Vietnam, the 17th parallel

ARBITRARY BORDERS Political Boundaries in World History

The Division of the Middle East The Treaty of Sèvres

The Iron Curtain The Cold War in Europe

The Mason–Dixon Line Vietnam: The 17th Parallel Korea: The 38th Parallel The U.S.–Mexico Border The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

ARBITRARY BORDERS Political Boundaries in World History

Vietnam The 17th Parallel

Robert C. Cottrell Foreword by Senator

George J. Mitchell

Introduction by

James I. Matray California State University, Chico

Dedicated to Sue and Jordan FRONTIS Modern Map of Vietnam

CHELSEA HOUSE PUBLISHERS VP, NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT Sally Cheney DIRECTOR OF PRODUCTION Kim Shinners CREATIVE MANAGER Takeshi Takahashi MANUFACTURING MANAGER Diann Grasse Staff for VIETNAM: THE 17TH PARALLEL EXECUTIVE EDITOR Lee Marcott PRODUCTION EDITOR Megan Emery ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR Noelle Nardone INTERIOR DESIGN Keith Trego COVER DESIGNER Keith Trego LAYOUT EJB Publishing Services ©2004 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of Haights Cross Communications. All rights reserved. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Librarywww.chelseahouse.com First Printing 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN: 0-7910-7834-5

Contents

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Foreword by Senator George J. Mitchell

vi

Introduction by James I. Matray

ix

Geneva, 1954

1

Vietnamese History

13

French Colonization

22

Vietnamese Resistance

32

Vietnam at War

46

The French Indochina War

55

Dienbienphu

68

A Divided Vietnam

79

The Americanization of the War

94

War’s End and the Aftermath

110

Chronology and Timeline

121

Source Notes

124

Bibliography

127

Further Reading

129

Index

133

Foreword Senator

I

George J. Mitchell

spent years working for peace in Northern Ireland and in the Middle East. I also made many visits to the Balkans during the long and violent conflict there. Each of the three areas is unique; so is each conflict. But there are also some similarities: in each, there are differences over religion, national identity, and territory. Deep religious differences that lead to murderous hostility are common in human history. Competing aspirations involving national identity are more recent occurrences, but often have been just as deadly. Territorial disputes—two or more people claiming the same land—are as old as humankind. Almost without exception, such disputes have been a factor in recent conflicts. It is impossible to calculate the extent to which the demand for land—as opposed to religion, national identity, or other factors— figures in the motivation of people caught up in conflict. In my experience it is a substantial factor that has played a role in each of the three conflicts mentioned above. In Northern Ireland and the Middle East, the location of the border was a major factor in igniting and sustaining the conflict. And it is memorialized in a dramatic and visible way: through the construction of large walls whose purpose is to physically separate the two communities. In Belfast, the capital and largest city in Northern Ireland, the so-called “Peace Line” cuts through the heart of the city, right across urban streets. Up to thirty feet high in places, topped with barbed wire in others, it is an ugly reminder of the duration and intensity of the conflict. In the Middle East, as I write these words, the government of Israel has embarked on a huge and controversial effort to construct a security fence roughly along the line that separates Israel from the West Bank.

FOREWORD

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Having served a tour of duty with the U.S. Army in Berlin, which was once the site of the best known of modern walls, I am skeptical of their long-term value, although they often serve short-term needs. But it cannot be said that such structures represent a new idea. Ancient China built the Great Wall to deter nomadic Mongol tribes from attacking its population. In much the same way, other early societies established boundaries and fortified them militarily to achieve the goal of self-protection. Borders always have separated people. Indeed, that is their purpose. This series of books examines the important and timely issue of the significance of arbitrary borders in history. Each volume focuses attention on a territorial division, but the analytical approach is more comprehensive. These studies describe arbitrary borders as places where people interact differently from the way they would if the boundary did not exist. This pattern is especially pronounced where there is no geographic reason for the boundary and no history recognizing its legitimacy. Even though many borders have been defined without legal precision, governments frequently have provided vigorous monitoring and military defense for them. This series will show how the migration of people and exchange of goods almost always work to undermine the separation that borders seek to maintain. The continuing evolution of a European community provides a contemporary example illustrating this point, most obviously with the adoption of a single currency. Moreover, even former Soviet bloc nations have eliminated barriers to economic and political integration. Globalization has emerged as one of the most powerful forces in international affairs during the twenty-first century. Not only have markets for the exchange of goods and services become genuinely worldwide, but instant communication and sharing of information have shattered old barriers separating people. Some scholars even argue that globalization has made the entire concept of a territorial nation-state irrelevant. Although the assertion is certainly premature and probably wrong, it highlights the importance of recognizing how borders often have reflected and affirmed the cultural, ethnic, or linguistic perimeters that define a people or a country. Since the Cold War ended, competition over resources or a variety of interests threaten boundaries more than ever, resulting in contentious

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FOREWORD

interaction, conflict, adaptation, and intermixture. How people define their borders is also a factor in determining how events develop in the surrounding region. This series will provide detailed descriptions of selected arbitrary borders in history with the objective of providing insights on how artificial boundaries separating people will influence international affairs during the next century.

Senator George J. Mitchell October 2003

Introduction James I. Matray California State University, Chico

T

hroughout history, borders have separated people. Scholars have devoted considerable attention to assessing the significance and impact of territorial boundaries on the course of human history, explaining how they often have been sources of controversy and conflict. In the modern age, the rise of nation-states in Europe created the need for governments to negotiate treaties to confirm boundary lines that periodically changed as a consequence of wars and revolutions. European expansion in the nineteenth century imposed new borders on Africa and Asia. Many native peoples viewed these boundaries as arbitrary and, after independence, continued to contest their legitimacy. At the end of both world wars in the twentieth century, world leaders drew artificial and impermanent lines separating assorted people around the globe. Borders certainly are among the most important factors that have influenced the development of world affairs. Chelsea House Publishers decided to publish a collection of books looking at arbitrary borders in history in response to the revival of the nuclear crisis in North Korea in October 2002. Recent tensions on the Korean peninsula are a direct consequence of the partitioning of Korea at the 38th parallel after World War II. Other nations in the course of human history have suffered due to similar artificial divisions. The reasons for establishing arbitrary borders have differed, but usually arise from either domestic or international factors and are often a combination of both. In the case of Korea, it was the United States and the Soviet Union who decided in August 1945 to partition the country at the 38th parallel. Ostensibly, the purpose was to facilitate the acceptance of the

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INTRODUCTION

surrender of Japanese forces at the end of World War II. However, historians have presented persuasive evidence that a political contest existed inside Korea to decide the future of the nation after forty years of Japanese colonial rule. Therefore, Korea’s division at the 38th parallel was an artificial boundary that symbolized the split among the Korean people about the nation’s destiny. On the right were conservative landowners who had closely aligned with the Japanese, many of whom were outright collaborators. On the left, there were far more individuals who favored revolutionary change. In fact, Communists provided the leadership and direction for the independence movement inside Korea from the 1920s until the end of World War II. After 1945, two Koreas emerged that reflected these divergent ideologies. But the Korean people have never accepted the legitimacy or permanence of the division imposed by foreign powers. Korea’s experience in dealing with the artificial division of its country may well be unique, but it is not without historical parallels. The first set of books in this series on arbitrary borders examines six key chapters in human history. One volume will look at the history of the 38th parallel in Korea. Other volumes will provide description and analysis of the division of the Middle East after World War I; the Cold War as symbolized by the Iron Curtain in Central Europe; the United States.-Mexico Border; the 17th parallel in Vietnam, and the Mason-Dixon Line. Future books will address the Great Wall in China, Northern Ireland’s border, and the Green Line in Israel. Admittedly, there are many significant differences between these boundaries, but these books will cover as many common themes as possible. In so doing, each will help readers conceptualize how factors such as colonialism, culture, and economics determine the nature of contact between people along these borders. Although globalization has emerged as a powerful force working against the creation and maintenance of lines separating people, boundaries are not likely to disappear as factors with a continuing influence on world events. This series of books will provide insights about the impact of arbitrary borders on human history and how such borders continue to shape the modern world. James I. Matray Chico, California November 2003

1 Geneva, 1954

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VIETNAM: THE 17TH PARALLEL

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fter ten weeks of prolonged negotiations, the delegates in Geneva finally devised a solution to bring the French Indochina War to a close. In the fashion of the Hebrew King Solomon or the Allies, wrestling with Korea as World War II ended, they agreed to a temporary partition of Vietnam. The dividing line—an arbitrary border—was the 17th parallel, near the country’s midsection, less than 100 miles north of the ancient capital of Hue. This meant that the French provinces of Tonkin and Cochinchina would be controlled by the communist-led Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the anticommunist State of Vietnam, respectively. The third province, Annam, was also virtually split in half, although more territory was placed under the control of the State of Vietnam than under that of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The expectation was that Vietnam would be reunified after national elections that were to be held within two years. As it turned out, however, the 17th parallel, like the 38th in Korea, long separated parties on either side of the line while serving as a battleground for the Cold War fight that raged in Vietnam and throughout the world. In each instance, drawing an artificial border in no way ensured that further hostilities would be avoided. Despite seven and a half years of continuous warfare, the French Indochina conflict had remained deadlocked as the summer of 1954 approached. That spring, the French fortress at Dienbienphu, in the northwestern sector of Vietnam near the border with Laos, along with more than 10,000 soldiers, fell to Vietminh forces led by General Vo Nguyen Giap. The Vietminh, who had suffered far greater losses at Dienbienphu, continued to harass French soldiers and those associated with the State of Vietnam throughout the countryside. Nevertheless, the French remained in control of large urban centers, including Hanoi in the north, Hue and Danang in the country’s midsection, and Saigon in the south. Still, the defeat at Dienbienphu was noteworthy: it was arguably the first such

Geneva, 1954

3

setback Western powers had experienced in dealing with Asian revolutionaries in modern times. Worries that the war in Southeast Asia could spread had led some of the great powers, including the United States, England, France, and the Soviet Union, to call for a conference in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss events in Indochina. A Five-Power Conference, which also included China, had begun in April and was intended to tackle issues related to two divided hot spots: Berlin and Korea. Representatives from the Five-Power countries gathered in Geneva, along with others from Cambodia, Laos, the State of Vietnam, and the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Indian delegates were also present, although India, a country that tried to carve out a middle path

The Geneva conference on Indochina opened on May 8, 1954. After 10 weeks of negotiation, the parties agreed to a temporary partition of Vietnam. The expectation was that Vietnam would be reunited following national elections to be held within two years. That expectation was never to be realized.

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VIETNAM: THE 17TH PARALLEL

during the Cold War, had not received an official invitation to attend the conference. The gathering began on May 8, the day following the surrender of the French garrison at Dienbienphu after a nearly twomonth-long siege. France’s position appeared weak, with one diplomat indicating that the French arrived in Geneva with a “two of clubs and a three of diamonds.”1 That European country, which had suffered German occupation of its divided homeland during World War II, attempted to recoup wounded national pride by retaining colonial possessions such as Vietnam and Algeria as the postwar era unfolded. After long years of struggle, however, the war in Indochina produced only more casualties, mounting opposition at home, and a lack of resolution in the field. The refusal of the United States to intervene at Dienbienphu had ensured the French defeat. Nevertheless, Georges Bidault, who led the French delegation in Geneva, sought a military cease-fire that would enable France to retain the southern portion of Vietnam, the area known as Cochinchina. The French position increasingly appeared desperate. The United States, on the other hand, stood as the preeminent world leader, having won a great amount of good will because of its fight against the Axis Powers—Japan, Italy, and Germany— during World War II. America’s apparent support for decolonization also was well received in many corners of the globe, including Southeast Asia. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had spoken of the need to terminate French rule in the region. The development of the Cold War, however, led many American policymakers to insist that aggression in Indochina, which leaders such as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles blamed on the Vietminh, must be halted. Consequently, Dulles was determined not to allow the Geneva Conference to relinquish any territory to Ho Chi Minh. Dulles, in fact, had been concerned about the possibility of U.S. involvement at Geneva. The very appearance of American representatives, he feared, might be viewed as amounting to U.S. recognition of Communist China, something the staunchly

Geneva, 1954

anti-communist Dulles opposed. Dulles, biographer Townsend Hoopes indicated, therefore displayed in Geneva the “pinched distaste of a puritan in a house of ill repute.”2 He refused to take the hand offered in greeting by Zhou Enlai, China’s foreign minister. Dulles muttered that he might run into Zhou if they were in a car crash together, but he clearly had no intention of displaying cordiality. Above all, Dulles insisted that the whole of Indochina not fall to communist control. On the evening of May 10, President Eisenhower met with Dulles and Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president told Dulles to consider possible military solutions for Indochina and to produce a joint resolution that could be sent to Congress to request authorization to send American troops into battle. As it turned out, General Matthew Ridgway, the army chief of staff, had ordered a study of military possibilities in Vietnam the previous year. The report indicated that anywhere between half a million and a million soldiers would be required, that conditions difficult in Korea would be worse still in Vietnam because of the jungle terrain and monsoon seasons; and furthermore, that the Vietnamese people, with their lengthy heritage of nationalism, would hardly support an American campaign. The drawing of an arbitrary border had seemed to resolve the Korean conflict, and American policymakers envisioned a similar solution for Vietnam. That approach, they hoped, would avoid the loss of American lives or financial resources. The Americans were hardly the only reluctant or less-thangracious participants in Geneva. The Vietminh wanted no dealings with officials from the State of Vietnam, which was still led by the former Emperor Bao Dai, and did not willingly meet with the French, either. In an unrealistic demand, Bao Dai insisted that Vietnam be unified under his control, and the Vietnamese communists reasoned that their successes in the battlefield entitled them to control the entire nation. Concerned about the intentions of Pham Van Dong, who represented the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, both Laos and Cambodia feared that the Vietminh sought to dominate all of Indochina.

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VIETNAM: THE 17TH PARALLEL

The French and the Americans distrusted one another, and the Americans considered the British, who favored an artificial division of Vietnam and wished to operate as peacemakers, too weak. The Russians and the Chinese appeared mutually hostile to one another, disproving the notion that all communists acted in unison. Moreover, Zhou Enlai, drawing on a careful reading of history, was opposed to the idea of a unified Vietnam, whether placed under colonial or Vietnamese rule. At the same time, he wanted to keep the United States out of Indochina and avoid a repetition of the Korean War, in which the Chinese suffered a million casualties. The Soviets, experiencing increasingly strained relations with China, hoped for improved dealings with the United States and adopted a less belligerent stance. Still, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden acknowledged that he had never before encountered diplomatic maneuvering of this sort: “The parties would not make direct contact, and we were in constant danger of one or another backing out the door.”3 The United States apparently had little desire or few hopes that a peaceful resolution of the conflict without communist control over all of Indochina could be achieved in Geneva. Secretary of State Dulles fired off instructions to the U.S. delegation on May 12, ordering them, in effect, not to deal with representatives from China or other governments that the United States refused to recognize. Dulles also ordered American delegates to present themselves as representatives of an “interested nation” only, not as a “belligerent or a principal.” American participation in Geneva, Dulles continued, resulted from a desire to help nations in Southeast Asia “peacefully to enjoy territorial integrity and political independence under stable and free governments.” The United States remained adverse to peoples in those countries being “amalgamated into the Communist bloc of imperialistic dictatorship.” Furthermore, the United States opposed any action that would result in the subverting of “the existing lawful governments” of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.4 Pham Van Dong continued to press the case of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, demanding that a political settlement

Geneva, 1954

resulting in a withdrawal of French forces and enabling the Vietnamese to chart their own course be arrived at first. At the same time, he called for the Pathet Lao and the Free Khmer guerrilla forces, backed by the Vietminh in Laos and Cambodia, respectively, to be accorded legal recognition and allowed to remain in control of the land they dominated. Only a week and a half into the conference, however, a Chinese deputy informed a French delegate that his nation was determined to help bring about peace in the region and to avoid supporting the Vietminh. Zhou Enlai soon told both Eden and the French diplomat, Georges Bidault, that he did not favor Vietminh control of bordering states. By some accounts, Zhou also warned Ho Chi Minh, the communist leader of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, that Chinese economic assistance would be decreased unless the Vietminh adopted a more conciliatory tone in Geneva. On June 17, Pierre Mendes-France, recently named prime minister of France, promised the French National Assembly that he would strive to bring the war in Indochina to an end. In fact, he informed those in attendance, “My government will give itself—and its adversaries—four weeks.... If no satisfactory solution can be achieved by then, I will resign.”5 Mendes-France asked for help from U.S. Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith, suggesting that the Americans convince the Vietnamese “that they would be wise to accept the French agreement with the Vietminh as the best agreement obtainable.”6 The appointment of Mendes-France as the French head of state caused British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to advise President Eisenhower that the new French leader “has made up his mind to clear out on the best terms available.” Given France’s past reliance on “untrustworthy local troops,” Churchill continued, “I think he is right.”7 Churchill then suggested the formation of a military alliance for Southeast Asia similar to the one founded in 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which the United States, Canada, and a number of Western European states had joined. Dulles liked this idea because he thought that such an alliance could help “keep freedom alive.”8

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Zhou Enlai informed a surprised Mendes-France that he thought “two Vietnams” might result from the conference. At the same time, he worried about the heightening of U.S. involvement in the region and insisted that his country sought only peace, held “no other ambitions [and] poses no conditions.”9 Dulles, on the other hand, worried that both Laos and Cambodia, along with southern Vietnam, might soon come under Communist domination. In the midst of the negotiations in Geneva, American diplomat Rob McClintock informed the U.S. State Department of the deterioration of relations between the French and leading figures representing the State of Vietnam. McClintock called particular attention to the agitated reaction of Ngo Dinh Diem, selected as prime minister of the State of Vietnam, and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, to French actions. As McClintock pointed out, Diem displayed “a curious blend of heroism mixed with a narrowness of view and of egotism which will make him a difficult man to deal with.” To McClintock, Diem was “a messiah without a message. His only formulated policy is to ask immediate American assistance in every form including refugee relief, training of troops and armed military intervention.”10 Ho Chi Minh’s analysis of the situation in his homeland was equally charged. In a report to the Vietnam Workers’ Party Central Committee, delivered on July 15, Ho applauded “the heroism of our armed forces and people,” in addition to “the fraternal countries and the world’s people” that had provided assistance to the resistance struggle. Ho condemned the contradictory nature of U.S.-led imperialism and dismissed Ngo Dinh Diem as an American puppet. He denounced the call for an American-sponsored military alliance for Southeast Asia, claiming that it would compel Asians to fight against other Asians. American imperialism, Ho accused, was the greatest threat to world peace.11 One of the most contentious matters confronting the representatives gathered in Geneva involved the question of where to temporarily divide Vietnam through the establishment of a border.

Geneva, 1954

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Under the terms of the Geneva Accord, the partition at the 17th parallel provided the Vietminh with the richest section of Vietnam, including control over Hanoi. Shown here in a picture taken on October 9, 1954, barefoot children run into the streets to welcome the communist Vietminh troops.

Ho Chi Minh’s representatives demanded that the division acknowledge the Vietminh’s military success, be temporary only, and lead to elections reunifying the nation within six months. At a bare minimum, they insisted that the division be drawn at the 13th parallel, only 100 miles north of Saigon. Equally recalcitrant, the French called for the separation to occur at the 18th parallel, just south of Vinh; the French ultimately accepted the 17th parallel, only miles north of Quang Tri, Khe Sanh, and Hue, as the dividing point. After Chinese pressure was brought to bear, Ho agreed to accept the French proposal that the country be divided at the 17th parallel. Referring to Zhou Enlai, an infuriated Pham Van Dong charged, “He has double-crossed us.”12

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American journalists worried that the partition at the 17th parallel provided the Vietminh with the richest section of Vietnam, including control over Hanoi and the Red River Delta. Newsweek magazine fretted, like many American policymakers, about the loss of 12 million people, along with “another 75,000 square miles of ... rich, rice-producing territory” to communist control.13 The South, the magazine noted, was headed by “divided and demoralized” forces, possessed a weaker army than that of the Vietminh, and had “always been more favorable to Ho Chi Minh than the North.”14 Despite the hostile attitudes of the American and Vietnamese delegates, the Geneva Conference produced accords during the late evening of July 20 and the early morning hours of July 21, just in time to prevent the fall of Mendes-France’s government. The final declaration noted the end of hostilities throughout Southeast Asia. This would supposedly enable Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam “to play their part, in full independence and sovereignty, in the peaceful community of nations.”15 The governments of Cambodia and Laos agreed to hold general elections in 1955, and similar elections were slated for Vietnam in July 1956. Other agreements included a prohibition against foreign troops, arms, and munitions being imported into Vietnam. In addition, there was to be no establishment of a military base controlled by a foreign state and no military alliances drawn with other nation-states. The Conference acknowledged that “the military demarcation line is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary.”16 Undersecretary of State Smith confirmed that his government was not prepared to offer full support for the agreement. Rather, the United States delivered its own interpretation of the accords. It would view “with grave concern” any violation of the provisions devised by the Conference, the American government warned.17 Britain’s Anthony Eden dismissed the American response as “unreasonable.”18 On July 22, Ngo Dinh Diem condemned the decision to cede “to the Communists all the north and more than four provinces of the central part” of Vietnam.

Geneva, 1954

Diem refused to accept what he called “the seizure by Soviet China—through its satellite the Vietminh—of over half of our national territory.”19 That day, Dulles told a gathering of the National Security Council in Washington, D.C., that the Vietminh had elected to compromise; the Vietminh believed that they would gradually obtain what they really desired. Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the brother of the Secretary of State, worried that Diem faced a host of problems in South Vietnam, where, he pointed out, the partition had made the French highly unpopular. The Geneva Accords resolved little, in the end, by setting up an arbitrary border at the 17th parallel. The agreement amounted to, as Canadian diplomat John Holmes indicated, a “nasty bargain accepted by all parties as the only way to avoid a dangerous confrontation.”20 Still unresolved were the very issues that had produced the French Indochina War, and both the United States and the State of Vietnam expressed considerable misgivings about the actual agreement. Nevertheless, the Eisenhower administration, undoubtedly recalling developments in Korea, reasoned that the temporary partition provided a chance to create a viable anticommunist government in the area south of the 17th parallel. Also fortunate, from the perspective of Secretary of State Dulles, was the fact that the accords allowed both Laos and Cambodia to emerge as independent states. Moreover, Dulles recognized that the demands of the communist representatives had hardly been unreasonable given the communists’ position on the battlefield. Such a development had taken place, Dulled rationalized, because of concerns that failing to placate the United States would increase the possibility of a larger war unfolding. The Vietminh and the French were not thoroughly pleased with the accords, either. The Vietminh seethed that their military triumphs had not been matched by successes in the diplomatic realm while still anticipating that reunification elections would enable them to establish control over all of Vietnam. The

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French continued to hope that French rule in southern Vietnam, particularly in Saigon and the Mekong Valley, could be maintained. Thus, the setting of an arbitrary border at the 17th parallel hardly settled long-standing issues relating to Vietnamese nationalism and attempts by other states to establish control over Vietnam.

2 Vietnamese History

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rcheological discoveries indicate that Vietnam was inhabited possibly half a million years ago. People on Vietnamese soil may have employed agricultural techniques 9,000 years in the past in a way few others did at that time. Approximately 3,000 years ago, the Red River Delta boasted a sophisticated civilization rooted in wet rice production and trade with other peoples. Soon, the kingdom of Van Lang, whose Hong Bang Dynasty existed for more than two millennia, emerged. Eventually dwelling in the southern section of the Red River Delta were the Lac Viet, who joined with other groups of Viet peoples to establish the government of Au Lac, an aristocratic and agriculturally based state whose capital was situated in the north at Co Lao, close to the Chinese border. Dynastic struggles in neighboring China led to the formation of the kingdom of Vietnam (or Nam Viet), with its capital of Canton, by Chinese General Chao T’o. The general, whose name in Vietnamese was Trieu Da, crushed the military forces of Au Lac, taking control of the Red River area. After his death, the Han Dynasty, from China, vanquished Vietnam in 111 B.C., making it part of the Chinese empire. Almost immediately, it became clear that the Vietnamese were not willing to accept such external control, no matter the territorial borders involved. This was especially true if others attempted to build arbitrary borders for Vietnam. Initially, China remained content to allow local tribal figures to maintain control of Vietnam. As the Common Era (the period dating to the birth of Jesus Christ) began, however, Chinese immigration into Vietnam mounted, as did the appearance of Chinese administrators. Those officials attempted to introduce more Chinese practices and institutions in a deliberate effort to transform Vietnam, which they considered backward. The Chinese incorporated new agricultural techniques, relying on plows and draft animals to cultivate rice paddies. They also used advanced irrigation and flood control systems. Such changes increased food production and resulted in a population boom. The Vietnamese themselves employed an intricate system of dams, dikes, and canals to take advantage of the Red River.

