When the Central Committee met in early spring, it concerned itself mainly with assessing the progress of the five-year plan.26 Reports were positive. In 1958, for example, only 4.74 percent of rural households belonged to a collective; by 1963, the figure was 87.7 percent. However, long-standing problems persisted: food shortages in the countryside, lack of support for government programs among ethnic minorities in highland regions, unsatisfactory industrial output, lack of advanced tools and technologies, and poor management of programs.27 Agricultural production had failed to keep pace with the growing population, retarding development generally. Until these problems were remedied, the Politburo would not amend the party’s strategy in the South.
Moscow’s continued objection to a military solution in the South reinforced those convictions. The outcome of the Cuban missile crisis had scarred Khrushchev personally and his Politburo generally by demonstrating the pitfalls of brinksmanship. On thin ice politically because of that outcome, the Soviet leadership was in no mood to take a similar risk in Indochina.28 As historian Ilya Gaiduk has noted, after the Cuban debacle Khrushchev was “much more reluctant to plunge into adventures that promised dubious dividends in the Cold War confrontation.”29 During a visit to Hanoi in January, Yuri Andropov, the head of the CPSU’s Department for Liaison with Communist and Workers’ Parties in Socialist Countries, privately pressed upon his hosts the imperative to act carefully and give the Americans no pretext for involving their own forces in the South.30 “The road to socialism is the road of peace,” Andropov told them. “The crisis in the Caribbean Sea region”—that is, the Cuban missile crisis—“was resolved by peaceful means.” Hanoi had therefore to settle its differences with Saigon and the Americans in the same way, he insisted.31
Prime minister Pham Van Dong summarized the views that governed party and state policy at the time in a report to the National Assembly in April.32 In doing so, he genuflected before the importance of assistance from socialist countries to the future of the Vietnamese revolution, but stressed the limited results of efforts so far to build socialism in the North and repeated the statistical analysis of those limitations. Concerning the situation in the South, Dong reiterated the usual list of ills resulting from American interference there, then made a surprisingly strong appeal for a diplomatic solution. Affirming Hanoi’s commitment to peace and the 1954 Geneva accords, he suggested that a negotiated settlement was still possible, provided certain minimum conditions were met. “Reunification through a peaceful solution,” Dong said, “means [it] must not [take place] by war, by violence, but by negotiations, an agreement, [and] mutual concessions without one side coercing or dominating the other.” To achieve this, as soon as possible officials from the two regions should meet to discuss national reunification. “Our country is part of the world,” Dong said in a reiteration of Hanoi’s internationalist concerns. “The revolutionary cause of our people is closely linked to the revolutionary cause of the world’s people. The process of the revolutionary struggle of our people is a microcosm of the process of revolution for the people of the world.”
Dong’s call for talks may have been sincere, but it was unlikely to deliver peace in the South. A month before he presented his report to the National Assembly, Dong had told the Polish commissioner on the ICSC that Hanoi remained open to a negotiated settlement provided certain conditions were met. But those conditions were prohibitive from Washington and Saigon’s perspective, including as they did strict observance of the 1954 Geneva accords, which banned foreign troops and bases in Vietnam as well as military alliances with parties outside Vietnam. “Nothing is possible as long as the Americans have not disengaged from Vietnam,” Dong bluntly told a French diplomat during a discussion in May on the likelihood of a negotiated solution for South Vietnam.33 Dong’s conditions included other terms that Washington and Saigon were likely to reject out of hand despite the reasonableness of the language in which he proposed them: formation of a “liberal and democratic régime” in Saigon and convening of an international conference of major powers who pledged to honor and enforce an agreement that enshrined these conditions.34
So the old party strategy endured. As it habitually did when facing an impasse in the South or pressure from militants to escalate armed struggle there, Hanoi intensified the diplomatic struggle. This time, it instructed DRVN and NLF representatives abroad to redouble their efforts to describe the agony of the southern people by generating and disseminating information to that effect.35 According to a Hungarian diplomat, the “main activity” of the DRVN Embassy staff in Budapest became propaganda work, including “giving lectures” about war against imperialism while trying to “obtain as much economic aid as possible” for their country.36 “The primary diplomatic strategy of our government,” Ho noted in May, was to “acquire new friends every day.”37 “All their efforts, diplomatic and propaganda,” were “directed towards getting the Americans out of South Vietnam” by mobilizing world opinion against them, a western diplomat said of Hanoi’s diplomacy.38 DRVN and NLF representatives overseas also emphasized increased American interference in southern affairs, involvement of U.S. personnel in military operations against the NLF, expansion of the strategic hamlet program, and use of toxic chemicals in rural areas. Hanoi—Ho, Giap, and their followers, to be precise—refused to give up hope that rallying world opinion against Washington might bring about national reunification without a major war.
