On the basis of the Central Committee’s recommendation to escalate hostilities, as well as its own interpretation of recent American undertakings, the Politburo decided, during a meeting on 25–29 September, to “take advantage of this opportune time to try and defeat completely the puppet army before American forces intervened.”167 At this “opportune moment” in the revolution, the Politburo made the fateful choice of ordering PAVN main-line units to the South. If an official history can be believed, most members of the Politburo at this point were confident that PAVN involvement below the seventeenth parallel would expedite the triumph of the revolution there.168 This decision effectively culminated the gradualist approach that had characterized the party’s revolutionary strategy since 1954. Le Duan and other decision-makers thought the NLF and PLAF had done well since the beginning of the year, but not well enough that events could be left to develop at their own pace in light of recent American attacks on the North. The revolution was now in a race against the clock; it had to redouble the effort to annihilate ARVN forces and complete that task before Washington could get its own forces into Vietnam in sufficient numbers to fight effectively.
To those ends, the Politburo directed the Central Military Commission and the PAVN General Staff to prepare a new strategic plan and “supply concrete guidance” to southern guerrilla units for sustaining and expanding “massed combat operations” and expediting the “destruction and disintegration of the bulk of the Saigon puppet army.”169 That is, the commission needed to take into account that PAVN units would soon be joining the fight in the South and adjust military strategy and tactics accordingly. The British Consulate was not incorrect in surmising that “the American show of force” on 5 August, “far from intimidating the North Vietnamese, seemed to have aroused them to still greater efforts” and instilled in them “a mood of confidence, even of arrogance.”170
In September, Hanoi deployed to the South a retinue of ranking party and PAVN officials, including Nguyen Chi Thanh, with orders to increase the military pressure on Saigon. Thanh was a central figure in the ruling elite, as already noted, and a proponent of reunification “at any price.” His deployment attested to Hanoi’s sense of urgency and the totality of its commitment to war in the South. Thanh replaced Nguyen Van Linh as head of COSVN, another symbolic move reflecting the determination of Le Duan’s regime to exercise direct and absolute control over activities there, which were about to involve PAVN units.171 “His command of COSVN,” historian Lien-Hang Nguyen wrote of Thanh, “marked the beginning of the end of southern autonomy in the field of military matters.”172 The ranking cadres accompanying Thanh were experienced in building and deploying main-line units, exercising military leadership, and assuming combat command.173 They set out at once to “strengthen leader cadres for the southern revolution” and reinforce the PLAF, whose numbers needed to grow and whose “scale of organization still had only reached the regimental level.”174
The arrival of high-ranking officials from the DRVN, presaging as it did the infiltration of the first PAVN combat units, marked the onset of a “northernization” of sorts of the ongoing military struggle below the seventeenth parallel. The reasoning was simple: because the NLF/PLAF, abetted by the North since the start of the year, had so far failed to win a decisive victory, northern boys would be entrusted to do what southern boys had not been able to do for themselves, to borrow from Lyndon Johnson’s idiolect.175 By the end of September, specific PAVN units had orders to make final preparations for their journey south.176 The first units—the 18th, 95th, and 101st regiments of the 325th division—began leaving for the South on 20 November, a little more than a hundred days after the Tonkin Gulf incident.177 PAVN troops subsequently captured by ARVN forces and interviewed by the ICSC indicated that some outfits may have started marching south as early as October.178
Some scholars have interpreted this sequence of events as evidence that it was only after the Tonkin Gulf incident that Hanoi decided to commit the DRVN fully to southern liberation, intimating that the American 5 August attack rather than Resolution 9 precipitated the dramatic escalation of hostilities.179 Thus Ang Cheng Guan has characterized the Tonkin Gulf incident as “an important turning point in the Vietnamese communists’ struggle” since it “stiffened the attitude of the Vietnamese communists” and “convinced [them] on intervening directly in the war” below the seventeenth parallel.180
In fact, as explained earlier, Hanoi had dramatically escalated hostilities and the North’s involvement since the start of the year, right after adoption of Resolution 9. To be sure, policymakers delayed dispatching PAVN units to the South, but that did not mean the decision was pending at the time of the Tonkin Gulf incident. In effect, what the incident, and the 5 August bombing in particular, did was to persuade the Politburo to advance the schedule of PAVN deployments it was already preparing but had hoped would not be warranted. The timing of the troop deployments was a tactical choice, not a strategic decision. The incidents of early August are important only to the extent that they influenced timing. Increased American bellicosity concentrated attention on the strategic goal of annihilating Saigon’s armed forces. The response to the 5 August attack marked not a break with past policy but an acceleration of the course of action set in motion by Resolution 9.