Vietnamese History

Despite the economic and technological improvements ushered in by the Chinese, the Vietnamese demonstrated a reluctance to accept political domination by their northern neighbors. In the year 39, Trung Trac and her sister, Trung Nhi, spearheaded a temporarily successful uprising against Chinese rule. As defeat approached, rather than submit to the Chinese, the sisters drowned themselves in a river. Over the course of the next several centuries, other revolts took place, drawing on the legend of the two women who had battled against a mighty imperial force. Despite repeated stirrings of Vietnamese nationalism that suggested the need for national borders, China held onto Vietnam for a full millennium. The Chinese set up a mandarin system to run the government bureaucracy by appointing a group of Vietnamese landlords to relatively low-level administrative positions. Serving as public officials or civil servants, these administrators (mandarins) began to adopt the dialect and style of the Chinese, who viewed the Vietnamese as barbarians. In the villages, Chinese rituals and practices supplanted those of the Vietnamese, and the educational system drew from Confucian works, which emphasized the need for social loyalty and obedience. Still, the majority of Vietnamese held to the older customs and ways, ensuring a divide between the countryside and provincial towns. With the passage of time, Vietnamese mandarins grew increasingly resentful of Chinese hegemony (dominance). Finally, they aligned with peasants, who were suffering from crushing taxation, to revolt against their Chinese overlords. This occurred in the tenth century, when the T’ang Dynasty was increasingly in disarray. In A.D. 939, the Vietnamese, guided by Ngo Quyen, ousted the Chinese, and the reestablished state of Nam Viet refused to pay tribute to China. Early in the following century, the Ly Dynasty emerged and soon pushed Vietnamese boundaries southward beyond the Red River Delta. All the while, the Vietnamese called on Confucian practices to help centralize government. The economy thrived, too, thanks to agricultural pursuits, commercial transactions, and handicrafts.

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In the late thirteenth century, the Tran Dynasty—which had supplanted another Vietnamese dynasty, the Ly—faced a growing threat from Mongols who had created a new Chinese dynasty. In a display of resistance, the Vietnamese twice held back the powerful Mongol invaders. Leading the defense of his homeland was the Vietnamese hero Tran Hung Dao. In 1407, Vietnam suffered another assault by the Chinese, this time triggered by the Ming Dynasty, which was angered by the Vietnamese refusal to pay tribute. Although the Chinese army prevailed, the reign lasted only two decades and faced continuous Vietnamese guerrilla activity. In 1428, Le Loi, who had recently proclaimed himself king, forced a Chinese withdrawal after relying on guerrilla strikes. A famous Vietnamese poem heralded the triumph: Henceforth our country is safe. Our mountains and rivers begin life afresh. Peace follows war as day follows night. We have purged our shame for a thousand centuries. We have regained tranquility for ten thousand generations.21

The new emperor undertook a series of major changes in Vietnamese society, including the redistribution of the land of large estate holders who had supported the Chinese. Peasants were provided with land, had their rents reduced, and saw legal restrictions lightened. The Le bureaucracy increased the reliance on Confucian tenets, and the Hong Duc Code helped establish the principle of rule of law. The Le Dynasty also continued a hard-fought battle with the Indianized kingdom of Champa, which flourished in Vietnam’s central highlands until the sixteenth century. Gradually, the Vietnamese proceeded southward, eventually taking control of the Cham capital at Vijaya in 1471. That development, coupled with the weakening of the Le Dynasty, led to a new struggle for power that pitted the Trinh family against the Nguyen family. The Trinh became dominant in the North, and the Nguyen controlled the South, moving to extend Vietnamese control

Vietnamese History

throughout the Mekong Delta. As the Khmer empire of Angkor weakened in Cambodia, the migration of farmers into newly acquired territories cemented Vietnamese dominance. Over the course of four centuries, the Vietnamese conducted a long march southward, seeking more land to provide for their growing population. It was increasingly clear that Vietnamese nationalists were unwilling to accept any arbitrary borders that prevented their takeover of the entire landscape all the way south to the South China Sea. Section by section, the movement continued, with the Vietnamese establishing settlements along the way. The Vietnamese cultivated rice until food supplies were depleted, before moving onto the next river valley. With the completion of the long march southward, Vietnam extended more than 1,200 miles from north to south in an “S” or snakelike fashion. Potentially rich rice-bearing deltas existed along the Red River in the North and the Mekong River in the South, and extensive mountain chains coursed over the national landscape. Most of Vietnam was forested or covered by jungle, with pockets of ethnic tribes residing on highlands. The expansion of Vietnam continued until the close of the eighteenth century, which coincided with another dynastic struggle pitting the Nguyen family against the Trinh. This conflict concluded with the triumph of Prince Nguyen Anh, who came to be known as the Emperor Gia Long. The emperor took control of Hanoi and set up his capital in Hue, located along Vietnam’s central coastline nearly 50 miles from what became the 17th parallel. Gia Long governed in the typical fashion of many Vietnamese leaders, cementing his reign over the country as a whole while acceding to local control provided that his rule was unquestioned. That was in keeping with the Vietnamese tradition of having imperial rule stop at the village gate. At the same time, Gia Long clearly appeared to possess the requisite “mandate of heaven,” or approval from divine forces. This powerful Confucian concept was derived from the Chinese, who believed, as did the Vietnamese, that a ruler’s hold on power could be lost if corruption or despotism prevailed or if there were a failure to attend to the people’s basic needs.

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***** Gia Long possessed an insular attitude about Vietnamese involvement with the West, but he did allow French missionaries to remain in Vietnam. The French were not the first Westerners to come to Southeast Asia: a Portuguese ship had landed in Malaya in the early sixteenth century. Within a matter of decades, Spanish, Dutch, French, and English seamen could be found on the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Some Westerners came to trade with the people of the region, and others were determined to conduct missionary enterprises. The first Western ship to appear in Vietnam landed in 1535, when a Portuguese boat headed into the Bay of Danang. Shortly thereafter, Portugal established a trading station in Faifo (later called Hoi An), just south of Danang. By the early seventeenth century, additional European trading posts could be found along the seaboard. That period also saw the first group of Jesuit missionaries—fresh from the Portuguese colony in Macao—arrive in Faifo. Within a short while, however, French churchmen, led by Alexander of Rhodes, began to supplant the Portuguese. That scholar’s impact on Vietnamese history was considerable because he trained Vietnamese to become Catholic priests and introduced the Roman alphabet to Vietnam. These endeavors became controversial as concerns spread that Catholicism endangered Confucian principles and even allegiance to Vietnamese rulers. Edicts barred proselytizing by Christians; many missionaries faced expulsion, and some suffered an even harsher fate. For a period, European involvement in Vietnam slackened noticeably, but the dynastic squabbles of the latter stages of the eighteenth century again afforded an opportunity for the French to make inroads. The backing of a French bishop, Pigneau de Behaine, helped bring about the defeat of the Trinh. Nevertheless, Gia Long refused to give the French preferred trade relations, as would his successor, Minh Mang. Indeed, Minh Mang proved to be more heavy handed in his dealings with Christian missionaries than Gia Long had been, and he persecuted Vietnamese who had converted to Catholicism.

Vietnamese History

The treatment of both missionaries and Vietnamese Catholics provided a justification for a French incursion (hostile entrance into a territory) into Vietnam at mid-century. Perhaps even more influential were French traders who sought expanded commercial opportunities in Southeast Asia and worried about losing out on the China market to the British. At the same time, the Nguyen Dynasty’s appeal had lessened among its own people because of corruption, land inequities, and resulting peasant unrest. Thus, from two perspectives, the mandate of heaven held by Nguyen rulers appeared increasingly shaky. Then, repression suffered by Catholic missionaries in Hue led to demands that the French protect those religious emissaries and the Vietnamese who had adopted the faith. Consequently, in 1857, the government in Paris instructed a French boat to take control of Danang until France’s demands were met. The action was undertaken the following summer but proved unsuccessful when a hoped-for peasant revolt failed to materialize. Watching as disease afflicted his men, Admiral Charles Rignault de Genouilly abandoned his intention to move against the capital city of Hue. “Everything here tends toward ruin,” he declared.22 Eventually, in 1861, de Genouilly, calling on 70 ships and 3,500 soldiers, decided to capture the southern city of Saigon. The French soon took control of larger sectors of territory and, in 1862, compelled Emperor Tu Duc (reign: 1847–1883) to agree to the Treaty of Saigon, which resulted in three provinces in the area ceded to France, three ports opened up to French boats, and priests allowed to conduct missionary work. Tu Duc also relinquished Vietnam’s claims to Cambodia, which the French would soon assume. From 1863 to 1867, the French carried out a series of military actions in the Mekong River Delta region. At the end of this period, they formed the colony of Cochinchina. Thus, the French began carving out new arbitrary borders, much to the dismay of Tu Duc and other Vietnamese nationalists. These proved to be not only territorial in scope, but political, cultural, and economic as well. Tu Duc’s attempts to ward off the French were weakened by divisions that existed among the Vietnamese. He decided to

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THE EMPEROR TU DUC Continuing the Nguyen Dynasty, Tu Duc was the last emperor of independent Vietnam, ruling from 1847 to 1883. He was also the one who witnessed his nation fall increasingly under the control of the French as they created arbitrary borders on Indochinese soil. Born in 1829, Tu Duc witnessed the reign of his grandfather, Minh Mang, and his father, Thieu Tri, whose persecution of foreign missionaries and Vietnamese Catholics provided a justification for French encroachments. Almost immediately after his rule began, Tu Duc faced challenges from French military leaders and forces, which he attempted to resist. He also wrestled with the issue of modernization, a phenomenon his immediate predecessors had avoided as much as possible. Ultimately, Tu Duc, who was compelled to accept borders arbitrarily drawn by the French, presided over the dismemberment of much of his homeland. Tu Duc’s reign was one of the lengthiest in the Nguyen Dynasty but was troubled throughout because of strife among Vietnamese nobles, conflicting ideas about modernization, and French challenges to Vietnam’s national autonomy. The first Vietnamese provinces to fall victim to French control were found in southern Vietnam, the area the French referred to as Cochinchina. A treaty signed in 1862 acknowledged French sovereignty over Cochinchina, including Saigon, and two decades later, France took hold of the rest of Vietnam. Beginning in August 1883, French forces attacked Hue, in central Vietnam—the territory referred to as Annam—and Hanoi in the northern sector known as Tonkin. A month before a treaty ceding this land to the French was signed, Tu Duc died of natural causes. He was devastated by the turn of events in his homeland and reportedly cursed the French at the end of his life. The imperial court proclaimed that sorrow resulted in Tu Duc’s death. Vietnamese nationalists were encouraged to avenge him and to quash French efforts to devise arbitrary borders for Vietnam.

negotiate with the French in part so that his forces could subdue peasants in the North who were battling against mandarins they considered corrupt. He also ordered an emissary to the United States in 1873 in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain assistance against French colonialism.

Vietnamese History

The French continued to make demands on the Vietnamese. In 1873, local officials began harassing a French gunrunner, Jean Dupuis. Subsequently, Dupuis put together a band of Europeans and Asians to protect his interests and asked for support from Admiral Jules-Marie Dupré, the governor of Cochinchina. Spotting an opportunity to extend French dominion, Dupre sent military forces to link up with Dupuis and grab hold of Hanoi. Opposition to this action arose in Paris, leading to a withdrawal after the Vietnamese government’s acknowledgement of French control of Cochinchina. As demands again arose for expanded commercial markets in Vietnam, there was another campaign to extend French control. After a Chinese contingent arrived in northern Vietnam at the request of the Vietnamese court, Captain Henri Riviere and his band of 200 soldiers swept into Hanoi and the Red River Delta. The death of Emperor Tu Duc afforded still more opportunities to subjugate the Vietnamese, leading to a treaty, signed in August 1883, that established a French protectorate over the whole area. China relinquished any claims to sovereignty over Vietnam. Within 10 years, the French added control over the kingdom of Laos. In the process, France devised a series of arbitrary borders that appeared to contradict the general pattern of the history of Vietnam and the Vietnamese people’s ingrained sense of nationalism that soon forces clashed with the imperialist designs of the French.

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3 French Colonization

French Colonization

W

ith the end of the nineteenth century fast approaching, French domination of Indochina, as exemplified by the shaping of arbitrary borders, was more fully in place. The French undertook a concerted effort to quash Vietnamese resistance and, in the process, to eliminate a sense of national identity long held by the people they were subjugating. The Vietnamese were deliberately referred to as “Annamites,” and the French refused to mention the name “Vietnam” and divided the country itself into three distinct regions. Northern Vietnam, including the Red River Delta area, came to be known as “Tonkin.” The nation’s central province, which contained Hue and Danang, was called “Annam.” Vietnam’s southern sector, which held the Mekong River Delta territory, was tagged with the label “Cochinchina.” The French then established the Indochinese Union, which included the protectorates of Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina, along with the formerly sovereign states of Laos and Cambodia. The French determination to exercise control over Indochina was in keeping with the pattern of European imperialism that flourished throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. The French considered it essential to expand their colonial wings in order to compete with other great European powers, including Britain, Germany, and Russia. Social Darwinist thought, with the belief that nations, like plant and animal life, had to compete strenuously or be left behind, prevailed. Another key idea propelling French imperialism and that of other European actors, along with the United States, was the “white man’s burden.” This was the notion that people of European ancestry had a duty to care for their less fortunate and less capable “little brown brothers”—as top American policymakers referred to them—found across the globe. God had supposedly ordained this development to ensure that progress, civilization, and Christian beliefs would be transmitted worldwide. The French, for their part, spoke of the need to conduct a mission civilisatrice, or civilizing mission, in Indochina. Economic designs also often guided the European and American forces that envisioned expanded market and investment

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opportunities in the far-flung corners of the planet. Throughout the world the architects of imperialism drew up arbitrary borders, as in Vietnam, in keeping with their colonial aspirations. Ultimately, those agents of Western-style imperialism proved incapable of controlling, let alone quashing altogether, nationalism in other lands. As French soldiers arrived in Vietnam, so too did civilians who supplied those troops. Others soon followed suit, including traders, farmers, various business operators, bankers, editors, physicians, and government officials. In the typical fashion of colonialists, these Frenchmen sought to benefit themselves more than the empire itself. Demands from French colons (colonial farmers or plantation owners) could prove as troublesome for governors-general as Vietnamese resisters, at least on occasion. At a minimum, the provincial nature of the colons ensured that France never truly carved out a long-term plan for Vietnam. Of little help was the fact that many of the French administrators sent to Vietnam were not of the finest caliber and often proved susceptible to corruption and bribery. All the while, the levels of bureaucracy mounted, with one Frenchman complaining that England possessed colonies for commercial purposes whereas France did so to provide jobs for bureaucrats. The burden of such bureaucracy fell most heavily on the Vietnamese, who were saddled with heavy taxation to cover part of the costs of French governance. The poorest peasants paid taxes at 33 times the rate of wealthy colons. Calling on a poll, head, or “body tax,” which the Trinh family had initiated in the early years of the eighteenth century, the French increased the amount demanded of each man in Tonkin fivefold. Those employed by the French and the Vietnamese who collaborated with them paid no such tax; Europeans residing in Vietnam, who saw themselves as forming a new aristocracy, received a similar exemption. The Vietnamese faced additional tax burdens, with levies placed on paddy rice, rice wine, and land. To ensure that sufficient funds were derived from the wine tax, French administrators required

French Colonization

each province to purchase a certain amount of wine. If provinces failed to meet their quotas, local officials were punished. Also afflicting the Vietnamese, particularly poor peasants, was the land tax, which could take as much as one-fifth of a peasant’s annual harvest. When harvests were sparse, peasants sold their land for next to nothing, enabling wealthy purchasers to acquire the property; those large landholders then exploited the labor of the peasants. Adding to the misery of the peasants—the vast bulk of the Vietnamese populace—was the corruption in which officials engaged. With the advent of French colonialism, local administration rapidly deteriorated. Previously, a rigorous examination system produced well-qualified officials who adhered to Confucian precepts. When the French marched into Vietnam, many of those officials refused to collaborate with the European colonialists. Less well-trained and often less honest figures came to replace them. With the passage of time, the situation became even worse as a relatively high percentage of these newer officials became addicted to opium, one of the government monopolies. Those officials acted as “contractors” for the French, or so Paul Doumer, who became governor-general of French Indochina in 1897, determined. ***** A former cabinet official, Doumer sought to convert Indochina into a profitable concern for the French, something that had not happened for the previous 40 years. Doumer wanted to centralize administration, produce balanced books, and quash guerrilla activity. He resorted to direct taxation of his colonial subjects and obtained additional revenue from a high tariff rate and through the sale of licenses for state-directed monopolies on opium, rice alcohol, and salt, which was used for food preservation; the monopolies generated nearly three-quarters of the general revenue. Some of the funds were employed to establish an extensive transportation infrastructure involving

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Soon after they had secured their rule in Indochina, the French began to mistreat the native people. In 1926, when this photograph was taken, there were many large rubber plantations in the province of Bie Hao, French Indochina. Landless peasants by the thousands went to work in these plantations. These shown are pouring rubber sap into large vats by hand.

roads, bridges, railroads, and ports. To encourage economic exploitation of southern Vietnam, Doumer sold large plots of land to wealthy colons and Vietnamese, resulting in the emergence of a considerable number of landless tenants. Rice production soared, enabling Vietnam to become the third-greatest exporter of the crop by the late 1930s. All this resulted from massive exploitation of the general Vietnamese populace. As Vietnam turned into a leading exporter of rice, rice consumption among the Vietnamese plummeted dramatically, decreasing 30 percent over a four-decade period when the population increased 80 percent; much of this decrease occurred with the unfolding of the severe depression of the

French Colonization

1930s. One report issued during World War II described the deteriorating condition of the Vietnamese people: “It is only in periods of intense agricultural labor, which means during onethird of the year and particularly during the harvest, that the people have enough to eat.”23 Landless peasants, either by choice or, much more frequently, through conscription (forced labor, in this instance), toiled in mines, plantations, and construction projects of various sorts headed by French engineers and foremen. Rubber plantations, including those run by Michelin, enforced horrific working conditions and had high disease rates. To maintain workforces, French employers turned to Vietnamese agents, who were paid for each worker they signed to extended contracts that could not be declined. The French treated reluctant Vietnamese like deserters from military service. The building of the Trans-Indochina Railroad from Saigon to Hanoi, which took 40 years to construct, not the 10 years initially anticipated, required 80,000 workers, who labored on mountains, in rivers, and through jungles. The price they paid was enormous, with accidents and disease taking the lives of nearly one-third of that workforce. Workers were yanked away from their families, saddled with fines for not laboring diligently enough, and physically abused by their overseers. Workdays were lengthy, the laborers were ill-fed, and medical care was generally not provided. In the end, the project they participated in, like so many others Doumer devised, demonstrated little careful thought on his part. The Trans-Indochina Railroad, for example, effectively replicated an already-existing path, which peasants often preferred. Highways likewise benefited tourists, not the Vietnamese people. As economic oppression befell the Vietnamese, the French tightened their political grip. Doumer established direct control over Tonkin, centralized French rule in Annam, and reigned in colons and their government allies in Cochinchina; all of these provinces involved the establishement of arbitrary borders, not always of the territorial variety. Doumer terminated Vietnamese

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PAUL DOUMER The governor-general of Indochina from 1897 to 1902, Paul Doumer was the embodiment of French colonization in the region and the leading advocate of the establishment of arbitrary borders to lengthen imperial control. Striving to make Indochina a profitable enterprise for France, Doumer attempted to tighten the existing colonial bureaucracy while improving the economic condition of French Indochina. This resulted in a job freeze and a campaign to curb administrative expenses, causing a Paul Doumer was the governor-general on centralized treasury to take control of Indochina from 1897–1902. He lived in colonial budgets. Hanoi and oversaw French rule of Under Doumer’s watch, taxes fell Cochinchina and the protectorates of heavily on the Vietnamese populace, Annam, Tonkin, Cambodia, and Laos. causing a great deal of resentment, as did his extension of the infrastructure in the form of roads, bridges, and railroads, which relied heavily on the forced labor of often overworked and diseaseriddled Vietnamese peasants. The French government’s monopolistic hold on salt, opium, and alcohol also wore down the Vietnamese, many of whom labored in coal mines and on rice plantations. Doumer’s government sponsored the use of opium by the Vietnamese and ran a modern refinery in Saigon that produced prepared opium fit for smoking by more affluent purchasers. The government also set up government dens and shops where poorer workers could acquire the drug. Opium use mushroomed, as did levels of addiction. The collected revenues resulted in a budgetary surplus, the first in more than a decade. Doumer thus was able to expand his public works program and to obtain a large loan that helped with the building of hospitals and schools. Doumer witnessed the establishment of the Ecole Française d’Extreme-Orient—which first appeared in Saigon in 1898—to offer an opportunity for elite education. Residing in Hanoi, Doumer oversaw French rule of Cochinchina and the protectorates of Annam, Tonkin, Cambodia, and Laos. Doumer determinedly guided a policy of pacification designed to eradicate guerrilla insurgencies, which challenged the placement of the arbitrary borders that he helped create.

French Colonization

authority in the northern and central provinces by removing from the mandarins the power to collect taxes. Doumer effectively bought off the emperor, providing him with a substantial annual allowance, and he converted the mandarins into ill-paid colonial employees. The French governor-general replaced the emperor’s secret council in Annam, which was made up of Vietnamese, with a council made up of equal numbers of French and Vietnamese members. Doumer attempted to keep a handle on the French colons in Indochina, and his departure in 1902 enabled them to reassert their dominion throughout the region. The colons continued to favor economic enterprises designed for quick profits. Rice farming, coffee, tea, and rubber all offered such a possibility, as did the extraction of mineral resources. The colons proved far more interested in such pursuits than in various types of heavy industry, with the exception of coal mines located near Haiphong. Consequently, rich opportunities were lost, with neither rubber factories nor steel plants established in Vietnam. The French did take certain steps to modernize Vietnam. Administrators introduced Western educational practices and theories but ultimately offered such instruction only to members of the Vietnamese elite and then only haphazardly at best. The large majority of citizens generally failed to acquire even that kind of exposure to Western culture. Vietnamese schooling and literacy actually thrived more fully before French colonization. A reported 20,000 schools existed in Tonkin and Annam, and private tutoring by individual families was carried out in villages. One Vietnamese researcher contended that a pair of schools could be found in each village, resulting in an even higher literacy rate in the country than in cities and towns. Eventually, the scholar gentry insisted that the French adopt certain educational reforms. Nevertheless, even at the end of World War I, only one out of 10 Vietnamese children attended Franco-Vietnamese schools. At the onset of World War II, a mere 14 secondary schools and one lone university could be found in Vietnam. Thus, in the

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educational realm, as in so many others, the French devised additional arbitrary borders that worked against the best interests of the Vietnamese. In a similar fashion, the French promised to bring economic prosperity to Vietnam and to elevate living standards of the general populace. In the end, however, it became increasingly clear that such improved economic conditions were limited, and numerous Vietnamese clamored for independence. Pockets of commercial and industrial enterprise did flourish in various areas, including the largest urban areas, provincial capitals, and market towns. Light industry associated with textiles, paper, and sugar thrived in particular. Infrastructural improvements also occurred, with bridge construction allowing passage over important waterways, railroads built across much of Vietnam, and Southeast Asia’s most noteworthy series of metaled roads laid out. Also, French agricultural techniques increased the amount of acreage under cultivation. In the Mekong Delta region, marshlands were drained and canals devised, and the French turned to cash crops along the border with Cambodia; these included coffee, tea, and rubber produced on labor-intensive plantations run by the French. Absentee landlords often controlled the new lands opened up in the Mekong Delta, saddling poor peasants, who had recently migrated from northern and central Vietnam, with high rents. Then, as agriculture became commercialized, many who had worked the land lost their jobs and ended up working in factories in cities or relegated to laboring in coal mines or on plantations. To a large extent, a Vietnamese business class involved with either commerce or manufacturing failed to develop, and the French actively discouraged the emergence of native industry. The result was a very skewed pattern of modernization that proved unsettling to many Vietnamese, including an important segment of the small but increasingly disenchanted elite. A lack of economic and political opportunities, coupled with the severe exploitation of the Vietnamese people, produced considerable resentment about French colonization. Thanks to Vietnam’s

French Colonization

long-standing nationalistic traditions, resistance to French rule inevitably sprouted, and, in the end, Doumer’s determination to eradicate guerrilla activity provided seeds for still greater discord. The brutal treatment of Vietnamese rebels did not make the French popular with the people they had colonized, and the carving up of Vietnam and all of Indochina with arbitrary borders did not help. Vietnamese nationalists refused to accept the shaping of the distinct provinces of Cochinchina, Annam, and Tonkin.

