A Sense of the Enemy

by Shore, Zachary

  Crippling ARVN forces was one thing; attacking Americans at so sensitive a time was quite another. If the standard interpretation for Pleiku and related attacks were correct—that the communists miscalculated—it would mean that Hanoi’s strategic empathy for America (specifically for President Johnson and his top advisors) proved inadequate at one of the war’s most critical turning points. This explanation, which we could call the “failed deterrence hypothesis,” would mean that Le Duan, and presumably other Party leaders, believed that attacks on Americans after Tonkin would not be used by President Johnson as justification for escalation. It would mean that Hanoi believed that the relatively minor gains it could win by attacking American bases would not be offset by the tremendous costs of a large-scale U.S. military invasion. In other words, Hanoi badly misread its enemy’s drivers.

  This explanation assumes that Hanoi, and/or the southern communists, made a rational cost–benefit analysis of attacking Americans after Tonkin and calculated that Washington would back down. The political scientist James Fearon has argued that rationalist explanations for war must not only show how war could appear attractive to rational leaders; they must also show why states cannot find an alternative to the costly act of war.21 On the eve of the Second Indochina War, Hanoi appears to have held what Fearon would call “private information” but that is in this case more precisely stated as a Marxist ideological conviction: that its victory was historically inevitable. Yet even this powerful belief did not go unquestioned. Le Duan himself had pointed to the Americans’ success against revolutionary movements in Greece and the Philippines. The notion of ultimate victory, therefore, may have been a deep aspiration, an expectation, and a hope, but Party leaders understood that its realization depended on their ability to bring it to fruition.

  The real problem with a rationalist interpretation is that the Politburo directive of August 7, 1964, shows that Le Duan expected America to intensify its commitment to the South—the opposite of backing down. It seems unlikely that the Party chief believed that America could be deterred by some relatively modest strikes. It is therefore worth considering some other possible explanations for the post-Tonkin attacks.

  The second alternative is that the attacks on Americans from Tonkin through to Pleiku were simply ill-conceived, undirected, and divorced from any larger strategy. Poor communication between Hanoi and COSVN could have been at play. Hanoi might have been unable to restrain the southern attacks and subsequently felt it had to commend COSVN units on their heroic actions. But, as we have seen, in 1962 Le Duan was working to restrain COSVN by advocating caution. Since Le Duan had appointed his own man, General Nguyen Chi Thanh, to oversee COSVN, Le Duan should have had even greater influence over military actions in the South. To accept what we could call the “poor planning hypothesis,” one must believe that on a subject of tremendous importance to Hanoi—the introduction of U.S. ground troops—Hanoi’s oversight of COSVN actions was lacking.

  There is another explanation for the attacks on Americans at this time, which we could call the “inevitable benefits hypothesis.” There can be little doubt that most of Hanoi’s leaders did not desire the massive deployment of American ground troops to South Vietnam. This was surely true of the Viet Cong fighters as well. One prominent Viet Cong leader recounted in his postwar memoir that he and his comrades viewed an American escalation as a “living nightmare,” one that filled them with “sick anticipation of a prolonged and vastly more brutal war.”22 Yet if Le Duan had already concluded that the Americans intended to escalate, then there was little that Hanoi could do to prevent it. In that case, there would be certain benefits from attacking American bases. If successful, they could provide a substantial boost to morale and the southern communists’ fighting spirit. Since the war to come was likely to be protracted, the southern communists would need to know that they had the ability to inflict real damage on the Americans, even against the invaders’ own military bases.

