Mao conceded that the United States, contrary to expectations, might decide to increase its military presence in South Vietnam, or even to invade the North. After all, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution had authorized President Johnson to take actions he deemed necessary to protect U.S. security interests in Southeast Asia. In such conditions, he advised the Vietnamese not to confront U.S. troops on the coast, but to avoid direct battle and withdraw into the interior, where they could wage guerrilla warfare against invading forces. In that protracted struggle, which might last one hundred years, Mao promised Chinese assistance, remarking metaphorically, “So long as the green mountain is there, how can you ever lack firewood?”35
During the next few weeks, Beijing acted to back up its promises. Army and air force units stationed in south China were placed in a state of military readiness, and additional forces were dispatched to the area. Anti-U.S. rallies carefully orchesrrated by Beijing broke out all over the country, and China’s official press promised firm support for its beleaguered ally. Still, Vietnamese leaders were determined to resist an over-reliance on Chinese assistance and refused an offer by Vice Prime Minister Deng Xiaoping to provide major assistance on the condition that the DRV reject any further relationship with Moscow.
The Tonkin Gulf incident had served to strengthen Hanoi’s relations with Beijing, but it led to a further deterioration in its ties with Moscow. Soviet officials had reacted to the news with equivocation, simply condemning the U.S. attacks and renewing their appeal for peaceful reunification. When Le Duan arrived in Moscow after his visit to Beijing in mid-August, Soviet officials emphasized the need for a negotiated settlement to end the Vietnam conflict, but then compounded the problem by procrastinating on a request by the NLF for formal diplomatic recognition as the sole legal government of South Vietnam.
The situation was to change, however, when, in the autumn, Nikita Khrushchev was overthrown by a cabal led by Leonid Brezhnev. On October 16, shortly after the news reached Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan sent a brief letter of congratulations to Brezhnev on his election to the position of Party first secretary. This note was carefully balanced by a message to Beijing a day later congratulating the Chinese on the explosion of their first nuclear device.
The emergence of a new leadership in Moscow was a welcome development to Ho Chi Minh, not only because it brightened prospects for an increase in Soviet military assistance, but also because it raised the possibility that the DRV could resume its previous evenhanded approach in relations with its two major allies. Even for Le Duan, the decision to favor Beijing reached at the Ninth Plenum had been a tactical rather than a strategic move. In November, Pham Van Dong was sent to Moscow to evaluate the attitude of the new Soviet leadership. For once, the visit went well. Soviet leaders promised to increase their assistance to the DRV and pledged further support in case the United States decided to extend the battle to North Vietnam. As a testament to their sincerity, they agreed to permit the opening of an NLF office in Moscow. In return, Hanoi vowed to refrain from further public attacks on Soviet policies and to make every effort to contain the war within the borders of South Vietnam. Hanoi now had firm promises of support from both its chief allies.36
By the autumn of 1964, instability continued in Saigon, as South Vietnamese politicians and military officers jockeyed for power under the exasperated eye of the United States. In the meantime, the military situation in the South grew ever more perilous. Lacking direction from above, commanders of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam refrained from adopting an aggressive posture on the battlefield and even made their own private arrangements with Viet Cong forces operating within their jurisdictions. U.S. intelligence sources predicted that without decisive action on the part of the United States, the Saigon government would fall to the Communists within three to six months. Such views were shared in Hanoi, where Party leaders ordered southern commanders to increase their efforts to obtain final victory. Terrorist attacks were ordered on U.S. installations in South Vietnam as a means of warning Washington that escalation could lead to increased American casualties. The directive resulted in a Viet Cong attack on the U.S. air base at Bien Hoa on October 31, 1964, killing four American soldiers and wounding thirty more. Further terrorist bombings took place in downtown Saigon: at the Caravelle Hotel, a favorite watering hole of Western journalists, and at the Brink’s BOQ (Bachelor Officers’ Quarters) across the street, on Christmas Eve, killing two Americans.37
