Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965

by Asselin, Pierre

  MODERATES AND MILITANTS

  Such were the calculations of the Politburo of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP), the main decision-making body in the DRVN. Specifically, they were those of Giap, president Ho Chi Minh, VWP general secretary Truong Chinh, Party Organization Committee chairman and vice minister of the interior Le Van Luong, president of the Federation of Trade Unions Hoang Quoc Viet, and, possibly, prime minister Pham Van Dong, who then doubled as foreign minister. Wary—and weary—of war, these men pinned their hopes on the Geneva accords and political struggle in the South to peacefully bring about national reunification under communist rule. Among the heavyweights, Ho wished to prevent further bloodshed, preempt American intervention, and reconcile with France; Giap wanted to give the forces under his command a chance to rest, reorganize, and modernize; and Truong Chinh, a leading doctrinaire, was eager to complete the party’s ambitious land reform program, launched the previous year, and get on with the North’s economic modernization and socialist transformation.

  The desire of key allies—namely, the Soviet Union and China—to avoid further conflict in Asia with the West reinforced these attitudes. In the aftermath of Stalin’s death, a power struggle had ensued in Moscow that kept Soviet leaders largely focused on domestic issues for nearly two years. Meanwhile, in Beijing, chairman Mao Zedong and the rest of the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were working on a new constitution and envisioning the country’s first five-year plan for socialist industrialization and transformation of agriculture. As they awaited Vietnam’s peaceful reunification, Ho, Giap, Truong Chinh, and their like-minded comrades in the Politburo agreed that rehabilitating and developing the northern economy while upgrading the armed forces could and should take precedence. On account of their strategic priorities, including caution over adventurism in the South, and the elements that informed them, namely, fear of a war with the United States, these men—with the exclusion of Truong Chinh, who would be demoted in 1956 and would thereafter change his views on reunification—formed the core of the risk-averse and temporizing “moderate” wing of the party that steered DRVN decision-making until 1963.

  The other two members of the Politburo, secretary of the Central Office (Directorate) for Southern Vietnam (COSVN) Le Duan and chairman of the General Political Department (GPD) of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) General Nguyen Chi Thanh, dissented. Both had strong ties to the South, having fought there during the Indochina War, and thought that suspending hostilities on current terms wasted communist gains there. Regrouping communist forces to the North was most galling to them. According to historian Stein Tønnesson, Le Duan, who was still in the South when the other members of the Politburo accepted the Geneva accords and ordered the troops to regroup to the North, felt betrayed by the acceptance.15 The only way to achieve the party’s objectives below the seventeenth parallel, he believed, was through military struggle, irrespective of the dangers entailed.16 While Le Duan and Thanh might have reconciled themselves to a strategic pause in the war, they opposed an extended lull and especially the withdrawal of Viet Minh forces from the South. Also, they did not think the party should prioritize economic recovery and development in the North while waiting on events in the South; Paris, Washington, or Saigon, if not all three, would never allow Vietnam to be reunified under VWP authority without putting up a fight.

  On the basis of their convictions, the two men formed the nucleus of the party’s hard-line, risk-taking “militant” wing, a minority faction committed to expeditious violent liberation of the South after July 1954, whose influence over decision-making increased slowly but surely over time. That nucleus eventually expanded to include Le Duc Tho, Le Duan’s deputy during the Indochina War and his closest ideological ally, and Pham Hung, COSVN’s third-in-command. Though unhappy about the strategic line set by the Politburo majority, the militants did their best to conform to it. As every party member knew, once the Politburo reached consensus and ruled on a matter, publicly questioning or opposing its ruling was strictly forbidden. But the militants, and Le Duan in particular, were not about to give up on their ambition to resume military struggle in the South sooner rather than later.

