United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense/IV. A. 5. 3. The Role of Hanoi
IV. A. 5.
Tab 3.
HANOI AND THE INSURGENCY IN SOUTH VIETNAM
TABLE OF CONTENTS and OUTLINE
| Page | ||||
| A. | Character of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam | 1 | ||
| 1. | Structure of the Government | 1 | ||
| a. | Constitution of 1946 | 2 | ||
| b. | Constitution of 1960 | 2 | ||
| 2. | Political Parties | 3 | ||
| a. | Lao Dong Party | 3 | ||
| b. | Fatherland Front | 5 | ||
| 3. | Leadership | 6 | ||
| B. | The DRV's Domestic Objectives | 9 | ||
| 1. | Societal Discipline | 9 | ||
| a. | Rural Opposition, 1954–1956 | 9 | ||
| b. | Peasant Rebellion of 1956 | 12 | ||
| c. | Reconciliation and Repression, 1957–1959 | 14 | ||
| 2. | Progress Toward Socialism | 16 | ||
| a. | Agriculture | 17 | ||
| b. | Industry | 18 | ||
| C. | Foreign Policy Objectives | 20 | ||
| 1. | Independence | 20 | ||
| 2. | Reunification | 22 | ||
| 3. | Support from Abroad | 25 | ||
| a. | Foreign Military Assistance | 25 | ||
| b. | Solidarity with the USSR and CPR | 26 | ||
| 4. | Vietnamese Hegemony | 29 | ||
| D. | Links with the Viet Cong | 32 | ||
| 1. | Southerners in the North | 32 | ||
| 2. | Fatherland Front | 37 | ||
| 3. | Common Leadership | 39 | ||
| 4. | The Communist Party | 40 | ||
| E. | DRV Strategy: Objectives and Timing | 45 | ||
| 1. | Political Struggle: Summer, 1954 -- Summer, 1956 | 45 | ||
| 2. | Internal Dissent and Reassessment: Summer, 1956 -- Fall, 1957 | 47 | ||
| 3. | Preparations: Winter, 1958 -- Spring, 1959 | 53 | ||
| 4. | Taking the Offensive: Spring, 1959 -- Fall, 1960 | 56 | ||
| a. | Surfacing the Strategy, 1959 | 56 | ||
| b. | DRV Intervention in Laos | 60 | ||
| c. | Explication of the Strategy, 1960 | 64 | ||
| FOOTNOTES | 72 | |||
Tab 3.
HANOI AND THE INSURGENCY IN SOUTH VIETNAM
A. Character of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam
Between 1954 and 1960, Ho Chi Minh had to face in North Vietnam, as did Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, the problem of building a nation out of the ruins of nearly a decade of war. During those years, until the DRV declared its support for the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, Ho seemed preoccupied with the problems of consolidating his regime and securing the foreign aid he needed to assure economic growth. Certainly agricultural shortages and popular unrest in North Vietnam in the immediate aftermath of Geneva were sufficiently serious to have discouraged foreign adventures through 1956. However, by January, 1961, when Hanoi announced the formation of the NLF, the internal difficulties of the DRV seem to have been largely resolved. Inquiry into the timing and extent of the DRV's participation in the insurgency of South Vietnam, therefore, requires assessment of those conditions within the DRV which might have affected its capability and willingness to prosecute a war of aggression.
1. Structure of the Government. He possessed one distinct advantage over Diem: his government had been in existence, in one form or another, continuously since 1945. Ho and his lieutenants ruled in radically differing circumstances as the status of the regime shifted from that of a state within the French Union in 1946, to a belligerent in a colonial revolution, and back to a sovereign state in 19554, preserving remarkable continuity. The Geneva Conference of 1954 restored its actual territorial dominion to about what it had been in 1954, in that France acceded to a cease-fire based up on a territorial division of Vietnam at the 17th parallel and to Viet Minh "conduct of civil administration" in the regions to the north, pending "general elections.""1/ The withdrawal of French Military forces and civil authority from northern Vietnam was coordinated with the DRV forces and leaders so that the latter systematically replaced the former; by the end of May 1955, the DRV had acquired full control of all its territory, and began to act as a sovereign state.2/ However, formal recognition of DRV statehood dates from January, 1950 (China and Soviet Union), and best information now available to the U.S. Department of State indicates that thereafter twenty-two other nations established relations with it. 3/ Formally, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was organized under a Constitution promulgated in 1946 which, in language echoing Jefferson, guaranteed civic freedoms, and reposed principal state power in a people's parliament. A Second Constitution was adopted on January 1, 1960, more explicitly drawn from Communist thought, resembling the Chinese Constitution in general, but containing Soviet style clauses on civil rights and autonomy of national minorities.
a. Constitution of 1946
The 1946 basic law declared Vietnam to be a democratic republic in which all power belonged to the people "without distinction of race, class, creed, wealth, or sex." Its territory, "composed of Bac-Bo, or Northern Viet Nam (Tonkin), Trung-Bo or Central Viet Nam (Annam), and Nam-Bo or Southern Viet Nam (Cochinchina) is one and indivisible… The capital of Viet Nam is Hanoi. 4/ However, the Constitution of 1946 was never institutionalized; instead, the exigencies of the war with the French eventuated in a government which was literally an administrative extension of the rigidly disciplined political apparatus headed by Ho Chi Minh and encadred by his colleagues from the Indochinese Communist Party. Pham Van Dong (presently Premier, then Vice President) announced in 1950 that promulgation of the 1946 Constitution had been postponed "because several of its provisions require for their application the cessation of the state of war," 5/ and in 1951, after Ho had openly aligned with the Sino-Soviet powers, the Viet Minh radio explained that "a gang of traitors" had been evolved in its formulation, and hence a "progressive character was lacking." In late 1956, the DRV set up a constitutional reform committee. 6/ In December, 1958, Ho invited the public to submit recommendations on a new draft basic law, and the second Constitution was promulgated in 1960.
b. Constitution of 1960
The 1960 Preamble speaks of a thousand years of struggle for independence, lauds Ho Chi Minh and the Lao Dong (Communist) Party, cites harshly United States "imperialists" and "interventionists," and presents this interpretation of the aftermath of Geneva, 1954–1960: 7/
" ... . In the South, the U. S. imperialists and their henchmen have been savagely repressing the patriotic movement of our people. They have been strengthening military forces and carrying out their scheme of turning the southern part of our country into a colony and military base for their war preparations. They have resorted to all possible means to sabotage the Geneva Agreements and undermine the cause of Viet Nam’s reunification .... "
" . ... Under the clear-sighted leadership of the Viet Nam Lao-Dong Party, the government of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam, and President Ho Chi Minh, our entire people, broadly united within the National United Front, will surely win glorious success in the building of socialism in North Viet-Nam and the struggle for national reunification."
Both the opening sentence of the Preamble and Article 1 of Chapter I of the Constitution itself, stipulate that Viet Nam is an entity indivisible from China to Camau in South Vietnam. Chapter II of the Constitution, which precedes the section on human rights, announces step by step that the DRV is advancing from "people’s democracy to socialism … transforming its backward economy into a socialist economy with modern industry and agriculture .... "Communism" (or a derivative term) is not mentioned as such, but the document is otherwise explicit that the economy is to be state-centered; e.g.:
"Article 12. The state sector of the economy, which is a form of ownership by the whole people, plays the leading role in the national economy. The state ensures priority for its development.
"Article 17. The state strictly... prohibits the use of private property to disrupt the economic life of the society or to undermine the economic plan of the state ....
Chapter III is a hyper-democratic guarantee of civil rights, and the remainder provides for an elected National Assembly .and a centralized, statist public administration.
2. Political Parties
a. Lao Dong Party
Unrecognized by the 1960 Constitution except in the Preamble's encomiums, the Lao Dong Party (Dang Lao Dong Vietnam, or Vietnamese Workers' Party, is the dominant political power within the DRV. It is an expressly Marxist-Leninist Party which traces its lineage back to the Indo-chinese Communist Party founded by Ho Chi Minh, and although the ICP was abolished in 1946, claims to have be e n prime mover in the major nationalist "front" movements through 1951, when the DRV "legalized" the Party. For example, Vo Nguyen Giap explained that:
Party statutes adopted in 1960 established a National Congress, and a Central Committee elected by the Congress, as its policy- making bodies. The Congress is ponderous (600 members, meets every 4 years), and the Central Committee in fact governs. More precisely, power is exercised by the Politburo, its steering group. The Central Committee serves as a forum for the discussion of policy, the dissemination of information, and the training of future leaders. Though major decisions appear as Central Committee resolutions, in actuality they originate with the Politburo. The Secretariat of the Central Committee is the principal executive agency of the party, directing subordinate Party organizations in foreign affairs propaganda, organization, inspection (or control), the military establishment, the "reunification" movement, industry and agriculture. The Secretariat also appears to control personnel assignments and promotions in the Party's middle and upper echelons. "The Vietnamese people's war of liberation was victorious because we had a wide and firm National United Front ... organized and led by the Party of the working class: the Indochinese Communist Party, now the Vietnam Workers' [Lao Dong] Party. In the light of the principles of Marxism-Leninism ... the Party found a correct solution to the problems .... "
Source: NIS 43 C, p. 28
The Lao Dong internal organizational principle is "democratic centralism," hierarchal subordination of elected leaders of Party entities formed in all geographic, economic, bureaucratic, social, and cultural groups, wherever at least three Party members exist. Membership in the Party is deliberately confined to an elite, and has never a mounted to more than about 3% of the population. 10/
COMMUNIST PARTY MEMBERSHIP
| (CIA Estimates) | ||||||
| 1931 | - | 1,500 | 1950 | - | 400,000 | |
| 1946 | - | 50,000 | 1962 | - | 570,000 | |
As of 1963, 80% of the Party were members of 10 years or more, less than 10%, were women, and no more than 7% were non-Vietnamese Although an elite, the Party admitted in 1960 that 85% of its members had no more than 4th grade educations. Lack of skill and drive, as well as inadequate strength, handicapped the Party in its attempts to encadre the DRV's ambitious agricultural and industrial programs. From the 1960 admissions, it appears that of 110,000 managerial personnel in the DRV, only 50,000 or so were Party members; about 10% of the Party is then employed directly in management. Nonetheless, the Party has from all appearances succeeded in lodging itself in pivotal positions in every part of the society, and certainly in the DRV's main undertakings.
b. Fatherland Front
One of the fundamenal procedures of the Vietnamese Communists has been the forming of a "united front" in which Communist Party members join cause with non-communists, especially nationalist activists. The Party itself has pointed out that this is in proper Leninist fashion:
"The policy of founding the Indochinese democratic front between 1936 and 1939, the Viet Minh front between 1941 and 1951, and the Lien Viet front [1946-1951]; the decision of signing the 6 March 19146 .. preliminary accord [Ho' s accommodation with France] .. -- all these are typical examples of the clever application of the ... instruction of Lenin." 11/
In 1955 the DRV organized non-communist elements into "mass organizations," within the "Fatherland Front" (Mat Tran To Quoc). 12/
SELECTED COMPONENT ORGANIZATIONS OF THE FATHERLAND FRONT
Lao Dong Party
Democratic Party
Socialist Party
General Confederation of Labor
National Liaison Committee of Peasants
Women's Union
Youth Federation
Writers and Artists Union
Journalists Association
Unified Buddhist Association
National Liaison Committee of Patriotic & Peace Loving Catholics
Industrialists and Traders Federation
Peace Committee The Fatherland Front follows the format of the Lao Dong Party, and Party members occupy the key positions within the Front. The Front composition has not been changed since 1955, but after 1960 it became more active in the "reunification" movement, serving as the proponent, or "externalizing agent" in the DRV for the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam. 13/
It should be noted that the Fatherland Front included two nominally non-communist parties, and that it advocated beginning in 1955 an interestingly different scheme for bringing about reunification of Vietnam: two legislative assemblies for North and South, respectively, separate armed forces, and a confederate government . But on all other issues the Front differed not at all from Ho, especially agreeing that: "American imperialism is the chief enemy." 14/ No other deviant view is on record from either the Front or the two "independent" political parties. Moreover, while the DRV government has on rare occasions included Socialist or Democrats, none has ever occupied an important leadership position.
3. Leadership
The most remarkable aspect Party is stability of their leadership. Most of the top leaders of the Party were old-time communists.
Membership in the Lao Dong Politburo 1951-60
Source: NIS 43 C, p.26
LAO DONG - DRV LEADERSHIP IN 1900 15/
Interlocking of top leadership positions in North Vietnam
A similar testimony to Ho's eminence lies in the murky evidence of factional dispute within the Lao Dong. In 1946 Truong Chinh and Giap appeared to foreign observers as "extremists," urging violence on Ho; in 1956 Truong was the Maoist extremist, Vo a Soviet-style moderate; in 1966, Vo was rated a moderate, but Truong had become a neutral, and reportedly himself had come under fire of "extremist" Le Duan. 17/ Increasingly, Ho has risen above the politics of personalities an intramural clashes, and to the extent that he became involved, seems to have mediated and reconciled rather than disciplined. Demonstrably, his personal leadership qualities kept the DRV elite a cooperative, integrated team, with individual ambitions and hardline-moderate factions delicately in balance.
The larger circle of the Central Committee of the Lao Dong exhibited no different complexion from the inner leadership, except that while most of the Politburo members are considered generalists, the 33 other Central Committee members include Party administrators, State specialists, or military and internal security leaders. More than half of the Central Committee have been identified as ICP members before World War II. 18/ The DRV of 1960, was, then, a state dominated by a coterie or revolutionaries of a particularly hardened breed. Ho himself, in a 1960 speech, paid this tribute to his colleagues:
"I wish to remind you that thirty-one of the comrades who are now in the Central Committee were given altogether 222 years of imprisonment and deportation by the French imperialists before the Revolution, not to mention the sentences to death in absentia and the years of imprisonment evaded by those who escaped from prison .... Our comrades made up for the years in prison in discussing and studying political theory. Once more, this not only proves that the enemy's extremely savage policy of repression could not check progress, but on the contrary, it became a touchstone, it has further steeled the revolutionaries. And the result was that the Revolution has triumphed, the imperialists have been defeated …" 19/
B. The DRV's Domestic Objectives
Ho Chi Minh was always a revolutionary. Whether he was first and foremost a nationalist, or a potential Tito, or the last of the Stalinists--and arguments can be advanced for each theory--as head of state he subscribed to internal programs for the DRV which were communist in concept and Maoist in execution. In repeated statements on the goals of the regime, he and the rest of the Lao Dong leadership made it plain that they were determined to revise radically North Vietnam's land-holding system, and reconstruct its traditional society along egalitarian and collectivist lines. Further, they were determined that North Vietnam would become agriculturally self-sufficient, and industrialized to the degree its natural resources would permit. In fact, the modernization they envisaged for North Vietnam surpassed in degree and urgency any of the My-Diem undertakings in South Vietnam. yet the latter aroused the peasant's apprehensions, and eventually their hostility. What of Ho Chi Minh's internal security? From the record of DRV policy from 1950 to 1960, it is clear that, while "progress towards socialism" in both the agrarian and industrial realms was always one principal State/ Party objective, a well-disciplined society thoroughly submissive to Party leadership was another, and frequently overriding goal.
1. Societal Discipline
By no means can it be said that at any time prior to Geneva, Ho and the Lao Dong Party held complete sway in rural North Vietnam. Aside from French supported counter-movements, the Viet Minh leaders had to contend with peasant reluctance to support them, and even outright rejection of their policy. Almost as soon as the DRV "legalized" the Lao Dong Party in 1951, the Party launched a series of land reform schemes which contravened even the popularity Ho et al enjoyed as heroes of the Resistance. Moreover, tensions developed-early between the Viet Minh and the Catholics as a group--less apparently over political issues than over traditional Catholic fear of Tonkinese persecution in the absence of French protectors. The Catholics of Tonkin had developed a political and military independence like that of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao in Cochin-china, and resisted the Viet Minh as vigorously as the latter resisted the Saigon regimes. In both land reform and relations with the Catholics, the Party and the DRV encountered stiff opposition.
a. Rural Opposition, 1954-1956
Prior to 1954, the Lao Dong Party experimented in Viet Minh liberated 3reas of Tonkin with a Maoist-style Land Reform Campaign. 20/ Other than the "Tar, Land Reform was the foremost undertaking of the Lao Dong Party after 1951. In essence, the Land Reform Campaign committed the party to an assault on the traditional rural social hierarchy, and to redistribution of land and wealth. Beginning with punitive taxes, the Campaign matured terror, arrests, and public condemnation, trials, and executions. Within the DRV hierarchy, the proponent of Land Reform was Truong Chinh (born Dang Xuan Khu, party name translating as "Long March"), Secretary General of the Lao Dong Party, who openly espoused the Maoist version of communism, and who relied upon Chinese advisers. Truong Chinh saw land reform as a method of organizing the peasantry under the Lao Dong Party, less important for its economic or social ramifications than for its political and military significance. Truong had warned in 1947 that:
"If we neglect the organization of the people, we cannot mobilize the entire people and the army, and cannot enable them to take part in the resistance in every field. In 1918 Lenin wrote: 'To wage a real war, we must have a strong and well organized rear ....' These words constitute very precious counsel for us in this long-term resistance war." 21/
As victory of the Resistance neared, Ho Chi Minh's internal reforms, as opposed to martial undertakings, In December 1953, for instance, he stated that:
"[The] two central tasks in the next years are to do our utmost to fight the enemy and to carry out land reform .... In 1954, we must pay particular attention to three great works:
"To combine land reform with strengthening of the armed forces ....
"To combine land reform with the training of cadres and the raising of their ideology ....
"To combine land reform with the development of agricultural production .... " 22/
Moreover, Ho apparently countenanced harsh measures to carry out both "central tasks." He is reported to have stated his basic strategy to Party cadres in these terms:
"To straighten a curved piece of bamboo, one must bend it in the opposite direction, holding it in that position for awhile. Then, when the hand is removed it will slowly straighten itself." 23/
When the Geneva Conference opened the way to Viet Minh dominion over North Vietnam, and held out the prospect to Tonkinese peasants of migrating to South Vietnam, hundreds of thousands were sufficiently apprehensive over religious persecution, or over "land reform" and other communizing campaigns to the North . There is considerable evidence that many of these fears were well-founded. On the heels of the withdrawing French Expeditionary Forces, Truong Chinh's teams of Chinese advisers toured from village to village to survey for land reforms, and these were followed by an infusion of Lao Dong Party cadres to village level. 24/ People's Courts were activated and the Campaign became the vehicle not only for land redistribution, but for Communist Party penetration into rural society, and a wholesale transformation of the penetrated community's traditional structure.
