These multiple consequences of the Ninth Plenum produced irrevocable changes in the party and the government, as well as in the conduct of the Vietnamese revolution. Le Duan’s rule—his supreme authority over party decision-making—would endure for twenty-three years, well past the period of this study and the triumphant events of 1975. Like Stalin and Mao before him, Le Duan centralized authority in a new executive structure in the party and government.182 He incontestably became “first among equals” in Hanoi. Because he, unlike Ho, kept a low public profile—a calculated move since he had little charisma and projected arrogance, Le Duan acted as “the mastermind behind the scenes.”183 That in turn enabled him to conduct the revolution on his terms, which meant, among other things, total commitment to violent liberation of the South and implacable opposition to the American presence in Vietnam. For all these reasons, it seems incorrect to say, as one scholar has said, that the militant-moderate strategic debate within the VWP came to an end only with the decision to launch the Tet Offensive in 1968.184 That debate ended when the Central Committee adopted Resolution 9 and Le Duan’s command of and influence over the party became essentially absolute.
7
* * *
Waging War, 1964
Nineteen sixty-four was a good year for Beijing. In January it normalized relations with France, elevating the PRC’s stature while sowing discord between Paris and Washington. In October, it detonated an atomic bomb, becoming only the fifth country to do so. With that step, Beijing gained not only international notoriety but also a guarantee against American military action in China. Days later, the Soviet Presidium ousted Mao’s nemesis, Nikita Khrushchev, from power. Khrushchev’s fall seemed to bode well for Sino-Soviet relations. As it turned out, Moscow’s foreign policy remained essentially unchanged thereafter, and Beijing was soon accusing the new Soviet leadership of practicing “Khrushchevism without Khrushchev.”
Despite chronic turmoil in Saigon, the Johnson administration remained committed to the preservation of a noncommunist South Vietnam, and to that end augmented its assistance to the RVN. The number of U.S. advisers below the seventeenth parallel soon reached 23,000. Following an attack on a U.S. airfield outside Saigon that left four American servicemen dead, the National Security Council recommended that the United States begin bombing targets in the DRVN. The Johnson administration drafted plans to that end but did not implement them, choosing instead to exercise prudence and wait on events in the South.
Within weeks after the VWP adopted Resolution 9, PLAF forces fully backed by the North initiated major combat operations with a view to annihilating ARVN forces. Though it had sanction to do so, the Politburo in Hanoi hesitated before committing PAVN units to the fight, hopeful that the PLAF would vanquish Saigon’s armed forces before the United States deployed its own troops to help them, thereby avoiding potentially debilitating complications. In the aftermath of the Tonkin Gulf incident, sensing that time was becoming of the essence, the Politburo fatefully decided to order the first PAVN units to enter the South to expedite the collapse of ARVN forces. By year’s end, Washington still had not committed combat forces to the fight, but the Vietnam War had begun.
SEEKING DECISIVE VICTORY
Adoption of Resolution 9 augured the onset in South Vietnam of a risky strategy of offensive military struggle waged by main-line forces answering to the VWP against vital allies of the greatest military power in the world. In the rhetoric of the Cold War, the southern revolutionary effort would henceforth aim to “roll back,” not just “contain,” reactionary authority and imperialist outreach below the seventeenth parallel. For the first time, Hanoi had a strategy in which liberation of the South measured in terms of cost and commitment was at least as important as socialist transformation of the North. It is certainly no coincidence that this shift occurred as men with strong ties to the South consolidated their hold over party decision-making. It had taken a decade for this to happen, but the militants, who had never reconciled themselves to the moratorium on armed struggle in the South in 1954 and thereafter, finally had what they wanted.