COSVN commanders in the South were not quite as optimistic as their superiors in the North, In a year-end assessment, they lamented that the PLAF was still unprepared to inflict a direct defeat on the enemy. But when, in December, Viet Cong forces mauled South Vietnamese units near the village of Binh Gia, about twenty miles east of Saigon, strategists in Hanoi boasted that the battle demonstrated the ability of the PLAF to defeat Saigon’s regular forces. Even the normally cautious Ho Chi Minh exulted that Binh Gia had been a “little Dien Bien Phu.” In a February letter to Nguyen Chi Thanh, newly appointed as commander of all insurgent forces in the South, Le Duan urged the general to make every effort to bring about the collapse of the Saigon regime before the United States could decide whether to send in ground troops. If that should be the case, he believed, the White House would have no alternative but negotiations and a final U.S. withdrawal. Le Duan admitted that success was not guaranteed, but—citing Lenin—he remarked, “Let’s act and then see.” Even if the campaign did not totally succeed, they would be in an excellent position to recoup and try again.38
For once, Hanoi was too late. On February 7, 1965, Viet Cong forces attacked a U.S. Special Forces camp at Pleiku, a provincial capital in the Central Highlands, killing eight Americans and wounding one hundred others. Six days later, President Johnson ordered retaliatory air strikes over North Vietnam. At first limited in scope, the attacks were eventually extended into an intensive series of regular bombing raids over much of the DRV, including some of its major cities. In March, Johnson ordered two Marine battalions to South Vietnam to protect U.S. military facilities at Da Nang air base. Two additional Marine battalions soon followed, as General William C. Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in South Vietnam, argued that without a substantial American combat presence, “a VC takeover of the country” was likely within a year.
In the meantime, relations between the Soviet Union and the DRV continued to improve. In early February, Alexei Kosygin, the new Soviet prime minister, visited Hanoi. In talks with Ho Chi Minh and other Vietnamese leaders, Kosygin promised “all necessary support and assistance” to his hosts and conveyed Moscow’s commitment of increased military aid, including advanced surface-ro-air missiles and anti-aircraft equipment. In return, the Vietnamese promised to make every effort to prevent the war in the South from spreading and to give serious consideration to a negotiated solution to the conflict.
Meetings with Chinese officials did not go as well. Beijing had just refused Kosygin’s offer to join with Moscow in a joint statement of support for the Vietnamese cause, arousing anger among Party officials in Hanoi. During a visit to the DRV in early March, Zhou Enlai explained that China had refused the offer because the new Soviet foreign policy was just “Khrushchevism” in disguise. Zhou also sought to persuade his hosts to refuse Soviet military assistance, warning bluntly that an increased Soviet presence in the DRV could endanger Sino-Vietnamese relations.39
By the time the VWP Central Committee convened its eleventh plenum on March 26, the scope of Washington’s response to deteriorating conditions in South Vietnam was becoming clear, even if its ultimate objective was not. Perhaps, some Party leaders speculated, the United States was only widening the war in order to negotiate from strength. If that was the case, there was no urgent necessity to change the existing strategy of seeking victory without the large-scale introduction of North Vietnamese regular forces. To Ho Chi Minh, however, the situation appeared more dangerous; U.S. air strikes after the Tonkin Gulf incident had convinced him that the Johnson ad