  Though he would play a central role in the coming and waging of the Vietnam War, Le Duan remains an obscure, enigmatic figure.17 He was born Le Van Nhuan on 7 April 1907 in the village of Hau Kien in Quang Tri (now Binh Tri Thien) Province, and as a railway official traveled throughout the country sometime in the 1920s learning what he could about French colonialism and its impact on Vietnam. He joined the radical Revolutionary Youth League in 1928, changed his name to Le Duan, and became a founding member of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP, the precursor to the VWP) in 1930. A year later he joined the ICP’s Bac Ky (Tonkin, the northern third of Vietnam) Committee for Education and Training, which was in charge of ideological indoctrination. He was soon arrested in Haiphong on charges of subversion, for which he was sentenced to twenty years in solitary confinement. His sentence was commuted in late 1936, and shortly thereafter he became secretary of the Trung Ky (Annam, central Vietnam) branch of the ICP. He was arrested again in Saigon in 1940 and sentenced to ten years at the infamous prison on Con Dao (Poulo Condore) Island.

  Le Duan’s years of incarceration were formative, shaping him into a stern, dogmatic, and stoic revolutionary.18 Freed in 1945, he then traveled to Hanoi to join the Party Central Committee in the newly proclaimed DRVN under Ho Chi Minh.19 By the time war with the French broke out in December 1946, Le Duan was back in the South as head of the Nam Bo Executive Committee (Xu uy Nam Bo), tasked with coordinating party and Viet Minh political activities in the southern third of Vietnam, the strategically important area formerly known as Cochinchina. In 1951 he was appointed in absentia to the VWP Politburo, and his Nam Bo Executive Committee was renamed COSVN and granted authority over political as well as military activities.20 After the partition of Vietnam in 1954, while most of his comrades regrouped to the North, Le Duan stayed in the South.21 Variously described as “violent,” “authoritarian,” “tough,” and “ruthless,” he was fully determined to achieve prompt reunification of Vietnam, whatever the cost.22

  THE NEW STRATEGIC LINE

  In September 1954, the Politburo issued an important statement concerning the situation created by the Geneva accords that confirmed and actually formalized the policy line espoused by the party in the days after the signing of the Geneva accords. Entitled “Politburo Resolution: On the New Situation, New Tasks, and New Policy of the Party,” the lengthy document detailed official views and listed pressing tasks and fundamental requirements to sustain peace and achieve reunification.23 According to it, the party and state faced a series of simultaneous transitions in the postwar era: from war to peace, from national unity to political partition, from a rural to an urban base, and from dispersal to centralization. While the North was now “liberated,” the struggle in the South was not yet over and would in fact continue as long as the Vietnamese there remained under the “yoke” of Diem and his foreign allies. However, the Geneva accords and the pressing need for peace dictated that the “mode of struggle” to complete the liberation of Vietnam must change. The party and its cadres and other loyalists in the South had to renounce violence and replace military struggle with political struggle to achieve reunification without risking the resumption of war.24 Henceforth, propaganda would constitute “the main thrust” of communist activities below the seventeenth parallel.25

  Above the seventeenth parallel, the party and the people had entirely different tasks. There, the need was to work together to rebuild an economy ravaged by years of war and foreign occupation, increase agricultural production as land redistribution continued, and develop industry. It was, in short, imperative to improve standards of living and overall quality of life. This stance would not just satisfy popular demands but also enhance the VWP’s and the DRVN’s legitimacy during the campaign for national unification.26 As they sought to rehabilitate the North, DRVN leader
s would collaborate closely with friendly political and military elements in Laos and Cambodia for greater regional security and improvement of conditions in those countries. For those leaders, the fate of Vietnam was inextricably linked to that of the peoples of Laos and Cambodia. They “considered Indochina as one geographical entity and a single battlefield,” a former party official later noted.27 In fact, no sooner had the Geneva accords been signed than the VWP set out to support, politically and materially, the creation of a “puppet” state-within-a-state in the area of Laos amenable to its control.28 Regarding other international matters, the Politburo urged its supporters to work with progressive elements in France and elsewhere to ensure implementation of the accords, and with that the reunification of Vietnam. Mobilizing world opinion on behalf of peaceful unification, the Politburo surmised, was fundamental for its achievement.

