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Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
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| 69. | ICC, Fourth Interim Report, op. cit., 30. |
| 70. | CIA, "Probable Developments in North and South Vietnam Through Mid-1957," (NIE 63–56, 17 July 1956), 10. A thesis advanced by Bernard Fall that the Viet Minh deliberately sent the families of the stay-behinds north, so that the hard-core regulars who remained in the
south could engage in "mobile warfare, without having to worry about reprisals against their relatives," has not been substantiated in recent interviews with Viet Cong. Fall, The Two Viet-Nams, op. cit., 358. |
| 71. | B.S.N. Murti, Vietnam Divided, op. cit., 224; U.S. Dept. of State, "Southern Regroupees and Northerners in the Communist Military Force in South Vietnam," (Research Memorandum RFE-49, November 9, 1966), SECRET, iii. Fall once accepted a figure of 120,000, but later tended to a ceiling of 100,000. Cf., Fall in Lindholm, ed., Viet-Nam, op. cit., 57; and Fall, Vietnam Witness, op. cit., 216. The 130,000 total approximates the figures published by the Research Staff of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1956; 150,000 Viet Minh troops and their families.[1] Wilfred G. Burchett, the Australian communist, has referred to "the withdrawal of the 140,000 Viet Minh and the cadres to the north."[2] The statistic usually used in U.S. official publications—for example in the 1965 White Paper—is 90,000 Viet Minh troops moved north, and this is commonly regarded as an invaluable reservoir for the DRV's subsequent infiltration of South Vietnam.[3] But the dimension of this resource extended beyond 90,000 "warriors." There were Montagnards who proved particularly useful in building and protecting the infiltration routes down through the Laotian and Vietnamese Highlands. There were also children, an obvious long-range asset.[4] The DRV set up a special school for southern Montagnards, and some 14 elementary and higher schools were reserved for other southern children.[5] Moreover there is evidence that the Viet Minh systematically broadened its family ties in the South through hundreds of hasty, directed marriages for departing "warriors" and by recruiting very young men and boys just before departure.[6] |
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- ↑ R.P. Stebbins and the Research Staff of the Council on Foreign Relations, The United States in World Affairs, 1954 (New York: Harper and Bros., 1956), 285, quoted in Kahin and Lewis, United States in Vietnam, op. cit., 75.
- ↑ Wilfred G. Bruchett, Vietnam, Inside Story of the Guerrilla War (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 128.
- ↑ U.S. Dept. of State, Aggression from the North (Washington: GPO, 1965) (Dept. of State Publication 7839, February, 1965), 11. Intelligence estimates of the 1954–1956 period used the figure 95,000; e.g., HIE 63-56, op. cit., 6.
- ↑ The Rand Corporation is sponsoring an extensive study of the DRV role in the southern insurgency, based on captured documents and interviews with prisoners and defectors; three reports published to date are germane: J. J. Zasloff, "The Role of North Vietnam in the Southern Insurgency," RM-4140-PR (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, August, 1966); Zasloff, "Political Motivation of the Viet Cong: the Viet Minh Regroupees," RM-4703-ISA/ARPA (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, August, 1966); Zasloff, "Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam, 1954-1960: The Role of the Southern Viet Minh Cadres," RM-5613-ISA/ARPA (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, March, 1967). For data on children and Montagnards, see RM-4140, 33–34; and RM-4703, 1, 25, 29–30; also Fall) The Two Viet-Nams, op. cit., 358.
- ↑ Report 204/64 of the GVN National Interrogation Center, Saigon, cited in RM-4703, op. cit., 30–31; Cf., Wilfred G. Burchett, The Furtive War (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 146–147.
- ↑ Dennis Warner, The Last Confucian, op. cit., 142–143, reported 500 marriages in Quang Ngai Province alone—and 20,000 families there with close relatives in the North; Wesley Fishel, "Vietnam's War of Attrition," The New Leader (December 7, 1959), 17 identified 300 marriages with departing Viet Minh in Binh Dinh Province: both cited in RM-4140, op. cit., 33. Concerning the recruitment of youth, see RM-4703, op. cit., 26; and the Report of the Saigon Military Mission, FY 1955, (Lansdale Report of 1955), 34.