David Elliott has described the evolution of Vietnamese strategy after 1954 as “a gradual process of accretion of new thinking and new strategic precepts, making it difficult to date the point at which a fully formulated version of an ‘anti-American strategy’ was in place.” The pivotal point in that process, he suggests, “roughly coincided with the new Kennedy administration’s more aggressive approach toward Vietnam.”1 That seems to date the change to 1961 or 1962. As it turns out, the formal articulation of the change—of Hanoi’s anti-American strategy, which eventuated in the Vietnam War—was Resolution 9. The resulting grant of authority to the Politburo to wage war in the South, the legendary blank check, was Hanoi’s equivalent of Washington’s Tonkin Gulf Resolution, passed by the American Congress in August 1964 and addressed below. Just as the latter would give the Johnson administration authority to engage U.S. ground forces in Indochina, so Resolution 9 authorized Le Duan’s regime to initiate “massed combat operations” below the seventeenth parallel. The Politburo thus had its sanction to go to war several months before the Johnson administration did.
Consistent with Resolution 9, communist-led forces in the South began “a new period of combat” in January 1964. Specifically, they dramatically increased the scale and frequency of military operations, effectively taking the conflict with Saigon and the Americans to an unprecedented level.2 To the militants who now monopolized decision-making in Hanoi, that represented “the only correct road to liberation.”3 Meanwhile, the VWP Secretariat directed the PAVN General Staff to intensify the training and “readiness activities” of the armed forces in the North so that when the time came “we could send battalions and regiments with their full authorized strength in troops, weapons, and equipment to fight on the battlefields of South Vietnam.”4 Until then, native South Vietnamese in the PLAF, including many who had left in 1954–55 only to return a few years later, would bear the brunt of the fighting.
Within weeks “VC incidents” in the South were up 40 percent and more serious armed attacks up 75 percent. The PLAF initiated most major battles, forcing the ARVN into a defensive posture.5 The strength and effectiveness of revolutionary forces increased progressively that year as Hanoi finally gave “full support” to the NLF and the PLAF.6 American reconnaissance flights over Laos soon detected massive buildups of materiel presumably intended for the PLAF.7 From these increases, Washington concluded that the DRVN was “forcing the military pace” in Laos and South Vietnam with one intention: to bring about “a showdown” below the seventeenth parallel.8
Vietnamese sources leave no doubt that that was indeed the case. In line with Resolution 9, “the most decisive requirement” of the revolution was by now “disintegration” of the ARVN, a revealing Central Committee report noted.9 Military struggle was “the deciding factor” to meet that end and generate a “decisive victory” within “a relatively short period of time.”10 Possibly, that meant two years, the time the party thought it had before Washington would be able to deploy its own combat forces in sufficient numbers and with sufficient equipment to challenge revolutionary forces effectively.11 The conflict in the South was no longer a “just struggle,” the Central Committee surmised; it had become a “just war.”12
Why did Hanoi think the NLF/PLAF could achieve “decisive victory” before Americanization of the war could be accomplished? Why was it so “optimistic” about its chances for promptly winning the military contest below the seventeenth parallel without even deploying PAVN units?13 First and foremost, Hanoi believed that “objective” conditions in the South were conducive to a speedy victory. On 30 January a second coup in Saigon ousted Diem’s assassins. In its aftermath, the situation in the RVN quickly “turned to disarray.”14 According to a SEATO Council report, the military situation became “extremely bad,” and there were no signs of it improving anytime soon.15 Deterioration of the military situation in the South was com
pounded by “the absence of a will to fight” on the part of some ARVN forces and the “tacit complicity with the NLF of a large portion of the rural population.”16 Politically and militarily, Canada’s ICSC delegation agreed, the scene below the seventeenth parallel was “disturbing and unsettled.” Unrest among Buddhists as well as Catholics suggested continuing and perhaps even mounting instability.17 Making matters worse for Saigon and Washington was the fact that southern opinion was becoming increasingly “indifferent to the political games of power” in the RVN because “people are tired of war.”18 An American assessment deplored the resulting “gradual abrading of the popular will to resistance” against communist insurgents.19 Canadian diplomats in the North Vietnamese capital reported that “general impression gathered from observers and foreign reps [in Hanoi] is that DRVN authorities are taking progressively more optimistic view of developments in RVN.” “Opinions offered by local officials are that war is going extremely well and total collapse may be expected after one or two more ‘coups.’”20