Hanoi’s behavior in this matter thus paralleled that of Washington after passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Like Johnson’s White House, Le Duan’s regime took several months before moving combat forces into the South after obtaining sanction—the proverbial blank check—to resort to war to meet its objectives there. Resolution 9 and the Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorized, among other things, the deployment of regular combat units to South Vietnam, but in both cases only when decision-makers thought it befitting to do so, as circumstances warranted. The Central Committee resolution represented “the formal authorization for increasing North Vietnam’s military presence in the South in 1964 and the years that followed.”181 It was the task of Le Duan and others in the Politburo and the Central Military Commission to work out the details. It took them months, largely because they thought time was on their side and the PLAF might win the military contest below the seventeenth parallel without PAVN troop support. In addition, DRVN leaders had been reluctant to send PAVN units into the South for fear the international community would condemn the action, as previously noted. But the attack of 5 August gave them a valid pretext to proceed with the troop deployments, thereby making the North’s commitment to the South virtually total. The PLAF attack on the U.S. base at Pleiku of early 1965, addressed in the epilogue, would serve as the Johnson administration’s own 5 August episode.
CHINESE SUPPORT
Shortly after the Tonkin Gulf incident, other developments improved the North’s prospects for quick victory, or so Hanoi believed. As a gesture of solidarity and perhaps to deter further U.S. attacks on the North, Beijing gave the DRVN fifty-one MiG jet fighters, agreed to train Vietnamese pilots to fly them, and began constructing airfields in southern China as sanctuaries for the DRVN’s new air force.182 The PRC also sent to the DRVN large stocks of new weaponry, which were promptly relayed to the PLAF and markedly enhanced their combat effectiveness. By year’s end, the PLAF possessed a respectable arsenal that included AK-47 rifles, 7.63mm machine guns, 82mm mortars, rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPGs), recoilless rifles of various calibers, and other weapons.183 The infiltration of almost eighteen thousand northern combat troops into the South before the end of the year, including the aforementioned full-strength PAVN battalions and regiments, was perhaps the greatest boon for the liberation effort in the South.184
While socialist solidarity encouraged Beijing to assist the Vietnamese, Chinese sources indicate that Mao believed Washington was planning another “war of aggression against China,” and thought arming the PLAF and the PAVN might preclude that scenario or, if not, would help defend the PRC.185 Whatever its motives, Beijing’s assistance bolstered the DRVN’s military capabilities,
including its fledgling air-defense system, and with it confidence that Hanoi could prevail in the looming confrontation with the Americans.186 “The [VWP], which during its 9th Plenum made the struggle against revisionism one of the essential conditions for the defense of the socialist camp, is more than ever loyal to that principle”; accordingly, its relations with the CCP were now “very close.”187
Beijing’s successful nuclear weapons test of 16 October was a considerable shot in the arm for Vietnamese proponents of all-out war in the South. That success meant that China would henceforth be an even more credible deterrent to American invasion of the North, thereby further bolstering the DRVN’s national security and confidence. The event was hugely popular in the DRVN and substantially increased the esteem there for the PRC, which was already high.188 In a congratulatory message to Beijing, Pham Van Dong exulted that this “success of the Chinese people” represented “an important contribution to strengthening the socialist camp,” one the Vietnamese people and Hanoi “highly appreciate.”189 The success occasioned in the DRVN an unprecedented wave of enthusiasm. “Never, to my knowledge,” French general delegate Jacques de Buzon noted, “had the attachment of the DRVN to the People’s Republic been expressed so manifestly and on such a scale.” “This extraordinary manifestation of fraternal solidarity with China, which Soviet diplomats and those from other people’s democracies are witnessing, is taking full effect and conveying a clear meaning,” he added.190 Celebration of Beijing’s achievement plus “the reserve observed toward the Soviet Union,” another French report noted, “confirm that the hostility Hanoi has always manifested toward the Moscow [Partial Nuclear Test Ban] Treaty of August 1963 has not abated.” They also confirmed that the unity of views between Hanoi and Beijing was, at that point, nearly absolute.191 In fact, it may have been more “absolute” then than at any time before or after in the history of Sino-DRVN relations.