  The document just summarized remained the basis for the DRVN’s domestic and international policy, the foundation of its revolutionary strategy, until 1959. It was thus its most consequential policy statement in the immediate aftermath of the Geneva accords concerning matters related to the coming of the Vietnam War. In its tone and substance, the document reflected the moderate tendencies of the Politburo and Central Committee majority, and quickly became an object of scorn among party militants.

  THE WAY FORWARD

  Within the parameters of the policies enunciated in the Politburo document of September, the VWP insisted that Viet Minh military forces below the seventeenth parallel regroup to the North. In violation of the accords, the party instructed some troops, approximately ten thousand of them by one account, to remain in the South. Their assignment, however, was not to fight; it was instead to serve as a “hedge against failure of the unification of Vietnam” and support the work of communist “agents,” that is, cadres and regional party leaders, similarly ordered to stay there.29 The continued presence of political operatives in the South to “look after the population” and implement the Geneva settlement was authorized under the accords. But under no circumstances, the party maintained, could they and the remaining troops engage in activities flagrantly violating the accords, especially fighting.30 French sources suggest that many Viet Minh troops whom the DRVN leadership ordered to regroup to the North actually remained in the South. In late August, for example, DRVN authorities contacted the French navy for assistance in transporting some seventeen thousand troops and their relatives from Xuyen Moc District on the coast just east of Saigon to the North. To the authorities’ evident dismay and embarrassment, less than eleven thousand people showed up for regroupment.31 Possibly these and other southerners refused to regroup because they disapproved of the terms of the Geneva accords or the decision to suspend hostilities, or simply because they could not bring themselves to leave the places they called home.32

  The Canadian delegation to the ICSC estimated that 173,900 troops and 86,000 “additional persons,” consisting of “military families, administrative cadres, and liberated prisoners of war,” regrouped to the North in 1954–55.33 The number of civilians who relocated there voluntarily is difficult to ascertain but appears to have been negligible. Following their regroupment, southern males of age were integrated into the PAVN, the DRVN’s standing army, while their families were granted privileged access to educational, economic, and social services. Many eventually regretted relocating to the North, and some even asked to return to the South.34 In agreeing to regroup, they had severed ties with friends and relatives and in time developed feelings of homesickness, remorse, or alienation as parochialism made it difficult for them to integrate into northern society. Even within the armed forces, some found it difficult to bond with northern comrades. “The Northerners stayed with Northerners, the Southerners with Southerners,” one regroupee later commented; “they didn’t mingle easily.”35 To ensure that southern regroupees remained where the government put them and did not return to the South (in violation of the Geneva accords), one or more of their children were sometimes sent to China or other socialist countries for education.36 Given these constraints, it is remarkable that DRVN authorities succeeded in regrouping as many troops from the South as they did, and in keeping them in the North.

  The voluntary migration of northern civilians to the South, permitted under the terms of the accords, proved a thorny issue for the authorities. To their consternation, significant numbers of people sought to join that exodus, so many in fact that the authorities came to believe that French and SOVN officials and supporters were “enticing” or “pressuring” the northern masses, especially Catholics, to emigrate. Petitions to the ICSC from about one hundred persons from the town of Thanh Hoa in March 1955 indicated that indeed “hooligans are spreading panicky rumours which influenced some of their relatives to move to the other zone.” According to the petitions, priests from a local church had even told people that “if they did not go South atomic bombs will be dropped in North Vietnam and that God will leave for the South.” Other priests allegedly promised people that they would be given land and buffaloes and money for travel if they went south.37 While the imminence of a nuclear attack on the North was a recurrent theme used by DRVN detractors to incite northerners to move South, other themes, according to ICSC investigators, included assertions that “the souls of Catholics will be lost if they stay in North Vietnam”; “famine and flood will be in North Vietnam”; the “Holy Virgin appeared and ordered all the Catholics to go to the other zone”; and the “pope ordered all Catholics to go to the other zone; otherwise they will lose their souls.”38 “Propaganda in regards to atomic bomb [and] Christ moving South,” an ICSC team concluded after visiting Nghe An Province, “appears to be causing an increasing amount of confusion in the population’s minds.”39 In and around Hanoi, which became the capital of the DRVN following the French withdrawal in September and October, more than thirty thousand people had signed up for emigration to the South within days after the Geneva accords became effective.40