  One way of thinking about this preescalation period is as a time of undeclared war. Many overt wars are often preceded by a period of undeclared war. This was true of the United States and Germany prior to Hitler’s declaration of war against America. Hitler’s declaration merely acknowledged the reality that had existed between the two powers, as the United States had been providing financial support to the British, French, Soviets, and other allies via the Lend-Lease program. Even though no formal state of war existed between the two nations, German U-boats fired on American vessels in the Atlantic in an effort to disrupt the transfer of supplies. Similarly, the United States and Japan were in a state of undeclared war prior to Pearl Harbor, as the United States cut off oil supplies to Japan under President Roosevelt’s quarantine policy.23 During such times of undeclared war, there is often an incentive for each side to make the other launch the first strike. This enables the side being attacked to rally its people around the government as it portrays itself as the nation’s defenders. This was true even of Hitler, who went to the trouble of casting Germany as a victim of Polish aggression on the eve of World War II. In the Gleiwitz incident, Hitler fabricated an attack on a German radio station by dressing up German soldiers in Polish uniforms. That drama enabled him to justify an invasion of Poland in September of 1939.

  Given Hanoi’s frequent wish to present itself as the victim of American aggression, and given that it expected an imminent American escalation, could Le Duan have encouraged the attacks on Americans (or at least failed to restrain them) in order to boost morale? Could he and others in Hanoi have reasoned that the time of undeclared war would soon be over and the time of a large-scale American invasion had come? This would not mean that Le Duan desired an invasion. It would instead mean that despite what he wrote to COSVN, he actually believed that deterrence had already failed, American escalation was inevitable, and it was best to strike the Americans hard in order to frame the Party as Vietnam’s defenders. Viewed in this light, his written assurance to COSVN in February 1965 that they could still prevent an American escalation likely stemmed from a desire to embolden their forces. If instead he had informed them that the strongest, most technologically advanced military in the world was about to commit hundreds of thousands of combat forces to attack a relatively small South Vietnamese revolutionary army, the effect could have been highly dispiriting. Wiser, from Le Duan’s perspective, would have been to urge the National Liberation Front (NLF) onward and persuade them that history was ultimately on their side. In the face of a large-scale war with America, morale would surely be at a premium.

  The southern communist fighters were not all of one mind regarding strategy. Many favored guerilla warfare over Le Duan’s preferred methods of large, conventional attacks.24 Although General Thanh imposed Le Duan’s policies on COSVN soldiers, Le Duan’s letters also show the First Secretary’s keen sense of his position. Unable to inflict the Ministry of Public Security apparatus upon southerners who rejected his plans, and recognizing that General Thanh’s efforts would need help to overcome southern resistance, Le Duan tried to rally COSVN units behind large-scale attacks against ARVN forces. He tried to persuade them that his methods were the best way of defeating the Americans. Furthermore, permitting COSVN units to attack Americans directly, culminating in the brazen Pleiku assault, was a clever move by a leader sensitive to southern needs. These strikes helped to unify a diverse collection of divided forces.

  Beyond the benefits to morale, Le Duan also recognized that escalation provided tangible advantages to the Party. Le Duan and other Party leaders expected a general uprising to occur in the South, which would overthrow the puppet government and pave the way for a socialist revolution. This uprising had been long awaited though thus far unrealized. An American escalation, invasion, and bombing of the North could prove fortuitous. It enabled the Vietnamese Workers’ Party to frame itself even more clearly as the Vietnamese peoples’ savior, heroically fighting against outside invaders. It furthered the conditions for attracting average Vietnamese, from
the North and South, to the Party’s cause. Le Duan bluntly articulated this rather cold-hearted line of reasoning in December 1965:

  In fact, the more troops the Americans send into our country, the more bases they build in our country, and the more they employ the most vicious and barbaric methods to bomb, shoot, and kill our people, the most intense the contradictions between them and all classes of the population will become; the deeper the contradictions between them and the leaders of the puppet army and the puppet government will become; the more powerful will be the awakening of the spirit of nationalism among the majority of puppet army soldiers and puppet government officials will become; and the more difficult the lives of the residents of the cities and the areas under enemy control will become. This situation creates possibilities for us to further expand our political struggle movement and attract new forces to join the front. For that reason, our policy must be to strive to assemble a broad-based mass force from every class of the population and persuade members of the puppet army and the puppet government to join a truly broad-based resistance front to fight the Americans and save our nation.25