As Hanoi moved closer than ever to Beijing on matters relating to revolutionary struggle, the DRVN government made “great efforts” to change the attitudes of the Vietnamese people toward China. In new history books, for example, the millennium-long Chinese occupation of Vietnam was shown to have been due to “the greed of an imperialistic government” and not to the Chinese people themselves, who had always been “friends of the Vietnamese.”192 Also, the NLF’s Liberation Radio appealed to the people of Chinese ancestry in South Vietnam to “stand up to struggle for their own salvation!”193 In the interests of diplomatic struggle and political struggle in the South, Hanoi was careful not to suggest that it was following Chinese dictates unquestioningly, which they in fact never did. “To cultivate an image of defiant independence in the face of an immensely stronger opponent suits its propaganda objectives in the underdeveloped world and especially in South Vietnam,” the Canadian representative noted. It also “avoids arousing latent domestic fears of a Chinese occupation and enables it to build up its military strength unnoticed by most of the world.”194
KHRUSHCHEV’S OUSTER
Hanoi’s improving prospects by the fall of 1964 were not fortuitous. They were instead the result of galvanizing the people behind their leaders following the American air attack of 5 August. A more concrete cause was the news out of Moscow in October: Nikita Khrushchev, the chastened champion of peaceful coexistence and longtime critic of revolutionary militancy in Vietnam, was out as head of the CPSU. His replacement until things shook themselves out in Moscow was a collective leadership that included first secretary Leonid Brezhnev, prime minister Alexei Kosygin, and president Nikolai Podgorny.195 What the change meant for Hanoi was not immediately clear, but it could only be, it seemed, good news. After all, historian Ilya Gaiduk has written, Khrushchev “never attached due importance to the conflict in Indochina,” “relegated the development of Soviet-North Vietnamese relations to a low place on his foreign policy agenda,” and never visited the DRVN.196
According to western observers, Khrushchev’s “brutal eviction” gave “great hope” to DRVN leaders.197 Only recently, Hanoi had been disappointed by the Soviets’ “conspicuously offhand” reaction to the events of early August.198 Now it was elated. “The Soviet people and the true communists in the Soviet Union resolutely protect Marxism-Leninism just like they protect the pupils of their eyes,” Hoc tap said of Khrushchev’s ouster.199 As that statement suggests, Hanoi interpreted Khrushchev’s removal to mean that the CPSU had recognized the untenability of peaceful coexistence as a strategy for world revolution and had taken the first step in replacing it with a more suitable one. Its first official message to Brezhnev and the new Soviet leadership reflected that interpretation; it was especially warm and differed in tone from previous messages to Moscow.200 Some in Hanoi, however, were skeptical. A high-ranking official in the DRVN Foreign Ministry, for example, told the British consul soon after Khrushchev’s ouster that he expected little change in Moscow’s policy concerning Indochina because revisionist views had been so widespread within the CPSU.201
The skeptics were soon vindicated. The change of leadership in Moscow translated into no immediate change in Soviet strategic thinking on Indochina.202 Moscow merely practiced “Khrushchevism without Khrushchev,” as the Chinese put it.203 In fact, the new CPSU leadership condemned the tone and substance of the Hoc tap article mentioned above, precipitating a flap in Soviet-DRVN relations. According to the Soviet Embassy in Hanoi, the article constituted “an open attack on the policy of the Soviet Union and, especially, the 20th and 22nd Party Congress[es].”204 Indeed, Moscow’s displeasure was such that DRVN authorities withdrew the article. According to an East German diplomat, shortly after publication of the Hoc tap piece, the Soviet ambassador visited prime minister Pham Van Dong to ask about the thinking behind the article. Dong allegedly evaded a clear response, but over the ensuing days “representatives of the editorial board of Hoc tap visited diplomatic missions, removed the copies [of the offending issue] already delivered, and replaced them with new ones, from which the article had been cut out.” Later, Le Duan told the Soviet ambassador that publishing the article had been a mistake and apologized for it.205