ministration had made a strategic decision to take a stand in South Vietnam. At a Politburo meeting in late February, he warned his colleagues not to underestimate the United States. In his view, it was vitally important to keep the conflict at the level of a “special war” (i.e., without the massive introduction of American combat forces), rather than advancing to the next stage of “limited war,” with U.S. troops involved in the fighting.40
Uncertain about Washington’s intentions, the Eleventh Plenum opted to continue existing policy, while seeking to determine whether the White House was willing to negotiate a U.S. withdrawal. During the fall and winter of 1964–65, Hanoi had rejected peace inquiries from Washington on the assumption that the United States was not yet sufficiently discouraged, nor was final victory yet in sight. Now Party leaders were prepared to test the diplomatic waters again. The NLF, through its Liberation Radio, set out its own conditions for a peace settlement on March 22, in a five-point statement that declared that talks could not begin until U.S. forces had been withdrawn from South Vietnam. Radio Hanoi rebroadcast the NLF declaration a few days later, but in a slightly modified version, implying that a full American withdrawal need not take place before the opening of talks so long as Washington pledged to do so. Then, on April 8, Pham Van Dong issued Hanoi’s “four points” declaration, which called for the departure of all foreign troops from Vietnam, a return to the provisions of the Geneva Accords, the resolution of the internal affairs of the South in accordance with the program of the NLF, and the eventual reunification of the two zones peacefully. The statement was vague on the timing of the U.S. withdrawal, and Ho Chi Minh served to muddy the waters when he told a Japanese journalist that Washington must withdraw its troops to create the proper conditions for a peace conference.41
As always, Ho Chi Minh played an active role in orchestrating Hanoi’s peace campaign. In Politburo meetings he urged his colleagues to prepare for the possible reconvening of the Geneva conference, so that whenever Washington indicated a willingness to withdraw, the DRV would be ready to facilitate the move. In the meantime, he argued that antiwar opinion in the United States and throughout the world should be stimulated, and Hanoi’s allies carefully consulted. The peace campaign, he advised, must express firmness and determination, but also be carried out with subtlety and flexibility.
If there were any hopes in Hanoi that the White House was ready to negotiate, they soon dissipated. In early April, just as Pham Van Dong was preparing to issue his “four points” proposal, President Johnson ordered two U.S. Army divisions to Vietnam to strengthen South Vietnamese positions in the Central Highlands. Then on April 7, he presented his own offer of “unconditional” peace talks in a speech at Johns Hopkins University, although he gave no hint of major U.S. concessions in order to bring them about. At the same time the Party leaders quickly concluded that the White House was not yet ready to consider a peace agreement on Hanoi’s terms and lost interest in pursuing negotiations.
Washington’s obdurate attitude undoubtedly confirmed in the minds of militants like Le Duan that victory would come only on the battlefield and not, as Ho Chi Minh had hoped, at the peace table. In a letter to General Nguyen Chi Thanh in May, Duan concluded that the introduction of U.S. combat troops indicated that conditions were not ripe for negotiations. “Only when the insurrection [in South Vietnam] is successful,” he wrote, “will the problem of establishing a ‘neutral central administration’ be posed again.” Although the “four points” remained on the table, they were only “intended to pave the way for a U.S. withdrawal with a lesser loss of face.”42
As the war escalated in early 1965, the role of China became increasingly crucial to the DRV. While Soviet assistance could provide Hanoi with advanced weaponry to defend North Vietnamese air space against U.S. air strikes, China was important both as a source of military and economic assistance and as a deterrent to Washington’s taking the war directly to the North. In both public and private statements, Chinese leaders had promised that the PRC would serve as Vietnam’s “great rear,” providing various forms of support for the cause of Vietnamese national reunification. Equally important to Hanoi, however, was Beijing’s implied threat that should the United States decide to extend its operations north of the demilitarized zone, China would intervene in the war directly on the side of the DRV.