U.S. intelligence was not at the time well informed on the ensuring events, but since various sources (chiefly Northern refugees) have filled in a fairly coherent picture. 25/ From the farmers' point of view, the regime's Campaign, involved three particularly onerous procedures. The first was an attack upon the position and prerogatives of the traditional village hierarchy, accomplished by the cadre's selecting and training several of the poorest, least successful villagers for a Land Reform Committee and a Special People's Tribunal, and soliciting, from the same sources, accusations against the more prosperous, socially elevated villagers. 26/ The second was the classifying of the entire populace into such lettered categories as "dishonest and ferocious landlords," "average normal landlords"; "rich peasants"; "strong middle level peasants"; or "very poor peasants." 27/ Thirdly, each village Tribunal was then assigned a quota of one landlord death sentence. According to a former Viet Minh, the initial results were displeasing to the "our Chinese comrade advisers, who felt that more "exploiters" should have been found. Accordingly, on orders from the Lao Dong Central Committee, new classifications were assigned which labeled five times the number of landlords. At the same time, the landlord execution quota was raised from one to five per village. 28/
The results of the Campaign were like the outcome of similar procedures in China earlier in the decade: widespread bloodshed. Aside from persons executed on the direct order of the Tribunals themselves, there were countless others who, evicted from their landholds, and ostracized by the community, were condemned to die of starvation. Figures on casualties of the Camp a ign are inconclusive. George A. Carver states that the killed ' ·Te re "probably on the order of 100,000"; a French professor then in Hanoi estimates that altogether 100,000 were lost; refugees have testified that the countryside of North Vietnam was white with the clothing of mourning; Bernard Fall believed that 50,000 to 100,000 were killed. 29/ That there were significant excesses i s evident from the behavior of the DRV itself, which beginning in August 1956, moved publicly to restrain Party cadres, to curb the power of the local courts, and to dampen the ardor of the "poor" peasants.
In August, 1956, Ho admitted that "errors had been committed in realizing the unity of the peasants" and promised to redress wrongful classifications and maljudgments by Land Reform Committees. 30/ At the 10th Plenum of the Lao Dong Party Central Comnlittee on 29 October 1956, Truong Chinh "TaS replaced by Ho Chi Minh himself as Party Secretary, and the top levels of the Central Land Reform Committee and the Ministry of Agriculture were shaken up. 31/ Vo Nguy en Giap, as the Party's spokesman, read a list of errors considered in these changes:
"(a) While carrying out their anti-feudal task, our cadres ... have separated the Land Reform and the Revolution. Worst of all, in some areas they have even made the two mutually exclusive.
"(b) We have failed to realize the necessity of uniting with the middle-level peasants, and we should have concluded some form of alliance with the rich peasants, whom we treated in the same manner as the landlords.
"(c) We attacked the landowning families indiscriminately....
"(d) We made too many deviations and executed too many honest people. We attacked on too large a front and, seeing enemies everywhere, resorted to terror, which became far too widespread.
"(e) Whilst carrying out our Land Reform program we failed to respect the principles of freedom of faith and worship in many areas.
"(f) In regions inhabited by minority tribes we have attacked tribal chiefs too strongly, thus injuring, instead of respecting, local customs and manners.
"(g) When reorganizing the party, we palace much importance to the notion of social class instead of adhering firmly to political qualifications alone. Instead of recognizing education to be the first essential, we resorted exclusively to organizational measures such as disciplinary punishments, expulsion from the party, executions , dissolution of party branches and cells. Worse still, torture. came to be regarded as a normal practice during party reorganization." 32/
On 2 November, the DRV announced that its first postwar elections would be held in 1957, and formed a constitutional reform committee as one of several measures aimed at greater freedom in the society. On 8 November, Ho abolished the detested Special People's Tribunals) and ordered the wholesale release of prisoners from the regime's detention centers. There followed then a systematic, government-wide "Campaign for the Rectification of Errors." Notwithstanding these admissions, or perhaps because of them, violence broke out in Nghe An, the province of Ho's birth.
b. Peasant Rebellion of 1956
The year 1956 had been a bad one for communist regimes. Obedient to the dictates of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, most communist governments, including the DRV, had launched programs of de-Stalinization and liberalization. In China these took the form of the "Hundred Flowers" movement, and in the DRV, the "Rectification of Errors Campaign." Poland and East Germany, as well as Hungary had experienced violence. Nonetheless, it was with some surprise that the world received Hanoi Radio's announcement of 16 November 1956, of riots which:
"Broke out when a gang of reactionaries, taking advantage of the mistakes comm itted during the political implementation of land reform, molested soldiers and cadres of the people's regime, seized quantities of arms and blocked traffic. Many dead and wounded are reported among the soldiers and cadre .... Drastic measures have been taken to maintain security .... Regional administrative committees have intensified efforts to correct mistakes committed in the agrarian reform program, and are now satisfying the legitimate aspirations of all compatriots, including the Catholics .... " 33/
On 17 November, however, Hanoi disclosed that "troops and cadres .... tried to reason with the people but were man-handled. This ended in a clash in which a few persons were killed and wounded, including some army men … Security services are now taking the necessary steps to maintain order and security and to protect the compatriots' lives and property … " 34/ On 21 November, Nhan Dan, the government nevspaper) noted that: "Nghe An is the province in which party organizations existed as early as 1930. But it is in the same province that the most serious mistakes have been made … ," and went on to deplore the execution and beatings of party members. 35/
What happened indicates that the populace of North Vietnam must have been living at the time under severe tension. The People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) had been deployed in strength into the rural areas to support the Land Reform Campaign:, and it was reportedly through PAVN channels that the DRV first learned of imp ending revolt. Local garrisons had been reinforced as citizens grew more restive, and units composed of regrouped southerners were sent into exceptionally tense areas.
On November 9, 1956, several hundred aggrieved peasants assembled in a market pl ace near Vinh--a predominantly Catholic arp.a --to petition an ICC team to arrange for some of them to migrate to S out~ Vietnam, and for return of confiscated land to others . The following morning a special DRV propaganda team and a contingent of 11VA troops arrived, and several arrests were attempted. A riot ensued) which spread into insurrection. On the night of 13 November PAVN troops stormed into the town, scattering the rebels and inflicting heavy casualties. Thousands of peasants then swarmed over their local government offices, destroying land records, and blocking roads. Some militia deserted and joined the rebels, and attacks on nearby DRV troops were attempted . Bernard Fall, in a 1957 article, described four columns of some 10)000 peasants marching in the province capital) seizing arrrtS from troops ) and forcing party cadres to sign confessions of crimes . 36/ Two reinforced army divisions, some 20,000 strong, were committed to put down the uprising. 37/.
The casualties resulting from the revolt are not known. Fall states that "close to 6000 farmers were deported or executed." 38/ Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon cited "massacres" in the North) claimed to have evidence that the entire population of Nghe An.had r~lained ignorant of its right to move to the South in 1954-1955) and called upon the ICC to reinstate Article 14(d). 39/ Vietnam Press) Diem's official press agency, on 9 November 1956, quoted Cong Nhan, a Saigon daily as follows:
"In the North, the fall of the illegitimate regime is near .... As soon as the people's hatred of the Communist dictatorship is sufficiently mature for it to succeed in overthrowing it, then general elections which are really free will take place in the whole of Vietnam, and will peacefully bring about the reunification of the country.
"If he refuses to haye recourse to force in order to liberate the North, while yet realizing the dearest aspirations of the people) the supreme head of the Republic of Vietnam does so solely in order to avoid bloodshed and undesirable fratricidal strife." 40/
c. Reconciliation and Repression, 1957-1959
From the DRV viewpoint the Nghe-An uprising) whatever its dimensions, coincided fortuitously with the Suez and Hungarian crises. The GVN simply could not muster sufficient evidence to compete for headlines, and U.S. attention was on Europe. In any event) Ho and his regime undertook a series of conciliatory gestures vhich sapped popular resentment, and occluded the situation abroad. Conciliatory gestures were quickly extended to Catholics. Radio Hanoi, which in July 1955, had broadcast a Lao Dong proclamation rejecting the existence of deities consistent with the "scientific principles of the doctrine of Marx and Lenin," on 22 November 1956 announced that:
" ... in the agrarian reform, we have committed errors, including errors in the observance of freedom of religion. The people in general, and the Catholic citizens in particular, want these errors corrected. These are legitimate demands." 41/
At the same time the government allocated about 48 million dong (about $15,000) for repair of Catholic churches and a seminary. 42/ On 15-16 December 1956, the DRV convened the National Committee of the Catholic Union, which issued a declaration criticizing the government for having violated the laws on religious freedom, pointing out that:
" ... the errors committed during the agrarian reform have violated the policy of religious liberty of the Lao Dong Party and of the Government and have infringed on the religious rights of the faithful.... " 43/
Ho Chi Minh personally received a delegation from the Committee of the Catholic Union to express his regret over the "errors" that had been committed, and Nhan Dan, the Lao Dong paper, published a series of articles on the same subject. The Lao Dong Party itself was purged with particular attention to the demonstrably unreliable rural membership acquired during the latter stages of Land Reform, and Nhan Dan through the spring of 1957 reported on continuing difficulty restoring the Party's rapport in the countryside. At the same time, the press carried a number of graphic accounts,of life in DRV prison camps. 4~/
In early 1957, in emulation of Mao, the DRV sponsored a "hundred flowers" campaign, and as in China, the regime was surprised by the sharpness of intellectual criticism which it evoked. 45/ The Hundred Flowers movement lasted in full bloom only about three months, but the literary license stimulated an unusual outflow of verse and fable, in which Land Reform, PAVN, foreign advisers, and the Party cadre were all criticized. Eventually the barbs became unbearable for the Lao Dong, and the flow of newsprint to opposition papers was cut, printers went on strike, and a particularly cutting journal, Nhan-Van ("Humanism," a pun on Nhan-Dan), was forbidden to publish. Arrests and trials followed and by mid-1957 the voice of the intellectuals had all but been stilled. Nevertheless, as late as 1960, official releases were still deprecating literature which did not meet regime criteria for "proletarian writings." By mid 1957, the DRV had reversed its policy on Catholics--six months after the "Rectification" rapprochement of December 1956. The denunciation of priests was resumed, and the Church was accused of political activities. In 1959, a more intense campaign of harassment was undertaken, including newspaper barrages depicting the Catholic clergy as the greatest obstacle to collectives in farm regions. Church activity was severely restricted ; all non-Vietnamese priests and nuns were expelled; and the movement of the native clergy was rigidly circumscribed. Catholic schools closed rather than accept DRV political instructors. Western observers in Hanoi in 1962 noted that congregations in Hanoi were composed invariably of the aged. Fall reported that as of that year there were but 5 bishops and 320 priests remaining in the DRV. 46/
The DRV, like the GVN also resorted to population relocations; the forced migration of Vietnamese from overcrowded, potentially dissident coastal region s into areas inhabited by minority peoples. The tribal people of North Vietnam comprise d about 15% of the population thinly settled over about 40% of the country. 47/ These folk had always resisted government from outside their tribal society . The French made only a pretense of governing them. Racially differentiated from the Vietnamese, the highlander-lowlander relationship historically proceeded from hostility on the one hand and contempt on the other. Even Truong Chinh was unwilling to press strongly his Land Reform Campaign against the patriarchal tribal system, but to the extent that he did, violence ensued. In Vo Nguyen Giap's catalog of mistakes recited on 29 October 1956 (supra), these difficulties were admitted, and concessions to the minorities; were part of the Rectification of Errors. The Constitution of 1960 guaranteed the preservation of minority languages and cultures, and autonomy for local government. More than 70% of public administration in the northeast border region was placed in the hands of non-Vietnamese, and the proportion was almost 50% on the Laotian frontier. Minority leaders were given seats in the National Assembly and on the Lao Dong Party Central Committee) and in both the Party and government bureaucracies numerous special minority boards and commissions were formed. Nonetheless) the first DRV Five-Year Plan (1960) included an expanded agricultural resettlement program in which 1,000,000 Vietnamese farmers were to move from the delta into the tribal regions to open new farmlands. In fact, the new farms were seldom self-sufficient, much less a contribution to the national food supply. But they aided internal security: their presence debilitated the traditional tribal society, and provided a quasi-military presence on the borders. In 1959, security forces in the border regions were further strengthened with Armed Public Security Forces to counter alleged airdrops of "ranger spies" from South Vietnam.
In most respects, the DRV had gone further in its self-accusation than had the de-Stalinization campaigns in other communist countries. Its recovery was equally exaggerated. Hoang Van Chi) a former Viet Minh cadre, believes that the Land Reform I s advance into mass terror, followed by "Rectification" and reconciliation, had been carefully calculated by Ho as a "bamboo bending" in . deliberate emulation of the Chinese, and that Ho, no less than Mao) was fully aware that bloodshed would eventuate. 48/ Aiming ultimately at nothing less than a rapid and total transformation of traditional society, both leaders resorted to terror, followed by calculated relaxation and retightening of government control, as necessary steps to a disciplined populace. If such was in fact Ho’s views, events bore him out, for by 1959 the DRV was able to resume a forced advance toward collectivization of agriculture, which, though afflicted with occasional administrative setbacks and by production decreases) did not again prompt revolt. 49/
Other internal security messures taken by the DRV included strict controls over personal mobility, the allocation of large manpower resources to internal security functions, and the employment of the Lao Dong Party as a control mechanism and security censor. The regime eventually acquired, through its duplicate Party and governmental bureaucracies, contacts with and control Over virtually every citizen. The formal internal security apparatus was effectively supplemented by population control documentation (identification cards, licenses, travel permits), by incessant propaganda, by networks of informers) and by surveillance in compulsory mass organizations. By 1959) following 5 years of oppression, relaxation, and repression, the people of the DRV were effectively disciplined.
2. Progress Towards Socialism
The assertion of the DRV Constitution of 1960 that the nation was "transforming its backward economy into a socialist economy with modern industry and agriculture ... " had substance, but entailed a substantial input from abroad. Though a primarily agricultural society, North Vietnam emerged from its war with France in 1954 a food-deficit area. Densely populated, war-torn, it found it self more than customarily dependent upon outside supplies of rice and supplemental foods, which it had usually imported from South Vietnam. Soviet stop-gap aid filled the food deficit until DRV production was improved. The negative attitude of the GVN toward any economic relations with the DRV beyond those necessitated by the Geneva regroupment, in which Diem became progressively more adamant, created one pressure upon the DRV to seek dependable sources of further aid abroad. A second stemmed from lack of human and material capital to take advantage of its natural resources: the North contained all the developed mineral lodes and most of the established manufacturing in the two Vietnams, as well as the bulk of electric power capacity in Indochina. 50/ The DRV needed substantial foreign aid either to press toward modernizing its basic industry or to collectivize its farms.
a. Agriculture
Foreign aid to the DRV in agriculture, aside from relief shipments of food, took the form chiefly of technical assistance, both in management and technique. 51/ Chinese experts in Maoist land reforms figured prominently in the-Concept and direction of the collectivization drives. Russian advisors are believed to have advocated DRV concentration on mineral and tropical products valuable in communist international trade, and to have furnished methodological assistance in irrigation, fertilizing, and the like, but to little avail: labor intensive, hand tool farming in the traditional fashion persisted. Progress towards collectivization was perceptible. After retrenching in 1957 following the peasant flare-up, the regime moved ahead, although more cautiously. At the beginning of 1958, less than 5% of the farm population was in producer cooperatives; enrollments increased thereafter, and sharply in 1960, from about 55% of peasant households in July to about 85% in December. About one third of the collectives were in advanced stages of communal land mmership and shared production; the remainder represented inchoate socialization, with market incentive still a mainstay. Performance in agriculture was generally poor, output never rising above subsistence levels, and slower and erratic growth depressing progress in other sectors of the economy. There was, however, perceptible progress:
Food Grain Per Capita 52/ ( in Kilograms) 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 260 310 283 315 358 304 337 339
The DRV gross national product, owing to improvements in both the industrial and agricultural sectors, grew steadily some 6%per year after 1958. The most promising years for the DRV were 1958 and 1959, when performance in both sectors was extraordinarily good; thereafter, consecutive years of poor harvests and rapid population increases cut into gains. b. Industry In industry, as compared with agriculture) foreign aid was more relevant, and visibly more effective. The DRV claimed in 19 63 that new capacity had raised the total value of factory and handicrart industrial output two and two-thirds times above the 1956 level; an average annual increase of some 20%. Socialization was pronounced: by 1963 state-owned enterpris es accounted for 60% of production, and partially state-owned about 6%. The North Vietnamese themselves possessed at the outset little capacity to carry out a balanced program of industrial development; in fact, handicapped as the DRV was by annual fluctuations in their agriculturally based economy and shortages of native technicians, its capability to absorb foreign aid was distinctly limited. Initially, to restore existing industrial plant) to improve comm unications, and to import consumer goods. Thereafter aid was extended in the form of credits for specified projects. The first DRV long range development plan) a three year program in 1958, proved too ambitious; targets were revised down annually, and at the end of the plan agricultural growth had averaged a little over 4'%, compared with 21% for industry . A Five Year Plan for 1960-1965 was designed for more "rational development" of heavy industry, but precisely how this was to be achieved, and the pace of improvement, apparently remained subjects of contention up until the exigencies of the war overtook the plan. U.S. intelligence is not informed as to hm-, precisely foreign aid was related to either DRV economic plans, but in terms of government budget revenues, the DRV reported that foreign aid and loans comprised 39.5% of its 1955 income, but dropped to only 15.7% of its 1960 income. By contrast, and as a measure of r e turn on both foreign aid and its own investment) profits from state enterpri ses contributed only 6·5 %to 1955 income , compared -lith 58.0% in 1960. Tota l aid for 1955 to 1963 was as follows:
ECONOMIC AID TO DRV 1955-1963 (In Millions of U.S . Dollars) 53/ .Donor (1) Grants Credits Total ~ Total Commu nist China 225·0 232.0 457.0 47.8 US SR 105·0 263.9 363.9 (2) 38.6 Rum ania 4.8 37·5 Poland 7·5 14·5 97·0 (3) 10.1 Czechoslovakia 9·0 7·5 East Germany 15·0 0 15·0 .1 .6 Hun gary 2.0 10.0 12.0 1.2 . Bulgaria 4.0 2·5 6.5 0·7 Total 372·3 584.l(3) 956.4 100.0
(1) Albania and North Korea also aided, insignificantly. (2) Does not include 1962 a g reeme nt for agricultural development assistance, value unknown. (3) Includes $16 . 2 million extended in 1955 as a consort ium. U.S. intelligence estimated that through 1963 DRV used about $334 million of aid ext ended by China, $324 million from the USSR, and about $106 from East Europe.