The apology was no doubt sincere, but it did not mean that Le Duan’s regime was reconsidering its stance on revisionism or revolutionary strategy. “If Hanoi is taking precautionary measures with Moscow,” the French Delegation reported, “its political sympathies remain, at the core, unchanged.”206 That was also the view in Moscow, where officials expressed concern that Chinese influence in North Vietnam had become “almost exclusive.”207 According to the Canadian representative in Hanoi, there were no signs after Khrushchev’s ouster that DRVN leaders considered retreating from their “pro-Chinese position” on domestic and international issues. Instead, Hanoi resumed its role of mediator in the Sino-Soviet dispute to put the dispute “in a context where it will represent [the] least danger to [the socialist] bloc and hence [to the] DRVN.” To that end, Hanoi now agreed to participate in a special conference of world communist parties in Moscow to address the dispute, as long as its purpose was to “temper conflict in private rather than exacerbate it in public.” Though reconciliation of Sino-Soviet differences might never be achieved, the Canadian representative thought, “agreement to conceal differences will tend to ensure DRVN maximum freedom of maneuver in pursuing [its] own domestic and foreign policies and give China less reason, excuse or opportunity to enforce rigid doctrinal allegiance and [a] paralyzing politico-economic alliance.”208
Neither Khrushchev’s removal nor the new military situation in Vietnam was enough to prompt Moscow to abandon its commitment to a diplomatic solution in the South.209 In a letter to foreign minister Xuan Thuy in late December, his Soviet counterpart, Andrei Gromyko, insisted that Moscow “takes the view that in order to normalize and peacefully settle” the crisis in South Vietnam and the rest of Indochina, “the strict observance of the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Indochina and the 1962 Geneva Agreement on Laos” must be “ensured by all countries concerned,” including the DR
VN.210 For the time being, Moscow would provide only “token” assistance to Hanoi.211 DRVN leaders were no doubt disappointed with this rigidity, but they were also unmoved by it. Appeals to Geneva agreements no longer resonated in Hanoi.
THE VIETNAM WAR BEGINS
On 11 October, the VWP’s Central Military Commission ordered the PLAF to prepare a major campaign in the South jointly with PAVN units to “annihilate a part of the enemy’s main force units,” destroy strategic hamlets, and expand liberated areas in the southwest along the Cambodian border, as well as in the Central Highlands. The campaign was to take place in two phases between December 1964 and March 1965. On the last day of October, zealous southern revolutionaries attacked an American airfield at Bien Hoa, just northeast of Saigon, killing four U.S. servicemen and wounding thirty. The American ambassador to the RVN, Maxwell Taylor, considered the attack “a deliberate act of escalation” as well as “a change of the ground rules under which [communist forces] have operated up to now.”212
The rules indeed changed in late 1964. The campaign ordered by the Central Military Commission got underway in Interzone V on 6 December with a massive assault on ARVN forces at An Lao. According to an official history, the assault marked “the first time in [Interzone V] that we used the new tactic of coordinating main force units with local and guerilla forces” in a major battle.213 The assault was a success, enabling Nguyen Chi Thanh and COSVN to throw caution to the wind, insisting in its aftermath that the strategy in the South was now “attack, attack, and only attack.”214 Canadian diplomats in Saigon spoke of a “time of ‘general intensification’” of hostilities in Vietnam thereafter.215 “Heartened by their successes, real or imaginary, strengthened by their friends’ support, and comforted by their enemies’ apparent discomfiture, the D.R.V. leadership could not but be encouraged to maintain its confident posture,” the British Consulate concluded at year’s end. “In their view the war will continue until it is ‘won’ or a negotiated settlement, on terms much more favorable than in 1954, is reached.”216
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