As 1964 gave way to 1965, the DRVN was at war in and with the RVN, and making preparations for an American onslaught against the North. “The capital has become a city of war,” a foreign diplomat reported following a visit to Hanoi in mid-December. “Anti-aircraft guns have been positioned on rooftops, and people are busy digging trenches in the streets.”217 Although Americans did not know it at the time, the Vietnam War had begun.
Epilogue
On 7 February 1965, elements of the PLAF attacked a U.S. Special Forces camp at Pleiku, in the Central Highlands, killing eight Americans and injuring more than one hundred others.1 That was the last straw for Washington, its 5 August episode. The Johnson administration began sustained bombings of North Vietnam in early March and, days later, deployed combat troops to South Vietnam, at first to protect U.S. air bases, and eventually to “search [for] and destroy” enemy ground forces.2
The sudden Americanization of the war and the bombings of the North distressed DRVN leaders, who had hoped Washington would keep its own troops out of Vietnam awhile longer and not attack the North continuously. The party and the government, they reckoned, were not entirely ready for war with the United States on both sides of the seventeenth parallel. Among party cadres and rank-and-file members, “the influences of revisionism have not yet been successfully overcome, and there are still manifestations of individualism.”3 The leaders blamed this on the continued presence in party ranks of enemies who sought to “destroy” the VWP from within.4
DRVN leaders at once redoubled the effort to purge party ranks of subversive thoughts and individuals. It would take at least a year, they estimated, to cleanse the party and ensure that cadres and members thought and acted fittingly, or at least well enough to lead the masses effectively in this new period of struggle.5 To the same end, they notably expanded party membership.6 To guarantee success in the “American War,” the spirit of the party needed to infuse the people of Vietnam. “Despite the intensification of the war in the South and the possibility of an extension of hostilities to the North,” the Canadian representative in Hanoi had accurately reported in January, Hanoi “will continue to give priority to domestic consolidation,” particularly in the ideological “sphere.”7
Within days after the beginning of U.S. combat operations, Hanoi announced that the struggle for reunification had entered a new phase, that of “limited war,” and launched what it called the “Anti-American Resistance for National Salvation.” The central aims of the resistance were to mitigate the effects of bombings in the North and pursue the attrition of enemy ground forces in the South. In April, DRVN leaders sanctioned a mass mobilization effort to meet those ends, the “Three Readinesses” campaign, which urged men in the North to be ready to fight, join the armed forces, and perform whatever other task was required of them.8 As part of this campaign, the authorities extended indefinitely the period of service of PAVN soldiers and recalled to service officers and men discharged earlier because of budget cuts. They also swelled the ranks of militia forces, from 1.4 million in 1964 to 2 million in mid-1965.9 The guiding principle behind these measures was “Let the Entire People Fight the Enemy and Take Part in the National Defense.”10 Because the anti-American resistance was a “total” effort involving everyone, Hanoi also launched the “Three Responsibilities” campaign, which directed able-bodied women to work as substitutes for male combatants; urge civilian men to participate as necessary in active resistance against the American aggressors; and fight if called upon to do so by the authorities.11
At an emergency meeting convened in response to the initial deployment of U.S. troops in the South, the Central Committee addressed the prospect of an American invasion of the North, long a concern of the leadership. It concluded that the Americans were indeed likely to “extend their war of aggression” above the seventeenth parallel.12 Despite this possibility and the concomitant intensification of the ground war in the South and the air war in the North, Le Duan’s regime reaffirmed its commitment to core revolutionary objectives and prompt and decisive military victory. The regime also refused to abandon or even neglect the pursuit of socialism in the DRVN, insisting on its continued transformation into a “great rear base,” even as it strengthened its defensive capabilities “on all fronts” and provided considerable assistance to “the front line in the South.”13 The mot d’ordre in the North thus became “Producing while Fighting,” promoted by the authorities through a variety of new patriotic worker and peasant slogans, such as “Carry Out Production Work as Vigorously as Fighting,” “Hold Firm Both Your Hammer and Your Rifle,” “Work Twice as Hard to Make Up for the Lost Time,” “Hold Both Our Plough and Our Rifle,” and “Fight the Enemy Wherever He Comes and Resume Production after the Fight.”14
Following the start of the war’s Americanization, Beijing encouraged Hanoi to press the military struggle and refuse to negotiate.15 Any willingness to talk to Washington after March 1965, the Chinese counseled, would manifest “weakness in the face of American imperialism.”16 Besides, the Johnson administration called for peace talks only to “deceive public opinion,” Chinese foreign minister Chen Yi told his Vietnamese counterpart.17 But Hanoi needed no such counsel; its mind was already made up on such issues. In the aftermath of the failures of the 1954 and 1962 Geneva accords, DRVN leaders, and Le Duan in particular, had developed a “Munich syndrome” of their own, an aversion to negotiations under circumstances in which they thought they looked weak or inferior to their enemy. David Marr has observed of this syndrome that “DRV leaders resolved never again to be put in a position where matters of vital Vietnamese national interest were subject to big power bargaining.”18 If they ever were to negotiate, it would only be from a position of absolute strength.