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Vietnamese Resistance

T

he severity of French colonization, as exemplified by the debilitating nature of forced labor, crushing levels of taxation, and a brutal pacification campaign, soon resulted in new anticolonial efforts. After decades of colonial government, Vietnamese nationalists called on the historic tradition of resisting outside rule, and newer ideas as well, in urging their countrymen to expel the French and overcome the arbitrary borders Doumer and other French administrators had set and maintained. In addition to the physical borders creating Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina, social and economic borders existed that reduced the vast majority of Vietnamese to a servile status in relation to French colonialists. Such differentiated treatment led to protracted battles against French control during the first several decades of the twentieth century, through two world wars, and into the Cold War. In the last stages of the previous century, French colonialists grappled with a series of irregular forces (those not belonging to an organized or official group), including Chinese ones based in Tonkin called the Black Flags. Both the Chinese and Vietnamese imperial courts offered at least tacit support to those guerrillas. After the death of a French captain in Tonkin, CommissionerGeneral Jules Harmand coldly warned the Vietnamese, We could, for we have the means, destroy your dynasty from top to bottom down to its very roots, and seize for ourselves all the kingdom as we have done in Cochinchina. You will be perfectly aware that this would present no difficulty to us. You are incapable of putting up a serious resistance to our armies ... you are at our mercy. We have the power to seize and destroy your capital and to cause you all to die of starvation. You have to choose between war and peace.24

Denying a desire to subjugate the Vietnamese, Harmand indicated that the French protectorate, with its arbitrary borders, must be accepted. This, he indicated, would result in “peace and prosperity” for the Vietnamese and offered “the only chance of survival” for the Vietnamese government and court. If this

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In the late nineteenth century, French colonialists were forced to grapple with Vietnamese guerrillas who had the tacit support of the emperor’s court.

supposedly magnanimous offer were declined, Harmand continued, “the most frightful things” would befall the Vietnamese: “The Dynasty, its Princes and its Court will have pronounced sentence on themselves. The name of Vietnam will no longer exist in history.”25 The Vietnamese emperor responded by signing a treaty establishing a protectorate in Annam and giving the French control over Tonkin. By 1885, the French had induced the Chinese to relinquish their claims to Vietnam but quickly confronted a rebellion associated with the boy emperor, Ham Nghi. Although Ham Nghi was soon captured and shipped to northern Africa, the resistance and his departure led to another movement, the Can Vuong, or Rescue the King campaign, spearheaded by the scholar Phan Dinh Phung. The Vietnamese nation had endured, Phung believed, because “the destiny of our country had been willed by Heaven itself.”26 Eventually, the French drove Phung

Vietnamese Resistance

and his depleted band of rebel fighters into the mountain area by the Laotian border, where dysentery killed the great nationalist leader in 1896. Although the administration of Paul Doumer was particularly determined to eradicate the vestiges of Vietnamese resistance, opposition to French rule never entirely dissipated. Prince Cuong De, who traced his claim to the throne to Gia Long, hoped that Japan, which was undergoing a time of rapid modernization, might provide military assistance to drive out the French colonialists in Vietnam. Japan’s stunning victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, the first example in modern times of an Asian nation defeating a major European power, provided still more hope for Vietnamese nationalists. In the first decade of the twentieth century, on the heels of Doumer’s departure from Vietnam, two great nationalists, Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh, offered contrasting approaches to expelling French colonialists and aradicating their arbitrary borders. Born in the central province of Nghe An in 1867, Phan Boi Chau began spearheading resistance efforts against the French shortly after completing his mandarin examinations with honors in 1900; his organization, Duy Tan Hoi, the Reformation Society, first appeared in 1904. Phan Boi Chau asserted that “the French treat our people like garbage.... The meek are made into slaves, the strong-minded are thrown into jail. The physically powerful are forced into the army, while the old and weak are left to die.... The land is splashed with blood.”27 Condemning antiquated feudal ways, Phan Boi Chau championed modernization. Initially, Phan Boi Chau backed the restoration of the monarchy, supporting Cuong De’s claim to the throne. After Japan’s sweeping victory over Russia, the two men decided to spend time in the rising Asian powerhouse, hoping to obtain backing for their campaign to reassert Vietnamese autonomy. Phan Boi Chau was drawn to the reformist program that the Emperor Meiji seemed to accept for Japan. Heeding the advice of the Japanese, Phan Boi Chau urged scores of young

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men to receive military and political instruction in Japan; such patriots, he hoped, would lead the fight against the French. Phan Boi Chau attempted to lead such a revolt against French rule in late 1907, but that resulted in the execution of a number of his supporters. Hoping to avoid capture by the French, Phan Boi Chau spent time in Siam but went to Canton when the Chinese Revolution of 1911 began unfolding. Attracted by Sun Yat-sen and Chinese champions of democracy, Phan Boi Chau became less desirous that the monarchy be reformed. Instead, Phan Boi Chau set up the Viet Nam Quang Phuc Hoi, the Vietnam Restoration Society, and favored the creation of a democratic republic. Phan Boi Chau suffered imprisonment from 1912 to 1917, and blame also came his way for a failed assassination attempt against the French governor-general of Indochina, Albert Sarraut. Born five years after Phan Boi Chau, Phan Chu Trinh was a member of an elite, landowning family that respected education. His father, a military officer and supporter of the Emperor Ham Nghi, had joined the Scholar’s Revolt but was murdered by other rebels, who viewed him as suspect. Phan Chu Trinh received the most advanced degree awarded to students who undertook classical studies to become mandarins, but he became disillusioned with the imperial bureaucracy shortly after meeting Phan Boi Chau and learning about the other man’s ideas. The two men, however, soon disagreed about tactics, with Phan Chu Trinh initially possessing less faith in the Vietnamese monarchy and the Japanese. Phan Chu Trinh also called for modernization, envisioned a new educational bureaucracy and legal system, and favored industrialization. In 1906, Phan Chu Trinh urged the new French governor-general, Paul Beau, to usher in such reforms, along with Western-style democracy: If the French government is really determined to treat the Annamite people more liberally, it cannot but approve my initiative and adopt my advice. It will invite me to present myself before its representatives to explain my case at ease.

Vietnamese Resistance

And on that day I will open my whole heart. I will show what we suffer and what we lack. And I dare to hope that this will mark the awakening, the resurrection of our nation.28

Phan Chu Trinh’s plea, like Phan Boi Chau’s exhortations, resonated with the Vietnamese people, who were chafing at French colonialism and the arbitrary borders that reinforced it. Some intellectuals established the Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc, or the Free School of Hanoi, hoping to foster Western and Chinese concepts of a progressive cast. Within a matter of months, however, the French shut the school down. All the while, Phan Chu Trinh continued to disagree with Phan Boi Chau’s willingness to resort to violence, instead maintaining a faith in French anticolonialists that many other Vietnamese nationalists considered naïve. Despite his nonviolent approach, however, Phan Chu Trinh was arrested by the French and charged with provoking tax revolts in Annam in 1908. Receiving a death sentence, Phan Chu Trinh ended up on the island of Con Son, where other political dissidents were sent. His release came after three years at Con Son and was followed by a stay in France, where he sharply criticized French colonial rule in Indochina. ***** Vietnam’s two greatest nationalists of the early twentieth century thus suffered exile and imprisonment during World War I. The treatment Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh received kept them from cultivating the mass support necessary to challenge French power. Another figure was also absent from Vietnam for an even greater period of time, but that did not prevent him from acquiring a reputation as his country’s leading nationalist and the one most able to expel French overlords and to obliterate the arbitrary borders that they had created. Born Nguyen Sinh Cung in Nghe An on May 19, 1890, he later called himself Nguyen Ai Quoc— Nguyen the Patriot—but became known as Ho Chi Minh.

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Densely populated and impoverished, Nghe An proved difficult to subdue, with its stubborn people referred to as the “Buffalos of Nghe An.”29 Ho continued a family tradition of battling against French rule, following the lead of his father, Nguyen Sinh Sac, a mandarin with a doctorate who backed Phan Boi Chau and lost his government job because of his nationalistic activities. Nguyen Sinh Sac repeatedly declared, “Being a mandarin is the ultimate form of slavery,” and refused to let his son take the mandarin examinations.30 His daughter, Nguyen Thi Thanh, assisted the De Tham guerrillas who were fighting the French, which resulted in her conviction for treason and a life sentence. One son, Nguyen Sinh Khiem, crafted biting letters condemning the destitute and servile condition of the Vietnamese, and Khiem’s brother Ho helped the Vietnamese underground from the time he was five years old. Among those visiting the family home were Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh. Initially, Nguyen Sinh Sac tutored Ho, now referred to as Nguyen Tat Thanh, for “he who will succeed,” in the classics. Then, Nguyen Sinh Sac enrolled his son in a local school, where his friend Vuon Thuc Qui, whose own father had been an ardent Vietnamese nationalist, taught Confucian classics but also fostered his students’ patriotism. Ho’s education was broader still, because he listened to the local blacksmith discuss the Can Vuong leader Phan Dinh Phung and other Vietnamese who fought for independence. In 1905, Ho and his brother enrolled in a Franco-Vietnamese preparatory institution located in Vinh. Later, they entered a Dong Bong upper-level elementary school, where they received instruction in Vietnamese, French, and Chinese. By the fall of 1907, the two brothers attended the Quoc Hoc or National Academy, Hue’s most prestigious Franco-Vietnamese school. While there, Ho participated in a protest movement that led a French policeman to inform this supposed troublemaker that he had been dismissed from the National Academy. In an effort to remain outside the clutches of French authorities, Ho began a lengthy odyssey that took him first throughout

Vietnamese Resistance

Annam and Cochinchina and then outside Vietnam altogether. Along the way, he took on odd jobs, even serving for a time as a teacher in Phan Thiet, where he spoke to his own students about such French philosophers as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. At the beginning of his classes, Ho led his students in reciting a poem once heard at the Hanoi Free School: Oh, Heaven! Can’t you see our suffering? The nation is in chains, languishing in grief, Foreigners have doomed it to hunger, They’re robbed it of everything it had.31

After spending some time in Saigon, Ho left Vietnam, beginning a nearly three-decade-long journey that took him to farflung lands, including both the United States and France. He boarded a French freighter that eventually docked in Marseille, briefly returned to Saigon in an attempt to see his father, and went back to Marseille, where he discovered that he had been denied admission to the Colonial School there. His exact whereabouts during this period are unknown, although he may have traveled to Paris to speak with Phan Chu Trinh. Over the course of several months, Ho passed through both Africa and Asia and then sailed for the Western Hemisphere. He may have gone to Argentina and Brazil before arriving on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Ho lived for a while in both New York City and Boston and also traveled to southern states, where he reportedly witnessed lynchings of African Americans carried out by the Ku Klux Klan. Traveling back overseas, Ho resided in London, hoping to study English there; obtained a job as a snow sweeper at a school; and then got work in the kitchens of various hotels. Eventually, he worked as an assistant to Auguste Escoffier, the renowned chef at the Carlton Hotel. Ho’s social conscience hardly abated while he was in England. He became active in union affairs, joining the secretive Overseas Workers’ Association, which was largely composed of Chinese laborers concerned about the plight of workers in British factories.

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Later, Ho indicated that he also had joined in street demonstrations supporting Irish independence and had begun to examine the writings of Karl Marx. Ho’s concerns about his own homeland remained paramount, and he wrote a series of letters to Phan Chu Trinh. At least some of these ended up in the hands of French officials, with one note indicating that Ho hoped to continue Trinh’s work. At some point, either late during World War I (1914–1918) or shortly thereafter, Ho moved to Paris. Jobs were difficult to come by, but Ho eventually became a photo retoucher, working at a shop run by Phan Chu Trinh. Ho was one of 50,000 Vietnamese then dwelling in the French capital. During the summer of 1919, Ho, supported by Trinh and Trinh’s associate, Vietnamese lawyer Phan Van Truong, established the Association des Patriotes Annamites, or the Association of Annamite Patriots. Aided by Phan Van Truong, Ho wrote a petition, “Revendications du peuple annamite,” or “Demands of the Annamite People,” which called for political autonomy for Vietnam, along with democratic liberties and an end to despised colonial practices. The signature at the bottom of the petition was that of Nguyen Ai Quoc, “Nguyen the Patriot,” the name soon associated with Ho. The petition appeared in L’Humanité, a leading radical French newspaper, and was distributed by the General Confederation of Labor, but it elicited little response from the delegates attending the Versailles Conference. Colonel House, a top adviser to United States President Woodrow Wilson, did send a pair of short replies; one indicated that the petition would be forwarded to the American head of state. Attention, desired or not, now came to Ho, who was interviewed by government officials and tailed by the French police. At a minimum, this resulted in publicity for the campaign for Vietnamese independence. Ho soon joined the ranks of the Socialist Party, believing, as he later recalled, that its members “had shown their sympathy toward me, toward the struggle of the oppressed peoples.”32 Socialism appeared to be in keeping with Confucian ideals, because of its emphasis on community

Vietnamese Resistance

and equality of both condition and opportunity. Soon, after hearing discussion of Vladimir Lenin’s “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” Ho moved further leftward. Lenin seemed to be urging western communists to link up with nationalist movements in Asia and Africa. A series of articles by Ho began appearing in left-wing publications in Paris. He denounced the educational system that the French had instituted in Vietnam, which had resulted in only a few Vietnamese being exposed to Western ideas. He began crafting a manuscript, Les opprimés, or “The Oppressed,” which condemned French policies in Southeast Asia. Police agents took hold of the manuscript, although the same theme, with a harsher Marxist quality, would appear in Ho’s 1925 book, Le procès de la colonisation française, or French Colonialism on Trial. His movement in a more radical direction led to Ho’s estrangement from his mentor, Phan Chu Trinh. By late 1920, Ho had called for the French Socialist Party to join the Communist International (Comintern). Ho now became a founding member of the French Communist Party, but he soon criticized others in the new organization for failing to support revolution in the colonial world. The people of Asia in particular, Ho believed, would gravitate toward communism. They recognized that wholesale reform of their societies was necessary and had historic ties to community concerns and the idea of social equality. A full quarter of Vietnamese farmlands, for example, remained communal. By contrast, Ho debunked the very notion of the supposed superiority of French civilization. Rather than liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French afforded the Vietnamese humiliation and subjugation. Ho continued to write articles condemning French colonialism and urging social revolution, and he remained involved in organizational work in radical circles. In 1922, he established a new journal, titled Le Paria or The Pariah, which sought to reach out to colonial people throughout the French empire. In the summer of 1923, Ho went to Moscow, where he criticized his fellow communists for failing to focus on colonial concerns. He

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served as a delegate representing Southeast Asia when the International Peasant Conference was held in Moscow in October of that year. By December, he had enrolled in classes at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. Increasingly well regarded inside the communist movement, Ho encountered several Chinese communists, including Zhou Enlai, along with Jiang Jieshi (often called Chiang Kai-shek), then acting as military adviser to Sun Yat-sen. At international conferences, Ho continued to warn those in attendance not to ignore “the fate of the oppressed peoples of the colonies.”33 Soon serving as an agent of the Comintern, Ho undertook another round of travels that took him back to China. He landed in Canton in November 1924. In the period just ahead, Ho, even more than before, began to supplant Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh as the most prominent Vietnamese nationalist who could contest the arbitrary borders that the French had imposed in Indochina. In 1925, Phan Boi Chau faced charges of sedition in Shanghai. French agents extradited him to Hanoi, where he was convicted of sedition and then placed under house arrest until his death in 1940. Phan Chu Trinh returned to Vietnam in 1925 but died the following year. The passing of these two great leaders ensured a further weakening of the scholar-gentry class. In Vietnam, the impact of the war and Western ideals helped lead to the growth of an urban middle class, with a group of young intellectuals troubled by French colonialism. Bui Quang Chieu helped establish the Constitutionalist Party, and Nguyen An Ninh set up a journal, La Cloche Felée (The Cracked Bell), which demanded even greater reforms. In the meantime, Ho continued his journeys and set up the secret Quoc Dan Dang Dong Duong, or Indochinese Nationalist Party, in February 1925. He also linked up with the Tam Tam Xa, a radical group that he hoped to convert into a Marxist-Leninist organization. Ho was instrumental in establishing the Hoi Viet Nam Cach Mang Thang Nien, or Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League, which championed both nationalism and social

Vietnamese Resistance

revolution. Within two years, he was a well-regarded figure in revolutionary circles in Canton, but he departed in 1927 as word arrived of his impending arrest by forces associated with Jiang Jieshi, now engaged in a bloody civil war with the communists. In November 1927, Ho received instructions to return to Paris to help his French comrades establish a program to assist revolutionaries in Southeast Asia. Concerns that the French police were searching for him perhaps led to the decision for Ho to head back to Asia. In mid-1928, he traveled to Siam, which was home to a large number of Vietnamese nationals and a branch of the Revolutionary Youth League. Sometime in late 1929, Ho, often in disguise at this point, got word that a court in Vinh had condemned him to death in absentia for conspiring to provoke a rebellion in central Vietnam. Competitors in the Vietnamese nationalist camp continued to surface, including those who joined the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang (VNQDD, or Vietnamese Nationalist Party), in late 1927. All the while, divisions developed within the ranks of the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League; some demanded that the fight for national independence take precedence over the quest for social revolution and others argued to the contrary. By the end of the 1920s, three competing communist organizations had appeared; Ho attempted to merge the parties. In early 1930, he called for the establishment of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP), urging that both workers and peasants lead the revolutionary struggle, something that doctrinaire communists (those who concentrated more on putting the theory into practice than on the practical difficulties involved) opposed. Ho also helped set up new communist parties in Siam and Malaya. As he did so, the revolutionary movement in Vietnam suffered severe blows after failed uprisings sparked by the VNQDD took place. Nevertheless, labor unrest occurred on plantations and in factories alike, with communist activists involved in the campaign in central Vietnam. Peasant councils called “soviets” appeared; they declared debts and taxes void, demanded a reduction of land rents, and confiscated

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communal lands. Some even more zealous peasants took over estates and assassinated landlords. In October 1930, communist delegates called for an “antiimperialist united front,” declaring that the poor and the middle class would line up with Vietnamese workers. They also changed the name of the VCP, now referring to it as the Indochinese Communist Party (Dan Cong San Dong Duong, or ICP). The intention undoubtedly was to emphasize the class struggle more than the fight for national independence, which was not to Ho Chi Minh’s liking. In contrast, he was pleased with the call for a united front, which allowed for reaching out to various classes of Vietnamese. Less encouraging was the news about the more violent treatment the insurgency received from the French. Also troubling to Ho were the terrorist strikes undertaken against the French or their supposed collaborators. Nevertheless, Ho attempted to draw attention to the plight of his countrymen in Vietnam, and he became frustrated about his inability to do more for them. The toll of French repression of activists in Vietnam was heavy, with a reported 2,000 killed by the spring of 1931 and another 51,000 detained. In June, Ho himself was arrested by British police in Hong Kong, and French authorities demanded that he be turned over to them. After a year in captivity, however, the British released him, after he promised to leave Hong Kong. In January 1933, immigration officials in Singapore grabbed Ho and returned him to the British colony. Once again, he was released, having agreed to leave Hong Kong within three days. Over the next several months, Ho spent time in Shanghai before heading back to Moscow in the spring of 1934. Somehow he avoided the dragnet initiated by Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin’s regime that proved so devastating to many communists, both Russian-born and foreigners like Ho. That same period was a difficult one for party activists throughout Vietnam, who endured police surveillance and lack of public interest. Ho attended the Seventh Congress of the Communist International held in Moscow in mid-1935, when a new party

Vietnamese Resistance

line was adopted. Now communists were urged to support Popular Front alliances with liberals and noncommunist radicals and to back anti-imperialist fronts that warned against the threat posed by Nazi Germany and Japan. Little is known about Ho’s activities during much of this period, although he did enroll at the Institute for the Study of the National and Colonial Questions. He also helped translate Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto and Lenin’s Leftism: An Infantile Disorder into Vietnamese. In September 1938, he finally left the Soviet Union and headed for China. That country was facing an onslaught from the Japanese, who had occupied Manchuria as early as 1931 and had initiated a wholesale assault against the Chinese mainland in 1937. Desperate circumstances compelled Jiang Jieshi to seek a new alliance with the communists, who were still in their Popular Front phase. Now, Ho discovered more about recent developments in Vietnam, where similar united front efforts had enabled the Indochinese Communist Party to acquire a certain respectability. Party membership had mushroomed, and new figures, including Vo Nguyen Giap and Truong Chinh, had achieved recognition. Operating out of south China, Ho produced editorials for the Notre Voix, a French-language Vietnamese newspaper that the Indochinese Communist Party put out in Hanoi. In July 1939, Ho relayed a message to a colleague in Vietnam, through which he too supported the Popular Front approach. The Communist Party, Ho wrote, should downplay its demands for national independence and highlight instead its insistence on Western-style democratic freedoms. To do otherwise, he feared, “would be to play into the hands of the Japanese fascists.” What was needed, Ho insisted, was “a broad National Democratic Front,” which would include Indochinese and “all progressive French people” residing in the region.34 This would bring together workers and members of the middle class, who would fight to vanquish arbitrary territorial, social, cultural, and economic borders that divided the Vietnamese people.

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5 Vietnam at War

Vietnam at War

I

n August 1939, the foreign ministers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact, effectively bringing the Popular Front to an end and almost immediately ushering in hostilities in Eastern Europe. After the German invasion of Poland later in 1939, Great Britain and France issued declarations of war. In Indochina, the French moved against the Indochinese Communist Party, arresting such leaders as Nguyen Van Cu and Le Duan. In June 1940, however, France surrendered to Germany, leading Ho Chi Minh to suggest that “the French defeat represents a very favorable opportunity for the Vietnamese revolution.” Consequently, he decided, “We must seek every means to return home to take advantage of it.”35 During the last months of 1940, Ho called for the establishment of another united front that would bring together Indochinese patriots who were determined to rid the region of French colonialism and the arbitrary borders France had established in Vietnam. He envisioned the unification of his native land in a manner that had been impossible since the reign of the Emperor Tu Duc. Ho suggested that the new organization be called the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, or the League for the Independence of Vietnam, which came to be referred to as the Vietminh Front. A Kuomintang military officer, Ho Hoc Lam, became chair, and Pham Van Dong, already a leading Vietnamese communist, served as vice chair. Insurgent activity emerged in both urban and rural sections of Vietnam, only to be harshly put down by the French. A number of important communist figures were executed. In early 1941, after three decades in exile, Ho Chi Minh, wearing the attire of a Chinese journalist, finally returned to Vietnam. The village of Pac Bao served as an operational base and was where Ho greeted comrades such as Pham Van Dong and Vo Nguyen Giap. During their discussions, Ho told Giap, “In about five years the revolution will be victorious and we will have a bright future. I only want to create one thing—to completely free our country and provide everyone with the necessities of life.”