  Enticing northerners to the South, DRVN leaders presumed, was part of a strategy devised by their enemies to influence the political situation and gather more votes for the 1956 elections. Thwarting that strategy thus became a “pressing struggle” for the party. To curtail the migration of people to the South, leaders urged cadres to work closely with Catholics and other groups with influence among would-be migrants in the North. The cadres were to publicize party and state policies regarding the protection of religious freedom, particularly among the sizeable Catholic communities of Bui Chu and Phat Diem. Those communities included many loyalists of the old French regime, whom cadres sought to co-opt by rallying sympathetic Catholics to spread among them information favorable to the DRVN. To placate Catholic landowners in areas of high Catholic concentration, the authorities suspended reductions in land rents and land redistribution, central features of the ongoing agrarian reform program. The authorities also allowed the circulation of foreign currencies, including SOVN currency, which was prohibited elsewhere in the DRVN. More significantly, they ordered the return of property earlier seized from Catholic organizations and the release of clergy previously placed under house arrest.41 These efforts suffered a major setback on 11 November 1954, when DRVN security forces opened fire on a group of three hundred Catholics seeking to emigrate, killing four and wounding several more.42 On other occasions Catholics provoked incidents, as in December in Tinh Gia District, where a group of approximately one thousand armed Catholics assaulted security and civilian officials while carrying banners reading “Down with Communism.”43

  In the end, Hanoi’s efforts to keep Catholics and others from abandoning the North failed dismally, despite the use of both carrot and stick tactics.44 A majority of Catholics, including almost the entire communities of Bui Chu and Phat Diem, opted to “follow the Virgin Mary” and go south.45 Historian Seth Jacobs has surmised that the Catholic population in the North declined from 1,133,000 to 457,000 as a result of the migration.46 Overall, some 930,000 northern civilians lef
t for the South in 1954–55.47 That outcome dealt a huge blow to Hanoi. Not only were those who resettled below the seventeenth parallel likely to vote against reunification under DRVN governance in 1956, but they—Catholics in particular—became in time dedicated supporters of the Diem regime who were eager to exact revenge on communists, whom they held responsible for their exile from the North.

  To offset that blow, Hanoi set out to exploit “contradictions” among the French, the Americans, and their allies in the South, as well as between those parties and the perceived needs and interests of the Vietnamese people. DRVN decision-makers correctly estimated that despite their common goal of maintaining a prowestern, noncommunist state below the seventeenth parallel, Paris and Washington disagreed on important matters of governance.48 To illustrate, Paris disapproved of Washington’s decision to support Diem, who despised France and made no secret of it, as SOVN premier.49 Indeed, the French were soon urging Washington to reconsider its decision and replace Diem, to “put together . . . another team” to preside in Saigon.50 Having also learned that the chief of staff of the SOVN army, General Nguyen Van Hinh, a “stooge of the French colonial reactionaries,” disapproved of the elevation of Diem, a “stooge of the Americans,” to the SOVN premiership, Hanoi directed cadres in the South to exploit that enmity and, by extension, the policy differences between the Americans and the French and between Diem and his domestic critics.51 Specifically, it proposed spreading disinformation about the SOVN regime in Saigon and its armed forces while infiltrating both. Cadres were to “closely coordinate legal and illegal political activities, but make the illegal work principal,” and above all to keep everything they did secret.52