Moreover, at this juncture, Hanoi felt it had to appear confident in its ability to triumph, to remain defiant. Thus DRVN leaders spurned all American and third-party efforts to jump-start negotiations. They had to be careful in doing so, however. If the public perception became that Hanoi had spurned an equitable diplomatic solution in favor of imposing a draconian peace, the revolution and the anti-American resistance would lose vital support and sympathy from abroad. Such a loss would compromise the diplomatic struggle and enable the Johnson administration to carry on its “war of aggression” with impunity, without fear of the domestic and international consequences of escalation. Hanoi had thus to convince the rest of the world, including the American people, that it longed for peace, while making clear to “warmongers” in Washington that it had no intention of abdicating its revolutionary purposes.
The consonance of policy and purpose between Hanoi and Beijing vexed Moscow, which still felt that a war in Vietnam was detrimental to its interests and those of the socialist camp. Nonetheless, Soviet leaders agreed to assist the DRVN, at least in defending itself.19 The reasons for this are obviously complex and involved the fact that to do otherwise would have compromised Moscow’s stance as leader of the socialist camp and rearguard against naked capitalist imperialism.20 Soviet aid to the DRVN was soon growing exponentially to include conventional heavy armaments, as well as surface-to-air missiles to help protect the North from American air attacks and Soviet personnel to install them. Yet at the same time, Moscow doggedly pressed Hanoi to negotiate with Washington and even tried to facilitate contacts between the two.21 Unlike Hanoi, Soviet leaders “do not believe in our victory and this pushes them to search for a resolution of the Vietnamese question by way of negotiations,” Le Duc Tho confided to a French journalist.22 Pham Van Dong echoed that thought, telling a western diplomat that the Soviets and other East Europeans had hounded Hanoi to adopt more “moderate” attitudes toward negotiations ever since Washington had introduced combat forces in Vietnam.23 DRVN leaders responded to such pressures as circumstances dictated. Fully aware of their dependence on aid from the Soviet Union and other eastern bloc countries, they tolerated the calls for negotiations and even pretended to act on them, but those calls actually fell on “totally de
af ears.”24
As it privately dismissed the pleas and concerns of its European allies, Hanoi continued to publicly promote socialist solidarity between the Soviet Union and China to try and mend the Sino-Soviet rift.25 This latter effort rested on the conviction that Washington took advantage of the dispute between Beijing and Moscow to “intensify to very high levels” its war in Vietnam.26 To mitigate the deleterious effects of the dispute, Hanoi ordered its diplomats to make “absolutely” no derogatory comments about either China or the Soviet Union and instead emphasize the contributions of each to the Vietnamese revolution and socialist internationalism.27 Hanoi also ordered party members and government officials to say nothing negative about the Soviets in private conversations with Chinese officials, and vice versa.
Far from deterring North Vietnamese decision-makers, the American military intervention solidified their resolve to fight resolutely, to pursue “victory at any price.”28
• • •
Hanoi’s strategy and tactics during the “American War,” which began in 1965 and ended in 1973 with the signing of the Paris agreement, were in many ways predictable. As they had been doing since before that war’s onset, DRVN decision-makers relied on three separate yet interrelated modes of struggle—political, diplomatic, and military—to meet their aims. Military struggle was paramount to them for much of the war’s duration, but even that decision, as demonstrated in this study, was made before, not after, the Americanization of hostilities in Vietnam.
The experiences of communist decision-makers—of Le Duan and members of his ruling clique—in the decade before 1965 were in that sense truly determinative, conditioning their thinking on everything ranging from how to wage war to when to sue for peace. Those experiences had been characterized by frustration and disappointment over the failed policies of the previous regime under Ho Chi Minh, which convinced the first secretary, Le Duc Tho, Nguyen Chi Thanh, Pham Hung, and other militants now at the helm of the party to spurn diplomatic compromise and pin their hopes on military struggle to meet their core goals. Specifically, the “lessons” they drew from that decade reinforced their faith in their revolutionary ideology and sense of purpose. These in turn informed their sense of the possibilities and challenges they faced during the American War. Fighting relentlessly, sacrificing selflessly, and winning totally became hallmarks of their worldview, which shaped both the course and the outcome of the Vietnam War.
In retrospect, there was little the United States could have done to change this mindset and thus alter either the course or the outcome of the war, short of resorting to disproportionate violence or surrendering—both of which it eventually did, in a sense. Le Duan and his like-minded peers had been calling for armed struggle in the South ever since the signing of the Geneva accords in 1954. These militants were not going to relinquish that aspiration once they finally controlled policymaking in Hanoi and could maneuver the situation to their apparent advantage. Persuaded that the socialist camp was behind them, that the masses in both halves of Vietnam were prepared to make the necessary sacrifices, that diplomacy would not resolve their dispute with Washington unless they negotiated from a position of strength, and most fundamentally, that history had vindicated their views and that their stance was therefore right, they conducted the anti-American struggle with unwavering determination. Revving up the pressure on the DRVN by gradual escalation—ever more U.S. troops in the South, ever more U.S. bombings of the North—was not going to disabuse them of their ideas and make them abandon their ambitions. They waged war against the United States with no discernible fear of consequences or concern for the suffering of their compatriots and the physical destruction of their country, because they believed history was on their side, and the triumph of the Vietnamese revolution would herald the triumph of the world revolution. The human and material cost of the war for the Vietnamese was indeed colossal, yet it was never high enough to compel decision-makers in Hanoi to renounce their core objectives or even amend them.