The Chinese Communists played a leading role in assistance for transportation , communication, and the irrigation system. Between 1957 and 1964 they built 14 rice mills, 28 sugar r efi neries, plus a number of consumer goods factories . A 1959 loan financed expansion in metallurgy, chemicals, and electric power. Chinese trainers, advisers, and technicians averaged 1500 t o 3000 per annum. Soviet aid was at first centered on heavy industry. Technicians -- about 150 to 300 persons yearly -- were concentrated in heavy manufacturing, mining and electric power. After 1960, Soviet assistance was also provided for telecommunications and agriculture.
The DRV's foreign trade tripled from 1955 to 1963, and although exports increased from 8% of total trade in 1955, to 37% in 1963, a deficit remained which had to be financed fr om aid -- from grants in 1955-1957, and from credit thereafter.
The pattern of trade was also Bloc oriented, as follows:
GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION OF DRV TRADE
(1962 Data in Percentages ) 54/ JJnport s Exports Communist China, N. K ., Cuba Eastern Europe US SR J apan Other Non -C ommunist Total 100.0 23·2 23·5 33.8 11.1 8.4 100.0 Together China and USSR accounted for two-thirds of all trade. Total exports were 60% from agriculture, for estry, f i shing and handicrafts, 30% from minerals; 50% of imports were machines and allied equipment. Less than 15% of all trade was with non-communist nations, consisting mainly of manufactured goods and chemicals for DRV coal.
Again, 1959 and 1960 were banner years. Compared with 1955, total trade more than doubled by 1959, and nearly tripled by 1960 :
| Value of DRV Foreign Trade[1] | |||
| (Millions of U.S . Dollars) 55/ | |||
| Total Trade | Imports | Exports | |
| 1955 | 80.4 | 73.6 | 6.8 |
| 1956 | 99.0 | 78.6 | 20.4 |
| 1957 | 140.5 | 99.5 | 41.0 |
| 1958 | 114.5 | 63.5 | 51.2 |
| 1959 | 171.8 | 104.5 | 67.3 |
| 1960 | 207.8 | 127.9 | 79.9 |
| 1961 | 224.2 | 143.7 | 80.5 |
| 1962 | 238.8 | 149.4 | 89.4 |
Ho was explicit in spurning Western assistance for DRV development. In September, 1955, he extolled aid from the "other democracies" and pointed out that:
"This selfless and unconditional aid, beneficial to the people, is completely different from the 'aid' conceived by the imperialists. Through their 'aid' the imperialists always aim at exploiting and enslaving the peoples. The Marshall Plan, which has gradually encroached upon the sovereignty of the recipient countries, is eloquent proof of this." 56/
C. Foreign Policy Objectives
In the aftermath of the Geneva Settlement of 1954, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam pursued beyond its borders national objectives which inevitably drew the DRV into a broader, more direct role in the southern insurgency, and, therefore , into conflict with the United States. The following examination of DRV national interests -- perforce speculative -- probes maximum and minimum objectives to delimit the range of DRV choice, and to determine the approximate apparent timing of those major foreign policy decisions which took it southward.
1. Independence
From the outset, Doc Lap, Independence, had been the battle-cry of Vietnamese of the Resistance, much as "liberty" rings for Americans. For Ho Chi Minh it was sine qua non: in 1946, he told a U.S. writer that "What follows will follow, independence must come first." 57/ Independence of Vietnam from foreign domination -- from colonialism in its political forms, its economic exploitation, its military occupation, its social subservience and racism -- has been the primary goal of the redoubtable
revolutionary's entire mature life. 58/ His main obstacles, as he saw them, were first France, then a Franco-American combine, and finally the U.S. alone; toward the expulsion of U.S. power and influence from Vietnam Ho, after 1954, directed most of the international power of the DRV. 59 / Nonetheless, while Ho's testimony is extensive on his deep antipathy to U.S. imperialism as the major danger to the DRV, his behavior in the Chinese-Russian rivalry indicated that he perceived yet another serious threat to Vietnamese independence in his northern neighbor: China, ancient overlord of the Viet peoples. 60/ Accordingly, the foreign policy of the DRV, though pivoted upon anti-Americanism, has guarded against encroachment by the Communist Chinese.
As an upper limit on reasonable expectations after 1954 , the DRV might have hoped, in the context of a worsening political climate within South Vietnam, or of some form of plebescite per the Geneva Settlement, that foreign military forces would be withdrawn from the South and foreign influence attenuated . A Franco-American withdrawal could have acceptably taken place under a neutralization formula, provided that the formula permitted pursuit of other DRV policies, such as reunification, and socialization.
Minimally, the DRV might have bee n willing t o accept a continued foreign presence in the south, especially a French presence, with as surance of eventual withdrawal, and compensatory concessions to the DRV on the issue of reunification.
In the literal sense, the DRV won its independence at the Geneva Conference of 1954, as attested by Pravda upon the close of the Con ference, July 22, 1954: "the freedom-loving peoples of Indo-China ... have won their national independence." In January, 195 7, the Soviet UN delegate requested entry of the DRV into the UN as a separate, distinct state, as it then existed in North Vietnam. 61/ But Ho Chi Minh, also on 22 July 1954, issued an appeal stressing the temporary nature of the partition, and the impermanence of the French military presence in the South. Moreover, he said: "North, Central and South Vietnam are territories of ours. Our country will certainly be unified, our entire people will surely be liberated." 62/ By 1957 the bar to independence and unification, the b a l eful foreign presence in Vietnam was plainly, in Ho's view, the US:
2. Reunification"The Vietnamese people have perseveringly carried on the struggle for the implementation of the Geneva Agreement to reunify the country, because South Viet-Nam is still ruled by t he US imperialists and their henchmen. In completely liberated North Viet-Nam, power is in the hands of t he people; this is a firm basis for the peaceful reunification of Viet-Nam, a task which receives ever-growing and generous help from the Soviet Union, China, and other brother countries. Thanks to this assistance, the consolidation of the North has scored good results." 63 /
The goal of independence, because of American "imperialist" support of the Diem government, thus became closely allied w'ith, if not inseparable from, that of reunification. But the DRV-Lao Dong leaders, though widely acknowledged by all Vietnamese as heroes in the struggle for independence, did not win similar acceptance as political spokesmen for Cochinchina or Annam. Indeed, in all the modern history of Vietnam there has been little real unity. Vietnam's record is, rather, one of violence and political division. The conquest of Vietnam's current territory by the Dai-Viet people of the Red River Delta (modern Tonkin) from the Chams (of modern Annam) and Khmers (of modern Cochinchina) took place throughout this milleniumj the Mekong Delta did not come under Viet suzerainty until 1780. In the meantime, civil 'Var had fractioned the Dai-Viet. for 150 years (1640-1790) two high walls divided North from South Vietnam at approximately the 17th parallel. A unified Vietnam came into being in 1802 under the Emperor Gia Long, but scarcely half a century elapsed before the French conquests began. Under the French, Cochinchina, Annam, and Tonkin were politically separate. 64/
Present-day South Vietnam--by Viet Minh terms, Zone V (Annam) and VI (Cochinchina or Nam BO)--has always been of secondary importance to the DRV. Ho Chi Minh's government can claim to have ruled Saigon, for example, for only twenty days in September, 1945, and neither th~ DRV government nor the Lao Dong Party ever commanded the strength in South Vietnam that they did in Tonkin. During the war of Resistance, 1945-1954, Zo ne V was less a theater of operations than a source of supplies and recruits for the Viet Minh in Tonkin, and in both Zone V and Nam Bo the Viet Minh practiced economy of force: only some 20% of organized Viet Minh military units llere in either at end 1953, even though the areas supported nearly half of all Vietnam's population. Douglas Pike's study of the Viet Cong led him to conclude that:
Even Ho Chi Minh was fairly explicit in assigning to South Vietnam a lesser role in the revolution . For example, in his December, 1953, addr.ess to the National Assembly on Land Reform, he was careful to point out that Zones V and VI 'Vere not yet ripe for "progress toward socialism": "The Cochin-Chinese regarded the resistance as Northern- oriented: the center of fighting 'Vas in the North, the Vietminh was strongest in the North, most of its leaders were Northerners, and the French 'Vere most vulnerable in the Red River delta. The South had less tradition of revolution, and inevitably a variety of North-South policy conflicts arose. The corrun unication channel between Hanoi and Saigon was undependable, and liaison within the South was difficult. The Northern leadership exhibited little knowledge about southerners and even less patience 'Vith Southern lethargy .... " 65/
"Land reform is a policy applied throughout the country) but it must be carried out step by step; first in locali ties Where sufficient conditions have been obtained and then in other localities ....
"The Government will deal with the regions inhabited by the national minorities, the Fifth Zone, South Viet- Nam, and the guerrilla bases later on . In guerrilla --and enemy--occupied areas, land reform will be carried out after their liberation ." 66/
Nonetheless, though South Vietnam had been relegated to a low operational priority, its eventual unification with the DRV became an article of faith which the Lao Dong leaders repeatedly and solemnly affirmed; for example, Ho Chi Minh :
"'Our compatriots in the Southern area are citizens of Vietnam. Rivers can dry up and mountains wear away, but this truth stands.' [Letter to Southerners, May 3, 1946.] 'Each day the Fatherland remains disunited, each day you [of the South] suffer, food is without taste, sleep brings no rest. I solemnly promise you, through your determination, the determination of all our people, the Southern land will return to the bosom of the Fatherland.' [October 23, 1946.] 'National reunification is our road to life. Great unity-is the power that will surely triumph. Thanks to this great unity, the Revolution was successful and the Resistance victorious. Now, with great unity, our political struggle will certainly be victorious, our country will certainly be reunified.' [July 5, 1956.] 'South Vietnam is our flesh and blood .... Vietnam is one country. South and North are of the same family, and no react ionary force can partition it. Vietnam must be reunited.' [September 2, 1957.] 'Every hour, every minute, the people of the North think of their compatriots in the South. The South Vietnamese people relentlessly have fought for nearly twenty years, first the French colonialists, then the American-Diemists. They are indeed the heroic sons and daughters of the heroic Vietnamese nation. South Vietnam truly deserves the same: Brass Citadel of the Fatherland.’ [May 9, 1963.]
After the Geneva Conference of 1954, the most Ho and the DRV leaders might have expected was that France and the U.S. would permit a plebescite to occur, or withdrawal under some one of the formulae mentioned above, with reunification to follow. However, for reasons which shall be set forth below, the actual course of events forced them to adopt what they probably regarded as a minimally acceptable policy, as follows : 63 /
Consolidate power in North Vietnam, and expect the South to collapse from internal dissension.
Expect general elections, but in prudence, anticipate their not being held, and prepare to take the South by force if necessary.
Move north the bulk of the Viet Minh forces in the South, and upgrade as a reserve.
Foster strong ties among the regroupees with families in the South.
Establish an effective political infrastructure in the South, and work to weaken the government as well as the position of foreign powers there.
In 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem, with patent U.S. backing, refused to open consultations with the DRV preliminary to the expected plebescite. There followed in rapid succession Diem’s own plebescite, the casting off of Bao Dai, and the withdravral of the French. When July, 1956, passed, hope that the Geneva Settlement might lead toward reunification waned in the North. It was thereafter increasingly clear that peaceable reunification was not in prospect for the foreseeable future. Ho Chi Minh, in a 1956 letter to the 90,000 to 130,000 regroupees who had gone North in the expectation of returning that year, explained the seeming inaction of the DRV on their behalf as follmvs:
After the internal turmoil of 1956-1957, the DRV~s domestic"Our policy is: to consolidate the North and to keep in mind the South.
"To build a good house, we must build a strong foundation. To have a vigorous plant with green leaves, beautiful flowers, and good fruit, we must take care of it and feed the root.
"The North is the foundation, the root of the struggle for complete national liberation and the reunification of the country. That is why everything we are doing in the North i s aimed at strengthening both the North and the South. Therefore, to work here is the same as struggling in the South: it is to struggle for the South and for the whole of Viet-Nam.
"Struggle is always accompanied by difficulties. But your difficulties are our common difficulties. After fifteen years of devastating war , the newly liberated North is suffering many privavations ….
" ... our political struggle will...be a long and hard struggle, then the tendency to become impatient, pessimistic, and to succumb to other cares will disappear.
"The political struggle will certainly be victorious, national reunification will certainly be achieved." 69/
decks were cleared for more direct action abroad. Internal dissension died down as the regime effectively suppressed or mollified the farmers and the Catholics, the epicenters of discontent. Also, privations afflicting the society stemming from the war and the regroupment were somewhat alleviated.
3. Support from Abroad
The DRV, within its own resources, probably could not have achieved or maintained its independence, and it certainly could not look for reunification without foreign support. During the period 1950 - 1954, the Viet Minh had accepted significant amounts of foreign aid, especially Chinese aid, 70 / and the Geneva Agreements were in large measure the product of the diplomacy of the Soviet Union and the Chinese People's Republic, rather than their Vietnamese allies. 71/ The DRV, as it emerged from Geneva in 19 54 , consisted of a society-torn by the war and undergoing the trauma of a 900,000 person exodus, a food deficit, a modest and Ivar-damaged industrial plant, and a drastic shortage of technicians and public administrators . Internal and external defense were almost immediately a principal policy aim -- certainly through the 1956 peasant rebellions, and their consequences . Whatever extraterritorial ambitions the DRV may have had, these were necessarily subordinate to survival as a state. In the view of the Lao Dong leaders, apparently even the realization of even that minimal goal hinged upon the DRV's receiving substantial military assistance from abroad. 72/ Additional foreign aid dependency stemming from the broad domestic:reform programs which the DRV undertook -- discussed above -- further impelled Ho Chi Minh and his government to turn to t he Chinese and the Russians. The DRV's dependence upon its communist allies increased markedly over the decade following Geneva.
a. Foreign Military Assistance
The DRV had sound reason to maintain a large military establishment in the aftermath of Geneva. The presence of the French forces in South Vietnam through 1956, and the US-aided GV1J military forces thereafter, taken together with the GVN's claims to DRV territory and people, GVN diplomatic hostility, and GVN belligerent propaganda, probably justified a large army for national defense. 73/ Moreover, internal security placed heavy demands upon DRV forces-,-at first to deal with the exigencies of establishing DRV control, pushing the Land Reform Campaign, and coping with the refugee problem. Large forces were also needed in 1956 to suppress uprisings, particularly in the predominantly Catholic rural areas . 74/ Beyond simply security, however , in orthodox communist fashion, the DRV regarded the armed forces as a primary instrument for indoctrination of the masses and for support of other Lao Dong Party programs; they also served as a reserve labor force to meet agricultural crises . 75/ And·the foreign policy of the DRV required a military instrument of extensive capabilities in insurgency operations -- subversion, infiltration, and guerrilla warfare. Manpower for such an establishment was available, although in poor crop years, diversion was necessary. But equipment was in short supply, and extensive training was in order. Most military equipment and supplies had to be imported) as DRV industry was incapable of more than small scale production of rudimentary small arms, small arms ammunition, and simple impedimenta, such as uniforms. 76/ Accordingly, virtually from the moment of its independence, the DRV sought and obtained military materiel from abroad) risking being caught at contravention of Article 17 of the Geneva Agreement to build a large, modernized land army of 10-14 divisions. 77/
b. Solidarity with the USSR and CPR
But military assistance and economic aid were conditioned on the quid pro quo of DRV identification with and support for the "Communist Bloc.~The price of Bloc support had been high; it included sacrificing French cooperation after Geneva. 78/ In subordinating its interests to those of the USSR and CPR at Geneva) the DRV impaired its own negotiating strength. Thereafter) similar subordination obstructed its attempts to achieve reunification. It was with France that the DRV had contracted to hold elections on reunification) and it tried after 1954 to pursue a policy calculated to encourage France's honoring its Geneva commitments. Moreover, the DRV, short of human and material capital, wished to maintain access to French economic resources. Pham Van Dong assured the French in January, 1955, that the DRV:
" .... sincerely desires ·to establish economic relations with France for reasons which are both political and economic .... That does not prevent us from establishing relations with friendly countries like China, but we are used to working with the French and can continue to do so on a basis of equality and reciprocity. II 79/
But Paris was faced, as Pham put it, with a choice between Washington and Hanoi, though he assured the French that "the unity of Viet Nam will be achieved in any case) with France or against France." The French opted for withdrawal in 1956: the price of protract ed intimacy with a solidly Bloc nation proved too high for France, both in its internal politics and in the Western alliance. 80/
For the DRV, solidarity with the Bloc entailed costs beyond French cooperation) for by the test of deeds, neither the Soviets nor the Chinese firmly supported its quest for reunification. It was the DRV's fate that the historically invincible monolith with which it cast its fortunes in 1950, was, by 1957, definitely disintegrating. Soviet policy vis-a-vis Vietnam had a1vays been subordinated to its European interests. This was evident as early as 1945, when the success of Ho and the ICP were accorded less importance than success of the Communist Party, and in 1954 it appeared that France, by rejecting the European Defense Community bought Soviet cooperation in settling the Indochina War--at the DRV's expense. 81/ Post Geneva, Soviet support of the DRV came into tension with its-Strivings toward detente with the U.S. Generally, the Soviets seemed willing to accept the Cold Ivar line SEATO drew at the 17th parallel, and were quite cool to DRV "reunification" talko But the most disruptive factor in Moscow-Hanoi relations after Geneva was not Washington, but Peking. The CPR, like the USSR, seems to have regarded the DRV as a pawn in a world-wide test of power. The Chinese would probably have been disinterested in having on its southern border a unified, strong Vietnam, even though it were communist. ·They seem to have always regarded support of the DRV as a way to embarass the Soviets, to attack the U.S . position in Southeast Asia, and to frustrate the US-USSR detente. Nonetheless, the Chinese had earned high regard in the DRV because they were willing, as the Soyiets were not, to succor Ho with military aid in his hour of need. Moreover, Mao's form of revolution seemed far more relevant to the J..ao Dong leaders than the Russian version. Propinquity thus reinforced the attraction of China both as a source of aid and as a socialist model, and offset much traditional Viet-Chines~ antipathy. However, like the Soviets, the Chinese maneuvered in Vietnam £or broader goals than DRV success. In· 1954 and 1955, possibly seeking to encourage an American withdrawal from the Taiwan Straits, the CPR adopted a soft line which blurred their stance on Vietnam just as the Geneva elections came into view. 82/ In 1956, Khruschev's depiction of Stalin's monstrous leadership at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union called into doubt the validity of Soviet preeminence within the Bloc. Mao's bids for Stalin's former position then split the Bloc.