THE RADICALIZATION OF MILITANTS
By spring 1963, militants were increasingly insistent that the party and the government more directly and aggressively support the southern insurgency by providing sophisticated weaponry to the PLAF, sanctioning all-out war, and deploying PAVN main-line forces to the South. Such insistence was beginning to have substantial results. In March the French Delegation noted of the DRVN that its “military involvement in the South is taking on such proportions that we can no longer consider it a ‘technical assistance.’”39 Hanoi had to “struggle protractedly and fiercely for national unification,” militants were claiming, and to “trust the correct fighting methods adopted by the southern people,” that is, armed struggle.40 A Nhan dan editorial boldly noted in March that Chinese revolutionary theses “constitute a creative application of Marxism-Leninism,” suggesting that Moscow was wrong to condemn them.41 It was the shared sentiment of party militants that Hanoi, in the words of historian Jean Lacouture, was being “overcautious and far too slow in intervening” to protect the revolutionary movement below the seventeenth parallel.42 The situation was now more pressing than ever because the pool of southern regroupees fit for deployment to the South to help the insurgency was nearly exhausted, and conditions were not improving sufficiently.43
Circumstances inside and outside Vietnam contributed to the radicalization of militants and the growing popularity of their views within the party during the first half of 1963.44 The most specific of these circumstances was the outcome of a firefight at Ap Bac in January. During a one-day encounter between a small force of PLAF guerrillas and a much larger force of ARVN regulars with American advisers, the well-entrenched guerrillas held their ground and inflicted heavy casualties on ARVN forces, forcing their retreat.45 For supporters of military struggle as the key to southern liberation, that episode was a watershed. “This victory put in evidence the fighting spirit and the extraordinary courage of the patriotic forces as well as their capacity [for military victory in] the American ‘special war,’” a party history noted.46 To militants, the outcome of the battle attested to the vulnerability of Saigon’s armed forces. “This was the first time in the plains region,” an official history of the PAVN relates, “that our liberation and guerrilla armed forces achieved victory in a large-scale, battalion-size battle with enemy forces nearly 10 times more numerous [and possessing] vastly superior equipment, weapons, [and] firepower.” The engagement thus “proved” the ability of communist-led forces to “defeat” the Americans and their “puppets” in a major combat operation.47 Specifical
ly, Ap Bac demonstrated that “our full-time troops” could wage war successfully in the South “with appropriate force levels and adequately organized and equipped, with tactical and technical training, relying on a firm People’s War battlefield posture and with the support of the political struggle forces of the masses.”48
The results at Ap Bac, a party historian has concluded, were a turning point in the revolution because they “supplied evidence that the popular forces had found the way of coping with the most modern weapons and tactics” of the enemy.49 By taking advantage of the élan created by the victory and the resulting disarray in the South Vietnamese army in the area of the engagement, militants reasoned, revolutionary forces could win a decisive military victory in the South before the United States had time to enlarge its military commitment to Saigon, provided of course that Hanoi offered its full support. Le Duan became convinced that the Americans had