For Mao Zedong, now on the verge of embarking on a major struggle with his more pragmatic rivals within the CCP leadership, the spreading conflict in Vietnam served as a useful means of mobilizing revolutionary zeal in China in favor of his domestic policies, while at the same time bogging down the United States in an unwinnable war in Southeast Asia. When Le Duan and Vo Nguyen Giap went to Beijing in April to request military equipment and fighter pilots to protect North Vietnamese air-space, Liu Shaoqi (soon to be purged in the Cultural Revolution) appeared amenable to the request as a means of raising morale in the DRV and protecting North Vietnamese airspace above the Twentieth Parallel, just south of the Red River delta. During a visit by Ho Chi Minh to China the next month, Mao agreed to provide “whatever support was needed by the Vietnamese.” Mao would send road-building crews to assist his allies in improving the transportation network, including the Ho Chi Minh Trail and roads from the Chinese border into the DRV, and to construct routes from northern Laos toward Thailand. The latter, Mao remarked, would be especially useful for “large scale battles in the future.” In return, Ho expressed his country’s gratitude for the firm support of “brotherly comrades” in China and promised that the Vietnamese would be able to wage the war themselves with the assistance of units that would now be sent from the DRV to the South.43
Beijing, nonetheless, was wary of a direct confrontation with Washington, and thus more circumspect in its references to possible greater involvement in the Indochina conflict. In a highly publicized interview with the U.S. journalist Edgar Snow in January, Mao declared that China would not enter the war unless directly attacked—a subtle signal that Washington could escalate the level of its presence in the South so long as it did not invade the DRV. In April, Zhou Enlai sent a private message to Washington via Pakistani President Ayub Khan that China would not provoke a war with the United States, but would perform its international duty in supporting the DRV; if the Johnson administration decided to expand the war beyond South Vietnam, Zhou remarked, the flames of war would spread and China would have to extinguish them. In that case it would be difficult to prevent the outbreak of a world war. Even if the war does not spread to China, Zhou concluded, “Still China will support Vietnam, so long as the DRV requests, so long as the NLF in South Vietnam requests it.”44
The following month, General Van Tien Dung went to China to complete the Sino-Vietnamese military agreement and work out the details. If the situation remained unchanged, the Vietnamese would fight the war by themselves, with military support provided by the PRC. If the United States provided air and naval support for a South Vietnamese invasion of the North, China would send its own air and naval forces to support PAVN units in self-defense. If U.S. troops invaded the North, China would provide its land forces as a strategic reserve and carry out operational tasks when necessary.
China had thus agreed to provide substantial assistance to the DRV in its struggle with the United States. But there were already signs of discord between China, the USSR, and the DRV. Mao Zedong’s January interview with Edgar Snow had caused anxiety among Vietnamese Party leaders, who feared that his comments would simply encourage Washington to believe that it could escalate the conflict inside the South with impunity. Then, in July, Beijing rejected Hanoi’s request for Chinese combat pilots to take part in the defense of DRV airspace. In an article that served as an elliptical message to Hanoi, Marshal Lin Biao called on the Vietnamese to practice “self-reliance,” as China had done during its own civil war with Chiang Kai-shek. Le Duan reacted angrily and went off to Moscow, where he praised the USSR as a “second motherland.”45
China’s backpedaling on its offer of comb
at pilots to the DRV may have been a product of the changing mood in Beijing. During the spring and summer of 1965, when Moscow publicized its proposal for the coordination of Sino-Soviet assistance to the DRV, bitter debates erupted in Beijing over the degree to which China should become involved in the conflict. While some Chinese leaders argued that it was their “internationalist” obligation to help a fraternal country in distress, anti-Soviet elements retorted that Moscow’s proposal was an insidious plot to engage China in a direct conflict with the United States. In the end, Beijing turned down the Soviet offer of united action, while warning the North Vietnamese of the perfidy of the Soviet Union. Soviet assistance to the DRV, Zhou Enlai cautioned Ho Chi Minh during Ho’s visit to Canton in November, was motivated by Moscow’s desire to isolate China and improve U.S.-Soviet relations; it would be better for Hanoi to refuse it.46
The number of U.S. military forces in the RVN increased steadily throughout 1965, topping 200,000 by the end of the year. Recognizing that American strategy in South Vietnam had escalated from a “special war” to a “limited war” with full participation by American combat troops, the VWP Central Committee approved a plan in December to introduce North Vietnamese regular forces in significant amounts to match the U.S. escalation. Under the aggressive command of General Thanh, PAVN units sought to engage the United States in selective locations throughout South Vietnam to demonstrate their capacity to match their adversary on the battlefield. While some leading Party strategists in Hanoi, including Vo Nguyen Giap, argued against Thanh’s strategy, the general received crucial support for his “seething” approach from Le Duan, who derided Giap as a “scared rabbit” who was afraid to take on the enemy directly.
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