  As Le Duan saw it, the American escalation offered two useful benefits to Hanoi’s cause. First, as described above, it allowed the Party to frame itself as the nation’s true defender against outside invaders—foreign forces who could be portrayed as cruel. This would attract more Vietnamese (from both North and South) to join the Party and support its aims. The propagandistic term “the resistance struggle against the Americans to save the nation” underscored this aim. The second benefit from escalation was that it provided greater opportunity to inflict casualties. The body count was seen as an essential component to Hanoi’s overall strategy of protracted war. The higher the casualties, Le Duan reasoned, the more soldiers the United States would be forced to deploy, the more overstretched it would become, and American domestic support for the war would sink even lower.

  In November 1965, with the American escalation well underway, Le Duan again wrote to the southern communists regarding the latest Party resolution. Following the massive influx of U.S. ground troops and Hanoi’s failure to prevent the Americans from expanding the war, the Party Secretary needed to reiterate the North’s commitment to a protracted war strategy. He maintained that, despite America’s escalation, the enemy’s objectives remained consistent. He cited Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s own words to a Congressional Armed Services Committee: “Even though our tactics have changed, our goals remain the same.” Though he did not admit directly that the efforts to prevent escalation had failed, he did offer a new objective for Hanoi: to prevent the Americans from expanding the war to the North.

  Hanoi had determined that in contrast to the preescalation phase, when ARVN forces constituted the primary targets, the postescalation phase meant that American soldiers as well as ARVN forces comprised the prime targets. “The dialectical relationship in this matter is that we attack U.S. troops in order to create conditions that will enable us to annihilate puppet troops, and, conversely, we annihilate puppet troops in order to create conditions that will enable us to attack and annihilate American troops.”26 Le Duan cautioned the southern communists to continue to avoid attacking the Americans where they were strong and to focus on attacking their weaknesses, but he added a new caveat: This instruction was not absolute; it was not cast in stone. The calculus had changed. Even striking Americans where they were strong could now be permitted.

  Le Duan recognized that inflicting the greatest number of American casualties represented a crucial lynchpin in the protracted war strategy. Although the escalation posed new challenges and augured more exacting costs on Hanoi, it also provided more targets for communist forces. The Secretary envisioned a clear causal chain of events that would flow from killing Americans:

  . . . the more American troops that come to Vietnam, the more of them we will be able to kill. If large numbers of American troops are killed, the puppet army will disintegrate even faster, the U.S.’s hope of securing a victory through military means will collapse, and the American people’s movement opposed to the U.S.’s dirty war in Vietnam will grow.

  Later in that same missive, Le Duan set a specific kill quota. He advised the southern communists to kill at least 10,000 Americans in the coming spring–summer campaign. Within the next few years he suggested that they aim to kill between 40,000 and 50,000 American soldiers.27 The bulk of this letter outlined the tactics that the southern communists should employ to accomplish their mission. One small part included training all classes of the population to profoundly hate the enemy.28 In his 2013 study of American atrocities in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves, Nick Turse observed that U.S. military policy centered on maximizing the body count of enemy combatants.29 It is striking that Le Duan adopted the same tactic toward the Americans.

  The Party leader had read his own people well. By the spring of 1965, as American attacks against the North increased, the People’s Army doubled its ranks.30 For the time being, at least, Le Duan, the strategic empath, had bolstered support for his policies among northern and southern communists alike. Now the task ahead required even finer appreciation of America’s constraints.

  The Escalation Paradox

  Le Duan argued repeatedly that America faced a dilemma. The more troops it deployed, the weaker it became. He articulated this and other assessments of American constraints at the close of 1965, as the escalation was fully underway. In December 1965, when Le Duan addressed the Twelfth Plenum of the Party’s Central Committee, he explained more fully the policy of protracted war. His address began by observing that the war had developed precisely along the lines that the Party had laid out in the Ninth and Eleventh Plenums. (Those comments, however, were highly hedged, offering possibilities, not definitive futures.) He then noted that the situation had developed more rapidly than expected. In mid-1965, he alleged that the puppet army of the South had been on the verge of disintegration but that the Party did not have the necessary means at that time to force its collapse. Had the DRV been able to push the ARVN to the breaking point, he maintained, then the Americans might not have deployed massive ground troops. The lessons from this episode, he said, bore directly on the policy of protracted war.