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When one compatriot asked Ho how they could succeed without arms, he replied, We must rely on our own force with some outside help. When the people absorb this beautiful idea of revolution, they will create the strongest of forces. Everything because of the people; everything for the people. People first, guns last. If we have the people on our side, then we will have guns. If we have the people, we will have everything.36

These and other communist leaders gathered for a series of meetings in May and June, at which Ho presided. They decided that the Indochinese Communist Party should silence the calls for social revolution and focus on the emancipation of Vietnam from colonial rule. Party leaders were to support moderate social reforms and democratic liberties rather than the nationalization of industries or the collectivization of farming lands. To support the nationalist struggle, the party leaders sought support from Vietnamese across the social spectrum, including peasants, workers, soldiers, intellectuals, and even sympathetic merchants. Ho wrote a letter intended for a wide audience across Vietnam: National salvation is the common cause of our entire people. Every Vietnamese must take part in it.... The hour has struck. Raise aloft the banner of insurrection and lead the people throughout the country to overthrow the Japanese and the French. The sacred call of the fatherland is resounding in our ears, the ardent blood of our heroic predecessors is seething in our hearts.37

Thus, Ho pointed to another problem confronting Vietnamese nationalists: the movement of Japanese troops into Vietnam. This had occurred in Tonkin shortly after the establishment of the Vichy government in France, which collaborated with the German takeover. In July 1941, only days after the German army invaded the Soviet Union, Japanese forces headed into Annam and Cochinchina as well. The Japanese invasion, which was welcomed by some Vietnamese who thought it foreshadowed an

Vietnam at War

Ho Chi Minh spent many years fighting for Vietnamese independence. He is seen here saddling a mule for a mission against the French in 1954.

expulsion of the French, proved at least as equally brutal as that by the European occupier. Several Vietnamese who were members of two religious sects, the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, at first looked favorably on the Japanese move into Vietnam. Eventually, that enthusiasm waned, along with the sense that the Japanese truly believed in pan-Asian nationalism. Nevertheless, the Japanese thrust was important, because it helped to dispel notions regarding Western supremacy. Ho Chi Minh viewed the Japanese no more favorably than he did the French. He warned that counting on Japanese troops to fight French bureaucrats could be likened to hunting for “the tiger only to be eaten by the wolves.”38 Japanese and French forces both sought to quash radical nationalists in Vietnam, resulting in the need for sanctuaries

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across the northern border in China. The Japanese involvement also produced the first signs of American military engagement in Vietnam. The Flying Tigers of General Claire L. Chennault, who served as a military adviser to Jiang Jieshi, began targeting Japanese airbases in northern Vietnam by early 1942. President Roosevelt had other interests in mind regarding Southeast Asia, believing that European-style imperialism, particularly the kind practiced in French Indochina, should come to an end. Even before the United States entered the war, Roosevelt had joined with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in issuing the Atlantic Charter, patterned after Woodrow Wilson’s vision of his own nation as peace keeper. From Roosevelt’s vantage point, this was designed to counter isolationism in the United States and to place England on record as committed to basic American ideals, including open diplomacy, national self-determination, and unrestricted trade. The Atlantic Charter as a whole appeared to encompass the idealistic tenets associated with Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and Roosevelt’s own “Four Freedoms,” propounded in January 1941. Roosevelt frequently expressed his opposition to the restoration of French colonialism in Indochina, something he believed the people of the region also opposed. The French, he said, had been in Indochina for more than a century without bettering the situation for the people there. By 1943, Roosevelt had informed his son Elliot that he would strenuously oppose any plan to advance French imperialism. Roosevelt soon envisioned an international trusteeship for Indochina being established after the war. After all, as he saw it, “France has had the country—30 million inhabitants—for nearly one hundred years, and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning.... France has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indochina are entitled to something better than that.”39 Both Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, who headed the Free French government-in-exile that was based in London during the war, however, opposed Roosevelt’s call for decolonization. Eventually, Roosevelt turned to Jiang Jieshi, wondering if he would care to rule over postwar Indochina. Fully cognizant of

Vietnam at War

the Vietnamese antipathy to colonialism, Jiang declined the offer, declaring that his southern neighbors were “not Chinese. They would not assimilate into the Chinese people.”40 Roosevelt then called for a trusteeship that would remain in place until the people of Indochina were prepared for independence, possibly after two or three decades. The historian George Moss affirms that Roosevelt remained “anticolonialist to the core, an antiimperialist ideologue” who “especially wanted to see Vietnam free of the burden of French colonialism.”41 Other well-regarded scholars, however, including journalist Stanley Karnow and historian Robert D. Schulzinger note that on January 1, 1945, Roosevelt informed Secretary of State Edward R. Stenninus, “I still do not want to get mixed up in any military effort toward the liberation of Indochina from the Japanese.... From both the military and civilian points of view, action at this time is premature.”42 ***** During World War II, many American operatives in the field came to appreciate the guerrilla forces associated with Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, who became the leading military strategist for the Vietminh fighters. Seeking international backing for the independence struggle, Ho and another communist leader, Le Quang Ba, had returned to China in August 1942. The former now held a card identifying him as a Chinese reporter named Ho Chi Minh. Chinese police, concerned that the two might be Japanese agents, arrested them. A military court decided that Ho was a political prisoner after he acknowledged being involving with the Communist movement in Southeast Asia. Over the span of one five-month period alone, Ho was held in 18 prisons in districts throughout southern China while a leading Chinese general called for his execution. Hopes that Ho could revitalize the flagging Vietnamese nationalist movement based in southern China led to his release in September 1943. Ho became immersed in the activities of the Vietnamese

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THE VIETMINH The Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, or the League for the Independence of Vietnam, provided an organizational apparatus to battle French colonialism, Japanese occupation during World War II, and the arbitrary borders France had previously devised for Vietnam. In May 1941, the Eighth Plenum of the Indo-Chinese Communist Party established the League, whose members became known as the Vietminh. Headed by prominent communists such as Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietminh nevertheless adopted a frontlike posture to attract Vietnamese nationalists of all types. Moreover, the Communist Party deliberately downplayed the call for social revolution, emphasizing instead the need for all Vietnamese to battle against colonial oppression. The Vietminh adopted a strategy of guerrilla warfare, conducting insurgent strikes in both rural and urban sections of Vietnam. In August 1945, the Vietminh helped spark the August Revolution, which resulted in the proclamation of Vietnamese independence and the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. From 1946 to 1954, the Vietminh fought against the French, a conflict that concluded with one of the century’s most important battles, which occurred at Dienbienphu. After the Geneva Accords of 1954, the Vietminh heeded calls to lay down their arms, which resulted in the capture and execution of many by soldiers and government agents associated with Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime in South Vietnam. Nevertheless, Vietminh veterans began to urge peasants to take land from the gentry throughout the Mekong Delta area and the rest of the territory in Vietnam situated south of the 17th parallel. Eventually, Vietminh forces would be reconstituted as members of the National Liberation Front once another guerrilla war—this one—waged against Diem and his American backers, broke out. That war continued the fight to overcome arbitrary borders, both long-standing and new, afflicting Vietnam.

Revolutionary League, known as the Viet Nam Cach Mihn Dong Minh Hoi. He also sought to befriend American officers operating in Liuzhou on behalf of the Office of War Information. By August 1944, Chinese General Zhang Fakui had decided that Ho could best lead the fight against the Japanese in Vietnam.

Vietnam at War

While Ho was away in China, his colleagues in Vietnam sought to build bases for the revolutionary struggle, particularly in the north; they also attempted to revitalize their cadre in the central and southern parts of the country. In July 1944, Vo Nguyen Giap called for guerrilla insurrections that would lead to the liberation of various territories. Other communist leaders worried about a possible French counteroffensive. They also questioned whether guerrilla fighters could battle against both the French and the Japanese. When Ho returned from China, he argued that a wholesale insurrection at present could prove disastrous. “The phase of peaceful revolution has passed,” he acknowledged, “but the hour of the general insurrection has not yet sounded.”43 He rejected Giap’s call for the establishment of a people’s liberation army, but Ho agreed that the first stages toward creating such a military force should be undertaken. In late December, the Vietnamese Liberation Army began to emerge. By that point, Ho and the Vietminh had begun to develop something of a sort of relationship with American operatives. This followed the rescue of a downed American pilot, Lieutenant Rudolph Shaw, who been forced to parachute near the border separating Vietnam from its formidable northern neighbor. Vietminh forces handed Shaw over to Ho, who greeted him warmly and agreed to help the American officer reach the Chinese border. The two men traveled together to Kunming, where the U.S. 14th Air Force was headquartered. As they traveled, the Japanese carried out a coup in early March, resulting in the expulsion of the French regime. Ho informed his new American allies about the Japanese grab for power: “The French imperialist wolf was finally devoured by the Japanese fascist hyena.”44 Ho met up with Charles Fenn, a Marine lieutenant, who reported that the Vietminh leader desired “only recognition of his group,” in addition to “arms and medicines,” in return for helping gather intelligence information about Japanese movements in the region.45 Fenn set up a meeting with Ho for General Chennault, who thanked him for helping rescue

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Lieutenant Shaw. Then, in Paise, located in Guangxi province, Ho encountered another American intelligence officer, Archimedes Patti, of the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS: the precursor to the CIA), who was ready to work with the Vietminh. Ho agreed to track Japanese troop movements, to help any downed American pilots or escaped prisoners of war, and to provide guerrilla fighters who would assist on sabotage missions. The OSS promised to deliver radios, several thousand guns, and ammunition to the Vietminh. French intelligence agents in Kunming had spoken critically about Ho, calling him “fearless, sly, clever, powerful, deceptive, ruthless—and deadly.”46 The Americans, however, were impressed with Ho’s intelligence apparatus and his guerrilla forces, with one OSS member declaring, “They had an uncanny ability to learn and adapt. They learned to pull a rifle apart and put it together again after being shown only a couple of times.”47 Under Ho and Giap’s guidance, the Vietminh battled the Japanese during the occupation; this enabled the Vietminh to align with American intelligence operatives. At that point, as earlier, both Ho and Giap remained adverse to foreign control and attempts to establish arbitrary boundaries that violated Vietnamese autonomy. They were committed to the unification of Vietnam with single-minded devotion; meanwhile, they watched as their nation experienced a terrible famine that took the lives of one million peasants. Although apparently willing to temporarily defer the drive for social transformation until the end of the war, the two leaders continued to stand as ideologically rooted revolutionaries seeking to prevent artificial borders from crippling their nation.

6 The French Indochina War

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W

hen the Japanese took control of Vietnam in early 1945, they arrested French officials and set up a government led by the Emperor Bao Dai. On March 11, Bao Dai proclaimed an end to Vietnam’s protectorate status within the French empire, but at the same time, Vietnam was compelled to accept Japanese hegemony. This helped discredit Bao Dai’s regime and enabled the Vietminh to expand their operations. Once again, the weakening of French rule further dampened beliefs about Western invincibility. It would likewise help challenge the supposedly sacrosanct nature of the arbitrary borders French officials had constructed for Vietnam. The Vietminh, led by General Giap, took control of half a dozen provinces in Tonkin, making inroads into cities as well as the countryside. In areas they dominated, the Vietminh abolished taxes, reduced rents, and redistributed estates held by French landowners. They also helped mitigate the impact of the famine that had crippled Vietnam in 1944, resulting in the death of as many as one million peasants. The Vietminh took control of local granaries and passed out rice to alleviate the distress. They also engaged in guerrilla strikes against both the Japanese and the French, while resorting to terror to intimate and silence political opponents. By August 1945, Japanese forces had surrendered to the Vietminh. Large gatherings occurred in Hanoi, Saigon, and other major urban centers throughout Vietnam to demonstrate support for Ho Chi Minh’s cadres (core groups of supporters). Virtually unopposed, the Vietminh swept into both district and provincial capitals and established the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which was headquartered in Hanoi. When speaking to a gathered throng in that city on September 2, Ho drew from the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in proclaiming, “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Ho also requested backing from “the Allied nations, which ... have

The French Indochina War

General Vo Nguyen Giap was a talented Vietminh leader who turned a largely disorganized collection of guerrilla fighters into an army powerful enough to defeat the French.

acknowledged the principles of self-determination and equality of nations.”48 As it turned out, however, the Vietnamese path to independence and the overcoming of arbitrary borders associated with colonialism would not proceed easily. Instead, the French, soon supported by the United States, proved determined to reestablish colonial rule.

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The death of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April 1945 led to the presidency of Harry S. Truman, who had to contend with the rapidly deteriorating relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. Before World War II even ended, the seeds for another conflict, the Cold War, as it came to be called, existed. In the postwar period, the battleground included not only war-torn Europe but also much of the colonial world, such as Southeast Asia. American officials, including Truman, did not completely understand the complexity of the situation in Indochina. Moreover, the new American president informed Charles de Gaulle, the head of the Free French forces during World War II, the United States would not contest France’s dominance of the region. In the meantime, Truman, meeting with the other Allied leaders in Potsdam, Germany, in late July, indicated that the temporary division of both Korea and Vietnam would soon follow. This seemed natural to Truman, subsequent to the earlier decision to establish occupied zones in Germany after it was defeated by Allied Powers—the United States, Britain, liberated France, Soviet Union, and China—in World War II. Berlin itself had been divided into four sectors placed under military occupation. The partition of Vietnam would supposedly ensure the disarming of the Japanese and was to take place at the 16th parallel, situated between Danang and Hoi An in the central section of Vietnam. In the northern sector, 200,000 of Jiang Jieshi’s Nationalist soldiers, under the command of General Lu Han, took control of the surrendered Japanese troops, and in Vietnam’s southern half, 20,000 British troops led by General Douglas D. Gracey were in charge. No decision was made about the future of Vietnam, which played into the hands of French colonialists. Desiring American support, Ho informed an OSS agent that he would be pleased by the appearance of a million American soldiers, but not any French ones. Shortly after Ho Chi Minh issued his Declaration of Independence, General Gracey called for the French to reassert civil and military control. Using American weapons, French

The French Indochina War

soldiers ousted the Vietminh government that had been established in Saigon. After Vietminh fighters slaughtered 150 people in a French suburb of the city, Gracey, in an astonishing turn of events, placed arms in the hands of the Japanese, who were now called on to help suppress Giap’s forces. The situation in the north was not much better for the Vietminh, who were also driven out of power in Hanoi. The first American casualty of the conflict in Vietnam was OSS agent A. Peter Dewey, who had worked closely with Ho. Not permitted by Gracey to display the American flag on his jeep, Dewey drove to the Tan Son Nhut air base in Saigon in late September. Recently, Dewey had affirmed, “Cochinchina is burning, the French and British are finished here, and we ought to clear out of Southeast Asia.”49 Vietminh forces shot at Dewey’s jeep, killing him. By the end of the year, British and Indian troops departed from southern Vietnam and were replaced by American-backed French forces. In the north, the Chinese also agreed to leave and were also supplanted by the French. Both Ho and General Jacques Philippe Leclerc, who now guided French operations in Vietnam, sought a compromise. In a prophetic statement, Leclerc warned, “Fighting the Viet Minh will be like ridding a dog of its fleas. We can pick them, drown them, and poison them, but they will be back in a few days.” Subsequently, he affirmed that his nation could not “control by arms an entity of 24 million people.”50 General Douglas MacArthur, of the U.S. army, also expressed concerns about developments in Indochina: “If there is anything that makes my blood boil, it is to see our allies in Indochina deploying Japanese troops to reconquer the little people we promised to liberate.”51 Ho again attempted to reach out to the United States, sending a lengthy letter to President Truman on February 16, 1946. He insisted that the French possessed no legitimate claim to Indochina and called on the United States to intervene in the region. Shortly thereafter, in early March 1946, French and Vietminh representatives produced accords that resulted in

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France’s recognition of Ho’s free state inside the French Union; this attempt to produce a different kind of artificial division of Vietnam did not please many of Ho’s compatriots, who continued to insist that a unified Vietnam should replace French colonialism. Nevertheless, free elections were planned, which were to decide the fate of Cochinchina. As a matter of strategy, however, Ho acceded to the demand that 25,000 French soldiers replace Chinese operatives in the section north of the 16th parallel. When criticized by compatriots about this decision, Ho exclaimed, You fools! Don’t you realize what it means if the Chinese remain? Don’t you remember your history? The last time the Chinese came, they stayed a thousand years. The French are foreigners. They are weak. Colonialism is dying. The white man is finished in Asia. But if the Chinese stay now, they will never go.52

As Ho traveled to France to finalize the agreement, however, the recently appointed commissioner for Indochina, Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu, proclaimed the establishment of the Republic of Cochinchina, with its rich rice-bearing deltas. Once again, the French sought to splinter Vietnam while ensuring that the most fertile land remained under their control. Ho unsuccessfully pressed his case for Vietnamese independence with both French and American officials. Before returning home, he agreed to a call for a referendum that was to take place in Cochinchina the following year to decide the matter of unification. Before his departure, Ho warned French Prime Minister Georges Bidault, “If we must fight, we will fight. You will kill ten of our men, and we will kill one of yours. But you will be the ones to end up exhausted.” At the same time, Ho worried that he had given up too much and had “signed my death warrant.”53 By November, the level of violence in Vietnam had mounted once again. Angered by the killing of three French soldiers in Hanoi, the French struck back, shelling much of Haiphong, which resulted in the death of 6,000 and the wounding of

The French Indochina War

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In December 1946, French troops came into Hanoi demanding that the Vietminh disarm. They took up positions on rooftop perches where they could train their machine guns down onto the street. This photo from January 1947 shows troops from the French Indochinese Union Army in one such location.

another 25,000. In mid-December, French troops marched into Hanoi to demand that the Vietminh disarm. Instead, General Giap called for a campaign of national resistance. Guerrilla attacks followed, including the bombing of the power plant in Hanoi, mines exploding in that city’s streets, and the assassination of several French officials. The Vietminh under Ho and Giap resorted to guerrilla strategies, retreating into the countryside and mountains in northern Vietnam. At first, they deliberately avoided set battles with the better armed and more numerous French forces, instead engaging in political agitation in villages throughout Vietnam. Next, they planned to build up their own units until they equaled

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those of their foes. Finally, the Vietminh envisioned a general offensive that would force the French to leave Vietnam. Once more, the Vietnamese anticipated protracted war, which they had already waged against the Chinese and the French. ***** At the outset of the French Indochina War, the French remained dominant in Cochinchina, and they soon controlled the largest municipalities in both central and northern Vietnam; these also represented borders to a great extent. In the countryside, however, the Vietminh often seemed to be in control, and they received considerable backing from the peasants. A major offensive conducted by the French in late 1947 nearly resulted in the capture of Ho and other Vietminh leaders and caused an estimated 10,000 casualties among the Vietminh, along with the abandonment of sanctuaries in Tonkin. The next year, the Vietminh, relying on both guerrilla tactics and quick strikes against French troops, won back control of the territory lost in 1947 and strengthened their grip over the territory they held in Cochinchina; thus, the Vietminh continued to attack the arbitrary borders linked with French imperialism. With the Vietminh holding the upper hand in more than half of the villages throughout Vietnam, the French worried about being mired in a war that could be compared to quicksand. The French also sought a political solution to the dilemma by establishing a government headed by the former Emperor Bao Dai. However, noncommunist forces proved unable to avoid the political squabbles that had divided them in the past, and Bao Dai’s government was dismissed by many Vietnamese as a “puppet” regime. Nevertheless, in 1949, France declared that Vietnam was an associated state inside the French Union, thus supposedly giving independence to the State of Vietnam. During this period, as the Cold War unfolded in Europe and elsewhere, the United States sided even more strongly with the French in their fight against the Vietminh. The U.S. State

The French Indochina War

Department expressed increasing concerns about Ho’s avowed communist affiliation. At the same time, certain conflicts existed regarding the United States’ support of the restoration of colonial rule in Indochina. The American embassy in Paris received a cable in early 1947 declaring that nineteenth-century–styled empires were quickly becoming antiquated. The American consul in Saigon, Charles Reed, soon affirmed that “something must be done to bring home to the French that times have changed and that the natives have the right to more than a semblance of independence.” Yet Reed worried if Ho’s “totalitarian” regime would relinquish control over Annam or Cochinchina.54 Still, the United States, as Secretary of State George C. Marshall indicated, possessed no interest in seeing “colonial empires and administrations supplanted by philosophies and political organizations emanating from and controlled by the Kremlin [the Soviet government].”55 A State Department document from September 1948 acknowledged the “unpleasant fact” that Ho stood as the “strongest and perhaps the ablest figure in Indochina.” Moreover, “any suggested solution which excludes him is an expedient of uncertain outcome.”56 In addition, American diplomats seemed to agree that “the French are no longer capable of carrying on the war in Indochina.” They heard warnings that “all independence movement leaders can take courage from the fact that ... no matter how large and well equipped an Army is, it can be worn down by stubborn resistance.”57 For a time, the State Department proved unable to demonstrate that “a Moscow-directed conspiracy” existed in Indochina.58 As Cold War tensions heated up through 1949, that kind of carefully drawn evaluation began to be discarded. Secretary of State Dean Acheson pointedly denounced Ho as an “outright Commie” who had refused to disassociate himself from a “Moscow connection and Commie doctrine.”59 Various State Department experts nevertheless continued to acknowledge the potency of “militant nationalism” in Asia and worried that the United States’ ties to outmoded European colonialism could prove discrediting.60

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In 1949, Cold War stances solidified. A Soviet blockade of Berlin that had begun a year earlier remained in place for several months, and reports spread that the Russians had detonated an atomic bomb. Furthermore, the Chinese communists under Mao Zedong came to power. Now China began to supply the Vietminh with automatic weapons, bombs, and trucks. In the United States, Cold War tensions, which had resulted in a domestic red scare (fear of radicals, particularly communists), heightened. The Truman administration had already subscribed to the policy of containment urged by State Department analyst George Kennan, which called for the United States to be always on guard against potential encroachments by the Soviet Union. Kennan argued that this required a willingness to act against both military forces that attacked another country and “subversives” who sought to infiltrate from within. Increasingly, the battle in Vietnam came to be viewed through the Cold War lens. That was particularly true as the 1950s began to unfold. In January 1950, both China and the Soviet Union extended formal recognition to Ho’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The following month, the United States did the same for Bao Dai’s government, although various figures warned against doing so. In this way, both sides in the Cold War struggle continued to maintain a belief in the arbitrary borders that characterized Vietnam. Raymond B. Fosdick of the State Department feared that Bao Dai’s regime was “doomed” and asserted that “whether the French like it or not, independence is coming to Indochina.” Why, he asked, “do we tie ourselves to the tail of their battered kite?”61 Nevertheless, in March, President Truman approved sending $15 million to assist the French war effort. The level of support intensified greatly after the outbreak of the Korean War in late June. Another reason the United States chose to provide increased assistance was the deteriorating French position in Indochina. Beginning in September 1950, General Giap attacked French military stations near the Chinese frontier, resulting in a heavy loss of men and arms for the French. In January, Giap attempted

The French Indochina War

to seize the offensive, sending “human waves” at French posts near Vinh Yen, a mere 25 miles outside Hanoi. Now the Vietminh casualties became considerable, although the French, who relied on napalm (a jellied gasoline) and howitzers (a type of cannon) provided by the United States, suffered more losses of their own. Two attacks carried out in the northern countryside that spring were equally disastrous for Giap’s forces, causing Giap to return to a guerrilla strategy. The French then began building a series of forts—known as the de Lattre Line, after General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the new commander of French forces in Indochina—throughout the Red River Delta. Meanwhile, France requested and received more American military assistance. Much of the war matériel, however, ended up in the hands of the enemy. Fearing that a French defeat was impending, American policymakers began discussing what options the United States should consider. With American forces bogged down in Korea, the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued against becoming involved in another land war in Asia. Still, President Truman refused to accept the possibility of a communist victory in Indochina and began readying a plan to bomb Chinese cities and conduct a naval blockade if China sent troops into Vietnam as it had in Korea. The growing recognition that the Korean conflict might result in a return to the 38th parallel undoubtedly influenced administration officials regarding Vietnam, including a willingness to accept communist control in the nation’s northern sector as long as a noncommunist regime would be established in the South. In October 1952, the French amassed 30,000 soldiers and numerous tanks and airplanes, hoping to batter Vietminh forces situated in jungle terrain northwest of Hanoi. After a matter of weeks, however, the French were forced to head back to the Red River Valley. In January 1953, a new administration, led by Dwight David Eisenhower, the World War II hero, came to power in Washington, D.C. Like Truman and Acheson had been, Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, were determined to prevent a communist takeover in Vietnam.

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The French, it was clear, were demonstrating increasing war weariness. With casualties mounting, support for the war effort continued to decrease in France itself. As the Korean War came to a close in July 1953, the Eisenhower administration, like its predecessor, worried about the possibility of Chinese intervention. Dulles suggested that nuclear bombs be dropped on China if such an event were to occur. In the meantime, the Vietminh remained a formidable force; journalist Theodore White contended that Giap’s army had “become a modern army, increasingly skillful, armed with artillery, organized into divisional groups.”62 Shortly after the death of General de Lattre, Henri Navarre became head of the French military campaign in Indochina. Navarre hoped to prevent defeat by augmenting the Vietnamese National Army and by sending additional troops to Vietnam. At the same time, Navarre, who planned to conduct an offensive against the Vietminh, soon informed French officials that victory would not likely result. This warning was not delivered to the United States, which footed the bill more and more for the French war effort. By 1954, the United States was paying for nearly 80 percent of that campaign and would eventually cover $2.6 billion of the $4.0 billion France spent during the war. Despite that assistance, the position of the Vietminh continued to improve. On the other hand, the Vietnamese auxiliary army, made up of 300,000 recruits, proved woefully ineffective, because many peasant soldiers were not inclined to fight. While Navarre focused on the Red River Valley, Giap’s forces expanded their activities in the Tonkin Delta and swept into Laos. Consequently, Navarre felt compelled to land 3,000 elite parachuters in an area near Dienbienphu, a village situated in Vietnam’s northwestern corner, close to Laos. Navarre’s plan was to draw Giap into a large-scale battle; Navarre believed that he could build an impregnable fortress, despite American warnings to the contrary. Navarre positioned his forces in the flat valley, which was ringed by high hills.

The French Indochina War

At the same time, the French began negotiating with the Vietminh, much to the displeasure of Dulles and Eisenhower. On March 12, a memo from the Joint Chiefs of Staff indicated that a negotiated settlement would lead to free elections, which would result in a communist victory. That, it was believed, would be followed by other communist successes in the region. Thus, belief in the domino theory—that if one country fell to communism, nearby states would probably do so as well— guided American thinking. Communist Party leaders throughout Vietnam similarly reasoned that if one region of the country were liberated, then the likelihood of terminating the arbitrary borders separating Vietnamese provinces increased. On March 13, the battle of Dienbienphu began in earnest as Vietminh howitzers began attacking the French garrison.