A second factor in Hanoi’s miscalculation was suggested in a Hoc tap article in January: the leadership there believed that socialist solidarity and the prospect of Chinese and Soviet involvement in an Americanized war would produce caution, perhaps even indecision, in Washington, certainly for a time and possibly long enough to delay the introduction of U.S. ground forces until the PLAF had had time to crush ARVN forces. “As long as imperialism exists, the imperialists can wage wars of aggression against small and weak countries,” the article stated. However, “the existence of the [big] socialist countries” and the recent momentum of world socialist and anti-imperialist movements confronted the Americans with a situation in which they had to be careful. In the foreseeable future at least, they were unlikely to dare committing their forces to any one of these multiple small wars that threatened to break out against them around the world. Should they do so, socialist and other anti-imperialist forces in Vietnam and elsewhere would surely prevail.21
Finally, as historian Gareth Porter has pointed out, DRVN leaders convinced themselves that in the near future Washington would refrain from committing its combat forces in the South because of “contradictions” at home and abroad. According to this reasoning, the intervention of American combat forces “would be opposed not only by the Vietnamese people, the socialist camp, and the [global] national liberation movement, but also by neutralist states, U.S. allies, and even the American people themselves.” Furthermore, Porter advanced, the leaders may have believed, as the logic in Hoc tap suggested, that Washington “could not afford to concentrate too many of its resources in a single place at the expense of its commitments elsewhere in the world.”22 Imperial overreach, in other words, militated against massive American intervention in Vietnam. An official Vietnamese source validates Porter’s assessment, contending that neither domestic nor international circumstances permitted Washington “immediately and all at once” to “commit the full force of U.S. military might to the Vietnam War.”23 If American policymakers did send U.S. combat forces to Vietnam, Hanoi estimated that intervention would be too limited to be determinative. More correctly, it calculated—albeit on the basis of quintessentially Marxist-Leninist considerations that did not accurately capture the Johnson administration’s actual thinking in the issue—that Washington would not use nuclear weapons in Vietnam, whatever the circumstances, despite Moscow’s fears on this point. “The imperialists wage wars to gain colonies, to turn them into dumping grounds for their goods, to force them to supply raw materials,” to exploit their labor force, Hoc tap reminded readers. Washington would never want to “seize a piece of land which has been contaminated by nuclear fallout,” where “imperialists themselves dare not set foot.”24
THE NEW REGIME ASSERTS ITSELF
The resulting changes in revolutionary strategy paralleled equally dramatic changes in party discourse. “Our southern compatriots can expect nothing from the ‘sincere desire for peace’ of the U.S. aggressors,” Hoc tap told readers in early 1964, “and cannot wait 15 or 20 years—when the socialist camp triumphs over the imperialist camp in the economic competition—to solve the problem of unifying Vietnam.” Instead, “they must rise up” violently, as the Chinese people had risen up under Mao in the 1940s.25 In the words of historian K. C. Chen, Hoc tap here “reaffirm[ed]” the decisions of the Ninth Plenum, rebutting the argument that people in the South should “pin their hope” on a diplomatic solution. It also “denied the thesis that [southerners] should wait for twenty more years for the reunification of Vietnam through peaceful and economic competition.” Instead, it upheld the imperative that Vietnamese revolutionaries should integrate political struggle with a more vigorous armed struggle.26
For the militants now calling the shots in Hanoi, war was “unavoidable” if the VWP was to resolve the contradictions dividing Vietnam from the United States and its allies. The struggle in the South was a zero-sum game; it could end only in “the disappearance of one [side] and the survival of the other.” “As long as imperialism exists, there will be the possibility of war. As long as class and class struggle exist there will be the possibility of revolutionary war in a country. As long as the oppression of a people by another people exists there will be the possibility of a war of national liberation.” It was therefore the “fundamental duty” of the Vietnamese, like other progressive peoples, to “step up revolutions for the liberation of peoples and the [world] socialist revolution.” It was also their duty to prosecute these revolutions by “making them continually successful, driving imperialism back step by step, knocking out imperialism organ by organ, and advancing toward complete destruction of imperialism.”27