suffered a loss of confidence so great that they realized “they could not defeat us” under current conditions.50 So inspiring was this single episode at Ap Bac that COSVN launched a mobilization campaign called “Emulate Ap Bac, Kill Pirates, Attack.”51 Interestingly, shortly thereafter revolutionary forces demonstrated an increasing ability to destroy strategic hamlets or entice peasants to abandon them.52 These events plus unrest among the South’s Buddhists prompted Saigon to proclaim a “national state of siege,” which militants hoped Hanoi would capitalize upon.53
The radicalization of Chinese domestic and foreign policy that resumed after mid-1962 was a second factor behind the stiffening resolve of VWP militants.54 According to historian Xiaoming Zhang, the creation in February 1962 of MACV had caused “deep concern” in Beijing, presaging as it might an extension to Vietnam of the conflict China had recently had with the United States in Korea and might soon have again over Taiwan.55 By summer of that year, historian Lorenz Lüthi has noted, “the ideological radicalization of domestic politics had started” in China.56 More importantly, PRC leaders now finally supported the liberation of southern Vietnam by military struggle, and even proclaimed it their “duty” to support the Vietnamese politically and materially “in order to promote an Asia-wide or even world-wide revolution.”57 This was music to the ears of Vietnamese militants and may well have convinced more fence-sitters and even some moderates of the appropriateness of war in the South. Consistent with its new position, the PRC significantly increased military aid to Vietnam starting that year.58 Beijing’s decision to finally unreservedly support violent struggle in Vietnam and its simultaneous renewed denunciations of peaceful coexistence intensified the revolutionary passion of Vietnamese militants and steeled their thinking on the direction liberation of the South should take and the central role the DRVN should play in it.59 “Mao’s aggressiveness, optimism, and commitment to Vietnam,” one scholar has written of these developments, promised “a continuation of a familiar relationship.” Here was, in effect, “the most prominent international instance of [Beijing’s] newly radicalized commitment to continuing revolution.”60
A visit to Hanoi by Chinese president Liu Shaoqi in May 1963 reinforced the perception among militants and possibly others that confrontationalism rather than caution was the better option for revolutionary success in Vietnam.61 Tellingly, just days before Liu’s visit, foreign minister Ung Van Khiem, a leading moderate and critic of Beijing, was replaced by Xuan Thuy, a friend of China and implacable enemy of the West in everything having to do with the Cold War.62 Rejecting the possibility of a negotiated solution to the conflict below the seventeenth parallel, Liu told his hosts that “the Vietnamese people cannot sleep and eat at ease for a single day so long as the Southern part is not liberated from the cruel rule of the U.S.-Diem clique.” Under NLF leadership and “with the support of their countrymen in the North,” Liu continued, the people of the South “will finally succeed in driving out the U.S. aggressors and accomplish the sacred task of Vietnam’s reunification after a protracted and arduous struggle.” “In the matter of such an important battle of principles” as the conflict between socialism and capitalism, “we cannot be spectators or follow a half-way line,” as Moscow was doing. Now was the time to struggle more fiercely, Liu claimed. The imperialist camp was rapidly disintegrating owing to “inherent contradictions,” while socialism and “the national revolutionary movement” were “rising like the sun in the East.”