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Dienbienphu

T

he decision of French military commander Henri Navarre to concentrate his troops at Dienbienphu, the scene of a small military base before World War II, proved to be a disastrous mistake. Rather than proving invulnerable to attack, as he had anticipated, the heavily fortified French base at Dienbienphu, situated in northwestern Tonkin, in a valley surrounded by hills, soon fell under a massive assault by Vietminh forces. Seeking to draw General Giap into battle, Navarre placed 17 battalions within the main compound. The French general eventually stationed 12,000 men, who relied heavily on a pair of nearby airstrips and airbases in Haiphong and Hanoi, at Dienbienphu. Navarre selected Colonel Christian Marie Ferdinand de la Croix de Castries to guide the French forces at Dienbienphu, located only eight miles from the Laotian border and 170 miles northwest of Hanoi. Castries relied on a series of defensive perimeters to shield Dienbienphu from a human wave assault, but little was done to protect his men from artillery. Ever confident, Castries, in early January 1954, foresaw “total victory after six months more of hard fighting.”63 In reality, the crushing defeat soon experienced by France threatened to bring the arbitrary borders long imposed on Vietnam to an end. Certain that he could improve the French position in Indochina, Navarre initially believed that success was imminent: “Now we can see it clearly—like light at the end of the tunnel.” In a more practical vein, Navarre hoped that he had discovered a “mooring point” that would offer an ideal springboard from which French forces could remove Vietminh guerrillas from mountainous areas.64 He sought to ensnare the Vietminh in a trap, with French soldiers in Tonkin and Cochinchina bearing down on them. Navarre also wanted to close off the opium trade, which the Vietminh relied on for money to purchase arms. At the same time, Navarre anticipated that both Ho and Giap would be compelled to respond to the challenge he was posing. The fortress at Dienbienphu, Navarre believed, would prove sufficiently enticing to attack but would be strong enough

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to withstand such an assault. Anticipating air supremacy and an advantage in artillery, Navarre envisioned raining death on Vietminh attackers. Beginning in late 1953, French pilots flying American planes dropped thousands of elite paratroopers and vast amounts of war matériel into the area. They joined other combat soldiers and support personnel; a third of the French Expeditionary Corps were members of the newly formed National Army of Bao Dai. Others came from various parts of the French empire, including Laos, Senegal, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Syria. Also present were Foreign Legionnaires from Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Eastern Europe. A small band of Americans was at Dienbienphu; most of those Americans served as pilots for the Civil Air Transport Company, which was based in Taiwan. A few were active duty American military personnel, who, as journalisthistorian Bernard Fall saw it, were seeking to familiarize themselves with the area if U.S. air power were needed. As the French buildup occurred, General Giap moved his troops into position. Assisting them was an intricate transportation network involving both coolie (unskilled laborers usually from the Far East) porters and a rebuilt major road that allowed the passage of trucks and artillery. Some of the regiments traveled across hundreds of miles of mountain trails. As Giap reported, “Truck convoys valiantly crossed streams, mountains and forests; drivers [faced] sleepless nights, to bring goods and ammunition.” Furthermore, “our troops cut through mountains and hacked away jungles to build roads and haul our artillery pieces to the approaches of Dien Bien Phu. Where roads could not be built, [cannons] were moved by nothing but the sweat and muscle of our soldiers.”65 Giap could call on a main-force fighting unit of 50,000 men backed by an equal number of support personnel and assisted by 20,000 to 30,000 Chinese workers, technicians, advisers, soldiers, and staff officers. The Soviets also provided trucks, artillery, and financial assistance for Giap’s fight. Meanwhile, both the Chinese and Soviets encouraged their Vietminh allies to strive for a political solution to the dilemma

Dienbienphu

in Indochina. The Chinese heard French Premier Joseph Laniel, annoyed by Bao Dai’s demand for full independence, proclaim that his own country had “no reason to prolong its sacrifices if the very people for whom they are being made disdain these sacrifices and betray them.”66 The war-weariness of the French troubled the Chinese, who feared that a French pullout might result in American intervention. Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai recognized that the United States posed a far greater threat to China than did France. The Chinese therefore warned the Vietminh to heed French peace efforts. The Soviets also hoped that the war in Indochina could be resolved peacefully, in order to curb East–West tensions. The Soviets particularly desired to establish improved relations with the French, which, they hoped, would convince France not to join the European Defense Community, a plan that sought to integrate French and German military units; that plan, to the dismay of the Soviet Union, called for the rearming of West Germany. Undoubtedly responding to pressure from his allies, Ho Chi Minh had declared as early as November 1953 that he would support the convening of an international conference to discuss Vietnam. France also decided that the war in Indochina could be discussed at such a forum. Plans were afoot to hold such a gathering, which would begin on April 26, 1954 in Geneva, Switzerland. A Five-Power Conference on Far Eastern Problems, to be cochaired by Britain and the Soviet Union and includeing France, China, and the United States, intended to discuss the now lengthy war in Vietnam. Eisenhower and Dulles recognized that they could not directly oppose efforts to bring about a peaceful resolution of the French Indochina War. Moreover, in early January 1954, the president conveyed to the National Security Council his opposition to sending American ground troops to Vietnam. At the same time, he likened Southeast Asia to a “leaky dike” and acknowledged that it was “sometimes better to put a finger in than to let the whole structure wash away.”67 As the enemy buildup continued, Navarre received warnings that the French position at Dienbienphu was not as impregnable

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as he had anticipated. Intelligence reports indicated that large numbers of Vietminh were gathering near the fortress, and Navarre had already been informed that the continued resupplying of the French forces was inadequate. On February 25, 1954, the French chief of air staff attempted to convince Navarre that the fortress should be evacuated. On the other side, Giap ignored the call by Chinese advisers to initiate massive human wave assaults. Instead, he adopted what he considered the “fundamental principle of the conduct of a revolutionary war: strike to win, strike only when success is certain; if it is not, then don’t strike.”68 Giap also planned to surround the French defenders in a viselike grip of his own, penetrating ever deeper until an overwhelming final assault would occur. ***** To further weaken the French position and undoubtedly in something of a diversionary move, Giap conducted strikes in Lai Chau province, Laos, and Dak To in Kon Tum province. This compelled the French to send troops from the Red River Delta to both Laos and the western highlands. Giap’s soldiers also wiped out 78 French planes at airfields in Hanoi and attacked enemy posts across Cochinchina, even attacking French ships in Saigon’s harbor. Then, sometime between March 10 and 12, both ground action and the initial shelling of one of the French airstrips at Dienbienphu began. At 5:00 P.M. on March 13, Giap’s larger artillery shells began falling on Him Lam Hill at Dienbienphu, to the dismay and surprise of the French forces. By boring into trenches, the Vietminh avoided much of the French artillery fire and edged ever closer to the fortress. There was fierce fighting for hilltops, with some taken and then battled over again and again. French bunkers and trenches collapsed, and Thai tribesmen defected to the Vietminh. On March 26, General Paul Ely, the French chief of staff, informed President Eisenhower, Secretary of State Dulles, and

Dienbienphu

As the Vietminh bombarded the French defenses at Dienbienphu, the besieged troops were desperate for reinforcements. In an attempt to help the French forces, these paratroopers were dropped at Dienbienphu in March 1954.

Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that Dienbienphu might soon be lost. At the battle site, the fighting sometimes involved brutal hand-to-hand combat. In the United States, American officials increasingly drew on the domino theory. In a public address on March 29, Secretary of State Dulles spoke about “The Threat of a Red Asia.” He declared,

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Southeast Asia is astride the most direct and best developed sea and air route between the Pacific and South Asia. It has major naval and air bases. Communist control of Southeast Asia would carry a grave threat to the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand.... The entire Western Pacific area, including the so-called “offshore island chain,” would be strategically endangered.69

Dulles pushed for something called “United Action,” a coalition made up of the United States, Great Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, and the Associated States of Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), to provide a defense shield for the region. President Eisenhower announced that he could foresee no larger tragedy than for his nation to become engaged in a major conflict in Indochina. Indeed, back in 1951, Eisenhower had written in his diary that he could envision no attainable military victory in such a military theater. Nevertheless, at a news conference on April 7, the president discussed the possibility of U.S. intervention, noting that Indochina was an important source of tin, tungsten, and rubber. In addition, Eisenhower asserted, China had been lost to the communists, and the United States simply could not tolerate more such losses. Then he warned about what fate might be in store for the region if Vietnam fell: “You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have the beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.” Eventually, Japan would fall under a communist sign. Thus, “the possible consequences of the loss,” Eisenhower declared, “are just incalculable to the free world.”70 The British, led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, responded with a critical perspective of their own. The British Foreign Office warned Washington that the fortress at Dienbienphu could not withstand the enemy assault. British diplomats doubted whether a successful conclusion to the war

Dienbienphu

were possible. Churchill was perfectly willing to join a collective security agreement after the sessions in Geneva, but he opposed military intervention in Vietnam, fearing that it might result in the deployment of Chinese troops. Anthony Eden worried about possible American plans, no matter how idealistically drawn, to replace the French in Vietnam. If that occurred, disaster loomed ahead, Eden predicted. The French delivered their own cutting analysis, declaring “a warning” without military intervention to be in vain and might further dampen French support for the war. The French also were unwilling to accept American demands that they promise to continue fighting while granting full independence to Vietnam. Eisenhower and Dulles were infuriated by both the French demands and by their insistence that the Americans “come in as junior partners.”71 Members of Congress also expressed concerns about heightened U.S. involvement, believing that once American military action was undertaken, land troops would follow. Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy insisted that military assistance alone would not defeat “an enemy of the people which has the support and covert appeal of the people.”72 Fearing that Dienbienphu might indeed be lost, Admiral Radford called for implementing Operation Vulture, the employment of American B-29s to quash the Vietminh artillery guns, an operation that Vice President Richard M. Nixon supported. Earlier, Nixon had argued, “We have adopted a new principle. Rather than let the communists nibble us to death all over the world in little wars, we will rely in the future on massive, mobile retaliatory forces.”73 Radford also suggested that if necessary, atomic weapons should be considered for deployment. This was not surprising, because Radford had suggested the “New Look” approach that the Eisenhower administration adopted. This approach urged reliance on nuclear weapons, which would provide “more-bang-for-the buck.”74 Eisenhower, who still desired to assist the French, worried about the possibility of the United States becoming mired in

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another land war in Asia. Deflecting Radford’s request for the time being, Eisenhower sent Dulles to seek support from European allies. That effort proved useless, and General Matthew Ridgway, the army chief of staff, expressed his opposition to the use of nuclear weapons. Ridgway also declared that air strikes alone would not work: ground troops would be required. Dulles soon told the French that no American intervention would be forthcoming. Historian Melanie Billings-Yun suggests that France was of mixed mind regarding greater U.S. engagement in the war, hoping to rely on the threat of that very possibility but worrying that it might actually take place. For his part, Dulles, was displeased that the French had expressed a willingness to negotiate with the other side. Vietnamese nationalists such as brothers Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu were no happier that such talks might be conducted. As the fighting wore on, Giap had to contend with refusals to obey orders, which began after the Vietminh endured terrible losses. Encouraged by political officers, the Vietminh continued to attack, clamping down on the French even more. On May 7, Vietminh soldiers captured Castries, who had refused to surrender. The next morning, the French raised a white flag of surrender, thereby ending the 55-day battle. The French suffered 7,500 casualties, and 10,000 men ended up in captivity; more than half the French prisoners of war did not survive their period of captivity. The Vietminh endured 25,000 casualties of their own. Nevertheless, the battle of Dienbienphu resulted in a telling victory for Ho and General Giap, whose forces wore down the French soldiers and public. Recognizing the significant nature of the conflict, Giap declared, “A colonized and weak people once it has risen up and is united in the struggle and determined to fight for its independence and peace, has the full power to defeat the strong aggressive army of an imperialist country.”75 A French soldier who had fought at Dienbienphu later explained to a reporter that he was told in a prison camp the Vietminh had prevailed because they, in contrast to the French, had fought for an ideal.

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After the surrender of the French troops to the Vietminh on May 8, 1954, 10,000 French troops became prisoners of war. Some of these captured men are shown being marched across the field after their surrender at Dienbienphu. This defeat ended nearly a century of French occupation of Indochina.

The day after the surrender at Dienbienphu, the delegates involved in the Geneva Peace Conference began to closely examine the French Indochina War. The Vietminh now held control of 80 percent of the Vietnamese landscape, and the French remained concentrated near Hanoi and Haiphong. Giap’s forces prevailed throughout most of Tonkin and Annam, and in approximately half of Cochinchina, including large portions of the Mekong River Delta. The dire situation in Vietnam helped topple the French government of Joseph Laniel, who on June 12 was replaced as prime minister by Pierre Mendes-France. The new French leader promised that a cease-fire would be obtained in Indochina, and the Geneva Accords, signed on July 21, 1954, brought the war to an official close. The eight-year-long French Indochina War had taken the lives of approximately 95,000 French soldiers, 300,000 Vietminh, and 1,000,000 Vietnamese civilians.

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The war ended inconclusively, with the decision made in Geneva to divide Vietnam artificially at the 17th parallel, thereby continuing the French practice of setting arbitrary borders for the nation in defiance of Vietnamese nationalism. The demarcation was intended to be temporary and actually ran just south of the 17th parallel, from a point along the B River to the village of Bo Ho Su and to the Vietnam border to the west. A demilitarized zone (DMZ) extended for three miles on either side of the demarcation line. Vietnam thus followed Korea in being saddled with arbitrary borders, a by-product of both historical developments and the relatively new Cold War struggle.

8 A Divided Vietnam

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T

he signing of the Geneva Accords in late July 1954 pleased few of the parties involved. On top of the indignities they suffered during World War II, the French now endured the loss of a major portion of their empire; this would lead them to fight more fiercely to retain control of Algeria, another troubled spot. Vietnamese associated with the State of Vietnam, ranging from Bao Dai to Ngo Dinh Diem, considered the appalling loss of the northern half of their country to the communist government headed by Ho Chi Minh. Ho was no happier with the final results, which were hardly in keeping with comrade Vo Nguyen Giap’s successes on the battlefield. The Vietnamese communists felt pressured by their big power allies, the Chinese and Soviets, to accept the temporary partition at the 17th parallel. This was not pleasing to the Vietminh, who remained determined to reunite their country and remove the arbitrary borders identified with despised colonialism. The British appeared somewhat more content with the decision that called for France’s departure from an imperial possession; of course, Britain had recently given up India, the jewel of its own empire, and had relinquished other valuable lands as well. The Americans, who refused to sign off on the Geneva Accords, were also somewhat comfortable with the results and the setting up of new borders inside Vietnam; at the same time, they appreciated that the precedent established in Korea had proven to be a troubling one. Both President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles recognized that Ho would likely sweep to victory if reunification elections were held soon. On the other hand, a 24-month period of delay, they anticipated, would enable them to create a nation-state in the area south of the 17th parallel. Thus, the Americans immediately began an experiment in nation building in which they sought to support a noncommunist government situated in Saigon that would remain in control of the former Cochinchina and parts of the area previously known as Annam. Only the region of Tonkin was seemingly lost to the communists, or so American policymakers hoped. By that stage, they did not believe that a rollback of the

A Divided Vietnam

This map of Indochina in 1954 shows the partition line between North and South that was agreed upon by the parties who signed the Geneva Accord. This line, at approximately the 17th parallel, did not satisfy anyone, but the communist Vietnamese were particularly unhappy with it. Their ultimate goal remained the reunification of their country.

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communist takeover in the North was possible without conflict that might draw in China or Russia and involve the use of nuclear weapons. Much depended on the creation of a viable nation–state in the stretch of territory from just above Quang Tri to the tip of the Mekong River Delta region. This area included much of Vietnam’s most arable land, along with the ancient imperial capital of Hue, the port city of Danang, and the bustling metropolis of Saigon, with the sweeping boulevards that had led some to view the city as the Paris of the Orient. It soon became clear that the Republic of South Vietnam, as the government entity in the south came to be called, could draw on seemingly limitless support from the United States, the world’s richest nation. All of this began to unfold despite the fact that those taking part in the conference in Geneva hardly anticipated that the partitioning of Vietnam and setting up of arbitrary borders, which followed the pattern established in Korea, would become permanent. They sought instead to develop a provisional military demarcation “point, around which the various forces would gather after they withdraw.” The initial plan called for Giap’s forces to be situated north of the parallel and those of France and its Vietnamese allies to be relocated to the south. Most of the Geneva delegates, in contrast to the American representatives, did not anticipate creating two separate states. Rather, they hoped to prevent further fighting in Indochina by establishing a 300-day cooling-off period during which personnel would shift from one region to the other if necessary. The two zones had the right to self-defense, but neither was supposed to join any military alliance, welcome additional soldiers or armaments, or establish new military bases. Moreover, neither side accepted the possibility of a permanent division of their native land or the artificial border established at the 17th parallel. The Geneva Accords called for consultations to begin on July 20, 1955. Those, in turn, were to set the stage for reunification elections, which were supposed to take place by the following July and were to be overseen by an International

A Divided Vietnam

Control Commission, with representatives from the communist bloc, the Western states, and the nonaligned nations. An end to hostilities also had been called for in both Cambodia and Laos, which were proclaimed fully autonomous states. Ultimately, both sides, along with their allies, violated the terms of the agreement carved out in Geneva. This would provide seeds for another, deadlier conflict. Before that war began, the contending parties jockeyed for position. Defying the expectations of the delegates in Geneva, American officials believed that their government would replace the French as the anticommunist barrier in Indochina. Initially, the Americans hoped that Bao’s government would present a legitimate nationalist alternative to Ho. In the process, the United States would help thwart communist aggression and prevent Ho from controlling all of Vietnam. ***** The United States thus cast its lot with the Republic of Vietnam, headed by Bao Dai. Despite their desire for Bao Dai to create a viable government, American policymakers feared, as they had for some time, that the former emperor hardly seemed credible as a rival to Ho. There did exist another model for some American officials: Ramon Magsaysay of the Philippines. That charismatic figure was a skillful enough politician and reformer that he, along with counterinsurgent activities, had helped subdue the communist-led Huk guerrillas. Colonel Edward Geary Lansdale, a former advertising executive, had provided valuable public relations advice to Magsaysay. Lansdale then went to Vietnam, where he met up with a Vietnamese nationalist chosen by the United States to become prime minister under Bao Dai: Ngo Dinh Diem. A staunchly nationalist anticommunist, Diem had refused to continue in a ministerial post under a government he saw as too beholden to the French. He had also refused to work with Ho and then left Vietnam in 1950, undoubtedly to escape assassination at the hands of the Vietminh, a fate suffered by one of his brothers.

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NATION BUILDING In the wake of the apparent success in fostering an anticommunist democratic government in the Philippines and inconstructing arbitrary borders, American policymakers believed that they could also create a viable nationstate in the area south of the 17th parallel, another artificial partition established by the demands of Cold War participants. As the policymakers saw it, the United States was not a colonial power and had no designs of an imperial cast in Southeast Asia. Rather, the United States only wanted to ensure that the people in the southern part of Vietnam could experience economic and political opportunities of the sort obviously denied to those living under the Communist dictatorship in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. American administrations from Truman onward denied that nationalist sentiments associated with Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh existed, considering the Northern regime, like the guerrillas in the South, to be part of an international communist conspiracy. Clearly, U.S. intentions in Vietnam appeared altruistic, or so the American public was led to believe. As it turned out, however, not all Vietnamese, communist or not, agreed with this perception of developments in Southeast Asia. For many, the United States came to be viewed as a neocolonial power determined to continue the Western rule established by the French. Fair or not, the United States was considered arrogant, and the attempts to create a government in the South were seen as heavy-handed and oppressive. Fueling such perceptions was the association of the United States with a series of unpopular and repressive governments in the South. As events unfolded, the United States never did uncover a Vietnamese version of Ramon Magsaysay but was saddled instead with the Ngo Dinh Diem and his successors.

Not all were pleased with the decision to back Diem or the experiment in nation building in South Vietnam, the direct byproduct of the arbitrary border allowed by the Geneva Accords. A National Intelligence Estimate delivered in August 1954 to the Eisenhower administration warned that the likelihood of establishing a viable government was “poor,” and the Joint Chiefs of Staff indicated that it would be “hopeless” to construct an army without a “reasonably strong, stable civil government in control.”76 Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson

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declared the situation “utterly hopeless” and suggested that the United States should extricate itself “completely and as soon as possible” or “nothing but grief ” loomed ahead.77 Another critic of American actions in Vietnam was British author Graham Greene, whose 1955 novel The Quiet American scathingly indicted CIA-styled operations in that nation. Over the next few years, Diem acquired some powerful allies, including a number of key figures who would later be associated with an organization called American Friends of Vietnam. These included Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Cardinal Francis Spellman, and Democratic senators Mike Mansfield, John F. (Jack) Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey. Diem became prime minister of Bao Dai’s government in June 1954. Also backing Diem was Colonel Lansdale, who conducted a series of operations, drawing on funds supplied by the CIA. Lansdale sent paramilitary operatives north of the 17th parallel to cripple transportation networks in that region and to carry out psychological warfare against Ho’s regime. The CIA joined with South Vietnamese commandos in an effort to weaken Ho’s hold on power. One of the major efforts involved encouraging a mass exodus of Northerners southward across the DMZ. Propaganda indicated that “Christ has gone to the South” and that a bloodbath would be carried out by the communists.78 Under Operation Exodus, almost a million Vietnamese migrated across the demarcation line, assisted by the U.S. navy and the American government, which helped resettle those who headed south. Operation Exodus provided a base of support for Diem. Many of the refugees were, like Diem, both Catholics and staunch opponents of the Vietminh. Several had worked for the Frenchcontrolled government or had been soldiers in the auxiliary forces. A large number of these Northern transplants would become officials in Diem’s government or serve in his military units. Not all were pleased with this state of affairs: some complained that “Vietnamese Catholics are the claws by which the French crab has been able to crawl across and devour our

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land.”79 Little troubled by such a charge, Diem established a regional defense group that viewed the partition of Vietnam as exactly what the delegates at Geneva had warned against: a permanent political boundary, and he was pleased when the United States spearheaded the formation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), an anticommunist alliance joined by Great Britain, France, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, and Thailand. Fearing that Ho would win the scheduled reunification elections, American officials also strove to ensure that such an event would not occur. Secretary of State Dulles encouraged Diem to insist on election safeguards that Ho could not accept. Diem went further, refusing even to explore the matter with his communist counterpart. Then, on August 9, 1954, he declared that the planned elections would not occur as long as the communists continued to rule north of the 17th parallel. As unrest threatened in the region south of the demarcation line, the Eisenhower administration began to question whether it should continue to back Diem or seek another anticommunist alternative. In 1955, however, Diem began to quash the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects, both of which possessed their own militias, and the Binh Xuyen criminal gang, which controlled gambling, prostitution, and opium rackets in the South. Diem then held a national referendum to decide if South Vietnam should be ruled by Bao or by himself. With 600,000 ballots reportedly cast—although only 400,000 voters were eligible to cast them—Diem won 98.2 percent of the vote. Diem soon insisted on the removal of the last French troops, declaring that their presence was incompatible with Vietnamese independence. In deference to American complaints, he created a legislative assembly in 1956. This assembly was dominated by Diem and his brother and right-hand man, Ngo Dinh Nhu, who headed a succession of police and paramilitary units. Once Diem had established himself as the strong man of South Vietnam, the United States backed him fully, helping build the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). Now, Senator Kennedy, conjuring

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up the image of an artificial border, referred to South Vietnam as the “finger in the dike” preventing “the red tide of Communism” from enveloping Southeast Asia.80 As Diem solidified his power south of the 17th parallel, in the North, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam continued to be dominated by such communist leaders as Ho, Truong Chinh, Pham Van Dong, and Vo Nguyen Giap; thus, the presence of arbitrary borders continued to beset the people of Vietnam. The party leadership sought to industrialize North Vietnam by nationalizing former French enterprises and turning commercial establishments previously run by Vietnamese into producer cooperatives. In adopting an austerity plan, North Vietnam seemingly offered little improvement in the everyday lives of the people. Still, a concerted effort at land reform, with small plots of land distributed to landless peasants, was also integral to the economic program. Those peasants, it was hoped, would produce surplus crops, resulting in profits that would enable them to purchase factory goods. As the land reform unfolded, many saw fit to settle old scores, and doctrinaire party members vilified landlords and wealthier peasants. This resulted in thousands being jailed or murdered, and it eventually compelled Ho to discard the program and issue a public apology. Despite the sometimes tragic mistakes made by his party leaders, Ho, in contrast to Diem in the South, retained the allegiance of the vast majority of people in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The repressive nature of the regime in the South ensured that Diem was unable to do the same there. Not helping matters was the skewed nature of economic development that occurred, a phenomenon intensified by the receipt of nearly one billion dollars in aid from the United States from 1955 to 1959. The bulk of that financial assistance helped finance military and paramilitary operations, not industrial or entrepreneurial activities, in the South. Despite such aid, the ARVN forces were hardly stellar. Their performance was tainted by Diem’s rampant favoritism, corruption, insistence on loyalty to Diem rather than battlefield accomplishments, and the perception that the officer corps— many of whom had supported the French—lacked patriotism.