  The policy of protracted war, Le Duan explained, was to use weakness against strength. Even if the enemy deployed 400,000 troops to Vietnam (the United States ultimately sent more than a half million), the Vietnamese would defeat them by bogging them down in a stalemate. That policy, however, did not entail an orderly, step-by-step advance. Instead, it required massing forces against the enemy under specific conditions. The Americans are warmongers by their nature, Le Duan frequently declared. That was why they continued to escalate and expand the war. These appear to be Le Duan’s true beliefs: that the Americans would continue to expand the war if the resistance was insufficient to deter them: and a protracted war would grind them down because it would increase American casualties, which in turn would bolster opposition to the war both within the United States and abroad.

  The Politburo was not in complete agreement on these matters. In a rare admission of internal Party disagreement, Le Duan commented that differences of opinion on these matters still remained despite their lengthy, ongoing discussion. The First Secretary stressed that the Politburo was unanimous in its view that no matter how many troops the United States should send, the Vietnamese would defeat them. Further, they all agreed that the Politburo “must firmly maintain and study and digest even further our formula of fighting the enemy using both military and political means.”31 Le Duan insisted that unanimous agreement was essential, crucial to the success of the movement. And then the hint of dissent emerged:

  However, in a limited period of time we have not been able to carefully and thoroughly discuss every aspect of each individual issue, and therefore we may have some slight difference on one aspect or another, such as on our assessment of the American imperialists, on the nature and the form of the war, on the formula of
a protracted war and striving to defeat the enemy within a relatively short period of time, about the effort to win the sympathy and help of our camp and of the international community, etc.32

  Though couched in understated tones, the “slight disagreements” he described involved rather major issues. We can surmise that at this critical juncture in the war, the Politburo did not share a consensus view on either America’s position or Hanoi’s strategy. Le Duan, however, seems to have had strong opinions of his own, and he sought to push them through the Party bureaucracy to translate them into policy.

  Following his admission of internal disputes, Le Duan launched into a new section titled, “Assessment of the American Imperialists.” He asserted that, in devising Hanoi’s war strategies, the most important question was to determine the balance of forces between the United States and Vietnam. It was a question, he stated, “of knowing the enemy and knowing ourselves.” The lessons of Sun Tzu would not be lost on Le Duan.

  A customary segment of many Party speeches included a historical analysis, which, heavily shaped by Marxism-Leninism, invariably illustrated both the enemy’s waning fortunes and the Party’s inevitable ascent. Le Duan thus laid out America’s global position at the close of World War II, when its strength was unmatched by any rival. Under these conditions, the Americans, he claimed, “hatched their plot to take over and dominate the world.”33 Since its zenith of global power at the war’s close, he continued, America’s position had steadily eroded. Its loss of a monopoly on nuclear weapons; the recovery of the Soviet Union; China’s rise; America’s defeats in Korea, Cuba, Laos, and beyond; and its declining economy all combined to shift the balance of forces to the revolutionary camps around the world. He then cautioned that the American successes in “snuffing out” revolutionary movements in Greece and the Philippines could not be ignored. After recounting America’s failures, from backing the French and paying 80 percent of their war costs only to be defeated at Dien Bien Phu, to now being bogged down in South Vietnam, Le Duan concluded that the Americans could not escape a crucial strategic contradiction. Although they possessed economic and military resources far greater than the DRV could muster, “the deeper they involve themselves in this war of aggression in the southern half of our country, the deeper they sink into a quagmire.”34 He observed that America’s greatest problem was that it was waging an offensive modern war against guerillas. Using large units to fight guerrillas in South Vietnam, he said, was “just like punching water—when you pull your fist out, the water just flows right back in.”35