Though more bellicose and dogmatic than its predecessor, the new regime was also cautious in its own way and calculating.28 It undertook at once to supply the NLF and PLAF with more advisers and materiel, as just noted, but directed them to work incrementally, to consolidate and safeguard the progress they made. “Attacks in stages” to “secure victory in stages” sloganized the strategy; revolutionary forces would not “win everything immediately.”29 The regime justified this caution in two ways. The PLAF was just now unable to defeat an enemy bloated on increased American aid in a single “general attack.”30 Also, piecemeal progress in the South was less likely to hasten American intervention.31 “We must find every means to limit the enemy to the kind of ‘special war’” now raging, the Politburo advised. “If the U.S. increases its involvement but the puppet armed forces are primary,” then the war in the South would remain “special”; however, “if the U.S. escalates to a point where U.S. forces are primary,” then the war would become “limited.” In the latter case, Washington was certain to introduce combat forces into the South and likely to use those forces to invade the North.32 That could have ruinous consequences; the recent experience of North Korea certainly suggested that. But averting an American invasion was also necessary because Moscow insisted that it would not be drawn into a military confrontation with the United States over Vietnam. Le Duan and other VWP militants may have resented Moscow for its stubborn refusal to condone military struggle in Vietnam, but even they recognized that achieving southern liberation would prove much more difficult if not impossible without Soviet political and, most crucially, material support. An “era of prolonged revolutionary crisis” had begun.33 If all went well, it would result in the destruction of Saigon’s armed forces before Washington understood what was happening and Moscow had a chance to punish Hanoi for its defiance.
The most obvious sign of Hanoi’s continued prudence was the delay in deploying PAVN units to the South.34 Admittedly, committing combat-ready PAVN units would fortify the communist-led military effort, but the liabilities seemed for the time being to exceed the benefits. Dispatching PAVN units to the South would notably increase the possibility of not just direct U.S. involvement in the South but also American invasion of the DRVN. It would surely outrage Moscow, possibly even end Soviet aid. The PAVN, for its part
, was technically ready to fight but could benefit from more training and better supplying. Finally, the international community would likely condemn infiltration of PAVN units into the South at that point as a flagrant violation of the Geneva accords. If the condemnations were sufficiently strong and widespread, they might belie the claim that the conflagration in the South was a southern affair and in so doing validate Washington’s contention that it was in fact spawned and abetted by the North. Should that contention gain credence, it would tarnish the revolutionary effort, undercut the diplomatic struggle, and perhaps even provide a sound pretext for direct American intervention.
Foreign observers thought that another explanation for Hanoi’s continued caution might have to do with the inability of the forces at its disposal to sustain, for the time being at least, a “two-front” war, in the North and the South. Extension of the war to the North, a likely outcome following the deployment of PAVN units to the South, would be especially problematic because local militias were unprepared to fight. “We notice a certain neglect in the training of paramilitary forces by North Vietnamese cadres,” the French Delegation noted. Furthermore, according to this French assessment, the northern population “has a tendency to only concentrate its efforts on economic production,” and thus had no desire or incentive to prepare for its own defense. The consensus among the people was that national defense should be the exclusive responsibility of PAVN forces. “Such an attitude,” the assessment reckoned, “constitutes revisionism” in the language of DRVN authorities and might pose a significant problem in the event of American aggression against the North.35 Even Hoc tap acknowledged northerners’ “fairly widespread lack of interest” in the southern insurgency, as well as their tendency to blame poor conditions in the DRVN on the situation in the South.”36 Le Duan and his comrades thus “moved warily.”37
Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 Page 29