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Also not helping matters was that in contrast to the communist government in the North, Diem’s regime failed to undertake land reform, actually returning lands that the Vietminh had distributed to peasants to their previous owners. Thus, Diem moved to restore arbitrary boundaries of a socioeconomic cast that the French had inflicted on his countrymen, a move that did not endear him to many. Perhaps worst of all, Diem and Nhu headed a government that proved to be highly undemocratic, despite attempts by American officials to portray that regime in a different light. Once in power, Diem undertook a systematic campaign, led by Nhu, to wipe out the Vietminh who remained in the South. Executions increased, as did the number of individuals placed in concentration camps, where they were supposed to be “reeducated.” Diem ruled with an iron fist, calling on the Can Lao, a secret organization that dug deep roots throughout South Vietnam. In a move that alienated many and violated longstanding practices, Diem refused to allow village councils to be elected by local communities, instead appointing officials beholden to him. Diem angered ethnic tribes when he allowed settlements in the Central Highlands. He infuriated some peasants whom he compelled to relocate to enclosed agrovilles (where peasants were placed in secure enclaves), often far removed from ancestral grounds. Ordinance No. 6, issued by Diem, allowed the government to arrest anyone viewed as a security threat. The later passage of Law 10/59 in May 1959, intended to eradicate the Vietminh “stay-behinds,” set up special military courts, complete with guillotines, to handle any individual who committed or sought to commit crimes against Diem’s regime. Diem believed that the greatest threat to his regime was the possibility of a conventional attack by North Vietnamese forces across the 17th parallel or through Vietnam’s neighbors to the west, Laos and Cambodia. He therefore stationed troops just below the demilitarized zone. At this stage, however, it was a new guerrilla movement, not regular army units from the North, that Diem had to confront.

A Divided Vietnam

After the July 1956 date for reunification elections passed, Vietminh leaders in the south began to strike back. Shortly thereafter, other Vietminh who had migrated north across the 17th parallel after the signing of the Geneva Accords returned to do battle against Diem’s regime. Initially, Ho and the Communist Party leadership in Hanoi refused to support armed insurrection. As Diem’s repressive actions intensified, however, the Communist Party shifted course, backing guerrilla action against the South Vietnamese government. Beginning in the late 1950s, Southern leaders resorted to the politics of assassination, murdering hundreds of local government officials. Individuals viewed as corrupt were among those targeted, as were officials considered to be doing a good job. Diem responded by denouncing the guerrillas as communists, derisively referring to them as Vietcong (VC: meaning Vietnamese communists); the Americans did likewise. In reality, the Southern insurgency was rooted in indigenous grievances but was soon spearheaded by the Communist Party leadership in North Vietnam. In May 1959, the Communist Party leaders in the North began building the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail, an intricate network of mountain and jungle pathways that darted along the easternmost sectors of Laos and Cambodia, enabling North Vietnamese soldiers to cross into South Vietnam. The very idea of that trail challenged the survival of the artificial border at the 17th parallel established in Geneva. Men and matériel began pouring down south, helping fuel the insurgency there. The communist leader in the South, Le Duan, ordered guerrillas to disperse when the enemy massed, to harass when the enemy passed by, to withdraw when the enemy advanced, and to mass when the enemy dispersed. In December 1960, Southern guerrillas established the National Liberation Front, which urged the setting up of a coalition government and the eventual obliteration of the temporary division at the 17th parallel. Late the next year, communist forces established the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG). American officials again became doubtful about the effectiveness of Ngo Dinh Diem. Starting in May 1959, American

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advisers joined military missions conducted by ARVN forces. American military figures began to recognize that the guerrilla activity posed the greatest threat to Diem’s regime, leading to greater emphasis on counterinsurgency. At the same time, however, few reforms were enacted that might have improved the chances for a successful government in the South. Then, in November 1960, Diem prevented a coup attempt undertaken by discontented military officers. The new administration of President John F. Kennedy, which came to power in Washington, D.C., in January 1961, appeared determined to battle guerrilla forces in Vietnam and elsewhere. A mere two weeks before Kennedy took office, Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev proclaimed support for wars of national liberation, the kind waged so recently in Vietnam, Cuba, and Algeria, and that threatened to break out in other hot spots around the globe. Kennedy hoped that economic support and the aid provided by the newly created Peace Corps, which sent educated Americans to provide technical and educational assistance to poorer lands, would make a difference. He also believed in the need to contain communist-inspired revolutions: thus his focus on counterinsurgent agents such as the Green Berets. Initially heeding warnings from the outgoing president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Kennedy worried that Laos might fall under communist control, triggering a domino effect on surrounding states; indeed, Eisenhower had referred to Laos as the “cork in the bottle.”81 Thus, American policymakers believed that Laos, like Vietnam, required artificial barriers to prevent communist subversion. As it turned out, Kennedy worked to bring about a coalition government in Laos, but Vietnam proved to be the most dangerous spot in the region. Reading a report by the now General Lansdale, Kennedy recognized that the revolts in South Vietnam endangered Diem’s government. Lansdale worried that the collapse of South Vietnam would be “a major blow to U.S. prestige and influence, not only in Asia but throughout the world.”82 Kennedy responded by increasing American economic aid and

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the number of military advisers the United States sent to the region. The president also authorized covert operations that took place north of the 17th parallel. These included support for South Vietnamese commando units and efforts to sabotage installations in the North. At the same time, the Pentagon indicated that eight ARVN divisions were required to safeguard both the demilitarized zone and the Central Highlands. Kennedy began to consider the possibility of committing American ground troops to Vietnam, something he and others had once opposed. Over the course of his 33-month administration, which ended abruptly with his assassination in November 1963, Kennedy increased the number of American advisers in Vietnam from about 800 to more than 16,000. He justified this buildup—known as “Project Beef-Up”—which apparently violated the 1954 Geneva Accords, as a response to North Vietnamese encroachments of those same accords. Kennedy also encouraged American representatives in Saigon to convince Diem of the need for genuine political and economic reforms, which the South Vietnamese leader refused to enact. The Kennedy administration sought to create new fortified settlements—now referred to as strategic hamlets—and resorted to the use of napalm and chemical defoliants (chemicals that made the leaves fall off plants) that destroyed to plant, animal, and human life. The increased American involvement temporarily appeared to boost the morale of the South Vietnamese military. The opposition to Diem, however, continued to mount in the countryside, where greater numbers of peasants refused to pay taxes and failed to report for induction into ARVN units. Meanwhile, the guerrillas, fueled in part by perceptions about the repressive and corrupt nature of the Diem government, appeared to multiply. In contrast, the guerrillas received support, particularly when they carried out land reform in territories they dominated. The ARVN forces, backed by the United States, drove some peasants into strategic hamlets, often at the point of a gun, and often dealt with them in a fashion that failed to discriminate

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This family portrait of President Ngo Dinh Diem and his family was taken in Saigon in 1963, the same year that his regime was overthrown. Diem (second from the left, standing) and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu (left, standing) were subsequently murdered in the year this photograph was taken. The woman seated is Diem’s mother, shown with her grandchildren, the children of Nhu and his wife.

between guerrillas and civilians. This enabled the guerrillas to wage an effective propaganda campaign through which they declared their fight to be against feudalism and imperialism, both associated with the Diem regime. They dismissively decried him as beholden to the Americans, resulting in the denigrating phrase, “My Diem.” At the time, a group of young American journalists, including David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, warned that optimistic reports presented by U.S. military officials were sorely exaggerated. A series of setbacks began to befall Diem. In early January 1963, a Vietcong battalion battered a large ARVN unit at the Battle of Ap Bac, in the Mekong Delta 50 miles outside Saigon. The VC killed 61 ARVN soldiers and shot down five helicopters, which had previously instilled great fear among many of the guerrillas. As opposition to Diem soared, religious discontent, encouraged by a sense that Diem favored Catholics over the Buddhist

A Divided Vietnam

majority, led to an attack on a religious procession in Hue that resulted in nine deaths. Buddhist-inspired protests surged forth, with a series of self-immolations attracting worldwide attention. Ngo Dinh Nhu ordered his Special Forces to attack a series of pagodas, producing more casualties and outrage. Finally, on November 1, military officers encouraged by the new American ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, ousted Diem, who had attempted to rule as a neoConfucian dictator. To Kennedy’s dismay, Diem and his brother Nhu were subsequently murdered, bringing the United States’ experiment in nation building in Southeast Asia to an inglorious end. That was assured when, only three weeks after the overthrow of Diem, an assassin killed President Kennedy. As 1963 neared its end, the United States had invested a great amount of material resources, along with the lives of more than 100 of its soldiers, in an effort to sustain a nation–state in the southern half of Vietnam. President Eisenhower refused to allow promised reunification elections, opting instead to back Diem and the plan to carve out an independent, noncommunist government in the South. Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, opted for a similar approach, at least until the end of Diem’s regime. Neither president questioned the appropriateness of a divided Vietnam, choosing instead to view that country as another chapter in the Cold War saga that produced artificial boundaries of various sorts. Some were territorial in nature, but all, to a large extent, were shaped by ideological, cultural, and political differences that pitted the East against the West.

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9 The Americanization of the War

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D

isturbed by infiltration from across the DMZ, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, formerly president of the Ford Motor Company and an ardent believer in the superiority of American technology, proposed the building of an electronic barrier that would sustain the arbitrary border established more than a decade earlier in Geneva. The “McNamara Line,” it was hoped, would make reliance on the Ho Chi Minh Trail more difficult. In the spring of 1966, McNamara asked the Pentagon to explore the possibility of devising “an iron-curtain counterinfiltration barrier across northern South Vietnam and Laos from the South China Sea to Thailand.”83 The Joint Chiefs of Staff did not like McNamara’s idea, having already questioned the practicality of such a barrier. In addition, they believed that it would prove to be a “visible, fixed, long-term” violation of diplomatic agreements. Thus, the U.S. military chiefs worried about an electronic barrier’s impact on the arbitrary border at the 17th parallel established at the Geneva Conference.84 Nevertheless, responding to McNamara’s directive, the Joint Chiefs devised a plan, as historian John Prados reports: The concept provided for a cleared path, or “trace,” five hundred yards wide, from which all vegetation had been removed, sowed with mines or other devices. The trace was to parallel the north side of Route 9 and have barbed-wire entanglements along its perimeters. Behind the trace would be an electrified fence, and behind that, watchtowers or bunkers for observation of the barrier area. Reserve bases would be located at intervals along the 225-mile length of the barrier. A less developed barrier would also be placed along the south side of Route 9 for a total length of 120 miles to protect from rear attack at key points.85

Such a barrier, the Joint Chiefs warned, would take three complete divisions, years to build, and a vast amount of construction material. It would serve as an impediment only to thrusts by large numbers of NVA troops and would fail to prevent seaborne

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assaults or those initiated in Cambodia. Joint Chiefs Chairman Earle Wheeler criticized the McNamara plan, arguing that its reliance on too many troops would weaken American military power. General William Westmoreland; Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp Jr.; and other top military figures also condemned the idea. During the summer of 1966, the JASON Group of the Institute for Defense Analysis presented to Secretary McNamara its own report regarding an electronic barrier. This study did not highlight the need for large numbers of troops up and down the line but instead called for “ground and air barriers with defenses limited to those under the DMZ, and a remote-controlled block on the Laotian side of the border, enforced by aircraft, artillery fire, and area-denial weapons such as mines.”86 Pleased with the JASON report, McNamara instructed the Joint Chiefs to construct it within a year, with secrecy surrounding the project, called Joint Task Force 728. The Joint Chiefs quickly indicated that this program should not replace other military plans, but McNamara convinced President Johnson to deliver a National Security Action Memorandum, NSAM-358, which gave the barrier the highest priority. Laotian leader Souvanna Phouma requested information from U.S. Ambassador William H. Sullivan. As the ambassador indicated, “Specifically he wanted to know if we intended to attempt to seal the DMZ hermetically. Were we going to clear a strip, put in minefields, barbed wire, control towers, etc., ‘line the Iron Curtain.’” Moreover, Souvanna asked if the barrier would reach to the border with Thailand. Secretary of State Dean Rusk informed Sullivan that the question of the barrier’s reach remained “an open question.” On further discussion, Souvanna warned Sullivan that the barrier would not be “watertight.”87 Responding to continued resistance from the Joint Chiefs, McNamara, who remained determined to solidify the border at the 17th parallel, revised the plans for the electronic barrier, submitting the latest version to President Johnson in January 1967. Now, the barrier began “from the coast below the Demilitarized

The Americanization of the War

Zone (DMZ).” At that location, which had experienced infiltration by the NVA, the new plan called for “strongpoints of company-size backing up the trace plus observation towers. At key terrain features would be even bigger bases manner by full battalions.” Those stations would be dispersed in central Vietnam and the foothills.88 Opposition to the electronic barrier continued. One civilian consultant, Richard S. Greeley, insisted that a series of events would have to take place for air strikes to knock out North Vietnamese supply troops heading down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and passing over the artificial boundary of the 17th parallel. This, chemist Greeley suggested, was unlikely to occur. When pressure was brought to bear, Greeley produced a more favorable estimate. Subsequent tests proved ineffective but were nevertheless deemed a success. ***** As the United States came to supplant the French as the leading Western power involved with Vietnamese affairs, charges of American “imperialism” took hold. Certainly, the American presence intensified, because of the concern that communism not be allowed to envelop the former jewel of French Indochina. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the new man in the White House remained determined that his country not “lose another one” to the communists. Indeed, shortly after taking office, Lyndon Baines Johnson asserted that he was not going to be known as the president who allowed Southeast Asia to “fall” as China had. Johnson received advice from a group of selfassured men, such as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and National Security Advisor Walter Rostow, a group that the journalist David Halberstam would ironically refer to as “the best and the brightest.”89 Under Johnson’s watch, the limited nature of U.S. involvement in the war began to be discarded. The death of Diem had not led to improved conditions in South Vietnam, as had been hoped

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for, but rather heightened political instability. The Communist Party leaders in the North called for an escalation of activities south of the 17th parallel. The party’s Central Committee declared, “We must strive to attain victory step by step and gradually push back the enemy before reaching the General Offensive and Uprising to win complete victory.”90 U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge warned the State Department that neutralism, an ever-present danger in South Vietnam, could lead to the disintegration of anticommunist forces there, eventual reunification with the North, and communist victories throughout the region. Convinced that a failure to demonstrate American support for the government in Saigon could produce such results, Johnson steadily increased the level of American engagement in the war. The Joint Chiefs of Staff considered the battle in South Vietnam the first genuine test of the U.S. commitment to suppress communist-inspired wars of national liberation. Johnson also continued Kennedy’s attempt to take the war to the North, conducting unpublicized raids across the 17th parallel. Such covert activities were part of Operation Plan 34-Alpha. After a pair of skirmishes involving American destroyers supposedly took place in the Gulf of Tonkin, Johnson upped the ante, unleashing American planes to bomb North Vietnam sites. Later it was indicated that the second destroyer incident probably never took place, but reports of strikes against the American ships led to the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave Johnson, as he saw it, virtual carte blanche (full discretionary power) to wage the war in Vietnam. Only two members of Congress, senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, voted against the measure, although others would soon offer similar critiques. Gruening had declared previously, “All Vietnam is not worth the life of a single American boy.... The United States is seeking vainly in this remote jungle to shore up self-serving corrupt dynasties or their self-imposed successors, and a people that has demonstrated that it has no will to save itself.”91 Now he condemned the sending of

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“American boys into combat in a war in which we have no business,” and Morse charged that future generations would rue “such a historic mistake.” Though little heeded at the time, the admonitions of the two legislators suggested, even at this relatively early point, that President Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam could produce a new kind of artificial chasm: impassioned disagreement regarding U.S. foreign policy that would fracture the Cold War consensus and divide the American people in a manner they had not experienced since the Civil War.92 ***** In late 1964 and early 1965, Vietcong attacked American targets in Vietnam. Coupled with warnings that the situation of the government in Saigon remained precarious, Johnson again decided that forceful action was necessary. In February 1965, Johnson ordered a systematic bombing campaign against North Vietnam in an effort to compel the communist leaders in Hanoi to “cry uncle” and withdraw support for the guerrillas in the South. Almost immediately thereafter, Johnson introduced the land forces other American leaders had worried might be planted in Southeast Asia. The result was another bloody quagmire, both similar to and quite different from the one that had taken place in Korea. Once again, a splintered nation, with a demarcation line, was torn apart more fully as it became ensnared in Cold War developments. As had occurred in Korea, a war would be waged in Vietnam largely to ensure that an arbitrary border remained in place; in the case of Vietnam at least, it happened with seeming disregard for the will and the well-being of the people. Once again, key American figures were divided regarding how the war should be waged, with some viewing the Vietnam War as the embodiment of the containment ideal and others hoping that the conflict would result in the liberation of the North from communist tyranny.

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On April 8, 1965, as Operation Rolling Thunder continued and American ground troops conducted sweeps, North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong proclaimed “four points” supposedly derived from the Geneva Accords. Those points required, in his estimation, recognition of Vietnamese autonomy and territorial integrity—which urged an end to the arbitrary borders established in 1954—along with the termination of all American military action in Vietnam. The points also called for acceptance of that agreement’s prohibition of the introduction of foreign military bases or the establishment of military alliances with other nations, for the shaping of internal affairs in the South according to the designs of the National Liberation Front, and for reunification of the Vietnamese people. Pham Van Dong’s “four points” demanded the termination of the artificial boundary established near Vietnam’s midsection 11 years earlier. As American involvement in Vietnam escalated, opposition to the war on the home front did as well. In the spring of 1965, teach-ins, in which discussion of the conflict occurred, took place on university campuses. At the same time, demonstrations in the street cropped up, with Washington, D.C. the scene of the largest antiwar gathering in American history, when 25,000 people congregated in mid-April to hear speakers denounce U.S. policy. In the period ahead, demonstrations became even larger, and the antiwar movement employed different tactics to challenge U.S. actions in Vietnam. Attempting to deflect criticism of his administration, President Johnson expressed his readiness to go wherever necessary at any point if that would help bring about an honorable peace. At the same time, the pace and scale of U.S. operations in Vietnam heightened, something the president attempted, in a fashion, to keep concealed from the American public. Nevertheless, by the end of the year, there were 185,000 American troops stationed in Vietnam. Johnson’s refusal to explain fully the heightened nature of U.S. involvement ensured that another kind of artificial division emerged, one that involved a battle for the hearts and minds of the American people.

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Throughout the 1960s opposition to American involvement in Vietnam escalated at home with teach-ins, demonstrations, and antiwar rallies. Despite President Johnson’s promise that he was working for peace, thousands of new troops were continually sent to war, including the U.S. First Calvary Air Mobile division pictured here approaching the Vietnam beach in 1965.

Despite the intensified nature of American engagement, the situation in the region south of the 17th parallel failed to improve. As had occurred since the removal of Ngo Dinh Diem, regimes came and went, until Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky and General Nguyen Van Thieu became the dominant political figures in South Vietnam. Like Diem and other predecessors, Ky and Thieu failed to adopt the kind of reforms that might have lessened support for the Vietcong. Instead, the new South Vietnamese leaders seemed willing to do America’s bidding, at least as far as accepting greater numbers of foreign troops and allowing the United States to conduct the bombing campaigns it considered necessary.

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That did not endear Ky and Thieu to the vast majority of the civilian populace in South Vietnam, who were increasingly caught in the crossfire of a brutal war that appeared both civil and colonial in nature. American policies were unpopular too, particularly General William Westmoreland’s emphasis on search-and-destroy missions, body counts, free fire zones where pilots could strafe whatever targets they considered essential, and the production of ever-greater numbers of refugees forced into overpopulated slums in urban centers throughout the South. For Westmoreland, the United States and its South Vietnamese ally had to wage a “war of attrition” against the enemy. Few people in the Johnson administration proved willing to challenge the president’s Vietnam policy. One who did so was Undersecretary of State George Ball, who warned the president in mid-1965: No one has demonstrated that a white ground force of whatever size can win a guerrilla war—which is at the same time a civil war between Asians—in jungle terrain in the midst of a population that refuses cooperation to the white forces (and the South Vietnamese) and thus provides a great intelligence advantage to the other side.93

Clark Clifford, who had advised Democratic presidents since Truman, worried about the potential cost of expanded American operations. He predicted, “If we lose 50,000 men there, it will be a catastrophe for the country. Five years, billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of men—this is not for us.”94 By 1966—the year American deployment figures in Vietnam surged to 365,000—additional critics within the ranks of the socalled “Establishment,” those in power, emerged. These included J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, who headed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and began holding televised hearings into American operations in Vietnam. Fulbright spoke and wrote about “the arrogance of power” that characterized U.S. dealings in Southeast Asia.95 Delivering critical testimony before his

The Americanization of the War

Despite intensified fighting, the situation in South Vietnam failed to improve in the mid-1960s and both American and South Vietnamese forces suffered considerable casualties. Here, a South Vietnamese soldier waits to be evacuated while kneeling with a row of dead soldiers.

committee were George Kennan, the author of the doctrine of containment, and former generals David Shoup, James Gavin, and Matthew Ridgway. Kennan indicated that he never intended for his theory to be applied globally or in an exclusively military

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fashion, and Gavin suggested the United States had devoted an overabundance of resources to Vietnam. More heated rhetoric could be heard on college and university campuses, where New Left groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) expressed disdain for the war. Both organizations also offered support for young men who desired to file with the Selective Service as conscientious objectors. Dissent cropped up even within the ranks of the U.S. armed forces, with the Fort Hood Three, a trio of enlisted men, declaring that they refused to participate in an “unjust, immoral, and illegal war.”96 The Johnson administration was also criticized by those who believed that U.S. policy was too timid. Both John P. McConnell, the Air Force chief of staff, and Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, Jr., the navy’s commander in chief in the Pacific, called for the president to bomb the North more heavily, striking military bases, industrial plants, and transportation networks. Many slammed the concept of limited war, which Johnson seemed to be applying in Vietnam. General Curtis LeMay believed that the United States should bomb cities and target dikes rather than pummel only military and industrial centers. Ironically, American ground and air operations in South Vietnam led to charges that the United States was employing firepower indiscriminately. The use of herbicides to prevent guerrillas from employing the countryside as a sanctuary increased; Agent Orange was the most popular. The reliance on B-52s initially appeared to make a difference, thoroughly frightening both civilians and combatants. With the passage of time, however, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers, often heading down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, began to adjust to the terrible noises, even as 500-pound bombs pockmarked the Vietnamese landscape. Historians James S. Olson and Randy Roberts argue that American policymakers continued to resort to bombing because it was less expensive, in terms of resources expended and lives lost, than ground operations. Secretary of Defense Robert

The Americanization of the War

McNamara, however, had envisioned an electronic barrier to prevent enemy forces from crossing the 17th parallel into South Vietnam, so American marines laid out “a twenty-five-mile bulldozed strip of jungle complete with acoustic sensors, land mines, infrared intrusion detectors, booby traps, and electronic wires along the northern border of South Vietnam.”97 Opposition from the military doomed the project. North Vietnamese General Tran Do asked, “What is the use of barbed wire fences and electronic barriers when we can penetrate even Tan Son Nhut air base outside Saigon?”98 McNamara eventually resorted to the building of a batch of American firebases along the DMZ. The type of warfare waged in Vietnam began to wear down American soldiers, 475,000 of whom were stationed in that country by 1967; 550,000 would be there by the following summer. Considerably younger on average than World War II–era combatants, these men, an increasing number of whom were drafted (forced into military service), contended with 12 or 13month tours of duty in which they effectively rotated in and then out of Vietnam alone. The infantrymen, or “grunts” as they were known, had it worst. They had to endure searing heat and biting rainy cold, debilitating levels of humidity, swamps, jungles, mountainous terrain, malaria, dysentery, poisonous insects and snakes, traps, feces-tinged sticks, and homemade incendiary devices. Confronting them were battle-hardened Vietminh veterans and fresh recruits who seemed to have more of a sense of why they were fighting—for land, for country, to expel outside dominance, to overthrow the regime in Saigon, to cut down the arbitrary border that splintered their nation—than their American counterparts. As the Vietminh had against the French, the communist-backed Vietcong and North Vietnamese army troops often seemed to pick and choose when they were willing to fight. They were generally more able to draw on support from villagers than could the ARVN or American soldiers. Nevertheless, enemy casualties mounted through 1967. Westmoreland’s search-and-destroy operations seemed to

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succeed, at least in terms of producing more dead VC. When a thrust by NVA forces just below the DMZ at Con Thien resulted in a thunderous response from American B-52s, Westmoreland claimed, “It was Dienbienphu in reverse,” because the NVA reportedly suffered 2,000 casualties.99 Thus, by the end of 1967, General Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition appeared to be succeeding, or so he informed the American people on his return home, declaring that “an important point” in the war had reached. As Westmoreland insisted, “The enemy’s hopes are bankrupt.”100 American and South Vietnamese forces had driven the Vietcong into remote sections of Vietnam or across the border into Cambodia while pushing NVA soldiers away from central and northern border areas. By all accounts, the enemy troops had suffered heavy casualties. At the same time, however, the VC and NVA still controlled the pace of fighting. Moreover, the policy of attrition produced more negative results still, with the rural economy crumbling and the number of civilian casualties and refugees growing. The failure to establish a truly representative government in the South hardly helped matters. All of this ensured that the United States was not accomplishing what it needed to in this fight: to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese population. As a consequence, the attempt to create a viable South Vietnamese state, which would have made the artificial boundary established at the 17th parallel genuine, failed. It was increasingly clear that something similar was taking place back home, where opposition to the manner in which this first televised war was being waged intensified. The artificial divisions in the United States, like the conflict several thousand miles away, thus continued to intensify. So-called “hawks” (those who supported the war) demanded more forceful action, but attention was focused more and more on the “doves” (those who opposed the war), many of whom challenged American involvement altogether. In the spring of 1967, massive antiwar rallies occurred in New York City and San Francisco, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the great civil rights leader, condemned the

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United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”101 The Resistance, a new antidraft movement, called for young men to refuse to register with the Selective Service. In

KHE SANH The scene of some of the bloodiest fighting of the Vietnam War, Khe Sanh is a valley encircled by mountains, located a half-dozen miles from the Laotian border and 14 miles from the demilitarized zone. In the summer of 1962, the U.S. Military Assistance Command instructed a Special Forces unit to join ARVN forces in setting up a surveillance camp outside the village of Khe Sanh. Operating out of a base constructed in the valley, U.S. Study and Observation Groups conducted a series of reconnaissance missions into Laos to check out enemy infiltration along the Ho Chi Minh Trail near the border drawn at the 17th parallel; those missions were designed to reinforce that boundary. As the number of NVA troops coming down the trail increased in 1966, General Westmoreland ordered American Marines to build a base of their own at Khe Sanh. During the next spring, NVA fighters attacked a team of Marines west of Khe Sanh. A firestorm of criticism resulted after a rescue patrol suffered heavy losses because of the faulty performance of their M16 rifles. That same period witnessed a series of assaults by Marines on the hills around Khe Sanh, where tough, hand-to-hand fighting occurred. Later that year, intelligence reports indicated that 25,000 to 40,000 NVA soldiers were gathering for a major assault. General Westmoreland believed that the 6,000 U.S. Marines stationed at Khe Sanh, along with massive firepower, could withstand an enemy offensive. On January 22, 1968, the Battle of Khe Sanh began. Fearing that another Dienbienphu would result, Westmoreland and President Johnson remained determined that Khe Sanh would not fall. The U.S. forces relied heavily on B-52s to pound enemy forces. Undoubtedly designed by the NVA as a diversionary move, the attack on Khe Sanh soon was overshadowed by the Tet Offensive. In March, the NVA units called off the siege of Khe Sanh; three months later, General Creighton Abrams, the new commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, ordered the closing of American bases in Khe Sanh, which were intended to maintain the border along the DMZ. The fight for Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive graphically demonstrated the artificiality of the border dividing North and South Vietnam.