Ho's isolation was borne home to him within the year after Geneva , as the deadline approached for consultations preliminary to the elections. Although the Soviet Ambassador to Hanoi had joined a chorus of dark threats from DRV representatives that "violent action" would follow if the consultations were delayed, the 20 July 1955 deadline passed while the parties to the Agreement were in the Summit Conference at Geneva on ways to decrease world tensions, and the Bloc did not press the point. Ho took the extraordinary step of a formal appeal to Diem, but the GVN on 7 August 1955 strongly rejected Hanoi's overtures for talks. 83/ A subsequent DRV appeal to the UK and USSR co-presidents of the Geneva Conference was also of no avail. In January, 1956, China, and then the USSR, did request another Geneva conference; but the USSR and the UK responded only by extending sine die the functions of the International Control Commiss ion beyond the expiration date. 84/
All indications are that Ho preferred to follow the Soviet lead, probably from both repugnance at the prospect of further dependency on China, and realization that the Soviet was in a better position to provide the kinds and amount of foreign aid and trade the DRV required. 85/ From 1956 through 1960 Ho, at some cost, honored the principle Mao intoned at the Communist summit meeting in Moscow in November, 1957: the Communist bloc must have a head and the Soviet Union must be that head. 86/ Soviet rebuffs of the DRV must have therefore been particularly painful for Ho. In the 9th Plenum of the lao Dong Party Central Committee (19-24 April 1956) Ho--who was in person the DRV's prime political asset, especially in view of Diem's ascendancy--dutifully recited the de-Stalinizing cant of the 20th Congress of the CPSU extrolling collective leadership, and damning the evil cult of the individual. 87/ Two weeks later, as the outcome of the meeting of Co-Chairmen of the Geneva Conference at which the Soviets tacitly accepted status quo in Vietnam, Ho received a message, dated 8 May 1956, signed by A. Gromyko, First Deputy Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, acting with the authority of his government, addressed to two sovereign states : the Governments of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Republic of Vietnam. 88/ Immediately after the deadline for elections passed, in August 195~ Ho penned a Pravda article deprecating notions that the DRV reunification "struggle" was a Vietnamese affair, denying that the DRV might develop a "national communism" of the Tito model, and rejecting ideas that the DRV might usefully pursue a course independent of the Bloc. 89/ The following January, 1957, after a stormy autumn of insurrection, the-Rectification of Errors Campaign, and "Hundred Flowers," Ho was surprised by the Soviet proposal at the United Nations to formalize Vietnamese disunity by admitting both the DRV and the GVN as member states. 90/ Nor were these the only instances of tepid support or countervailing policy from the Soviets. The DRV forwarded messages to the GVN in July 1955, May and June 1956, July 1957, March 1958, July 1959, and July 1960, urging a consultative conference on elections , offering to negotiate on the basis of "free general elections by secret ballot," and urging liberalization of North-South relations. Throughout, the Soviet Union never went beyond words and gestures of solidarity.
For Ho Chi Minh, the major international difficulties in securing foreign aid had internal ramifications as well. There is evidence of a rising tide of conviction within the Lao Dong Party that more forceful measures were necessary towards reunification, which took the form in 1957 of an attack upon Ho Chi Minh's own position, and upon the Soviet-oriented faction within the Party elite. 91/ There was also an evident realignment of the DRV hierarchy in which Le Duan, an advocate of forceful resolution of the impasse with Diem, came to prominence in mid-1957. 92/ (Le Duan who served in the South, through 1956, appears to have been de facto the Secretary General of the Party 1957-1960; there- after, he openly held the office, and is considered the second ranking member of the Politburo.) 93/
Ho Chi Minh, despite rumors that he was dead or discarded, survived the 1957 crisis seemingly intact.
By 1958 the DRV elite were apparently more disposed to seek their own solutions in Vietnam, less sensitive to the persistent coolness of Khruschev, and more responsive to Mao than theretofore. After 1958, in the developing Sino-Soviet dispute, the DRV tended to indorse Chinese doctrine and methods, but was careful to avoid Peking-style abuse of the Russians. Ho, on occasion, served as mediator in the dispute, but on such central issues as disarmament, "peaceful coexistence," and Moscow's call for "democratic centralism" in the world communist movement, HoTs view by 1960 approximated that of Mao: independent, activist and bellicose) at least insofar as Diem's GVN was concerned. 94/ Nonetheless, DRV support for the Soviet Union) qualified though it was, paid off. In the period 1954 to 1960, the USSR supplanted the CPR as its prime foreign aid donor:
Communist Economic Aid Extended DRV (Millions of U.S. Dollars) 95/ China 1955-1957: Grants 200 Cr edits Total 200 1958 -1960 : Grants 25 Credits ~ Total 100 USSR & East Europe 100 19·5 119·5 159 159
4. Vietnamese Hegemony
The foregoing discussion has been confined to the immediate foreign policy goals of the DRV in the aftermath of Geneva. There remains, however, a more far-reaching objective: Vietnamese domination over Indochina. As mentioned, modern Vietnam is the product of conquest. 96/ The Khmers (Cambodians) and the tribes along Viet Nam's Laotian frontier have historic cause for apprehension over Viet forays westward. In the nineteenth century, just ahead of French imperialism in Indochina, Vietnamese forces occupied and annexed contiguous Laotian frontier provinces (those which were roughly the territory controlled by DRV-linked Pathet Lao in 1963). 97 / But in current era, the furthest reaching of all Viet expansionist aspirations were those of the Communist Party of Indochina (ICP)) which from its foundation aimed at the establishment of political control over Laos and Cambodia as well as Vietnam) and which regarded a workers and peasants government over a unified Indochina both feasible and necessary. According to a l "'io Dong Party history published in Hanoi in 1960: "The Vietnamese) Cambodian) and laotian proletariat have politically and economically to be closely related in spite of their differences in language, custom, and race." 98/ The history quoted echoes the sense of one of the earliest known Lao Dong Party directives) captured in South Vietnam, dated November, 1951; entitled: "Remarks on the Official Appearance of the Vietnamese Workers Party." In a section labeled "Reasons for the Division Into Three Parties And For the Change in the Party Name," the document states that the Communist Party would continue to promote revolution throughout Southeast Asia as it had in the past, and stressed its essential unity despite outward appearances:
"The creation of a separate party for each of the three Nations does not prejudice the revolutionary movement in Indochina."(a) In 1930, we recommended the creation of an Indochinese Communist Party, not only because Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos suffered under the same yoke of domination and had the same enemy, but also because at that time only the Revolutionary Movement in Vietnam was in a state of development, while it was still weak in Cambodia and Laos. If at that time there had not been one Communist Party for the three countries, the creation of a Communist and revolutionary movement in Cambodia and Laos would certainly have been retarded.
"Today, however, the situation has changed. The Cambodian and Laotian peoples are rising to oppose the French and obtain their independence. Communist Party sections exist in Cambodia and Laos and are beginning to grow. Cambodia and Laos already have a united Liberation Front (Issarak in Cambodia; Issara in Laos). Cambodia has a National Liberation Committee; Laos a Resistance Government, etc ....Within these organizations there are already groups of faithful Communists who act as Delegations to the Indochinese Communist Party from which they receive directives. For that reason, the creation of a separate Communist Party for the working class of Vietnam does not risk weakening the leadership of the revolutionary movements in Cambodia and Laos or the carrying out of Marxist-Lenin propaganda action. In addition, the Vietnamese Party reserves the right to supervise the activities of its brother Parties in Cambodia and Laos.
"(b) Each Nation - Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, has its own Party, but unity of leadership and action remain between the three Parties. There are several means of unifying the leadership and action. For example, the Central Executive Committee of the Vietnamese Workers Party has designated a Cambodian and a Laotian bureau charged with assisting the revolutionary movements in these countries. It organizes periodic assemblies of the three parties in order to discuss questions of common interest; it works towards the creation of a Vietnamese-Khmer-Laotian United Front.
"(c) Militarily Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos constitute a combat zone; Vietnam has substantially assisted Cambodia and Laos militarily as well as from all other points of view. The creation of a separate Vietnamese Party will not therefore weaken the military cooperation between the three Nations in the fight they are waging against the imperialists. Later, however, if conditions permit, the three revolutionary Parties of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos will be able to unite to form a single Party: the Party of the Vietnam-Khmer-Laotian Federation." 99/
P. J. Honey stated in 1965 that one of the main requirements of DRV foreign policy was "to impose Communist Vietnamese rule over Laos and Cambodia," but noted that:
"It is open to debate whether this ambition for territorial aggrandisement springs from the expansionist nature of Communism, from the imperialist character of the Vietnamese people which has shown itself repeatedly through their history over the past millenium, or from the feeling that they had played the major role in driving out French colonial power and were therefore entitled to the fruits of their efforts. What emerges very clearly is that the actions of the Vietnamese Communists since 1951 are entirely consistent with the aim set out in the document [quoted above] ....
"North Vietnam shares a common frontier with Laos and undetermined numbers of North Vietnamese soldiers have been operating on Laotian territory for several years. Moreover, the nominal head of the Pathet Lao, Prince Souphanouvong, has spent more years in Vietnam than in Laos and is the husband of a senior Vietnamese Communist. For both reasons Laos presents her with the ideal circumstances for the pursuit of her expansionist aims. Additionally, the prosecution of the war in South Vietnam requires that men and supplies be infiltrated into that state, and eastern Laos provides the most secure and convenient route for such traffic ....
"Cambodia touches the territory of no Communist state and is, in consequence, not amenable to the same tactics as those employed in Laos . Instead, the Vietnamese Communist leaders have attempted to cement relations with the established, non-Communist government of Norodom Sihanouk in order to induce that government to create as many embarrassments and difficulties as possible for the rival Vietnamese regime in Saigon. By exploiting historic Cambodia antagonisms towards neighbouring Thailand and South Vietnam, they have achieved the rupture of diplomatic relations between Cambodia and these two states, but ... Norodom Sihanouk has reached the conclusion that China, not North Vietnam, will exercise the dominant influence over South East Asia in the years to come and has evinced a readiness to reach an accommodation with the Chinese, whose objectives do not necessarily coincide with those of the North Vietnamese at all points ... " 100/
The 1951 Lao Dong document quoted above stipulated that:
"Not only is it our duty to aid the revolutionaries in Cambodia and Laos, but we must a l so aid the revolutionary movements in the other countries of Southeast Asia, countries such as Malaya, Indonesia, Burma, etc." lOll
Since DRV independence in 1954, its foreign policy has op enly supported neutral regimes in Laos and Cambodia, while covertly it has undertaken major politico-military operations in Laos, and supported subversive organizations in Cambodia and Thailand. 1021 It is possible to infer, as ha s P. J . Honey, that the ultimate DRV objective is Vietnamese hegemony over Indochina: quasi-independent, communist governments controlled by the Hanoi leaders through the Lao Dong apparatus. However, it is also possible to interpret the Lao Dong Party tracts as bombast, and DRV extra-territorial operati ons as a necessary part of its thrust toward reunification of Vietnam. It is clear that DRV control of the Laotian Panhandle and the Mu Gia and Keo Nua Passes would be essential to any contemplated large scale infiltration of men and materiel from North to South Vietnam.
D. Links with the Viet Cong
From 1954 on, the DRV possessed four principal ties with insurgents within South Vietnam: the Southern Viet Minh who were regrouped to the North; the "Fatherland Front," the DRV mass political organization devoted in part to maintaining identification with Southerners, and promoting the cause of reunification before the world; some commonality of leaders ; and the Lao Dong Party. Each of these deserve discussion preliminary to analyzing the extent to which these links permitted Hanoi to influence the form and pace of the insurgency in South Vietnam.
1. Southerners in the North. The estimated 130,000 "regroupees" of Geneva in North Vietnam after the evacuations of 1954-1955 included as many as 90 ,000 "soldiers," and possibly half that number of dependents. There were among them possibly 10,000 children, and about the same number of Montagnards. Of this entire group, U.S. intelligence estimates indicate that about 30-35,000 have since returned to South Vietnam. 1031 Regroupees provided virtually all the infiltrators in the period 1959--1964. Thereafter, known infiltration has been almost exclusively by Northerners, which has led U.S. intelligence to conclude that the DRV had by 1964 exhausted its "pool" of trained and able manpower among the regroupees. 10!~1 As of July, 1967, the GVN had only a small fraction of the Southern regroupee infiltrators under its control : 180 POW, and an undetermined (probably very much smaller) number of defectors. 105 / In August, 1966, a DOD contractor published a study based on detailed interrogation of 71 of these regroupees (56 POW and 15 defectors) plus 9 other NLF rnembers . 106/ Two out of three in the sample were Communist Party members; all regroupees had undergone intensive training in the DRV before being sent south. The earliest trip South by any among the group was 1960, the latest 1964. The survey of their experiences and attitudes affords some insights into the policy and operations of the DRV. Most of the physically fit Southerners had been placed in the North Vietnam Army (NVA) where they acquired military training and discipline, and political indoctrination--the 305th, 324th, 325th, 330th, and 338th NVA Divisions Viere filled with Southerners, and remained so until 1959, when infiltration started on a large scale. 107/ Those Southerners with non-military professional skills were placed in DRV civilian society where they could be useful. But all, no matter where placed, were apparently watched to assess their reliability, and eventually selected for return to the South by DRV authorities. Civilians were urged to "volunteer" to return, soldiers were ordered to do so. Almost all were pleased to comply, not only because it meant a return to family and land of birth, but because few liked North Vietnam, and because they had heard of the sufferings inflicted upon their people by the GVN, and wanted to "liberate" them from Diem and the Americans. The chosen were then sent to special training centers -- the most important of which for the interviewed regroupees was at Xuan Mai -- where they attended courses of several weeks to several months, depending on their background. The emphasis -- about two-thirds of instructional time -- was on political indoctrination . Themes included an impending victory in the South, to be followed by "peace, neutrality, and reunification." They were taught that after infiltration, they were to approach uncommitted Southerners, by stressing the land reform policy of the Viet Cong, by urging families to call back sons serving in ARVN, and by castigating the agroville-strategic hamlet program of the GVN. One propaganda specialist related that he Vias instructed to press three programs: political struggle, armed struggle, and "military proselyting" (vinh van) -- the latter again aimed at sapping the will of ARVN to fight, and causing desertions.
Following training, the regroupees were formed into units of 40 to 400 for the trip south. A few were infiltrated by sea, but the majority were taken by truck through North Vietnam to Laos, and thence walked south on foot. The journey took at least two and one-half months; . most reported the trails were well organized, with camps built at intervals, and guides available at each ca mp to conduct arrivals on the next leg of their trip. Strict camouflage discipline was observed, and conversations with camp attendants or guide personnel was forbidden. On arrival at their destinations in South Vietnam, they were smoothly integrated into local Viet Cong organizations. (Little subsequent friction was reported by the regroupees between themselves and the Viet Cong, but some southern VC recruited in the late Fifties or early Sixties, the "winter cadres," have expressed animosity toward the "autumn cadres," as the regroupees were called.)
The interviews with the regroupees suggest that:
The DRV quite deliberately organized, and trained an infiltration force of Southerners.
The infrastructure for doing so -- the training centers and the infiltration routes south -- indicate extensive preparations for the process before it ·Has started in earnest in 1960.
The DRV had specific political, as well as military, objectives in returning the Southerners, including the overturning of Diem, and eventually, reunification.
The interrogations of the regroupees also indicate that the DRV viewed the regroupees as a long-range political asset , establishing special schools and educational programs for Southern children. A captured Viet Cong Lieutenant Colonel stressed this point, and quoted Phan Hung of the Lao Dong Politburo, speaking at the Third Party Congress in September 1960:
"The Party has tried to develop 10,000 teenage children regrouped from the RVN into a cohes ive group of engineers, doctors , professors, and other specialists for the future. This is proof that the Party has l ooked out for the welfare of the South Vietnamese too." 108/
The informant stressed that at least until he left North Vietnam in November, 1961, . none of this shadow national elite had been conscripted: in his view, the DRV had yet to use a powerful political force, a cadre for South Vietnam whose attitudes had been carefully conditioned by more than a decade of education in the DRV, the Soviet Union, or other communist countries. As of 1968, there is no information that the DRV had committed these cadres in South Vietnam.
In early 1967, at the request of the Secretary of Defense, an interagency study group was convened from CIA, DIA, and the Department of State for a comprehensive review of U. S. intelligence concerning: "The North Vietnamese Role in the Origin, Direction, and Support of the War in South Vietnam." 109/ The resultant study validates the foregoing ob servations on the regroupees in all respects, as do other captured documents and interrogation reports. Taken together, available evidence indicates that infiltration of regroupees fr om North to South Vietnam began as early as 1955. For example, a U.S. intelligence report of November, 1955 reported on the arrival of 50 regroupees in October, 1955; and the Lieutenant Colonel mentioned above , an intelligence officer, described trips to South Vietnam and back in 1955, 1956, and 1958.
However, from all indications, the early infiltration was quite small scale, involving mo more than a few hundred persons in all. There are no reports indicating DRV preparations of an apparatus to handle large-scale , systematic movements of people and supplies before 1958. Early in that year, according to one prisoner, Montagnards from Quang Tri and Thua Thien Provinces began to receive training in North Vietnam in the establishment and operation of way-stations and guide systems in Laos and South Vietnam; the prisoner left North Vietnam in March, 1959 with a group of other cadre to organize tribesmen for those missions. He testified t hat thereafter he made several inspection trips a long the routes to check on the building of troop shelters in the encampments. 110/ Several other POW have disclosed that in early 1959 they were chosen to man "speclal border-crossing teams" for moving drugs, food, and other materiel across the DMZ into Quang Tri and Thua Thien. 111/ In April, 1959, a prisoner reported that the Lao Dong Party Central Committee directed the forming of a headquarters to control this effort, which came into being on May 5, 1959, as the 559th Transportation Group, directly subordinate to Party headquarters. 112/ Another prisoner served with the 70th Battalion of the 559th Group, which was formed in 1959 and sent into southern Laos. The 70th Battalion received weapons, ammunition, mail, and supplies from Hanoi and transported them to another organization in charge of distribution to insurgent units. The 70th Battalion was in charge of 20 way-stations, furnished escorts for infiltrating groups from North to South Vietnam, and transported sick and wound ed personnel from Thua Thien Province back to North Vietnam. 113/ While the 559th Group was being deployed on land, other prisoners reported that the 603d Battalion, was formed in June, 1959, to manage maritime infiltration into South Vietnam. 114/ According to prisoners, the 603d Battalion had 250 men upon formation, and by December, 1959, had 11 infiltration "cells" and supporting bases in operation.
