or the Paris Agreement. In it the United States was required (1) to stop all its military activities against North Vietnam (article 3); (2) not to continue its military involvement or intervene in the internal affairs of South Vietnam (article 4); (3) to withdraw from South Vietnam all its troops, military advisers, and military personnel within 60 days (article 5); and (4) to dismantle all its military bases in South Vietnam within 60 days (article 6). No provisions in the agreement openly required North Vietnam to withdraw its troops from South Vietnam or to stop infiltrating them into the South. The latter condition, however, was at least implied by article 7, which stated that "the two South Vietnamese parties shall not accept the introduction of troops, military advisers and military personnel ... including armaments, munitions and war materials into South Vietnam." The agreement also admitted the NLF's status as being equal to the Republic of Vietnam's in articles 2b, 2c, 7, 10, 11, 12, and 13.
Why the Agreement Failed
The U.S. government had yielded far too much to communist demands.
The communist party apparatus in South Vietnam was in fact extremely weak as a result of the defeats it had suffered during the Tet offensive of February 1968. Communist military forces were in no better shape. They were not able to mount a large-scale operation throughout South Vietnam. They did launch some attacks from time to time, but these were intended as mere shows of strength. In summer 1972 they had to concentrate three North Vietnamese army divisions in the demilitarized zone across the Ben Hai River in order to take over Quang Tri. However, these forces were severely beaten. There were no compelling military reasons, then, for the United States to make such concessions.
In addition, the U. S. government had committed serious mistakes in the style of its negotiations with the NLF. It was part of the NLF's strategy that negotiations should be made directly with the U.S. government and that the South Vietnamese government should be treated as a puppet. In the process of proposing negotiations and in the course of the negotiations themselves, the U.S. delegates played key roles. The South Vietnamese government was not even included in the eight-point plan until October 1971. Right up to the signing of the 1973 Paris Agreement, the U.S. government continued to mastermind the peace conference and the South Vietnamese government continued to be just a follower. The difference was a crucial one. By its stance at the Paris conference, the United States had tacitly accepted the communist propaganda line that it was a foreign aggressor waging an unjust war. Under this assumption, the U.S. government incurred the chief responsibility for all the problems before the conference, including all the consequences of its military actions. The NLF, then, cut the South Vietnamese government completely out of the picture — a classic example of divide and conquer.
Upon the signing of the Paris Agreement, the American troops gradually pulled out of South Vietnam. The disengagement was completed within the prescribed 60 days. North Vietnam, on the contrary, starting right in 1973, built a road system for the movement of military supplies on the eastern side of the Truong Son Mountains. The road, over one thousand kilometers long, connected Highway 9 (Quang Tri) with areas east of Saigon. According to Van Tien Dung, the general offensive's North Vietnamese commander, it was "an 8-m-wide, two-way road for heavy trucks and year-round tank traffic, transporting hundreds of thousands tons of war materiel to the battlefields." North Vietnam used "thousands of bulldozers, dozens of thousands of troops, engineers, workers, and laborers to build the road." Along it, east of the Truong Son mountain chain, lay a 500-km fuel pipeline from Quang Tri through the Central Highlands to Loc Ninh [north of Saigon] to supply dozens of thousands of vehicles moving in both directions." According to the same source, "military supplies such as tanks, armored vehicles, missiles, long-range artillery, and anti-aircraft weapons" were sent to the battlefields a few at a time until large stockpiles of them had accumulated. "For the first time," he adds, "our long-range artillery pieces and modern tanks were sent to rubber plantations in South Vietnam." George Nash, in The Dissolution of the Paris Peace Accords, says that North Vietnam sent many troops to the South.
In the first two months after the cease-fire, more than 30,000 NVA [North Vietnamese Army] personnel were infiltrated into Vietnam via Laos and Cambodia. By the late fall of 1973, according to American intelligence reports, about 70,000 NVA troops had illegally entered the South; by early 1975, the figure had reached 170,000 ... Between January 28 and mid-April 1973 alone, over 7,000 illegal NVA military truck crossings occurred between the DMZ [demilitarized zone] and South Vietnam. During 1973, the North constructed 12 airfields in the South, installed SAM-2 missiles in Khe Sanh ...
By the time the Paris Agreement was signed, the NVA had about 145,000 troops in South Vietnam. In January 1975 it launched an offensive to take over Phuoc Long, a town located near the Cambodia-Vietnam border, 80 km north of Saigon. In March North Vietnamese troops, increased to over 200,000 regulars, launched a general offensive to conquer South Vietnam. They concentrated five infantry divisions, seven independent regiments (including one artillery, one armored, one antiaircraft, and one sapper), and three regional regiments on the South Vietnamese highlands in order to take over Banmethuot, a town situated near the Cambodian border. The town fell on March 10. The communist forces then moved on Saigon via Tuy Hoa, Nha Trang, and Phan Thiet. By April 30 their victory was complete.