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mid-October, street fighting broke out in Oakland, and in Washington, D.C., thousands of demonstrators encircled the Pentagon, the symbol of the American military establishment. Then, beginning in late January 1968, North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces combined to initiate the Tet Offensive, in which provincial capitals and all the major cities in South Vietnam were attacked. This occurred after a diversionary strike at Khe Sanh, near the 17th parallel, and clearly caught the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies off-guard; the size of the offensive also demonstrated the impotence of that border. “Seismic/acoustic sensors” first put in place for McNamara’s proposed electronic barrier indicated that heavy enemy movement was underway. General Westmoreland and President Johnson feared that another Dienbienphu might be approaching, but an NVA officer later explained that that would have been “impossible” given the strength of the U.S. military.102 Rather, the NVA wanted to know how the Americans would respond to the initiation of attacks from the DMZ. Most important, military commanders wanted to discover if such action would result in the American troops being sent over the partition line. Although the Vietcong in particular suffered tremendous losses as the Tet Offensive unfolded, news of fighting on the grounds of the U.S. embassy in Saigon and the 25-day holding of Hue by enemy troops were among many events that called into question the optimistic reports the Johnson administration and General Westmoreland had been delivering. Even General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted that Tet had been a “very near thing,” and the conservative Wall Street Journal suggested that “the American people should be getting ready to accept ... the prospect that the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed.”103 A loss of support for the war effort became evident, as Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy challenged Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic Party’s 1968 presidential nomination. Equally striking, a group of leading advisers to Democratic presidents—including the newly appointed secretary of defense,

The Americanization of the War

Clark Clifford—urged Johnson to deny military requests for an additional 200,000 troops. Eventually, Johnson withdrew from the presidential race and agreed to open peace talks in Paris, but violence prevailed both in Vietnam and at home. In March, in a village known as My Lai, American soldiers engaged in a rampage that resulted in the massacre of hundreds of civilians. The American public did not hear of the My Lai story for another 19 months. Meanwhile, assassinations of key political figures took place in the United States, with both Dr. King and Senator Kennedy shot. Anger and disillusionment spread, particularly among disaffected young people, as exemplified by protests at Columbia University and a violent clash with police that occurred in Chicago during the Democratic Party’s national convention. Thus, in the United States itself, divisions and boundaries among the American populace increased; some of those divides threatened to become permanent. Such developments, coupled with the continued reports of casualties in Vietnam, led to the November election of Republican Richard M. Nixon as president of the United States. Nixon promised to restore “law and order” at home and hinted that he had various plans that would lead to an end to the war and protect the nation-state that had resulted from the arbitrary border at the 17th parallel.

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10 War’s End and the Aftermath

War’s End and the Aftermath

T

he division of Vietnam at the 17th parallel, the arbitrary border drawn during the Geneva Convention in 1954, continued to haunt that country a decade and a half later. By that later date, Vietnam had endured another lengthy period of war but appeared no closer to the reunification envisioned by nationalists for centuries and promised so recently in Switzerland. As the 1960s came to an end, the Vietnam War continued to rage, notwithstanding tremendous setbacks suffered by Vietcong guerrillas during the Tet Offensive and caused by Operation Phoenix, a CIA-orchestrated counterinsurgency campaign throughout the South Vietnamese countryside. With the weakening of the VC and in further response to U.S. engagement in the war, more and more North Vietnamese soldiers came down the Ho Chi Minh Trail or across the demarcation line. Over the next half-dozen years, this scenario was repeated again and again, until the long-hoped-for reunification of Vietnam did come about, not through elections but by way of military conquest. Only that would allow for the abolition of the arbitrary border separating the Vietnamese from their countrymen. In January 1969, the administration of Richard Nixon came to power in Washington, D.C. Nixon, who had been a staunch hawk on the war, possessed varied ideas on how to bring it to a close. He recognized the extent of opposition at home and the difficulty of battling enemy forces—committed ones, no less— several thousand miles away. Still, like his predecessors, Nixon was determined not to lose the Vietnam War, even hoping at times that his military forces might prevail. Relying on advice from his top foreign policy advisor, Henry Kissinger, Nixon— who insisted on achieving “peace with honor”—also explored diplomatic angles that would allow his country to save face as American troops withdrew. Responding to domestic and international affairs, both Nixon and Kissinger reluctantly readied to abandon the artificial border dividing Vietnam. Kissinger convinced the president to propose a pullout of American and North Vietnamese troops, along with a “restoration” of the 17th parallel as a point of demarcation. As historian

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William S. Turley noted, such a proposal inferred that neither American nor NVA forces were indigenous to the area below the 17th parallel—that, in effect, Vietnam was made up of two nation–states. This stood in stark contrast to the centuries-old desire of Vietnam rulers and nationalists to represent a united state, one that refused to accept foreign domination in any fashion. The new American proposal was also at odds with North Vietnam’s insistence that the Geneva Accords had called for the nation’s reunification, because the 17th parallel was truly an arbitrary border. Borrowing from President Eisenhower’s move during the Korean War, Nixon considered threatening North Vietnam with nuclear weapons. As Nixon informed an aide, I call it the Madman Theory. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button, and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris begging for peace.104

Working another angle, Nixon hoped to convince the Soviet Union to pressure Ho to accept a diplomatic solution. In return, Nixon, long viewed as an out-and-out anticommunist, offered the Soviets needed food supplies, technology, and an arms agreement. While suggesting that such “linkage” of Soviet and American assistance would benefit both sides in the Cold War struggle, Nixon called on American firepower to demonstrate something of the Madman Theory in action. Although the operations were concealed from the American public and much of the government, B-52s conducted aerial attacks against North Vietnamese sanctuaries inside Cambodia. Nixon also urged that all non–South Vietnamese troops be removed from the area south of the 17th parallel. In June 1969, Nixon declared that 25,000 American soldiers were being withdrawn from Vietnam. Perhaps Nixon felt compelled to

War’s End and the Aftermath

do so in part because of disturbing developments plaguing American forces on the battlefront. That spring, American soldiers engaged in continuous attacks on Ap Bia Mountain in the A Shau Valley refused orders to conduct another sweep. Also, reports increased about “fragging” incidents, in which American troops deliberately fired on their compatriots, usually gung-ho officers who seemed to expose them to unnecessary risks. Still determined, however, Nixon threatened forceful action against North Vietnam, but Ho Chi Minh—before h e died on September 3—and his fellow Communist Party leaders refused to heed such warnings. Nixon also had to contend with the continued opposition to the war in the United States. On October 15, a one-day moratorium enveloped America, amounting to a strike on university campuses, businesses, and even government offices. On November 15, 400,000 people rallied in the nation’s capital to protest American actions in Vietnam. Later that month, revelations of the My Lai massacre came to light, and Nixon implored the so-called “Silent Majority” of his countrymen to support him. Nixon remained committed to his multipronged approach to the war, continuing to withdraw American troops and calling for a policy of “Vietnamization” to help sustain the nation–state made possible by the border at the 17th parallel. This required more of the fighting of the war to be done by ARVN forces and paralleled earlier French attempts to “yellow” the war (or replace French casualties with Asian ones). In other ways, the Nixon administration expanded the war, as demonstrated by an incursion by American and South Vietnamese troops into Cambodia in the spring of 1970 and a U.S.-backed push into Laos by ARVN soldiers the following year. Both involved crossings of real territorial borders by American units and forces identified with the southern regime that had been created after the establishment of the boundary at the 17th parallel in Vietnam. To Nixon’s chagrin, opposition to developments in Southeast Asia continued to unfold in the United States, with more calling for “bringing the war back home.” Some, as had been the case

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When President Nixon took office he initiated the withdrawal of some American troops from Vietnam. However, protests of the war continued in the United States, including the demonstration shown here at the Washington Monument on Moratorium Day, November 15, 1969.

since 1967, urged revolution in America, with a small number, including a group called the Weathermen, resorting to terrorism. A band of returned soldiers who joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) became important new figures in the ranks of the antiwar movement. Tragedy befell the peace forces when National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970, in the midst of massive protests against U.S. actions in Cambodia. In Southeast Asia, notwithstanding the ferocity of the bombing campaigns undertaken in Cambodia, Laos, and on both sides of the 17th parallel in Vietnam, the war remained a bloody stalemate. In fact, setbacks mounted as American troops withdrew, demonstrating the poor quality of many of the ARVN forces.

War’s End and the Aftermath

This proved true during the invasion of Laos, known as Lam Son 719, when the South Vietnamese experienced terrible losses. Kissinger believed that ARVN units opted to withdraw quickly, fearing a large North Vietnamese attack that could result in a massacre of their own forces. A continually frustrating problem for the United States involved the plight of several hundred servicemen, most of them aviators, held as prisoners of war (POWs) by the VC or the North Vietnamese. Starting in May 1971, Kissinger began participating in secret meetings with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho, in which the American policy advisor indicated that the United States would remove its remaining troops from South Vietnam in return for the release of the POWs. The North Vietnamese delegate insisted that his country would not accept an armistice, or truce, until the South Vietnamese government, headed by President Nguyen Van Thieu since 1967, was replaced by one that included VC members. When the attempt to resolve matters diplomatically failed, the North Vietnamese, seeking to drive Thieu from power, conducted another major offensive. In the spring of 1972, North Vietnamese troops led by General Vo Nguyen Giap flooded across the 17th parallel. Attacks occurred in South Vietnam’s northern sectors, across the Central Highlands, and then near Saigon itself. The NVA offensive surprised the South Vietnamese, whose commander in the northern sector, General Lam, did not believe the communists would violate the Geneva Accords so flagrantly. He had previously insisted that the North Vietnamese simply could not move over the 17th parallel. The enemy forces, President Nixon reflected in his diary, were more willing than their ARVN counterparts to make the kinds of sacrifices that would result in victory. To prevent the collapse of the South Vietnamese regime during the so-called Easter Offensive, Nixon undertook massive bombing strikes against the north, relying on B-52s to carry out Operation Linebacker I. Targets previously off-limits to American planes were now hit; Haiphong was mined and a naval blockade was instituted against North Vietnam.

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In the fall, Le Duc Tho informed Kissinger that the North Vietnamese no longer demanded Thieu’s removal before a cessation of hostilities. Thieu, however, insisted on the withdrawal of all NVA forces north of the 17th parallel. Nixon, then in the midst of a presidential election, nevertheless allowed Kissinger to proclaim, “Peace is at hand.”105 Following Nixon’s sweeping electoral triumph, however, Kissinger, in keeping with Thieu’s stipulation, called for the North Vietnamese to pull back above the 17th parallel. Le Duc Tho responded by referring to the Geneva Accords, which had indicated that the demilitarized zone “should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary;”106 it was, he argued, an arbitrary border that had to be discarded. Nixon chose to strike back at the North Vietnamese with another series of massive bombing raids. These occurred during the Christmas season, with American pilots dropping bombs on both Hanoi and Haiphong during Operation Linebacker II. Once again, Nixon removed previous restraints, informing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “This is your chance to use military power to win this war, and if you don’t, I’ll consider it your responsibility.”107 The damage was considerable, ranging from the killing of nearly 2,000 civilians to the downing of 15 B-52s and 11 other planes, which resulted in the death or capture of almost 100 American crewmen. A firestorm of criticism erupted, with Nixon denounced as a “madman” and Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme likening Operation Linebacker II to Nazi atrocities. In reality, the U.S. military struck at military targets only, and those in densely populated locations were off-limits. ***** Peace negotiations resumed soon, with an agreement reached in January 1973. For the initial time, the North Vietnamese agreed to the inclusion of an explicit reference to the demilitarized zone, and the American diplomats acknowledged that it

War’s End and the Aftermath

was intended to be a “provisional” boundary, not one that was either political or territorial. Both sides promised to release prisoners of war within 60 days of the cease-fire. The United States was to withdraw its remaining 24,000 soldiers from South Vietnam 60 days after the return of 591 American POWs, and the North Vietnamese were not compelled to send their troops already stationed in the South back across the 17th parallel. The Communist Party leaders did promise that there would be no attempts to take advantage of the cease-fire or to send more troops into the South. This soon became a point of contention, because American diplomats believed that the North had agreed not to send additional forces across the demilitarized zone. The North Vietnamese contested that interpretation of the Paris Accords, reasoning that they could send troops to replace those returning home. Although Thieu remained in power in Saigon, the Committee on National Reconciliation, which had representatives from the National Liberation Front, was established and planned to hold elections that would lead to the formation of a new government in the South. The International Commission for Supervision and Control of the Cease-Fire, made up of representatives from Canada, Indonesia, Poland, and Hungary, was set up to track developments and to see if the cease-fire remained in place. The United States agreed to provide $3.25 billion in economic aid to rebuild Vietnam. (That assistance was never forthcoming.) The North Vietnamese began releasing American prisoners of war in stages, beginning on February 12. For the American public, the war had seemingly come to an end. It had caused tremendous damage and suffering in three Southeast Asian nations and had threatened to tear apart the United States itself apart. An untold number of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians lost their lives because of the conflict, and more than 58,000 Americans died as well. Still unresolved was the future of South Vietnam, which continued to appear to many as an artificial state made possible by the creation of an arbitrary boundary. For several months after

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the Paris Accords were signed, President Nixon intensified bombing campaigns in Cambodia, hoping to hit sanctuaries used by the communist Khmer Rouge and North Vietnamese. As Congress moved to prohibit the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, however, North Vietnam stepped up the pace of its infiltration into the South; the North Vietnamese also increased the assistance provided to communist guerrillas in both Cambodia and Laos. The North Vietnamese–backed Khmer Rouge continued their advance toward Phnom Penh in Cambodia, and by 1974, the Pathet Lao held much of northern Laos. As fighting continued in Southeast Asia in 1974, the U.S. Congress passed the War Powers Resolution, which requires the president to notify Congress before sending American forces into foreign conflicts; congressional approval is required to keep those troops in action for more than 60 days. Congress, dealing with a president weakened by the Watergate scandal, which eventually led to his resignation, sharply reduced the level of economic assistance provided to the Thieu regime in South Vietnam. The situation continued to deteriorate in the nation–state that the United States had helped construct south of the the 17th parallel. The South Vietnamese economy, so long dependent on American dollars, experienced crippling inflation and massive unemployment in major urban centers. Repression characterized Thieu’s government—dissidents were treated harshly, as they had been all along. More and more people poured into Saigon, which was flooded with larger numbers of prostitutes, black marketeers, orphans, refugees, and military deserters. Because of decreased support from the United States, the ARVN no longer possessed a seemingly endless supply of war matériel. Matters soon went from bad to worse, as the Communist Party leadership in Hanoi undertook the final offensive. In January 1975, a two-year program for taking over South Vietnam began; the actual reunification of Vietnam occurred much more quickly. On March 10, the North Vietnamese Army, reinforced with additional troops that had come across the

War’s End and the Aftermath

demarcation line, struck in the Central Highlands, causing a panicked retreat by South Vietnamese forces. On March 26, in the midst of a growing exodus of civilians and ARVN soldiers alike, Hue fell, and Danang did so four days later. On May 1, Saigon—soon to be referred to as Ho Chi Minh City—fell, Phnom Penh did so within two weeks, and Vientiane would later in the year. The Republic of South Vietnam came to an end, as did the temporary partitioning of Vietnam at the 17th parallel. Thus, after decades of warfare, Vietnam was reunited. The reunification promised through the Geneva Accords had finally occurred, allowing the removal of the demarcation line, an arbitrary border that resulted from Cold War concerns and compromises that offended Vietnamese nationalists. Scars and memories remained, however, and as a new era dawned, sounds of ordnance exploding along the former DMZ could be heard, causing still more casualties in beautiful, but often tragic, Vietnam. The removal of the arbitrary boundary that had splintered Vietnam for so long did not overcome all the cultural, political, and ideological differences that had divided the Vietnamese people. French imperialism had been vanquished, along with American neocolonialism, but Vietnam was still set by internal chasms, including those that evidently caused Northerners and Southerners to be viewed differently. After the war ended, many Southerners, including large numbers who had supported the struggle against the French, the Americans, and their Saigonbased allies, found themselves viewed with suspicion by their supposed comrades from north of the 17th parallel. New divisions soon surfaced, too, with Communist Party leaders quarreling among themselves about the future of their nation. An American-led economic and diplomatic boycott of Vietnam continued, and the resulting isolation crippled that country’s ability to rebuild after the war, as did communist economic policies, which eventually compelled some in the party to call for market solutions. That tendency heightened after China’s adoption of economic liberalism and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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Most striking of all is that other divisions remained in place as Americans struggled with the meaning of the war that had gone so badly for the United States, while the Vietnamese retained a communist political monopoly in the midst of a campaign to open up their nation for trade, commerce, and tourism. With the passage of time, American government leaders, veterans, and common citizens began responding more favorably to calls to establish relations with the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese, in turn, appeared increasingly receptive to that possibility, suggesting that efforts be undertaken to mend various rifts and ruptures that had wounded the peoples of both Vietnam and the United States. As the early years of the twenty-first century unfolded, the struggle to overcome the legacy of long-entrenched arbitrary borders remained in place in each country and in the hearts and minds of their citizens.

CHRONOLOGY & TIMELINE 111 B.C.

China’s Han dynasty conquers Nam Viet.

A.D

The Trung sisters conduct a revolt against Chinese rule.

39–43

939

Ngo Quyen drives out the Chinese and reestablishes the state of Vietnam (Nam Viet).

1400s to 1700s

Dynastic struggles and the long march southward unfold.

1407–1428

The Ming Dynasty attacks Vietnam, but King Le Loi successfully repels the Chinese.

1471

The Vietnamese capture the Cham capital at Vijaya.

1500s

Europeans start making inroads into Vietnam.

1802

The reign of the Emperor Gia Long begins.

mid-1800s

French incursions take hold. Vietnamese resistance occurs immediately.

1862

The Treaty of Saigon is signed.

1867

The French form the colony of Cochinchina.

1883

The French establish a protectorate over Vietnam.

1893

The French take control of Laos.

1897–1902

Paul Doumer serves as governor-general of Indochina.

1903–1919

Pham Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh are the outstanding nationalist figures of Vietnam.

1911–1941

This is the period of the lengthy exodus of Ho Chi Minh.

1930

Ho Chi Minh helps found the Indochinese Communist Party.

1940–1945

The Japanese become the effective rulers of Vietnam.

1941

Ho returns to Vietnam and soon founds the Vietminh Front.

1944–1945

The Vietminh establish relations with the agents from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

1945

The Japanese stage a coup against the French. The Vietminh sweep into a series of cities and rural areas across Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh declares the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The United States begins to lend support to the French, who are determined to reestablish their dominance in Indochina. The French Indochina War begins. The French name former emperor Bao Dai head of the State of Vietnam. The United States agrees to provide military assistance to the French. The first U.S. Military Advisory Assistance Group arrives in Saigon.

1948 1950

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CHRONOLOGY & TIMELINE 1954

1955

1960 1963 1964 1965

The battle of Dienbienphu rages, culminating with a Vietminh triumph. The Geneva Accords produce a temporary division of Vietnam at the 17th parallel. The United States supports the selection of Ngo Dinh Diem as prime minister of the Republic of Vietnam. Operation Exodus occurs in the North, resulting in one million Vietnamese migrating south of the 17th parallel. Diem solidifies his hold on power in the South. He refuses to allow reunification elections, instead conducting a referendum in which he receives 98.2 percent of the vote. The National Liberation Front is founded. Buddhist protests mount in Vietnam, and Diem is overthrown. U.S.-backed actions against North Vietnam intensify. Congress passes the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. The U.S. undertakes a systematic bombing campaign against North Vietnam. President Johnson sends 111B.C. China’s Han dynasty conquers Nam Viet

1500 Europeans begin to make inroads into Vietnam

1930 Ho Chi Minh helps found the Indochinese Communist Party 1862 The Treaty of Saigon is signed

1930

111B.C. 1802 The reign of the Emperor Gia Long begins

1850 French incursions take hold with Vietnamese resistance resulting

939 Ngo Quyen drives out the Chinese and reestablishes the state of Vietnam

122

1883 The French establish a protectorate over Vietnam

CHRONOLOGY & TIMELINE American ground troops to Vietnam. Opposition to the war mounts in the United States. The Battle for Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive occur; 550,000 American troops are stationed in Vietnam. President Nixon attempts to rely on the Madman Theory. Nixon begins to withdraw American troops but expands the air war over Laos and Cambodia. American and ARVN forces make an incursion into Cambodia. The U.S.-backed ARVN incursion into Laos takes place. The North Vietnamese conduct a major offensive in the spring. The U.S. carries out Christmas bombings. Peace accords are signed in Paris. The last American ground troops withdraw. The fall of Saigon occurs, resulting in Vietnam’s reunification.

1968 1969

1970 1971 1972 1973 1975

1948 French name former emperor Bao Dai head of Vietnam

1940—45 The Japanese effectively rule Vietnam 1945 Ho Chi Minh declares the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam

1940

1965 President Johnson sends American ground troops to Vietnam

1973 1954 Battle of Dienbienphu The Geneva Accords produce a temporary division of Vietnam 1973 at the 17th parallel Peace accords are signed in Paris

1941 Ho returns to Vietnam and founds the Vietminh Front

The last American ground troops withdraw

123

NOTES Chapter 1 1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

124

Quoted in Chester Cooper, The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam. New York: Dodd Mead, 1970, p. 79. Quoted in Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles. Boston: Atlantic, Little, Brown , 1973, p. 222. Quoted in Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History. New York: Penguin Books, 1984, p. 199. Quoted in John Foster Dulles, Memorandum on Instructions to the American Delegation at Geneva, May 12, 1954, American Journey Online, http://www.americanjourney.psmedia.com /index.html. Quoted in Karnow, Vietnam, p. 201. Quoted in Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 74. Ibid. Quoted in James S. Olson and Randy Roberts, Where the Domino Fell: American and Vietnam, 1945–1995. St. James, NY: Brandywine Press, 1999, p. 49. Quoted in Karnow, Vietnam, pp. 201–202. Quoted in Rob McClintock to State Department, July 4, 1954, American Journey Online. Quoted in “Report by Ho Chi Minh to the Sixth Plenum of the Party Central Committee,” July 15, 1954, Vietnam: A History in Documents. New York: Meridian, 1971, pp. 155–157. Quoted in Patrick J. Hearden, The Tragedy of Vietnam. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991, p.60. Quoted in “The Uncertain Calm,” Newsweek, August 2, 1954, 15. Quoted in “Asia: Attack and Retaliation,” Newsweek, August 2, 1954, 32. Quoted in “The Final Declarations of the Geneva Conference,” July 21, 1954, in A Vietnam Reader: Sources and Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991, p. 40. Ibid, pp. 40–41. Quoted in “The American Response to the Geneva Declarations,” July 21, 1954, in A Vietnam Reader, pp. 40–41. Quoted in Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 77.