Still other POWs stated that in January, 1960, a training center for infiltrators vas in operation at Son Tay, northvest of Hanoi, and that in early 1960, the NVA 324th Division in Nghe An was directed to begin infiltrator training. 115/ About the same time the Xuan Mai Infiltration Center was established southwest of Hanoi, a school which by 1961 could accommodate several 1000-man classes simultaneously. 116/
Moreover, available evidence points to 1959 as the year in which significant numbers of regroupees began to be funneled from North Vietnam through the way-station system into Sout h Vietnam. George Carver, of CIA, has conservatively estimated that 1959 infiltration amounted to a "few hundred." 117/ Altogether, during 1959 and 1960, twenty-six groups of infiltrators, comprising 4500 personnel, were confirmed by interrogations of two or more prisoners from each group. 118/ The same sources established that most of the infiltrators were military officers, senior non- commissioned officers or trained political cadre. Capture d documents and interrogations also indicate that at least half--military and civilian--were regular Lao Dong Party members. The following table shows U.S. intelligence estimates of infiltration into South Viet-Nam from 1959 through 1965; during 1963 "regroupee" resource waned visibly, and in 1964 apparently dried up; by early 1965 at least three out of four infiltrators were ethnic North Vietnamese. 119/ Year 1959 ) (4) 1960 ) 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3 NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011 TOP SECRET - Sensitive Infiltration from North to South Vietnam 1959-1965 Confirmed (1) Probable (2) 4556 26 4118 2177 5362 7495 4726 3180 9316 3108 23770 1910 Total (3) --- 4582 6295 12857 7906 12424 25(;80
(1) A confirmed unit/group is one which is. determined to exist on the basis of accepted direct information from a minimum of two prisoners, returnees or captured documents (any combination, in addition to indirect evidence).
(2) A probable infiltration unit/group is one believed to exist on the basis of accepted direct information from one captive, returnee, or captured document, in addition to indirect evidence.
(3) The total does not represent all the data on hand. In 1965 a "possible" category was added to show 1l...11its/group thought to be in South Vietnam on the basis of unconfirmed evidence . Adding the "possible" category raises the totals for 1965 to 33,730. Still other information, though available, has been considered insufficient to warrant adding to the totals.
(4) The figure shown is for both 1959 and 1960. There is no evidence that the regroupees themselves exerted significant pressure upon the DRV leaders to undertake the infiltrations or force reunification by other means. Many were dissatisfied with the North, but there is no record that they openly and collectively agitated for return to the South. Rather, they appear to have been retained in large groups only within disciplined military units, and otherwise they had no appreciable collective identity outside the formal groupings organized or authorized by the DRV. The DRV did appeal to them as a group from time to time, but principally when it wished to mobilize opinion against some deed of the GVN. For example, in December, 1958) in Diem's "political re-education center" at Phu Loi (Tpu Dau Mot), just north of Saigon) there was an epidemic food-poisoning in which at least twenty prisoners dies. Hanoi launched at major propaganda effort to exploit the mishap, claiming that: 120/
"Six thousand former resistance members and fighters for peace and national reunification, six thousand patriots, men and women of all ages and ways of life, detained without trial in a concentration camp as an act of reprisal, were victims of a wholesale food-poisoning which resulted in more than a thousand dead on the very first day. The survivors were hurriedly taken to other camps or left dying behind the Phu Loi barbed wire .... "
The Phu Loi Massacre became one of the cases which und erwrote Hanoi's appeal to the world in 1959 and 1960 to end:
"… this regime of terror and massacre set up by Ngo Dinh Diem in the south of our country at the behest of the U.S. imperialists. It is the duty of all honest people to extinguish this hotbed of 1-rar ....According to available data which cannot be complete from July, 1954) date of the signing of the Geneva Agreeme nts, to February) 1959) 180)84 3 former resistance members were arrested) 50)000 others were subj ected to a regime of forced labour in the so-called 'Agricultural colonies .' The Phu Loi camp is part of this network of sorrow and affliction which Ngo Dinh Diem) the henchman of the American imperialists, hopes to quench the aspirations for freedom independence and national unity of our people . . . /footnote; The famous declaratlon of Diem) during his visit to Washington in 1957: 'The United States' frontier extends as far as the 17th parallel in Vietnam.' " 121/
At the forefront of the "movement of protest If were Southerners in North Vietnam) who could write or speak vith special poignancy about the event. Thus, the regroupees became a strategic propaganda as well as personnel resource for the DRV.
2. The Fatherland Front. Policy on the regroupees, and orchestration of propaganda relating to reunification 1-Tith South Vietnam, was apparently reserved to the top echelon of the Lao Dong Party. There is some evidence of the existence as early as 1957 of a branch of the Lao Dong Party Central Committee called the "Reunification Department," which had purviev over all matters relating to regroupees; the Department or Commission was surfaced at the Third party Congress, September, 1960. 122/ A prisoner talten in 1964) a regroupee from Binh Dinh Provinc e) indicated that he worked for this Department for some years prior to infiltrating in 1963) with duties of supervising civilian cadres. He described the Department's having a personnel management system) with formal records land reports, education programs for cadres and their children; he also stated that the Committee decided which regroupees would be ordered South. 123/ The head of the Reunification Department of the Lao Dong Party possibly' since 1957, and at least since 1960, was Nguyen Van Vinh, an NVA Major General, a Deputy Chief of Staff of the NVA, a Vice Minister of Defense and a member of the Party Central Committee. Vinh was in South Vietnam up until late 1956. 124/
However, overt DRV political activities with the regroupees or on behalf of reunification) were normally carried out through the Fatherland Front, which, as mentioned above, from its foundation in 1955 advanced proposals for rejoining North and South Vietnam. With the founding of the NLF in late 1960) the Fatherland Front became its DRV counterpart, its propaganda counterpoint) its sounding board) and international sponsor. 125/ In fact the NLF was set up as a mirror image of the Fatherland Front:
SELECTED CO~~ONENT ORGANIZATIONS National Liberation Front (South Vietnam) People 's Revolutionary Party (PRP) Democratic Party Radical Socialist Party Association of Labor Association of Women Association of Youth Association of Artists and Writers Association of Demccratic Journalists Association of South Vietnamese Buddhists South Vietnam Comm ittee for the Defense of Peace South Vietnamese Committee for Afro- Asian Peoples Solidarity Fatherland Front (North Vietnam) Lao Dong Party Democratic Party Socialist Party General Confederation of Labor Women's Union Youth Federation Writers and Artists Union Journalists Association Unified Buddhist Association National Liaison Committee far Patriotic and Peace Loving Catholics Vietnam-Soviet Friendship Association Vietnam-Chinese Friendship Association Vietnam -French Friendship Association Peace Committee Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee 3. Common Leadership. North and South Vietnam have shared leaders throughout the last three decades, a commonality which has lately developed into Northerners holding the top posts both within the GVN and within the NLF. Tran Van Gian, an old rcp leader, headed the "front" government in Saigon in 1945, and then returned to Hanoi to hold high DRV posts. His successor was ~guyen Phuong Thao (alias Nguyen Binh), a northerner, who led the Southern Resistance through 1951, and subsequently died in the North. 126/ Nguyen Phuong Thao (alias Nguyen Binh) was succeeded by Le Duan,who became First Secretary of the Lao Dong Party openly in 1960, and probably de facto in 1957· Le Duan's deputy was Le Duc Tho, in 1960 director of the Organizational Department of the Lao Dong Party, and a member of its Central Committee. Pham Hung, in 1960 a member of the Lao Dong Secretariat and a Deputy Premier of the DRV, and Ung Van Khiem, in 1960 on the Lao Dong Central Committee, were also among the leaders of the Southern Viet Minh through 1954.
Le Duan remained in the South after Geneva, or at least is mentioned in intelligence reports as being in the South frequently through 1957. 1271 His return to North Vietnam in mid-1957 precipitated, accordiI1g to some sources, a struggle among Ho's lieutenants between a moderate faction opposing DRV support of guerrilla war in the South, and a militant faction led by Le Duan. 128/ He is also reported to have been sent on an inspection trip to the South in 1958, and in early 1959, to have presented a series of recommendations for immediate action in the South to the Lao Dong Central Committee. 129/ General Van Tien Dung, Chief of Staff of the NVA and alternate Politburo member, was reportedly a member of the Party's southern apparatus from mid-1955 through 1956, having been sent south to contract alliances with Hoa Hao and Cao Dai armed bands; Nguyen Van Vinh, one of his deputies, also served there at the same time. 130/ Intelligence is vague on Le Duan's replacement in 1957. However, among those northern leaders mentioned by intelligence sources as serving in the South in the period after 1956 are Tran Van Tra, Le Duan's pre-1954 military adviser in the South, and nOlv a NVA deputy chief of staff; and Muoi Cuc (Nguyen Van Cuc), one of Le Duan's close follmrers. 131/
Both the infiltrated regroupees and the relatively few northerners who accompanied them in the years 1959-1963 were lower-level leaders. As Geo~ge Carver put it:
"They were not foot soldiers or cannon fodder (at least not until Hanoi began sending in whole North Vietnamese units in late 1964 or early 1965). Instead they were disciplined, trained and indoctrinated cadres and technicians. They became the squad leaders, platoon leaders, political officers, staff officers, unit commanders, weapons and communications specialists who built the Viet Cong's military force into what it is today. They also became the village, district, provincial and regional committee chiefs and key committee members who
built the Viet Cong's political apparatus.
"The earlier arrivals had had at least five years of indoctrination and training in North Viet Nam, or elsewhere in the Communist bloc, before departing on their southern missions . . ." 132/
The monopoly of Viet Cong leadership by the infiltrators from the North became evident after 1960. By 1965, they were clearly dominant. For example, while southerners still controlled the Viet Cong of the Mekong Delta, in the provinces just north of Saigon -- Tay Ninh, Binh Duong, Binh Hoa, and Phuoc Tuy especially -- regroupees and northerners had assumed most of the principal cow_mand positions. A document captured in January 1966 listed 47 VC officials attending a top-level party meeting for that region, of whom 30 had infiltrated from 1961 through 1965. Seven of these, all holding high posts in the regional command, were North Vietnamese. 133/ U.S . intelligence has estimated that one-third of the infiltrators from 1962 through 1964 were military officers or political leaders. 134/ A high-level defector from the VC 165A Regiment, charged with the Saigon region, stated that in 1965 8 of its 20 top officers were infiltrators. Other prisoners and ralliers have provided evidence that from one-quarter to one-third of Viet Cong officers in Liberation Army units were infiltrated from the North. At Viet Cong central headquarters in Tay Ninh -- Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN) -- Senior General Nguyen Chi Thanh of the NVA and Major General Tran Van Tra of the NVA and the Lao Dong Central Committee, his deputy, both North Vietnamese, held the top positions in the Communist Party Secretariat, under which there was a Military Affairs Committee heavily weighted with North Vietnamese military Officers. By 1966 it was clear that in the northern provinces of South Vietnam, the NVA was in direct command. General Hoang Van Thai, a deputy chief of staff of the NVA, and Major General Chu Huy Man, a member of the Lao Dong Central Committee, comraanded all VC/NVA operations there. 135/
4. The Communist Party. U .S. intelligence has been relatively well assured that throughout the years since 1945 the Communist Party of North Vietnam -- in its several guises -- has remained active in South Vietnam and in control of the Communist Party there. Public statements by Ro, by Truong Chinh, and other DRV leaders confirmed intelligence collected by the French that the Party went underground upon its formal disestablishment in 1945, but stayed operational and united throughout Vietnam. 136/ The Party publicly and privately took credit for organizing and leading the Viet Minh in the years 194·5 to 1951, and upon the DRV' s legalizing the Lao Dong Party in 1951, openly identified the latter, with both the Indochinese Communist Party pre-1945, and the covert Party of the years thereafter. By 1954, the Party seems to have asserted itself in virtually all of the Viet Minh IS sprm-rling undertakings. Party members held the key positions in the Front, both in the North and in the South, and Party cadre served as the chain of command for both operational int elligence and decisions. 137/ The Viet Minh administered South Vietnam as tvo Itinterzones It or regions (see map), and established 
As the Viet Minh military apparatus was dismantled, COSVN was apparently closed down. There is convincing evidence) however, that from 1955 on, there were tyro Party headquarters -- or at least communications centers -- in South Vietnam) each communicating directly with Lao Dong headquarters in Hanoi. 141/ One of these was located in "Nam Bo" (South Zone), the other was located in "Trung Bo" (Central Zone) Region Five). Captured docum e nts and prisoners indicate that these headquarters were active in handling the infiltration between North and South Vietnam in the years immediately after Geneva; they are also mentioned as the site of conferences between southern Vietnamese and northern leaders like Le Duan and Van Tien Dung. 142/ While prisoners and captured documents have established these links between Hanoi and the South) reports are too fev in number and insufficiently comp rehens ive to warrant the conclusion that Hanoi was always in a position to dictate or even manipulate events in South Vietnam; they do offer persuasive evidence that the Lao Dong Party continued conspiratorial, political, and military activities in South Vietnam throughout the years 1954 to 1969. Moreover) the documents and interrogations are supported by circumstantial evidence. The village level organization of the Viet Cong, even that in the early years of the insurgency, VC propaganda techniques, and the terror-persuasion methodology employed by the early Viet Cong, all closely followed the doctrine of the Lao Dong Party. 143/ The eventual appearance of a "front" structured like the Fatherland Front; the reiteration by Cong of propaganda themes being trumpeted by Hanoi; and indications of preoccupation within the Viet Cong leadership over following the Lao Dong Party line also support the conclusion that the Party was playing a significant role in the mOQDting rebellion against Diem.
In 1961, when the People's Revolutionary Party of South Vietnam came into being, there was some effort in both North and South to portray it as an indigenous South Vietnamese party, independent of the Lao Dong. But documents and prisoners have since proved that if this were the case, neither the Viet Cong hierarchy nor rank-and-file believed it so. A document captured in 1962; a provincial party directive) stated that the creation of the PRP "is only a matter of strategy … to deceive the enemy ... Our party is nothing but the Lao Dong Party of Vietnam) unified from North to South) under the direction of the Central Executive Committee of the Party) the chief of which is President Ho." 144/ Another party directive captured in 1966 provided that: "the masses who have good sympathy towards the Party should be well informed that the Lao Dong Party and the People's Revolutionary Party are one party headed by the Central Committee with Chairman Ho at the head." 145/ An NVA naval officer captured in 1966, a second generation Party member, asserted that: "Once South Vietnam has been liberated, the NLF will suffer the same fate as the Viet Minh did in North Vietnam after independence was gained from the French. The Front will atrophy and quickly disappear . . ." This officer was emphatic that: "The Lao Dong and the PRP are one and the same organism the PRP and the Lao Dong will emerge into the open (after reunification) as one party ... under Ho's authority." 146/
In March, 1962, the Central Office of South Vietnam (COSVN) was reactivated, built around the Nambo Inter-Zone Committee, and given purview over Cochinchina and Annam. The 1962 reorganization is believed to have been intended to improve the coordination of insurgent activity and to lend substance to the newly created PRP.
Available evidence indicates that the PRP is the southern element of the DRV Lao Dong Party. But whether the PRP is a subsidiary of the Lao Dong Party or merely a territorial department of the Party is unclear. Pointing to a parent-subsidiary relationship are the facts that membership requirements in the PRP are considerably less stringent than in the Lao Dong Party) that the PRP regulations are designed for an independent entity) and that the SVN military party system is subordinate to COSVN, whereas the DRV military party system is not subordinate to analogous party committees. But Vietnamese Communists assert that there is only one Vietnamese Communist Party because Vietnam is one country; the Lao Dong Party appears to count PRP members in its official membership figures; and infiltrating Lao Dong Party members are automatically accorded PRP membership. The fact that some members of the Lao Dong Central Committee are officials of COSVN could be consistent with either relationship; whatever the exact relationship, COSVN is the extension of the Lao Dong. COSVN's immediate superior in the Lao Dong Party hierarchy seems to be the party's Reunification Department, which is believed to have issued specific orders to COSVN based upon the directives of the Lao Dong Central Committee. The principal function of the Reunification Department seems to be to act as the COSVN liaison office in DRV, where it forwards correspondence and recruits and trains political cadre before infiltration south. COSVN leadership of the military party system in SVN appears to have been subject to the technical supervision of the Lao Dong Central Military Committee. 147/
George Carver has summarized well presently available information concerning command linkage between Hanoi and the South:
"As the organizational structure of the Viet Cong movement has expanded over the past four years, its general outlines have become fairly well known. In the insurgency's initial phase (1954-1959), the Communists retained the Viet Minh's division of what is now South Viet Nam into 'Interzone V' (French Annam below the 17th parallel, and the 'Nambo' (Cochin China), with each area under Hanoi's direct control. In late 1960 or early 1961, this arrangement was scrapped and field control over all aspects of the Viet Cong insurgency vested in a still existing, single command headquarters, originally known as the Central Office for South Viet Nam (or C.O.S.V.N.--a term still in circulation) but now usually referred to by captured Viet Cong as simply the P.R.P.'S Central Committee. This command entity, which also contains the headquarters of the N.L.F., is a mobile and sometimes peripatetic body, usually located in the extreme northwestern tip of Tay Ninh province in prudent proximity to the Cambodian border. . . At the 1962 Geneva Conference on Laos, a member of the North Vietnamese delegation inadvertently commented that the published roster of the Lao Dong Party's central Committee did not include some members whose identities were kept secret because they were 'directing military operations in South Viet Nam.' One of the four examples he cited was 'Nguyen Van Cuc,' which is one of the aliases used by the Chairman of the P.R.P. This Lao Dong Central Committee member, whose true name we do not know, is probably the overall field director of the Viet Cong insurgency in South Viet Nam. The overall commander of Viet Cong military forces (who would be a subordinate of Cuc's within the Communist command structure) is almost certainly the Chairman of the (P.R.P.) Central Committee' s Military Committee -- a man who uses the name Tran Nam Trung but whom several captured Viet Cong cadre members have insisted is actually Lieutenant-General Tran Van Tra, a Deputy Chief of Staff of the North Vietnamese army and an alternate member of the Lao Dong Central Committee. The director of all Viet Cong activity in V.C. Military Region 5 (the northernmost third of South Viet Nam) is Nguyen Don, a Major-General in the North Vietnamese army and another alternate member of the Lao Dong Central Committee, who in 1961 was commander of the North Vietnamese 305th Division but came south late that year or early in 1962. In short, not only does the P.R.P. control all aspects of the Viet Cong movement, including the N.L.F., and not only is it a subordinate echelon of the North Vietnamese Lao Dong Party, but the P.R.P.'s own leaders appear to be individuals who themselves occupy ranking positions within the Lao Dong Party hierarchy." 148/
However, while the fact of extensive DRV control over South Vietnam's insurgents after 1960 sheds light on recent DRV policy, it does not answer the questions of when and why that control was imposed. These are best addressed in the broad context of world events, which, as much as DRV domestic politics, or U.S. and GVN policies, seem to have governed DRV strategy.