To counter those objectives, the United States sent more than half a million troops to fight communist-led forces in the South, killed hundreds of thousands of those forces (to say nothing of the collateral civilian casualties), sprayed the cancer-inducing defoliant Agent Orange across the southern countryside, destroyed Hue and other cities in order to “save” them during the Tet Offensive, and dropped more ordnance on Vietnam than it did on Germany and Japan in all of World War II. Unrepentant, the men in charge in Hanoi long refused to negotiate and then to negotiate earnestly, or to cease hostilities or otherwise assuage the agony of the Vietnamese masses. These too were conscious choices. A different leadership in Hanoi would surely have acted differently. However, in light of what is now known of intra-VWP affairs, it is unlikely that any different group of leaders, be they ever so “hawkish” or “dovish” on matters relating to the conduct of the war, could ever have seized power in the DRVN once the balance there had shifted in favor of Le Duan and his associates.
It was only in the aftermath of the dispiriting failure of the 1972 Spring Offensive—a desperate, no-holds-barred communist effort to achieve military victory in the South—that Hanoi demonstrated some tractability by finally agreeing to negotiate seriously. In October of that year, DRVN representatives at the Paris peace talks begun in 1968–69 submitted the first complete draft of a peace settlement, which, after some fine-tuning, the United States accepted. Unfortunately, the prospect of peace quickly dissipated as Saigon objected to several of the settlement’s provisions and Washington decided to heed the concerns of its ally and seek further alterations to the document. By early December, after some more haggling, Washington and Hanoi were within one sentence of finalizing a new settlement acceptable to both sides, but the latter refused to make a final concession on language concerning the status of the demilitarized zone between the two Vietnams insisted upon by the Americans. Instead, it suspended the negotiations and temporized, hoping that antiwar sentiment in the United States, and in Congress specifically, would compel U.S. president Richard Nixon to withdraw the last U.S. troops from Vietnam and terminate American aid to Saigon with no condition other than the return of American prisoners of war.29
As had been the case in 1964 when the war began, in 1968 with the Tet Offensive, and in 1972 with the Spring Offensive, Le Duan and the Politburo again misjudged their chances for success while underestimating the swiftness and decisiveness of Washington’s response to their actions. The Nixon administration answered this last suspension of negotiations with the massive “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi and Haiphong. This operation, code-named Linebacker II, dealt such a stunning blow, psychologically and physically, to the DRVN and its leadership that within days Hanoi conceded the contested language concerning the demilitarized zone. On 27 January 1973, the two sides signed the Paris agreement ostensibly ending their war.
Like the 1954 Geneva accords, the 1973 Paris agreement was, from the perspective of DRVN leaders at the time, a product of necessity mandated by the shortcomings of the military struggle. But, unlike their predecessors, who respected the accords they signed because they thought them workable, Le Duan and his regime honored the Paris agreement only as long and to the extent that it was expedient for them to do so. Thus they suspended hostilities and returned American and other prisoners, but otherwise acquiesced in the agreement only for the moment. That moment passed with the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops from Vietnam. At that point, Hanoi promptly began working on plans to take over the South militarily, assuming—correctly this time—that Washington would not come to the rescue of its embattled allies in Saigon once war resumed.
Within little more than two years after the signing of the Paris agreement—30 April 1975 is the official date—the PLAF and the PAVN had defeated the ARVN, forced the abdication of the Saigon regime, and completed the “liberation” of the South. In July of the following year, Vietnam was formally reunified under the communist aegis, thereby fulfilling the central objective of the V
ietnamese revolution. The road to that fulfillment had been long, turbulent, and more than ghastly at times, but Le Duan and other revolutionary leaders, at least, had occasion to celebrate.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. A growing body of works on the Cold War stresses the agency of “small actors.” See, among others, Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Matthew J. Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post–Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
2. Patricia M. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 3.
3. The notion that for much of the period covered in this study there existed within the VWP two main, competing wings is admittedly simplistic. Presumably, there were several factions within the party, and no two members thought exactly alike on all issues. However, given the paucity of sources, both primary and secondary, on this matter, the moderate-militant binary is sensible as well as useful to contextualize the dilemmas confronting the party after 1954. Besides, it was essentially in such terms that close observers at the time characterized intra-VWP tensions and identified the ideological proclivities of core leaders. Hopefully, in the not-too-distant future Vietnamese authorities will start doing more to help us understand the history of their predecessors on their own terms. Also, I use the terms moderate and militant to identify the party’s two rival wings because I find those more precise than North-firster/South-firster and other pairings used by scholars who have written on the topic. I owe a significant debt of gratitude to the Vietnam Studies Group and to Bill Turley, Hue-Tam Tai, Shawn McHale, Tuong Vu, and Balazs Szalontai in particular for their succor as I grappled with identifying the two factions.
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