19. Quoted in Ngo Dinh Diem, “Statement Regarding the Geneva Accords,” July 22, 1954, American Journey Online. 20. Quoted in George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002, p. 49.

Chapter 2 21. Quoted in Karnow, Vietnam, p. 104. 22. Quoted in Thomas D. Boettcher, Vietnam: The Valor and the Sorrow. Boston: Little Brown, and Company, 1985, p. 8.

Chapter 3 23. Quoted in Boettcher, Vietnam, p. 24.

Chapter 4 24. Quoted in Anthony Short, The Origins of the Vietnam War. New York: Longman, 1989, p. 13. 25. Ibid., pp. 13–14. 26. Quoted in William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life. New York: Hyperion, 2000, p. 14. 27. Quoted in Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, p. 11. 28. Quoted in Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, p. 30. 29. Ibid., p. 15. 30. Quoted in Schulzinger, A Time for War, p.7. 31. Quoted in Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, p. 40. 32. Ibid., p. 62. 33. Ibid., p. 99. 34. Ibid., p. 235.

Chapter 5 35. Ibid., p. 242. 36. Quoted in Cecil B. Currey, Victory at Any Cost: The Genius of Viet Nam’s Gen. Vo Nyugen Giap. Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, Inc., 1999, p. 60. 37. Quoted in George Donelson Moss, Vietnam: An American Ordeal. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002, p. 22. 38. Quoted in Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, p. 21. 39. Quoted in Moss, Vietnam, p. 24. 40. Ibid., p. 25.

NOTES 41. Ibid. 42. Quoted in Schulzinger, A Time for War, pp. 14–15. 43. Quoted in Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, p. 281. 44. Ibid., p. 296. 45. Ibid., pp. 289–290. 46. Quoted in Karnow, Vietnam, p. 139. 47. Ibid.

Chapter 6 48. Quoted in “The Vietnamese Declaration of Independence,” September 2, 1945, A Vietnam Reader, p. 32–33. 49. Quoted in Karnow, Vietnam, p. 139. 50. Quoted in Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, p. 28. 51. Quoted in Moss, Vietnam, p. 36. 52. Quoted in Hearden, The Tragedy of Vietnam, p. 33. 53. Quoted in Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, pp. 379–380. 54. Quoted in “Airgram from Reed to Acheson,” June 14, 1947, Vietnam: A History in Documents, p. 66. 55. Quoted in Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 13. 56. Quoted in “Department of State Policy Statement on Indochina,” September 22, 1948, Vietnam: A History in Documents, p. 75. 57. Quoted in Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 31. 58. Quoted in Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945–1990. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991, p. 23. 59. Quoted in “Telegram from Acheson to the Consulate in Hanoi,” May 20, 1949, in Vietnam: A History in Documents,, p. 79. 60. Quoted in State Department Report for the National Security Council (NSC), “U.S. Policy Toward Southeast Asia,” (NSC 51), July 1, 1949, in Vietnam: A History in Documents, p. 81. 61. Quoted in “Memorandum by Raymond B. Fosdick (Consultant to the Secretary of State on Far Eastern Policy) for Ambassador at Large Philip Jessup,” November 4, 1949, Vietnam: A History in Documents, Porter, pp. 83–84. 62. Quoted in Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 29.

Chapter 7 63. Quoted in Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, p. 39. 64. Ibid, p. 37. 65. Quoted in Currey, Victory at Any Cost, p. 193. 66. Quoted in Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 60. 67. Quoted in Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 37. 68. Quoted in Currey, Victory at Any Cost, p. 191. 69. Quoted in “Address by Dulles,” March 29, 1954, Vietnam: A History in Documents, p. 135. 70. Quoted in “Eisenhower Counts the Dominoes,” A Vietnam Reader, pp. 38–39. 71. Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 43. 72. Ibid. 73. Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, p. 44. 74. Ibid., p. 43. 75. Quoted in Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945–1990, p. 36.

Chapter 8 76. Quoted in Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 57. 77. Ibid. 78. Quoted in Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 81. 79. Quoted in Hearden, The Tragedy of Vietnam, p. 63. 80. Quoted in William S. Turley, The Second Indochina War: A Short Political and Military History, 1954–1975. New York: Mentor, 1987, p. 38. 81. Quoted in Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 86. 82. Quoted in Hearden, The Tragedy of Vietnam, p. 87.

Chapter 9 83. Quoted in John Prados, The Blood Road: The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1998, p. 213. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., pp. 214–215.

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NOTES 88. Ibid., p. 215. 89. Quoted in David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest. New York: Random House, 1969. 90. Quoted in “Resolution of the Ninth Conference of the Lao Dong Party Central Committee,” December 1963, Vietnam: A History in Documents, p. 257. 91. Quoted in Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, p. 118. 92. Quoted in “The Senate Debates the Tonkin Gulf Resolution,” August 6–7, 1964, in A Vietnam Reader, pp. 75–76. 93. Quoted in “Undersecretary of State George Ball’s Memo to President Johnson,” July 1, 1965, A Vietnam Reader, p. 87. 94. Quoted in Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 178. 95. Quoted in J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power. New York: Random House, 1967. 96. Quoted in Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 208. 97. Quoted in Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, p. 158. 98. Ibid. 99. Quoted in Robert Pisor, The End of the

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Line: The Siege of Khe Sanh. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002, p. 70. 100. Quoted in “Address by Commander of U.S. Forces in Vietnam, Gen. William C. Westmoreland,” November 21, 1967, Vietnam: A History in Documents, p. 354. 101. Quoted in Martin Luther King Jr., “Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam (April 1967),” in Against the Vietnam War: Writings by Activists. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999, p. 102. 102. Quoted in Turley, The Second Indochina War, p. 108. 103. Quoted in Pisor, The End of the Line, p. 236.

Chapter 10 104. Quoted in Hearden, The Tragedy of Vietnam, p. 153. 105. Quoted in Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 299. 106. Quoted in “The Final Declarations of the Geneva Conference,” July 21, 1954, in A Vietnam Reader, p. 40–42. 107. Quoted in Moss, Vietnam, p. 395.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

American Journey Online. http://www.americanjourney.psmedia.com/ index html (1999).Boettcher, Thomas D. Vietnam: The Valor and the Sorrow. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985. Cooper, Chester L. The Lost Crusade. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970. Currey, Cecil B. Victory at Any Cost: The Genius of Viet Nam’s Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap. Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, Inc., 1999. Di Leo, David L. George Ball, Vietnam, and the Rethinking of Containment. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Duiker, William J. Ho Chi Minh: A Life. New York: Hyperion: 2000. Fulbright, William J. The Arrogance of Power. New York: Random House, 1967. Halberstam, David. The Best and the Brightest. New York: Random House, 1969. Hearden, Patrick J. The Tragedy of Vietnam. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991. Herring, George C. America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 2002. Hoopes, Townsend. The Devil and John Foster Dulles. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: Penguin Books, 1984. Long, Ngo Vinh. Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants under the French. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Moss, George Donelson, Ed. A Vietnam Reader: Sources and Essays, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991. Moss, George Donelson. Vietnam: An American Ordeal. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Olson, James S., and Randy Roberts. Where the Dominoes Fell: American and Vietnam, 1945–1995. St. James, NY: Brandywine Press, 1999. Pisor, Robert. The End of the Line: The Siege of Khe Sanh. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2002. Porter, Gareth, Ed. Vietnam: A History in Documents. New York: Meridian, 1981. Prados, John. The Blood Road: The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1998. Robbins, Mary Susannah, Ed. Against the Vietnam War: Writings by Activists. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Schulzinger, Robert D. A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Short, Anthony. The Origins of the Vietnam War. London: Longman, 1989. Turley, William S. The Second Indochina War: A Short Political and Military History, 1954–1975. New York: Mentor, 1987. Young, Marilyn B. The Vietnam Wars 1945–1990. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991.

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FURTHER READING Books

Allen, Douglas, and Ngo Vinh Long, Eds. Coming to Terms: Indochina, the United States, and the War. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991. Andrade, Dale. America’s Last Vietnam Battle: Halting Hanoi’s 1972 Easter Offensive. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001. Buttinger, Joseph. Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled. Volume I: From Colonialism to the Vietminh; Volume II: Vietnam at War. New York: Praeger, 1967. Cable, James. The Geneva Conference of 1954 on Indochina. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Dawson, Alan. 55 Days: The Fall of South Vietnam. New York: PrenticeHall, 1977. DeBenedetti, Charles, and Charles Chatfield. An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Devillers, Philippe, and Jean Lacouture. End of a War: Indochina, 1954. New York: Praeger, 1969. Duiker, William J. The Communist Road to Vietnam. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981. ———. Vietnam: Nation in Revolution. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983. Eisenhower, Dwight D. Mandate for Change. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963. Emerson, Gloria. Winners and Losers. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976. Fall, Bernard. Hell in a Very Small Place. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1967. ———. Street Without Joy. Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole, 1963. ———. The Two Viet-Nams: A Political and Military Analysis. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964.

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FURTHER READING

Fitzgerald, Frances. Fire in the Lake. Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1972. Gardner, Lloyd C. Approaching Vietnam: From World War II through Dienbienphu. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988. Gettleman, Marvin, et al., Eds. Vietnam and America: A Documentary History. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1985. Gravel, Senator, Ed. Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971–1972. Halberstam, David. Ho. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987. ———. The Making of a Quagmire. New York: Random House, 1964. Hammer, Ellen J. The Struggle for Indochina, 1940–1954. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1954. Higgins, Hugh. Vietnam. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1982. Johnson, Lyndon B. The Vantage Point. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971. Kaplan, Lawrence, et al. Dien Bien Phu and the Crisis of FrancoAmerican Relations, 1950–1954. Eds., Wilmington, DE.: Scholarly Resources, 1990. Kutler, Stanley I. Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War. New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1996. Lacouture, Jean. Ho Chi Minh. New York: Random House, 1968. Langguth, A. J. Our Vietnam: The War 1954–1975. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Maclear, Michael. The Ten Thousand Day War. New York: St. Martin’s, 1981. Mann, Robert. A Grand Illusion: America’s Descent into Vietnam. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Marr, David G. Vietnam Anticolonialism, 1885–1925. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

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FURTHER READING

Moise, Edwin E. Historical Dictionary of the Vietnam War. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2001. Nixon, Richard M. The Memoirs of Richard M. Nixon. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978. Oberdorfer, Don. Tet! Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971. Olson, James, Ed. Dictionary of the Vietnam War. New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1987. Patti, Archimedes L. Why Viet Nam? Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Randle, Robert. Geneva 1954: The Settlement of the Indochina War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969. Rotter, Andrew J. Light at the End of the Tunnel: A Vietnam War Anthology. Ed., Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1999. ———. The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Roy, Jules. The Battle of Dienbienphu. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2002. Shaplen, Robert. The Lost Revolution. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Shultz, Richard H., Jr. The Secret War Against Hanoi: The Untold Story of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam. New York: Perennial, 2000. Simpson, Howard R. Dien Bien Phu: The Epic Battle American Forgot. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s Inc., 1996. Tucker, Spencer C., Ed. The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. VanDemark, Brian. Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War. New York: Oxford, 1995. Wells, Tom. The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

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FURTHER READING

Zaroulis, Nancy and Gerald Sullivan. Who Spoke Up?: American Protest against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1984.

Articles

Cottrell, Robert. “The Longest War in US History: Vietnam,” Choice 40, June 2003, p. 1657–1666. Immerman, Richard. “The United States and the Geneva Conference of 1954: A New Look,” Diplomatic History, 14, Winter 1990, p. 1.

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INDEX American Imperialism, 8 Americanization of the War, 94–109 bombing of North Vietnam, 98–99 charges of imperialism, 97–98 General Westmoreland’s strategy, 105–107 and Khe Sanh, 107 maintaining the arbitrary border, 99–100 and the McNamara Line, 95–97 photograph with caption, 103 protests in America, 101–105 Vietcong attacks, 99–100 Annamites as Vietnamese, 21 Army of the Republic of Vietnam, (ARVN), 86–87 join Americans, 90–93, 105–106, 115–116 Atlantic Charter, The during the Vietnam War, 50–51 Axis Powers, 4

Bibliography, 127–128

Chau, Phan Boi and alliance with Trinh, 35–40 executed supporters, 36 rise of, 35–40 Chronology, 121–123 Churchill, Winston advice to President Eisenhower, 7–8 critical perspective, 74–75 issuance of the Atlantic Charter, 50–51 Clifford, Clark, advisor to Johnson, 102–103 Cold War, The unfold of, 62–63 Contributors, 138

Dai, Emperor Bao and Geneva conference, 5 and the Japanese control of Vietnam, 56 opponent of Ho, 83–84 d’Argenlieu, Georges Thierry established the Republic of Indochina, 60–61 de Gemouilly, Admiral Charles Rignalut movement against Hue, 19–20 Dewey, OSS agent A. Peter first United States casualty in the Vietnam War, 59 Diem, Ngo Dinh, 8, 10–11 death of, 97–98

photograph with caption, 92 secured power, 87–89 Dienbienphu, 68–78 defeat at, 1–2 as French fortress, 1–2, 4 lost in war, 72–73 photograph with caption, 73 positioning of French troops in, 69–72 and United States refusal to intervene, 4 victory for Ho and Giap, 76–77 Divided Vietnam, 79–93 and America, 80, 82 and ARVN, 86–87 big loss for the French, 80, 82 and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, 89–90 and Ho, 80, 82 and the likelihood of a viable government, 83–85 Operation Exodus, 85–86 and SATO, 86–87 Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc established during Vietnamese resistance, 37 Dong Minh Hoi and The Vietnamese Revolutionary League, 52–53 Doumer, Paul biography, 28 determination to eradicate the Vietnamese resistance, 35 and role in Indochina, 26–31 Dulles, John Forster meeting with the National Security Council, 11 orders no deals with China, 6–8 role of Secretary of State, 4 and the Threat of Red Asia, 73–74

Easter Offensive, 115 Eisenhower, President advice from Churchill, 7–8 Enlai, Zhou, 6 encounter with Ho, 42 and Mendes–France, 8

France misgivings of Geneva Conference,11–12 Free Khmer guerrilla forces,7 French colonization, 23–31, and arbitrary borders, 22 and the cost to the Vietnamese, 24–25

133

INDEX and Doumer’s role, 26–31 economic depression of the Vietnamese, 27–28 exploitation of the Vietnamese, 25–27, 30 and Vietnamese resistance to, 32–45 and Vietnamese schooling, 29–30 French Indochina War, 1, 55–67 dominance of, 62 French troops photograph with caption, 61 Further Reading, 129–133

Geneva Conference of 1954, 1–12, 111 acknowledgements of, 10–11 arguments over the divide, 9–10 conference about Vietnam, 2 and the fall of Mendes–France government, 10 as five-power conference, 2 misgivings of France and Vietminh, 11–12 misgivings of United States and Vietnam, 11–12 opening day, 2 partition of Vietnam, 2–3 turmoil with, 82–83 as two divided hot spots, 2 Giap, Vo Nguyen attack on French troops, 64–65 attacks on South Vietnamese, 115–116 call for guerilla forces, 53–54 photograph with caption, 57 role in the Vietnam War, 51 strike on Lai Chau, 72–73 Guerrilla forces, 7

Hanoi Free School established during Vietnamese resistance, 37 Harmand, General Jules warning to the Vietnamese, 33–34 Ho Chi Minh Trail building of, 89–90 Hoopes, Townsend as Dulles’ biographer, 4–5

Indochina French domination in, 21–31 map of, 81 and the Whites Man’s Burden’, 21 Indochinese Communist Party

134

war in Vietnam, 47–48 Indochinese Nationalist Party also referred to as Quoc Dan Dang Dong Duong, 42–43

Jason Group, The report on the McNamara Line, 96–97 Johnson, President expression of readiness for war, 100–102

Khe Sanh synopsis of, 107

Lattre Line, de French forts built, 65 Lattre, General Jean de orders in French Indochinese War, 65–66 Le Dynasty battle with Champa, 16 Long, Gia insular attitude about Vietnam, 18–19 Ly Dynasty, emergence of, 15–16

Matray, James I., 134 McClintock, Rob on Diem, 8 McNamara Line, The establishment of, 95–97 and the Jason Group, 96–97 McNamara, Robert Americanization of the war, 95–97 Mendes–France, Pierre on Enlai, 8 Geneva conference and the fall of his government, 10 Prime Minister of France, 7 strive to bring the war in Indochina to rest, 7 Minh, Ho Chi, 4 analysis of his homeland, 8–9 attempt to reach out to the United States, 59–61 encounter with Enlai, 42 issuance of Declaration of Independence, 58–59 and the plight of his countrymen, 44–45 referenced as Ho, 8–9 return to Vietnam, 47–49, 51 schooling of, 38–41

INDEX starting the Indochinese Nationalist Party, 42–43 support for, 56 and the Vietnam War, 47–48 Mitchell, Senator George J., 134 Mongol invaders, and Vietnamese history, 16

Nation Building, 84 Nghi, Emperor Ham as boy emperor, 34 murder of, 36 Nguyen Family, struggle with Trinh Family, 17–18 and Vietnamese History, 17–18 Nguygen The Patriot, 37–45 see Nguygen Ali Quoc Nhu, Ngo Dinh,8 Nixon, President Richard administration of and the end of the war, 111–120 withdrawal of troops, 112–113 Nonaggression pact ending the Popular Front, 47 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance of, 7–8

Operation Exodus, 85–86 Operation Linebacker, 115–116 Operation Vulture attempt to save Dienbienphu, 75–76

Pac Bao operation base for The League for the Independence of Vietnam, 47–48 Paria, Le (journal) established by Ho, 41 Pathet Lao, guerrilla forces, 7 Prados, John reporting on the McNamara Line, 95–96

Quoc Dan Dang Dong Duong also referred to as the Indochinese Nationalist Party, 42–43 Quoc, Nguyen Ai Vietnam’s leading nationalist, 37–45 Quyen, Ngo ousted Chinese, 15–16

Radford, Admiral Arthur and meeting with Roosevelt, 5 Republic of Indochina, The establishment of, 60–61 Roosevelt, President Franklin D. death of, 58 on French rule, 4 Hooper as biographer, 4–5 issuance of the Atlantic Charter, 50–51 and meeting with Radford, 5

Scholar’s Revolt, The, 36 17th parallel, The, 112, 114–115, acknowledgement of the Vietminh’s military, 9 an arbitrary border, 1–12 compared to the 38th parallel, 1–2 controlling borders,1–2 official divide by Geneva, 78 Smith, Walter Bedell Undersecretary of State, 7, 10 Source notes, 124–126 Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SATO), 86–87

Tam Tam Xa radical group, 42 T’ang Dynasty, 15–16 38th parallel, The compared to the 17th parallel, 1–2 Tho, Le Duc response to Geneva Accords, 116–117 Tran Dynasty threats to, 16 Trinh Family dominance in the North, 16–17 struggle with Nguyen Family, 17–18 Trinh, Phan Chu and alliance with Chau, 35–40 death sentence of, 37 rise of, 35–40 Truman, President Harry S. contentions with Vietnam War, 58 Tu Duc, Emperor, 47 attempt to ward off French, 19–21 continuing the Nguyen Dynasty, 20

U.S. First Calvary Air Mobile division photograph with caption, 101 United States

135

INDEX involvement in Vietnam, 63–67 misgivings of Geneva Conference, 11–12 refusal to intervene at Dienbienphu, 4 as world leader, 4

Van Dong, Pham, 47 as Democratic Republic of Vietnam representative, 5–7 orders to Pathet Lao and Free Khmer guerilla forces, 7 outrage of, 9–10 Viet Nam Doc Lab Dong Minh Hoi leaders of, 47–48 also referred to as The League for the Independence of Vietnam, 47–48 Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang also referred to as the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, 43–44 Vietcong suffering of, 108–109 Vietminh battle with Japanese, 54 control of Vietnam, 56 feared to dominate all of Indochina, 5–6 losses of, 1 misgivings of Geneva Conference, 11–12 photograph with caption, 77 resistance of, 5 synopsis of, 52 their control of the divide, 9–10 Vietnam compared to World War II, 2, 4 first United States casualty in, 59 guerrilla forces in, 61–62 Japanese control of, 56 misgivings of Geneva Conference, 11–12 Vietnam at War, 47–54 and Duc, 47 and the Atlantic Charter, 50–51 and Ho, 47–48 and the Indochinese Communist Party, 47–48 The League for the Independence of Vietnam, 47–48 and the movement of the Japanese into, 48–49 and the need for sanctuaries, 49–50 and the nonaggression pact, 47 Vietnamese burden of French democracy, 24–25 economic depression, 27–28 exploited by the French, 25–27, 30

136

referred to as “Annamites”, 23 Vietnamese History, 13–21 and China, 14–21 emergence of Ly Dynasty,15–16 and Emperor Tu Duc, 19–21 European involvement in, 18–19 inhabitance of, 14 and the Kingdom of Nam Viet, 14 and Le Dynasty, 16 long march southward, 16–21 and Mongol invaders, 16 protection by French interests, 19–21 and Quyen, 15–16 and Red River Delta, 14–15 stirrings of Vietnamese nationalism, 15–16 and T’ang Dynasty, 15–16 and Tran Dynasty, 16 and Trinh Family, 16–17 Vietnamese Nationalist Party also referred to as the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, 43–44 Vietnamese resistance, 32–45 hardships of the revolutionary movement, 43–44 Vietnamese schools, 29–30, 38

War’s end and the Aftermath, 110–120 and the 17th parallel, 119–120 American response to, 117–118 American struggle with the war, 119–120 bombing in Southeast Asia, 114–115 Easter Offensive, 115 and the Geneva Accords, 116–117 and Geneva conference, 111 Giap’s attacks, 115–116 and the Nixon administration, 111–120 Operation Linebacker, 115–116 peace agreement of 1973, 116–117 and a photograph of Washington Monument, 114 plight for POWs, 115–116 policy of ‘Vietnamization’, 113–114 and the reunification of Vietnam, 118–120 withdraw of American troops, 112–113 Washington Monument photograph with caption, 114 World War I, 40 World War II compared to Vietnam, 2, 4 guerrilla forces in, 51 and Indochina, 26–27

PICTURE CREDITS page: Frontis Courtesy of the Library of Congress Geography & Map Division 3 9 26 28 34 49 57

Associated Press, AP Associated Press, AP © Bettmann/CORBIS © Hulton|Archive by Getty Images © Leonard de Selva/CORBIS © Hulton|Archive by Getty Images Associated Press, AP

61 Associated Press, AP 73 Associated Press, AP 77 Associated Press, VIETNAM NEWS AGENCY 81 © Bettmann/CORBIS 92 Associated Press, AP 101 Associated Press, AP 103 Associated Press, AP 114 Associated Press, AP

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Robert Cottrell has been a faculty member in the Department of History at California State University at Chico since 1984. Since arriving at the university, Cottrell has taught over a dozen different history courses and two American Studies courses. He was chosen as Outstanding Professor for 1998–99, an award that recognized both scholarship and excellent teaching. He has published a number of books, predominantly in his major are of interest, twentieth-century U.S. history. He looks forward to writing and is always thinking ahead to his next project. Vietnam: The 17th Parallel is his first book for Chelsea House and another is in the planning stages. George J. Mitchell served as chairman of the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland during the 1990s. Under his leadership, an historic accord, ending decades of conflict, was agreed to by the governments of Ireland and the United Kingdom and the political parties in Northern Ireland. In May 1998, the agreement was overwhelmingly endorsed by a referendum of the voters of Ireland, North and South. Senator Mitchell’s leadership earned him worldwide praise and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. He accepted his appointment to the U.S. Senate in 1980. After leaving the Senate, Senator Mitchell joined the Washington, D.C. law firm of Piper Rudnick, where he now practices law. Senator Mitchell’s life and career have embodied a deep commitment to public service and he continues to be active in worldwide peace and disarmament efforts. James I. Matray is professor of history and chair at California State University, Chico. He has published more than forty articles and book chapters on U.S.-Korean relations during and after World War II. Author of The Reluctant Crusade: American Foreign Policy in Korea, 1941–1950 and Japan’s Emergence as a Global Power, his most recent publication is East Asia and the United States: An Encyclopledia of Relations Since 1784. Matray also is international columnist for the Donga libo in South Korea.

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