E. DRV Strategy: Objectives and Timing
From the close of the Geneva Conference on 22 July 1954, through Hanoi’s announcement of the founding of the National Lj.beration Front of South Vietnam on 29 January 1961, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam appears to have passed through four distinct phases in striving toward its national objectives of independence, reunification, assured foreign support, and Vietnamese hegemony in Southeast Asia.
1. Political Struggle : Summer, 1954 -- Summer, 1956. In the year following Geneva, the DRV executed its regroupments and pressed hard towards land reform and economic recovery. In February, 1955, the Malenkov clique fell from power in the USSR, and the Soviet Union came under a collective leadership within which Khrushchev was pre-eminent. Intimations that the new leaders vrereinterested in pursuing a conciliatory policy in the Cold War distinctly at variance with the national interests of the DRV were manifest in Soviet inaction when the deadlines for consultations concerning the Geneva Plebiscite passed in July, 1955. 149/ Doubly disappointed that Diem was not overturned by the sects, and that its principal ally seemed ill-disposed to back its cause, the DRV maneuvered frenetically to precipitate a reconvening of the Geneva Conference and to stymie Diem . U . S . intelligence was aware of a directive passed down through 180 Dong Party channels in August, 1955, for subordinates to struggle against the Americans and Diem It . . . so that there may be a less dangerous administration that will go to a conference with us." 150/ In September, 1955, the newly created Fatherland Front brought · out its proposal for a confederation of North and South Vietnam, coupled with assurances that in both entities landlords would get free treatment. In South Vietnam in the same month, on three occasions soldiers fired on crowds agitating for the Geneva Plebiscite . 151/ Captured reports from Party field operators in South Vietnam were pessimistic, containing predictions of "long, painful and complex struggle," and reporting weaknesses such that "it is not time to meet the enemy." 152/
But within South Vietnam, Diem moved smoothly through his own plebiscite ejecting Bao Dai, announced plans for a new constitution, and proclaimed Ordinance No.6 (11 January 1956), giving the GVN povrerful legal recourse against "struggle movements." And just as the flurry of DRV diplomatic notes finally elicited help in the form of Chou En 18i's letter of 26 January 1956, calling for a new Gen eva Conference, Khrushchev dropped the "de-Stalinizationl" bombshell: at the 20th Congress
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev, in denigrating Stalin, undermined the Soviet position as the fount of Commun ist international policy, and fractured the Cormnunist Bloc. In April, 1956, just after the United Kingdom issued a note castigating the DRV for violation of the letter and spirit of the Geneva Accords, Khrushchev committed the Soviet Union to "peaceful competition" with the West : "We say to the representatives of the capitalist world: 'You are for the development of capitalism. We are for socialism. We do not want to impose our institutions on you) but we will not allow you to interfere in our affairs. Therefore) there is only one way open to us -- peaceful competition." 153/
The Soviet softening,taken with the U.K. position) plus Diem's successful elections in March, 1956, seemed to write off action by the Geneva powers, and evidently caused serious reconsideration by the lao Dong leaders. On 24 April 1956) Ho Chi Minh issued a statement reporting on the Ninth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Lao Dong Party, in which, in Hanoi's ca. 1960 version) he held that:
"… We have grasped the great significance of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This Congress has:
"Analyzed the new sitl'.atlon prevailing in the world, and pointed out the new conditions favorable to the preservation of peace and the advance toward socialism by the Revolutionary Parties of the working class and the laboring people;
"Clearly shown the Soviet Union's victorious road, giving us still greater enthusiasm and making us believe still more strongly in the invincible forces of the Soviet Union, the bastion of revolution and of world peace;
"Pointed out the tasks of the Communist Party in the ideological and organizational fields. The Congres s particularly emphasized the application of Marxist-Leninist principles to collective leadership and opposed the cult of the individual.
"While recognizing that war may be averted, we must be vigilant to detect the warmongers' schemes; for as long as imperialism exists) the danger of war still exists.
"While recognizing that in certain countries the road to socialism may be a peaceful one) we should be aware of this fact: In countries where the machinery of state) the armed forces) and the police of the bourgeois class are still strong, the proletarian class still has to prepare for armed struggle.
"While recognizing the possibility of reunifying Viet -Nam by peaceful means, we should always remember that our people's principal enemies are the American imperialists and their agents who still occupy half our country and are
preparing for war; therefore, we should firmly hold aloft the banner of peace and enhance our vigilance." :1.54/
The text of this statement reported by U.S. intelligence at the time, however, had Ho coupling his statement that "the enemies of our people . still occupy one half of our national territory and are preparing for war … " with the ominous assertion that the DRV must "be in a position to change the form of the struggle . .. " Moreover, Truong Chinh, the Party First Secretary, was reported to have addressed the notion that "peaceful unification" of Vietnam might be "illusory and reformist." 155/
In May the Soviet Co-chairman of the Geneva Conferenc e signed the letter calling upon the two Vietnams to observe the Accords, but in effect committing the Geneva powers and ICC to status quo in Vietnam. At this juncture, the DRV appeared resigned to partition for the foreseeable future, as evidenced in the public letter of 19 June 1956 from Ho Chi Minh to the restive regroupees, in which he undertook to explain and defend a "s ocialism in one country" strategy (see supra, p. 24), but stressed that "the present political struggle is a stage in our national democratic revolution . . . in the present political struggle, as in the Revolution and the Resistance, our compatriots in the South are in the vanguard, closely united and struggling herOically and perseveringly." 156/ As the deadlines for the Geneva Elections (July) 1956) approached, NVA troops were dravm back from the Demilitarized Zone in Vietnam to defensive positions; DRV diplomats wooed the neutral nations in search of support, openly advocating neutralization of Southeast Asia: Captured orders to Party cadre in South Vietnam stressed "an ideology of lying 101" for a long time …" 157/
The Geneva deadline passed uneventfully, the DRV by July being well impressed with the futility of looking to the Conference for aid. Ho's Pravda article of 2 August 1956 underscored the DRV's rejection of a go-it-alone strategy, and its continued fealty to the Bloc led by the Soviets. 158/
2. Internal Dissent and Reassessment: Summer 1956 -- Fall, 1957·
By mid-1956, the Lao Dong Party leaders faced at home not only a crisis of confidence over their foreign policy failure, but
the serious threat to internal security arising from reaction to the Land Reform Campaign. To stem deterioration of public morale, Ho announced on 18 August 1956 the "successful completion" of Land Reform, admitting to "errors" by the Party, and closing his statement with an appeal for unity under the Fatherland Front: "Unity is our invincible force. In order to consolidate the North into a solid base for the struggle to reunify our country, our entire people should be closely and widely united on the basis of the wrker-peasant alliance in the Viet-Nam Fatherland Front. It is all the more necessary for veteran and new cadres of the Party and Government to assume identity of ideas, to be united and single-minded, and to compete to serve the people." 159/
All through the fall of 1956, with the Party and the government under patent stress, the public statements of the Lao Dong leaders reiterated the theme. At the Tenth PlenU1l1 of t he Central Committee of the Party, in late October, 1956, Truong Chinh, as the proponent of Land Reform, was publicly sacrificed. to "rectification of errors" and to national unity. Vo Nguyen Giap's confessional at the Tenth Plenum took place on 27 October 1956, t he day after Diem promulgated the new Constitution of the Republic of South Vietnam and took office as its first president. North Vietnam's peasant uprisings in November further deepened the contrast between North and South, much to the DRV’s disadvantage internationally. After a fence-mending December, the DRV summoned its National Assembly for one of its rare sessions. The Assembly took cognizance that "the struggle for unity would be long and difficult," and that "consolidation" of the North would have to take priority; on 22 January 1957 it passed a resolution stating that:
"The National Assembly confirms that in 1956, the work of strengthening the North and struggling for national reunification was crowned with great successes, though errors and short-comings still existed in some work. Our successes are fundamental, and will certainly be developed. Our errors and short-comings are few and temporary, and will certainly be removed, and are nml in the process of being overcome." 162,/
The National Assembly adjourned on 25 January 1957, the day after the Soviets proposed admitting North and South Vietnam to the United Nations as separate, sovereign states --·a move concerning which the DRV evidently had no warning, and W"hich probably dates the nadir of DRV fortunes post-Geneva. 161/ Ho Chi Minh promptly denounced the Soviet action in a message to the UN, but at no time was the DRV more isolated.
It was about this period that mounting dissatisfaction with the Party leaders in South Vietnam began to be felt in Hanoi. Prisoners and documents attest that Ie Duan, the Lao Dong chieftain in South Vietnam, had lost faith in "political struggle" as early as 1955; one source reported that it Vias Le Duan's view that Hanoi was "wasting time," and that the Diem government should. be "forcibly overthrown" as soon as possible if the DRV were to expect to "succeed in gaining control of South Vietnam." 162/ In February, 1956, Le Duan is reported to have conferred with southern leaders on tactics, and concluded that "military pressure" was essential for reunification. He is alleged to have called for a military campaign in the Highlands, and a revitalizing of the Communist Party apparatus in the South. There is some evidence of his having published these views in a book in late 1956. Hanoi, preoccupied with int ernal problems, was in no position to act on such proposals, but it could not ignore the "mood of skepticism and nonconfidence" -- as a southern communist later described it -- pervading the South.
Sometime in early 1957 Le Duan returned to Hanoi from South Vietnam to assume a key role in Lao Dong policy formulation. In any event, Ho Chi Minh evidently deferred to southern sentiment when on 15 February 1957 he applauded the "appeal of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on the banning of atomic weapons and on reduction of armament," reaffirmed the DRV's similar devotion to peace, but went on to note that:
The U.S. is not well informed on how the Lao Dong leaders"The National Assembly has discussed the question of national reunification. Th e struggle o18ged by our people for this purpose is long and difficult but will certainly be victorious. To achieve national reunification, all our people must unite closely, make further efforts to consolidate the North and make it a basis for national liberation. Our deputies have voiced the iron will of our people in the work of national reunification. The National Assembly has many a time o18rruly welcomed the firm and consistent combativeness of our compatriots in the South…
"…the National Assembly has called on our compatriots throughout the country and residing abroad and on our People's Army to unite closely in their struggle, consolidate the North, maintain and extend the struggle wag ed in the South, and strengthen our international solidarity.
"The National Assembly has appealed to our" compatriots in the South to struggle perseveringly and to strengthen their will for national reunification and independence. No force can hamper the determination of our people for unity and fraternal love.' ...
"We are duty-bound to unite and struggle in order to carry into practice the decisions of the National Assembly, implement the policies and political lines of the Party and Government, speed up the tasks set for this year, increase production, practice savings, consolidate the North, and unite the people throughout the cou~try on the basis of the program of the Fatherland Front for the struggle for national reunification." 163/
decided which to pursue of the several policy courses open to them, but there is evidence that the developing of consensus took several turnings. There appeared to be at first a move led by Ho and Giap toward strengthening DRV ties with the Soviets, crowned with some immediate success. On 28 February 1957 the UN General Assembly recommended to the Security Council that South Vietnam (and South Korea) be admitted to the UN. 164/ In early May, Diem paid a state visit to the U.S., where he received assurances of continued strong U.S. support. 165/ Whatever its reasons, the Soviet thereupon took a position against the admission to the UN of South Vietnam, and on 20 May 1957, Marshal Kliment E . Voroshilov, President of the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet, arrived in Hanoi for a state visit billed in DRV newspapers as a "most important event." 166/ It then appears that Truong Chinh and other Sinophile leaders pressed hard for orientation toward Peking. Amid evidence of haste and confusion, Ho left the country to visit East Europe in July, 1957, returning after stops in Moscow and Peking on 30 August 1957. Ho was in Moscow in July when Khrushchev expelled Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich -- the anti-party group -- from the Praesidium of the CPSU, and probably gained some first hand insight into the ideas of the new leaders. 167/ In his absence, the DRV signed a new economic agreement with the CPR, and on his return, he appears to have been plunged into a power struggle of some proportions. Ho Chi Minh issued a statement on 2 September 1957 that the government of South Vietnam had to respect the desire of its people for reunification, and averred that his European trip demonstrated a "complete unity of views" with fraternal countries and that the trip had "splendid" results. lfJ3/ Also in September, Le Duan was formally admitted to the Politburo. In late October or early November, Ho left, somewhat mysteriously, for Moscow. Although Hanoi newspapers had announced a six week long fete in honor of the 40th anniversary of Russia's October Revolution, the actual celebrations were limited to a few, simple events, and handled low-key by the DRV and its press. Such speeches as were recorded had distinct Maoist overtones. Truong Chinh re-emerged from eclipse as the principal party spokesman, while Giap dropped from sight. Le Duan also went to MOSCOW, but returne d without Ho Chi Minh. Then, in late December, amid rumors that Ho and Giap were dead, both reappeared in Hanoi, and resumed their former position. 169/ In 1958, the Soviets replaced the CPR as the DRV's prime aid donor.
In subsequent years, Lao Dong Party historians identified the meetings in Moscow in the fall of 1957 as one of the pivotal events in the modern history of Vietnam. Western corm:nentators have focused on Khrushchev's speech in which he pointed out that capitalism was doomed but that, "the only correct path in the development of international relations is a policy of peaceful coexistence . . . We work from the premise that wars are not necessary to advance socialism …" But DRV attention has been directed to the Moscow Declaration of 1957, embodied in the "Communique on the Conference of Representatives of Communist and Workers Parties of Socialist Countries," which took quite a different line:
"The communist and workers parties are faced with great historic tasks . . . In present day conditions in a number of capitalist countries, the working class has the possibility . . . to unite the majority of the people, when state power without civil war can ensure the transfer of basic means of production to the hands of the people . . [However] in conditions in which the exploiting classes resort to violence against the people, it is necessary to bear in mind another possibility -- nonpeaceful transition to socialism. Leninism teaches and history confirms that the ruling classes never relinguish power voluntarily. In these conditions the severity and forms of class struggle will depend not so much on the proletariat as on the resistance of the reactionary circles to the will of the overwhelming majority of the people, on the use of force by these circles at one or another stage of the struggle for socialism." 171/
The congruence of this Declaration with Ho's April, 1956, statement to the Ninth Plenum of the Lao Dong Party Central Committee (supra, 46–47) and with the rhetoric Hanoi had been using to condemn Diem, seems more than coincidental. Le Duan returned from Moscow ahead of Ho to present the results to the Lao Dong leaders, and issued on 7 December 1957 a public statement that the Declaration:
" . . . not only confirmed the line and created favorable conditions for North Vietnam to advance toward socialism, but has also shown the path of struggle for national liberation and has created favorable conditions for the revolutionary movement in South Vietnam." 172/
Some authorities have viewed the "crisis of 1957" within the Lao Dong leadership as a clash of factions over whether to align with the bellicose Mao (pro Truong Chinh, Nguyen Duy Trinh) or remain loyal to the temporizing Soviets (pro Ho and Giap). 173/ P. J. Honey, for example, found it significant that even Mao acknowledged Soviet leadership at the 1957 Moscow Conference, and notes that in February, 1948, the spokesman for the DRV National Assembly's Political Subcommittee announced that:
"Our firm international position is to stand in the socialist camp headed by the Soviet Union. . . This position proceeds from our people's fundamental interests and from the requirements of North Vietnam's advance towards socialism." 174/
Honey deprecated contrary statements issued by Hanoi about the same time -- e.g., that the NVA would "always stand ready by the side of the CPR in its struggle to recover Quemoy and Matsu, and to liberate Taiwan…" and thought that:
"It is very probable, although not a scrap of evidence has so far come to light which would corroborate it, that Ho Chi Minh was secretly reassuring the Soviet leaders, explaining that North Vietnam was supporting China only with empty words, while her actions proved that she had not been taken in by Maoist innovations." 175/
D. S. Zagoria interpreted the DRV strategy debate as less a dispute over external relations than over internal priorities: "The crucial local issue has resolved around the relative priority to be assigned to economic development of the North and struggle in the South." He concluded that "pro-Soviet" view prevailed simply because "between 1957 and 1960) northern leaders agreed on the need to concentrate on economic development." 176/
Proponents of both interpretations conclude that Hanoi's predilection for the USSR was ipso facto a deferral of support for the insurgency in the South. But the evidence supports a third interpretation. It is quite possible that the DRV leaders sought and won Soviet support be cause they found it impossible amicably to set priorities between internal and external national objectives. It seems evident that only the Soviets could offer the wherewithal to pursue both sets of goals simultaneously, and it is possible that the Lao Dong leaders opted for "guns and butter" rather than "socialism in one country." The apparent harmony among the pro-China and pro-Russia "factions" by early 1958 bespeaks such a compromise solution. Of course, serious doubt remains whether the Soviets would have valued DRV fealty high enough to pay the price, yet it seems that such could have been the case. The new DRV-USSR understanding reached during 1957 definitely included the extension of material aid which North Vietnam needed for its economic advancement. It evidently also included Soviet concurrence in a more adventuresome policy toward reunification. Whether or not specific DRV advances upon South Vietnam were countenanced, it is evident that the DRV leaders had obtained Soviet recognition that North Vietnam's circumstances placed it outside the range of strategic and doctrinal considerations which had lead Khrushchev, et al., into "peaceful competition" and "peaceful coexistence."
3. Preparations: Winter, 1958 -- Spring, 1959. In the autumn of 1957, and throughout 1958, violence in rural South Vietnam mounted, and increasingly manifested strategic direction. There is, however, only sparse evidence that North Vietnam was directing, or was capable of directing that violence. Yet even had the DRV determined in late 1957 to support insurgency in South Vietnam, there probably would have been little sign of that decision in 1958, so soon after it had been reached. The Lao Dong leaders were possibly the most experienced and dedicated group of professional revolutionaries in the world -- and probably the most cautious. Perhaps more than any other such group, the North Vietnamese communists had subjected their past to intense and objective scrutiny, striving to detect errors in strategy and tactics, and to derive lessons applicable to the future. The writings of Ho, Giap, Truong Chinh, and others have revealed that they were by no means satisfied that they had always made correct choices in the past on questions of war or peace. The salient lesson they have drawn is that premature revolution is significantly worse than no revolution at all, and they have repeatedly cited the abortive uprisings of 1930 and 1940 as cases in point. In both instances, amorphous, mainly spontaneous insurrection lead to failure, and then to reprisals and heavy losses among exposed middle and lower echelon Party leaders, which set back Party progress several years.