Diplomacy or the desire for peace without victory, Liu continued in obvious criticism of Moscow, “must not be used to abolish the socialist countries’ duty to support the revolutionary struggles of the oppressed nations and peoples” or “to supersede the revolutionary line of the proletariat of various countries and their parties.” “In order to carry out peaceful coexistence,” Liu added, “what is required is, first of all, to carry out resolute struggle against the imperialist policies of aggression and war and not to liquidate this struggle, and it is even more impermissible to liquidate the struggles of the oppressed nations and people.” Even while building socialism at home, socialist countries “must resolutely support the revolutionary struggles of all oppressed nations and peoples.” That was, Liu asserted, “their compelling international duty.” Wherever there existed oppression by imperialism and its reactionary allies, including in southern Vietnam, the people must “rise up in revolution.”63
According to one account, during one semipublic meeting Liu praised Stalin, an affront to Khrushchev so potentially serious that the Vietnamese press decided not to report it.64 To be sure, the vehemence of Liu’s rhetoric surprised his Vietnamese hosts, but his tone as well as the substance of what he said validated the views of many of them. During Liu’s stay, the British consul complained, references to the relations between China and the DRVN as being as close as “lips and teeth” were repeated “ad nauseam.” “Although in her official attitudes the D.R.V. continues to keep the balance between the Russian and Chinese wings of the Communist movement,” the consul continued, there was “little doubt” after Liu’s visit that many in the upper echelon of the party had “much in common with the Chinese.”65 One study suggests that Liu’s visit “marked the ascendency of the pro-Chinese cause in North Vietnam.”66 Another study notes that the diminished levels of Soviet assistance in its aftermath, as Chinese aid increased, encouraged many in the VWP to rank Moscow’s commitment to world revolution “in the rear area of the conflict rather than at its center.”67 To French diplomats on site, the mere presence of Liu in Hanoi at that juncture “marked a worrisome turn in the foreign policy of North Vietnam,” pushing as it did, according to the Canadians, “the DRVN towards the Peking position” on conflict with the West.68
To offset the visit’s potentially harmful effects on Soviet-Vietnamese relations, Ho Chi Minh allegedly insisted on the inclusion in Vietnamese speeches of references to the need for unity in the communist camp as well as to Hanoi’s “deep concern at the differences now existing in the international communist movement and the socialist camp.”69 At the ceremonies concluding Liu’s visit, Ho repeated his litany that the CPSU and the CCP “are the two biggest parties and bear the greatest responsibility in the international communist movement,” and that the unity of those parties “is the pillar of the unity of the socialist camp and the international communist movement.”70
Contemporaneous international developments also encouraged the hardening of views in the VWP. To a man, militants considered the outcome of the Cuban missile crisis a demonstration of Khrushchev’s cowardice and the bankruptcy of peaceful coexistence, though it was also a major setback for the capitalist camp, which had to accept the continued existence of the Castro regime. In addition, they saw the result of the Algerian war of independence as a stunning victory over imperialism. Historian Odd Arne Westad has suggested that the result of the Algerian conflict was a “key reason” for the radicalization of militants in Vietnam and for the growing importance of their views among DRVN leaders.71 In conjunction with continuing decolonization in Asia and Africa and the emergence of new Marxist insurg
ent movements in Latin America, these developments convinced militants and others of the inherent weakness of imperialism and the growing strength of world revolutionary forces. In the wake of so many “progressive” developments, it was easy to read them collectively as portending the eventual demise of capitalism and the triumph of proletarian internationalism. The age of “transition from capitalism to socialism as the dominant system in the world” had begun; a new revolutionary tide was swelling across the globe, and Vietnamese communists had to help it along.72
The political situation in Laos further emboldened militants. The emergence there of increasingly powerful pro-American factions indicated that Washington was continuing its clandestine operations in flagrant violation of the previous year’s accords (which Hanoi itself continued to violate, notably by reintroducing main-line troops plus assorted political and military specialists).73 The neutralist government of Prince Souvanna Phouma teetered on the brink of collapse because of those violations, and “counterrevolutionary” elements seemed poised to seize the reins of power once it fell. “The situation in Laos has become very serious,” Pham Van Dong had told the National Assembly earlier in 1963. The Americans had “strengthened their occupation forces in Thailand” in preparation for “increased intervention in Laos.” They had also illegally repositioned reactionary forces in Laos “to create a chaotic situation.” Washington hoped by these actions to “demonstrate that the policies of peaceful neutrality and rule” by a rickety coalition of three disparate factions “could not be maintained,” and that the recent Geneva agreement on Laos “in the end had produced no results.” It would then use those conclusions to “carry out its wicked designs.”74 In light of circumstances in Laos and elsewhere, militants surmised, the VWP had no choice but to revise its revolutionary strategy and escalate armed struggle in the South.
Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 Page 25