What Was the National Liberation Front?
The Geneva Agreement, concluded in July 1954, prescribed that all nationalist Vietnamese and French forces should move to the South and all the communist Vietnamese forces to the North. The people in each zone had a right to freely move to the other zone. The movement was made within 300 days. The Seventeenth Parallel was a temporary boundary to divide the two zones until the country should be reunified by a general election to be held in 1956.
"Staying Behind Is Glory"
The French and nationalist forces completed the movement to the South in mid-1955. Some 800,000 ordinary northern citizens fled the communist regime and went south. In South Vietnam, the communist forces that had been regrouped in designated areas were sent to the North. Not one ordinary citizen left for the North.
In order to win the general election, the communist party had a scheme to plant its agents as underground workers in South Vietnam. In 1962 the author interviewed defectors from the party who stated that when the Geneva Agreement was signed, South Vietnamese party cadres received orders from the party's higher echelons to pack up and report to centers of regroupment from which they could be transported to North Vietnam. The cadres were so excited that they showed up in public places, boasting of the revolution's accomplishments. In early 1955, however, many of them received contradictory orders requiring them to stay back in the South to work as underground agents. Many of them felt very angry about these orders because their identities had now been revealed to the public; now, if they stayed behind as underground agents, their lives would be endangered. The defectors said that the party Central Committee had to convene a meeting to look for a solution to the problem. As a result, a study program was carried out to motivate those cadres on the basis of the principle "Departing is victory; staying behind, however, is glory."
The number of communist cadres planted in South Vietnam at this time is not known. In 1963, a defector who had been a Viet Cong deputy chief of a district security division told the author in Saigon that in his native village of Thuan Hung, An Xuyen Province, which had a population of over ten thousand people, the Communists left behind numbered over one hundred party members grouped into 30 separate cells. In age the members ranged from youth to over 50 or 60. About one in five was a woman. Such communist "sleepers," the nucleus of what later became known as the Viet Cong, were able from 1956 onward to start and lead political movements, including several that demanded peace for the South Vietnamese people.
Until 1958 these underground agents were able to combine the military struggle with the political one (the political struggle consisted of demands for welfare and democracy by communist-led groups). In that year, however, the agents began large-scale guerrilla warfare, using weapons that had been buried during the 1954-55 period before communist troops were regrouped to the North. Remote villages in Kien Hoa and Kien Phong provinces were actually controlled by the Communists. Over the next few years, communist guerrillas were able to create unstable situations in rural areas. They were a particular threat to the security of communications lines between towns. Early in 1960, during the Vietnamese New Year festival, communist military forces successfully attacked the head quarters of a South Vietnamese division in Tay Ninh, seized trucks, weapons, and ammunition, then withdrew into the jungle. With the development of the military forces, communist political units also grew in size and number.
The Concerted Uprising Campaign
The communist expansion in South Vietnam was merely a scheme of the Vietnamese communist party (then officially named the Vietnam Workers Party, or VWP) to conquer South Vietnam by force. This strategy was reflected in Ho Chi Minh's appeal in May 1959 "to unify the country by appropriate means." He also called openly for the "liberation" of South Vietnam. During this period the party staged a new major effort, the Chien Dich Dong Khoi (Concerted Uprising Campaign), which began in July 1959 and ended in June 1960. Its purpose was to expand the amount of territory under direct communist control. The tactics, which the party called "breaking up the machinery of oppression," were, on the one hand, to disrupt the strategic hamlets set up by the Ngo Dinh Diem government for the purpose of isolating communist underground agents from villagers; and, on the other, to liquidate the South Vietnamese hamlet and village officials on whom real authority rested in the countryside. In other words, the Communists tried to eradicate the South Vietnamese administrative machinery from the villages and hamlets, then place them under their direct control. They planned to continue enlarging the communist-controlled areas in this way until they could seize enough of the countryside from which to besiege the cities and launch a general offensive. The communist apparatus and military forces were greatly enlarged by this campaign. During the 1959-60 period, it was the author's estimate that some 100,000 hamlet and village officials of South Vietnam were eliminated either by assassination or by some form of neutralization.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Vietnam Under Communism, 1975–1982"
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Table of Contents
Foreword,
Acknowledgments,
Photographs,
1 From the Tet Offensive to the Communist Takeover,
2 Communism and the Vietnamese Economy,
3 The New Leaders,
4 Conflict, Change, and Ideology,
5 The Party and the People,
6 Repression — and Resistance,
7 Culture with a Socialist Content,
8 Measures Against Religion,
9 Vietnam's "Bamboo Gulag",
10 Re-education or Revenge?,
11 Hanoi's Foreign Policy: I. Expansion and Isolation,
12 Hanoi's Foreign Policy: II. Relations with Noncommunist Neighbors,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Glossary,
Bibliography,