The 1940 rebellion has seemed particularly poignant to DRV commentators. When the Japanese invaded Tonkin in September, 1940, the Indochinese Communist Party, together with other Vietnamese nationalists, elected violent resistance. Demonstrations took place throughout the country. Ho Chi Minh was at the time in Kuming, with the ICP "External Bureau." Ho and his colleagues there counseled their in-country counterparts against proceeding beyond demonstrations, but the ardor of local leaders could not be dampened. In November, 1940, peasants in the Plain of Reeds took up arms, and there was shortly a series of peasant jacquerie, which spread throughout the Mekong Delta. As Ho, et al., had predicted, the uprising failed and the French administration in Saigon launched a savage repression which virtually destroyed the ICP organization in rural Cochinchina. 177/
In May, 1941, at the Eighth Plenum of the ICP Central Committee, there was an exhaustive review of the 1940 debacle, and a re-direction of party effort toward forming an alliance of all social classes and political parties, nationalist movements, religious sects, and anti-Japanese resistance groups . Social reform and communist slogans were de-emphasized. All the resources of the Party were to be thrown behind a new front group which would carry out the Party strategy; that group was the League for Independence of Vietnam, or the Viet Minh. 178/ Again and again thereafter, communist leaders in their speeches and published works have returned to the lessons of the abortive revolt and the Eighth Plenum : never squander Party grassroots organizations in futile causes; submerge the Party in a broader cause, behind a national front.
The example of successful revolution most often held out by DRV leaders has been the "Augus t Revolution" of 1945· The official DRV history points out that this uprising was successful because, under Party leadership, there had been: (1) a careful preparing of the people in both ideology and organization, including the training of cadres, the build-up of bases of resistance, and the organization of armed forc es -- peoples' war, peoples' army; (2) a seizing of the right opportunity; (3) "launching the revolutionary high tide of the whole people" -- meaning the forming of a "national front" organization which could command the support of the majority of the people, including "all class es , nationalities, and religions"; (4) a skillful combining of military and political "struggle" -- that is, the employment of both forms of r evolutionary endeavor, and the gradual shift in emphaSis from political to military methods; (5) dividing the enemy by proselyting his armed forces, civil service, and citizenry. 179/ The first two lessons , on preparation for and careful timing of revolution, have received particular stress. Party history is accurate: Ho Chi Minh carefuJ.ly husbanded his forces and waited for the moment to strike. Virtually all the energies of the Viet Minh from 1943 through the spring of 1945 were devoted to the patient development of a political infrastructure in rural areas, and the building of guerrilla strong- holds in the mountains adjacent to China. Ho permitted his armed forces to begin systematic guerrilla warfare only after the Japanese set up an independent Vietnam under Bao Dai in March, 1945· Even then, how ever, he used them sparingly. There was supposed to have been a Vi et Minh conference in June, 1945, to signal the "general uprising," but Ho Chi Minh delayed convening of this conference because h e vTaS convinc ed that uprising would be premature . Although DRV histories do not say so, there is, in fact, every indica tion that when the "Augu st Revolution" was launched, it came not as a conscientious, coordinated effort controlled by Ho and his lieutenants , but as another more or less spontaneous rebellion. 180/ Confronted with the prospect of being a bystander while others won-victory, Ho hastily convened the deferred conference on 16 August 1945, and formally com- mitted the Viet Minh to the overthrow of Bao Dai and the expulsion of the French and Japanese. Within three weeks, the independence of the DRV was proclaimed, and Ho was installed in Hanoi as its president.
One example DRV historians do not often cite is the inc eption of tbe long and ruinous Resistance War which began in December, 1946. From all appearances, the DRV leaders still entertain serious doubts over the wisdom of going to war against France at that juncture. There is evidence that the incidents which opened the war in December, 1946, had not been condoned by HO J and that he re-committed the Viet Minh to military action only reluctantly, and after events had issued their own dictum. Moreover , communist literature on the Resistance War of 1945-195L~ abounds with reproach for loca l leaders launching too-venturesome, costly enterprises without proper preparation. Even top leaders were not immune to criticism on that score; e.g ., Le Dusn was apparently relieved of command over COSVN in late 1952 or 1953 for pressing too fast and hard. 181/ From the highest strategic level to the lowest. tactical level, Vietnamese communist doctrine underscores the essentiality of careful preparatory work, and the criticality of timing initial overt operations. 182/ It is not likely, then, that a decision to proceed toward the reunification of Vietnam by force was lightly taken by the Lao Dong leaders; it would in any event have countenanced extensive, painstaking, covert groundwork.
Such preliminary efforts might have be en the refurbishing of the Communist Party in South Vietnam, which had been seriously weakened by Diem's persistent Communist Denunciation Campaign. It seems probable that, whenever they were started, the initial steps of the DRV were directed to reinvigorating the Lao Dong apparatus in the South. For this purpose it would have needed relatively few cadre -- for instance, with 400 men, the Lao Dong could have dispatched 10 organizers to each of South Vietnam's provinces. From all indications, organizers were sent South in 1958; the numbers are not known. Similarly, in all likelihood the DRV would have looked to base preparations. Again evidence is scanty, but there were definite indications that guerrilla secure-areas were being prepared in the Highlands, in the Plain of ,Reeds, and in the War Zone C - War Zone D region north of Saigon. 183/ There are also indications, however, that debate over strategy continued through 1958. Reports captured while being forwarded via Lao Dong channels from South Vietnam to Hanoi indicate that some subordinates there clung to the belief that the Diem regime could be toppled without recourse to guerrilla warfare, and that others despaired of success without substantial militarJ aid from the North. There is also evidence throughout 1958 that Viet Cong tactics were being subjected to careful study in Hanoi. 184/
Whatever preparations were in progress during 1958, in December, 1958, or January, 1959, Hanoi apparently declded that the time had come to intensify its efforts. On December 1, there was an incident at a "political re-education camp" north of Salgon -- the "Phu Loi Massacre" -- which the DRV promptly seized upon to launch a worldwide propaganda offensive against Dlem. U .S . intelligence came into possession of a directive from Hanoi to its subordinate head-quarters in Inter-Sector V during December, 1958, which stated that the Lao Dong Party Central Committee had declded to "open a new stage of the struggle" ""}B 5/; the following month, January, 1959, U. S. sources also acqulred an order directing a Viet Cong bulld-up in Tay Nlnh province to provide a base for guerrilla operations; the same order mentioned simllar bases in the mountains of western Inter-Sector V. 186/ In February, Viet Cong guerrillas successfully attacked a GVN outpost near Trang Sup, in Tay Ninh, and Diem told a French correspondent that "at the present time Vietnam is a nation at war." George Carver has recorded that in late 1958 or early 1959, Le Duan journeyed to South Vietnam for an on-the-spot appraisal of affairs there, and that his report lead to a DRV decision to step up support of the insurgency.
"Consolidation of the North" proceeded apace during 1958. Societal discipline advanced to the point that by early 1959 the land reform campaign -- under a different name -- was re-initiated without difficulty. 187/ Crops were good, and economic prospects in both the agricultural and industrial sectors were excellent. 188/ In January, 1959, the DRV contracted with the Soviet Union for a 50% increase in trade, and in February another large loan was negotiated with the CPR. 189/ Against this background of domestic success -- progress and plenty within North Vietnam -- and of interna tional finesse -- cooperation with both the great communist powers without domination by either -- the DRV implemented the next step in its strategy.
4. Taking the Offensive: Spring, 1959 - Fall, 1960.
a. Surfacing the Strategy, 1959
However the DRV privately viewed the war in South Vietnam during 1959 and 1960, the public statements of its leaders were aggressive. If the numbers of infiltrators and the amount of supplies dispatched to the South were insignificant or unimpressive to the beleaguered insurgents, the pose adopted by the Lao Dong principals must have greatly enheartened insurgents in South Vietnam.
On 4 April 1959, President Eisenhower, in an address at Gettysburg, declared that South Vietnam could not, without U.S . aid, meet the dual threat of aggression from without and subversion within its borders." He stated that U.S. national interests compelled the U.S. to help South Vietnam sustain its morale, economic progress, and military strength. 190/ On 30 April 1959, Pham Van Dong applauded Khrushchev’s rejoinder to President Eisenhower as follows:
"Comrade Khrushchev’s strong statement was a powerful blow to the US imperialists aggressive bloc. The Vietnamese people are very grateful to the Soviet Union, head of the socialist camp, for its constant sympathy for and support to their righteous struggle for national reunification. Comrade Khrushchev!s statement powerfully encourages our people to enthusiastically build North Viet-Nam and advance gradually toward socialism and to struggle for national reunification..."Just as observed by Comrade Khrushchev, the intervention by US imperialism in South Viet-Nam is the cause of the continued partition of Viet-Nam ... The struggle for the reunification of our country is still meeting with difficulties and hardships, but we are confident that the Vietnamese people will certainly triumph in the complete liberation of our country from the US-Diem clique's dictatorial yoke just as they had gloriously succeeded in their valiant struggle in the past. The American imperialists and their lackeys, who are being opposed and isolated, surely will not be able to avoid the ignominious defeat of those who go counter to the march of history." 191/
Ho Chi Minh's May Day speech of 1959 opened with an encomium from the Soviet Union, China, and other socialist powers who were promoting the movement for national liberation in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. According to the Hanoi Radio report, Ho pointed out "that the earnest desire of the Vietnamese people from North to South is peace and national reunification. On orders from the U.S. imperialists the South Vietnamese authorities are sabotaging the implementation of the Geneva Accords and strangling all democratic freedom of the southern people." Ho concluded on the note that:
"Under the leadership of the Viet-Nam Lao Dong Party and the government, all our people will further strengthen solidarity and unity of mind with other countries in the socialist camp, headed by the great Soviet Union . . . [and] strengthen solidarity within the national united front... By so doing the north of our country will steadily advance toward socialism as a strong basis toward victory in the struggle for national reunification."
On 4 May 1959, the official DRV newspaper declared that:
"The glorious South Vietnamese people surely will not remain with folded arms before the continuous and cruel repressive acts of the U.S.-Diem clique. The Vietnamese people have many times compe lled their enemies to pay for their bloody crimes. The U.S .-Diem clique has by its own will contracted a big debt of blood toward the Vietnamese people, and have dug their own graves."
The foregoing were issued while the Lao Dong Party conducted the Fifteenth Plenum (Enlarged Session) of its Central Committee in Hanoi. The session featured speeches on foreign and domestic programs, but it is fairly certain that a Plenum of the Lao Dong Central Committee is not a debating society nor a parliament -- decisions were not reached there, they were presented.
On 13 May 1959, Hanoi broadcast in English the communique of the Lao Dong Party Central Committeej on the Plenum, a bellicose tone was unmistakable:
"The Central Committee of the Vietnam Lao Dong Party has held its 15th enlarged session to review the developments in the struggle for national reunification and lay down the tasks for the whole party and people in connection with that struggle …
"North Vietnam, now completely liberated, has carried through its task of national people's democratic revolution and is carrying out the socialist revolution and building socialism. This is an extremely important change which determines the direction of development of the Vietnamese revolution in the new stage. Meanwhile, the southern part of our country is still under the domination of the American imperialists and their lackey -- Ngo Dinh Diem. They have turned South Vietnam into a new-type colony and a military base for preparing war.
"The interventionist policy of the U. S. imperialists and the South Vietnam authorities' policy of dependence on the United States have undermined and deliberately continue to undermine the implementation of the Geneva agreements and the cause of peaceful national reunification, thus cutting across the desire and interests of the Vietnamese people. The U.S. imperialists and their followers are scheming to perpetuate the division of our country and prepare a new war.
"To carry out this perfidious scheme, over the past few years the U.S.-Diem clique has been actively increasing its military forces, carrying out a policy of ruthless exploitation of the people, abolishing all democratic functions, repressing and terrorizing the people in a most barbarous manner, causing ever more serious dislocation of the South Vietnamese economy, and making the life of local people more and more precarious and wretched…
"To achieve national reunification on the basis of independence and democracy, the session mapped out the following tasks: the entire people will unite and strive to struggle for national reunification on the basis of independence and democracy to endeavor to consolidate the North and actively take it step by step toward socialism, to build a peaceful, unified, independent, democratic, prosperous and strong Vietnam; and to contribute to the safeguarding of peace in Southeast Asia and the world.
"The session expressed its unshakable belief that our whole people, uniting and struggling heroically and
perseveringly, will certainly smash the U.S. imperialists' scheme to seize our land and their lackeys' plot to sell out our country. On the basis of the consolidation of North Vietnam and its steady development in all fields, of the broad and powerful development of the patriotic movement in the South, and will the approval and support of the peace loving people allover the world, our struggle for national reunification will certainly be successful."
The following day the official press carried an editorial (also broadcast by Radio Hanoi in English) commenting on the communique:
"At present, the world and home situation has become basically different from that of the past. It has been developing in a way which is fully advantageous to our people and very disadvantageous to the imperialists and their lackeys. Our strength in all fields in the North, which is the firm base for the revolutionary struggle in the South, has constantly been consolidated and increased. The magnificently heroic struggle of the southern people has constantly developed and their united strength has broadened without a halt. Strength in all fields of the socialist camp has grown majestically.
"On the basis of an unprecedently firm North Vietnam and socialist camp, our compatriots in the south will struggle resolutely and per~istently against the cruel U.S.-Diem regime
"Our people, always cherishing peace, are determined to struggle to compel the other side to carry out correctly the Geneva agreements, to re-establish normal North-South relations and to hold consultations on general elections to reunify the country. How ever, our people are determined not to give the imperialists and feudalists a free hand to oppose our people's aspirations and to keep the southerners in slavery. Our people are determined to struggle with their traditional heroism by all necessary forms and measures so as to achieve the goal of the revolution."
On 10 July 1959, the Belgian Communist publication Red Flag published an article under Ho Chi Minh's by-line which reported that:
On 8 July 1959, the United States armed forces sustained the first combat deaths in the war: two U.S. servicemen were killed by a terrorist bomb inside a U.S. compound at Bien Hoa. Other Viet Cong terrorist activities mounted to new levels of intensity. In the fall of 1959, as recounted above, communist guerrillas began to attack openly units of the Army of Vietnam, and to occupy province and district capitals for short periods. 1931 On 12 September 1959, Premier Pham Van Dong told the French Consul in Hanoi, that:"We are building socialism in Viet-Nam, but we are building it in only one part of the country, while in the other part we still have to direct and bring to a close middle-class democratic and anti-imperialist revolution." 192/
"You must remember, we will be in Saigon tomorrow, we will be in Saigon tomorrow." 194/
In November, 1959, Pham Van Dong twice told Canadian ICC Commissioner Ericksen-Brown that "we will drive the Americans in the sea" -- statements deemed significant enough by the Lao Dong hierarchy to elicit a visit from General Giap to "reassure" Ericksen-Brmm of th~ DRV's peaceful intent. 195/
But the U.S. and Diem were both inured to threatening communist invective; what should have been more ominous was the DRV's willingness to act, first evident in Laos.
b. DRV Intervention in Laos
During the First Indochina War, 1945-1954, a nominally independent national movement developed in Laos, the paramilitary Pathet Lao, and its political arm, the Lao Fatherland Front (Neo Lao Hak Xat). 196/ It was quite clear, hmTever, that the Viet Minh -- and the Lao Dong Party -- dominated the Resistance in laosj in fact, the Viet Minh negotiated the Geneva settlement on behalf of its Laotian allies. After the Accords were signed, some Laotians were regrouped to North Vietnam itself, and like the South Vietnamese, were formed into NVA units. In 1954-1955, the DRV openly assisted the Pathet Lao in consolidating political and military strength in Phong Saly and Sam Neua, two provinces on Laos' northeast border with North Vietnam, designated as regroupment zones by the Geneva Agreements. 197/ U.S . intelligence obtained evidence that DRV cadres remained in these provinces following regroupment, some as advisors, but some occupying key political and administrative positions in the Pathet Lao and Neo Lao Hak Xat. Captured documents indicate that a North Vietnamese headquarters for this effort was set up in laos, with the following missions assigned from Hanoi:
(1) implementation of the truce and the political struggle;
(2) establishment and training of the Laotian (Communist ) Party; (3) assistance in fiscal matters; and
(4) improvement of Pathet Lao military forces.
A captured report to Hanoi, probably from this headquarters, indicated that by 1956 the Laotian Communist Party had expanded from less than 100 to more than 2,000 members, and that a light infantry, guerrilla force of more than fifteen battalions had been created. Apparently, Hanoi had planned to withdraw the Vietnamese cadre in late 1956, and there is evidence that some withdrawals took place by early 1957; there is also evidence that most DRV cadre remained. However, in 1957, with the aid of the ICC, a political settlement was reached. Two battalions of Pathet Lao surrendered to the Royal Laotian Government (RLG), to be incorporated into its army, and the Pathet Lao agreed to demobilize 5,000 other troops. Two officials of the Lao Fatherland Front were admitted to the Royal Laotian Government, and the movement ostensibly integrated into the national community.
During 1958 and early 1959, the Royal Laotian Government became increasingly pro-Western, and DRV activities in Laos were evidently attenuated. However, in May, 1959, when the Royal Laotian Army (RLA) attempted to disestablish its two Pathet Lao battalions, one escaped and marched for the DRV. DRV reaction was quick. Immediately thereafter U. S. intelligence was reliably informed that a military headquarters similar to the Viet Minh's Dien Bien Phu command post had been set up near the Laos border to control operations in Laos by the NVA 335th Division, which had been formed from the "Lao Volunteers" regrouped to the DRV in 1955. 198/ From mid-1959 onwards, the U.S. acquired convincing evidence of an increaslng DRV military involvement in Laos, and beginning in late 1960, of USSR entry into the conflict with substantial military aid for the Pathet Lao. The Pathet Lao aided by a severe weakening of the RLG from a neutralist coup by Kong Le in 1961, and a counter coup by right-wing forces in 1962, mount ed an offensive against the RLG to expand Pathet Lao controlled territory, which continued through a "cease-fire" of May, 1961.
It was not, however, until December, 1960, that the DRV announced to foreign diplomats resident in Hanoi its decision to intervene in Laos; during 1961 the DRV presence in Laos was transformed from a semi-covert MAAG-like undertaking to an operational theater. Beginning in December, 1960, and throughout 1961 and early 1962, Soviet aircraft flew 2,000 to 3,000 sorties from the DRV to Laos, delivering more than 3,000 tons of supplies to commun ist forces, which expanded their territory to hold the northern h a lf of the country. Ethnic North Vietnamese appeared in Pathet Lao formations, and Kong Le himself admitted that NVA officers and soldiers were serving as "technicians" with his paratroops. North Vietnamese from NVA formations were captured by RIG forces and captured documents substantiated the presence of entire NVA units. In De c ember, 1961, a convoy of Soviet-made tanks was sighted entering Laos from the DRV, and shortly thereafter DRV officials formally presented 45 tanks to Kong Le. U.S. aerial photography identified also Soviet-made artillery and radar in use by the Pathet Lao. Truck convoys of 20 to 300 vehicles were observed entering laos carrying munitions, rice, motor fuel, and NVA troops. Altogether, the combined communist forces demonstrated significant military superiority over the RIG forces. Rightist forces (under Phoumi Nosavan), U.S . military aid notwithstanding, were markedly unsuccessful in stemming the communist drive. In May, 1961, a truce was struck, and the conflict was carried into international conference; at Geneva on 23 July 1962, a new political settlement was reached. As of that period, U.S. intelligence reported 12 NVA battalions in laos, some 6,000 strong. In addition, 3,000 NVA personnel were serving with PL units. 199/
The Geneva Agreement on Laos of 1962 consisted of joint declaration by the several nations concerned with Indochina -- including the U.S., the DRV, and the GVN -- agreeing that-Laos would be neutralized:
"All foreign regular and irregular troops, foreign para- military formations and foreign military personnel shall be withdrawn from Laos … the introduction of foreign regular and irregular troops, foreign para-military formations and foreign military personnel into Laos of armaments, munitions, and war materiel generally, except such quantities as the Royal Government of laos may consider necessary for the national defense of Laos, is prohibited …"
In concert with the Pathet Lao, the DRV circumvented these agreements. Although measures were taken to conceal DRV presence and ostensibly to withdraw DRV forces -- 40 North Vietname se were removed under ICC observation -- U .S . intelligence obtained good evidence, including a number of eye witness statements, that the bulk of the NVA forces remained in Lao; U.S. estimates placed NVA strength in Laos in early 1963 at 4,OOO troops in 8 battalions, plus 2,000 Pathet Lao advisors. 200/
In any event, by late 1960 the DRV could look upon its Laotian enterprise as successful in substantially expanding its sphere of influence in Laos, to include control over the territory adjacent to South Vietnam over which pass ed its "Ho Chi Minh Trail" of infiltration (see map). Eventually the enterprise brought about withdrawal of the U.S . military pres ence from Laos, per the Geneva Agreement of 1902. If the Vientiene government, braced with broad U.S. aid, surprised the DRV with its resiliency, it at least proved unable to challenge the Pathet Lao -- and DRV -- gains. Whatever the DRV longer term goal in Laos, reunification of Vietnam seemed there-after to take priority over further extension in Laos. In any event, the
DRV succeeded in securing its Laotian frontier from U.S. or Laotian 
access to South Vietnam via the Laotian panhandle.
It is not clear whether the DRV found it necessary to pressure or subvert the Cambodian government in order to bring it into line with its general strategy, but align the Cambodians did. As in Laos, the Viet Minh had fronted for Khmer Resistance at the Geneva Conference of 1954, and there is evidence that in the years following it supported subversive organizations in Cambodia. In 1958, a crisis between South Vietnam and Cambodia erupted over boundary disputes and border violations. Cambodia formally laid claim to all of Cochinchina in a declaration to the United Nations, while South Vietnam laid claim to off-shore islands and other nominally Cambodian territory.
Beginning in 1958, Cambodia declared for "neutralism," and thereafter its relations with the DRV were marked with increasing cordiality and cooperativeness. Evidence collected since-1963 indicates that the Viet Cong built bases adjacent to the Cambodian border, used sanctuary areas across it, operated trans-frontier supply routes, and had sources of supply within Cambodia . . Insofar as the minimal evident objectives of DRV policy were concerned -- use of Cambodian territory to further the campaign to reunify Vietnam -- Cambodia proved to be incapable of interfering even when, apparently, it wished to police its territory. 201/
c. Explication of the Strategy, 1960
During 1958 and 1959 work had progressed on a revision of the DRV Constitution. On 1 January 1960, with much fanfare, the new basic law was promulgated. The Preamble recounted the modern history of Vietnam, in part as follows:
"Vietnam is a single entity from Lang-Son to Camau.
"The Vietnamese people, throughout the thousands of years of history, have been an industrious working people who have struggled unremittingly and heroically to build their country and defend the independence of their Fatherland . . . With the Dien Bien Phu victory, the Vietnamese people defeated the French imperialists and the U.S . interventionists ..
"This major success of the Vietnamese people was also a common success of the liberation movement of the oppressed peoples, of the world front of peace, and of the socialist camp.
"Since the restoration of peace in completely liberated North Viet-Nam, our people have carried through the National People's Democratic Revolution. But the South is still under
the rule of the imperialists and feudalists; our country is still temporarily divided into two zones …
"The Vietnamese revolution has moved into a new position. Our people must endeavor to consolidate the North, taking it toward socialism, and carry on the struggle for peaceful reunification of the country and completion of the tasks of the National People's Democratic revolution throughout the country.
"In the last few years, our peoples in the North have achieved many big successes in economic rehabilitation and cultural development. At present, socialist transformation and construction are being successfully carried out.
"Meanwhile, in the South, the U. S. imperialists and their henchmen have been savagely repressing the patriotic movement of our people. They have been strengthening military forces and carrying out their scheme of turning the southern part of our country into a colony and military base for their war preparations … But our southern compatriots have constantly struggled heroically and refused to submit to them. The people throughout the country, united as one, are holding aloft the banners of peace, national unity, independence, and democracy, resolved to march forward and win final victory. The cause of the peaceful reunification of the Fatherland will certainly be victorious." 202/
Strangely, even so formal a statement of aims escaped attention in the West, even though the deteriorating situation in Southea st Asia had now become sufficiently grave to cause concern throughout the world. Within the U.S. Government, extensive reappraisals of U.S. policy were launched. Aid to Laos was stepped-up, and the U.S. country team in Vietnam was directed to prepare a counter-insurgency plan for bringing U. S. aid more efficiently to bear the GVN's internal defense. The inflamed situation in Laos and South Vietnam were among the major international irritants toward which hopes for the Summit Conference in Paris in May, 1960, were directed. The breakdown of the Paris talks, and the subsequent hardening of relations between the United States and the USSR, formed the backdrop against which the Soviets moved into deeper commitment to support of the DRV, and the DRV into more open support of the insurgents in South Vietnam.
In early September, 1960, the Lao Dong Party held its Third Congress, and passed the following resolution:
"In the present stage, the Vietnamese revolution has two strategic tasks: firs~, to carry out the socialist revolution in North Viet-Nam ; second, to liberate South Vietnam from the ruling yolk of the U.S . imperialists and
their henchmen in order to achieve national unity and complete independence and freedom throughout the country. These two strategic tasks are closely related to each other and spur each other forward…
"The two revolutionary tasks of the North and South belong to two different strategies, each task being aimed at satisfying the definite requirement of each zone under the specific conditions of our divided country. But these two tasks have one common aim -- to achieve peaceful national reunification and resolve one common contradiction of our whole country -- the contradiction between our people and the imperialists and their henchmen.
"The common task of the Vietnamese revolution at present is: to strengthen the unity of all the people; to struggle resolutely to maintain peace, to accelerate the socialist revolution in North Viet-Nam while at the same time stepping up the National People's Democratic Revolution in South Viet-Nam;…
"The revolution in the South is a protracted, hard, and complex process of struggle, combining many forms of struggle of great activity and flexibility, ranging from lower to higher, and taking as its basis the building, consolidation and development of the revolutionary power of the masses. During this process we must pay special attention to the work of organizing and educating the people, first and foremost the workers, peasants and intellectuals, promoting to the highest degree the revolutionary fighting spirit of the various strata of our patriotic countrymen. We must unceasingly expose the criminal schemes and acts of the U. S. imperialists and their henchmen, doing our utmost to divide and isolate them.
"To insure the complete success of the revolutionary struggle in South Viet-Nam our people there must strive to establish a united bloc of workers, peasants, and soldiers and to bring into being a broad national united front directed against the U.S.-Diem clique and based on the worker-peasant alliance. This front must rally all the patriotic parties and religious groupings, together with all individuals inclined to oppose the U.S.-Diem clique. The aims of its struggle are peace, national independence, democratic freedoms, improvement of the people's living conditions, and peaceful national reunification.
"The front must carry out its work in a very flexible manner in order to rally all forces that can be rallied, win over all forces that can be won over, neutralize all forces that should be neutralized, and drawn the broad masses into the general struggle against the US-Diem clique for the liberation of the South and the peaceful reunification of the fatherland.
"The revolutionary movement in the South plays a very important role in relation to the reunification of the country. Simultaneously with the effort to build the North and advance toward socialism our people must strive to maintain and develop the revolutionary forces in the South and create f'avorable conditions for peaceful national reunif'ication .... " 203/
Ho Chi Minh, in his speech at the Congress, attributed the "victory of the Vietnamese revolution" in part to the "whole-hearted assistance of the fraternal socialist countries, especially the Soviet Union and China." He identified the DRV with the world "forces of peace" and stated that "the Democratic Republic of' Vietnam is a member of the big socialist family headed by the great Soviet Union." 404/ Giap's speech at the Congress clted the example of' the August, 195, general uprisings, noting that victory came because "our party kept a firm hold on the national democratic revolutionary line," and paid appropriate attention to preparing the people for their tasks. Le Duan's address stressed that:
"The southern people's revolutionary struggle will be long, drawn out, and arduous. It is not a simple process but a complicated one, combining many varied forms of struggle -- from elementary to advanced, legal and illegal -- and based on the building, consolidation and development of the revolutionary force of the masses. In this process, we must constantly intensify our solidarity and the organization and education of' the people of the South ... and must uphold the revolutionary fighting spirit of all strata of patriotic compatriots." 205/
Le Duan also called for a "worker-peasant-army coalition bloc," and a "broad national united front against the US-Diem clique." {{quote|In a policy-cycle similar to that of 1957 -- strategy
announced around September, followed by international exposure and confirmation at Moscow in November -- the DRV obtained at the "Conference of' Representatives of Communist and Workers' Parti.es" held in Moscow in November, 1960, fairly explicit endorsement of its line of action in South Vietnam. As in 1957, the Moscow Declaration distinguished between war in general and anti-colonial wars, noting that "national-liberation revolutions have triumphed in vast areas of the world" and emphasized that: It is interesting, in the light of the foregoing, to read the Communist Party history, written in South Vietnam around 1963 and captured on Operation CRIMP in 1966 (see Tab 2, p. 51 ff.) . While such a history must be regarded with caution--Soviet historians have not hesitated to establish that the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar --the CRIMP history, consistent with other captured documents and prisoner interrogations, dates the insurgency in South Vietnam from the Lao Dong Party conclave of May, 1959: "The complete collapse of colonialism is inevitable. The downfall of the system of colonial slavery under the impact of the national-liberation movement is a phenomenon ranking second in historical importance after the formation of the world system of socialism."
"The United States of America is the chief bulwark of present- day colonialism .... "
" .... the working class of many capitalist countries, by overcoming the split in its ranks and achieving unity of action of all its detachments, could deliver a heavy blow to the policy of the ruling circles of the capitalist countries and force them to step up preparations for a new war, repel the offensive of monopoly capital , and ensure satisfaction of its vital everyday and democratic demands."
" .... The Communist Parties, guided by Marxist-Lenini st teaching, have always been against the export of revolution. At the same time, they resolutely struggle against imperialist export of counter-revolution. They consider it their international duty to call on the peoples of all countries to unite, to mobilize all their internal forces, to act vigorously and, relying on the might of the world socialist system, to prevent or decisively rebuff the interference of the imperialists in the affairs of the people of any country who have risen in revolution."
"The Communist Parties reaffirm the propositions of the 1957 Declaration concerning the question of the forms of transition of various countries from capitalism to socialism."
"In conditions when the exploiting classes resort to the use of force against the people, it is necessary to bear in mind another possibility--that of nonpeaceful transition to socialism. Leninism teaches, and historical experience confirms, that the ruling classes do not relinquish power voluntarily. In these conditions the degree of bitterness and the forms of the class struggle will depend not so much on the proletariat as on the extent of the resistance of the reactionary circles to the will of the overwhelming majority of the people, on the use of force by these circles at one or another stage of the struggle for socialism. " 206/
" … Particularly after 20 July 1956, the key cadres and Barty members in South Vietnam asked questions which demanded answers: 'Can we still continue the struggle to demand the implementation of Geneva Agreement given the existing regime in South Vietnam? If not, then what must be done?' A mood of skepticism and non-confidence in the orientation of the struggle began to seep into the party apparatus and among some of the masses.
"At the end of 1956 the popularization of the volume by Comrade Duan [Le Duai] entitled ’The South Vietnam Revolutionary Bath'[2] was of great significance because the ideological crisis was now solved … After analyzing the character of the South Vietnam society, the character of the American-Diemist enemy etc., the volume outlined a new strategic orientation for the South Vietnam revolution, a strategic mission in which everyone could have some confidence: It is necessary to continue the national democratic revolution in South Vietnam and it is necessary to use force to overthrow the feudalist imperialist regime in order to establish a revolutionary democratic coalition and create the conditions for the peaceful reunification of the Fatherland.
"After the Resolution of the Fifteenth Conference of the Central Committee was issued all of South Vietnam possessed a clear and correct strategic policy and orientation. The Resolution of the Fifteenth Conference of the Central Committee[3] clearly delineated the general responsibility of the Vietnam revolution, analyzed the special characteristics of the South Vietnam situation, clearly spelled out the revolutionary tasks in South Vietnam and at the same time outlined the path which the South Vietnam revolution should take.
"Thanks to this correct and clear delineation of the strategic orientation and path, the South Vietnam people and party clearly understood the aims and enlightened path to follow .... The volume 'South Vietnam Revolutionary Path' and the Resolution of the Fifteenth Conference of the Central Committee provided the cadres and Barty members with a pair of wings with which to fly and lamps to shine upon the path ahead, a feeling of encouragement and confidence, a determined will because the goals were clear and the path bright ....
"Since the end of 1958, particularly after the Phu Loi Massacre, the situation truly ripened for an armed movement against the enemy. But the leadership of the Nam-Bo Regional Committee at that time still hesitated for many reasons, but the principal reason was the fear of violating the party line. The directive of the politburo in May 1959 stated that the time had come to push the arms struggle against the enemy. Thanks to this we closely followed the actual
situation in order to formulate a program which we felt would be essential, and in October 1959, the armed struggle was launched.
"Was the armed struggle slow in coming? We realize that it was not possible to launch the arms struggle too soon, before the situation had ripened. At any rate, a short period of time was lost because although many areas were engaged in armed propaganda [terror-backed persecution] up to this time, it was limited to armed propaganda and insufficient strength existed to maintain continued opposition to the enemy. Although slow in coming, it was not too slow because there was still time to transform the situation into one where the proper conditions existed. However, if the change had been even slower, even more difficulties would have been encountered and the change in the movement would not have been as easy."
"The Resolution of the 15th Conference of the Central Committee officially and concisely specified the responsibilities and strategic aims of the South Vietnam revolution.
"But problems still existed: how were these responsibilities, aims, and progress of the South Vietnam revolution to be implemented? What must the main forms and procedures of the struggle be? Although the Resolution outlined some of these factors, at the time of the Conference, the details of the South Vietnam movement as well as revolutionary experiences of friendly nations were not sufficient enough for the Conference to formulate a precise program. Only 2 years later, were there sufficient factors available, based partly on the experiences of Laos but mainly on the experiences of the South Vietnam revolutionary movement, the Central Committee was able to formulate a clear and concise program concerning these problems .... "
The latter reference is to a January, 1961, Resolution of the Central Committee of the Lao Dong Party, which directed concentration on peasant problems, stressed political action--"The political aspect is truly the basic one," said the CRIMP history--and warned against "revisionism." The Lao Dong newspaper carried an editorial, broadcast by Radio Hanoi on 13 January 1961 which described the 1961 Resolution as a document which:
"Reaffirms and sheds more light on the thesis of the Declaration of 1957 concerning the forms of transition from capitalism to socialism in different countries and clearly points to the lines and methods of struggle of the communist parties of capitalist countries ....
"As for the colonial countries, the statement points out that the struggle for national independence should be waged through armed struggles or by non-military methods , according to the specific conditions in the country concerned. The working class, which plays a major role in the national liberation struggle, is determined to
carry through the tasks of the national and democratic revolution against all schemes of reaction to hinder progress of society … "
"The Declaration of the Conference of Representatives of Communists and Workers' Parties in Moscow in.1957, and the new statement are a profound summary of the experiences of revolutionary struggle and of building a new life of our time. They represent a development of Marxism-Leninsim for the new conditions of history." 207/
But none of the communist statements--neither the Moscow Declaration of 1957, nor that of 1960; neither the Lao Dong Resolution of September, 1960, nor that of January, 1961--attracted much attention in the West. Neither did the Manifesto of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, proclaimed,in December, 1960, seemingly in response to the Lao Dong Third Congress Resolution. But N. S. Khruschev made news with his 6 January 1961 "wars of national liberation" speech … Khruschev's remarks were actually little more than a precis of the Moscow Declarations of 1957 and 1960; nonetheless, they shocked the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in his "A Thousand Days," declared that Khruschev's "elaborate speech ...made a conspicuous impression on the new President, who took it as an authoritative exposition of Soviet intentions, discussed it with his staff, and read excerpts from it aloud to the National Security Council ....Underneath the canonical beat of language, the oration sounding a brutal joy over a world where democracy was everywhere on the retreat and communism everywhere on the march." 208/ The President and his principal cabinet officers returned to this speech again and again in their explanations of Administration policy. 209/
Khruschev offered an analysis of the world situation as it appeared at the beginning of the 1960's and declared that, as of that moment, "the prevention of a new war is the Question of all Questions." He described three categories of wars: "world wars, local wars, and liberation wars or popular uprisings." World wars, he declared, were unlikely. Local wars were also improbable. But, he said, "liberation wars and popular uprisings will continue to exist as long as imperialism exists… such wars are not only admissible but inevitable ... an example … is the armed struggle of the Vietnamese people .... " He asserted uneQuivocally that "the communists support just wars of this kind whole-heartedly and without reservation and they march in the van of the peoples fighting for repression." But Khruschev's speech notwithstanding, by 1961 the strategic course of the DRV was well set, and the new President was already at war in South Vietnam with the DRV.