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SOME VIETNAM WAR ISSUES
REVISITED:
THE ROLE PLAYED BY ARVN
Nguyen Ngoc Bich
The Vietnam Center
at Texas Tech University organized its 2006 annual conference on the theme of
“ARVN: Reflections and Reassessments after Thirty Years” at the Holiday Park
Plaza in Lubbock, TX, last March 17 and 18. The conference, the first of its
kind, focuses on the role and performance of the armed forces of the Republic of
Vietnam, a long-overdue assessment. The following paper was given by Prof.
Nguyen Ngoc Bich as the Luncheon keynote on the first day of the Conference.
The Vietnam War is
almost 31 years behind us now. Claims have been made that we have put that
conflict to rest, that we have “beaten” the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” and the
two peoples, Vietnamese and Americans, have made heroic efforts to put that war
behind us. How true is that? And have we really succeeded?
It seems that to this
day, we are still struggling with words to describe that conflict—the longest
conflict in the history of the United States. The Vietnam War lasted longer
than the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, World War II and the
Korean War combined, so how could we forget it so easily? The wounds are too
deep and in the last two presidential elections the Vietnam-era experience still
formed the basis on which the electorate judged the character of such candidates
as Bill Clinton or, even more recently, President George W. Bush and his rival,
John Kerry.
Words can play tricks
sometimes
The war in Vietnam
sometimes is a word trap. Much too often it is described as a war between the
United States and Vietnam, as if there were cleanly only two sides, the
Americans on the one hand and the Vietnamese on the other. Such a reduction
clearly will not do since by virtue of this conference alone, we are recognizing
that there were at least two Vietnamese sides to the war, usually known in
Vietnamese as “Quốc-Cộng,” Nationalists vs. Communists—a basic definition that
was accepted by both sides in the Vietnamese conflict and only got blurred in
recent years by the co-optation by Hanoi of the term “Quốc gia” in some of their
institutions. This is a mistake that is made not only by the common people, it
is all too often made even by intellectuals and academics, and most recently, it
was even made by President Bush and Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, when both of them
answered in interviews that the South Vietnamese did not do enough to fight for
themselves. This, I think, is the very raison d’être of the present
conference. Was South Vietnam a legitimate government and state, and did ARVN
fight?
Years ago, at the
height of the conflict, I had a quarrel with my good old friend, Douglas Pike,
whose passing away a few years back we all mourned, about a rather simple word,
Viet Cong. Taken etymologically, “Viet” is short for “Vietnam” or “Vietnamese”
and “Cong,” of course, means “Communist(s).”
Used by Vietnamese,
North and South, it is simply just that. “Viet Cong” were and still are
“Vietnamese Communists,” meaning that no Vietnamese, for practical purposes or
in fighting, made a distinction between a NVA (North Vietnamese Army) unit and a
Viet Cong unit. In battle they both shoot at you, and you’d better shoot back
and not waste too much of your time making a difference between a NVA regular,
who usually was in uniform, and a VC who might not be in uniform but who still
handled an AK47 and shot just as skillfully as his NVA counterpart. Does anyone
think that the other side, NVA or VC, would try to make a difference between
shooting down an American and an ARVN soldier?
Yet for the longest
time, in discussing the Vietnam War, the Americans have tried to make that
difference, and Doug was the leading authority on that basic distinction with
his famous book, Viet Cong (MIT, 1966). In doing so, Doug and his followers—and
there are many, even sitting today in this room, I am afraid—bought one of the
basic contentions of the enemy, that the war, at least in South Vietnam, was
originally an internal rebellion fueled by apparently legitimate and purely
southern grievances against the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem. In so
doing, the war, say between 1959 and 1975, was artificially delinked from what
went on before and what went on after those two dates.
“Vietnam War” or “Indochina
War”
In the U.S., the
Vietnam War is seen as lasting eight years from 1965 to 1973. But, of course,
it is well known that American involvement dates from well before and lasts well
after these two dates. Now we know, for instance, that the war in Vietnam went
from 1945 to at least September 1989 as part of a larger conflict that
physically was fought in no less than three countries: Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia. And if we consider Vietnam to be two countries (North and South), a
de facto and even de jure situation in international life from 1954 to 1975,
then the conflict was carried out in four countries—something fully reflected in
the way Hanoi divided the theaters involved, all under the same command:
North Vietnam was
Theater A
South Vietnam was
Theater B
Laos was Theater C
And Cambodia was
Theater D.
The French also were
more realistic than the Americans when they rarely call the war in Vietnam “la
guerre du Vietnam.” Instead, they call it, for purposes of periodization:
“La première guerre
d’Indochine,” the First Indochina War, 1946-54;
“La deuxième guerre
d’Indochine,” the Second Indochina War, equivalent to the period of main
American participation, 1954-75; and
“La troisième guerre
d’Indochine,” the Third Indochina War, which included two phases, the Border War
with China (February-March 1979), and the Occupation of Cambodia (December
1978-September 1989).
Conscious as they
were of not enlarging the conflict, for fear of involvement by China and, to a
lesser extent, by the Soviet Union, the various American administrations, with
the exception of Eisenhower, who in his memoirs, Mandate for Change, still used
the term “Indochina” instead of Vietnam, to the end insisted on calling it the
“Vietnam War.” By so doing, they yielded to a certain reality on the ground but
blurred many other essential distinctions: if Hanoi was free to roam and fight
outside of North Vietnam’s borders, in Theaters B, C and D, the United States
and its ally, South Vietnam, were easily seen as transgressing the borders of
Vietnam when they brought the war to the enemy in Laos (as in Operation Lam Son
719) or to Cambodia (as from 1970 to 1973).
And yet nobody, to my
knowledge, insists on calling the war in Vietnam the “South Vietnam War.” Why?
Because instinctively, one could say that it feels right to be able to retaliate
against Hanoi for some of its actions in the South—such as the bombing over
North Vietnam to interdict troop movements into the South. Thus it was almost
artificial that the U.S. in 1964 had need of a Maddox incident to justify its
bringing the war to North Vietnam through the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
“Aggression from the North”
(1961, 1965)
This is crucial in
terms of legitimacy of one’s cause, the cause of South Vietnam and the United
States, if there had been, as claimed by the 1961 U.S. State Department White
Paper, “aggression from the North.” A follow-up White Paper claims the same,
with much more documentation, in 1965. It should be noted that one of the major
anti-war voices in the mid-1960s, I.F. Stone in Ramparts, spared no time or ink
to debunk the idea that there was “aggression from the North.” This obviously
meant that even in I.F. Stone’s mind, as well as in the mind of many other
anti-war leaders, should this claim be substantiated, then the U.S. and Saigon
had a legitimate basis for fighting that “aggression”—it was no mere local
rebellion based on local grievances against the government in the South.
Now we know. When
asked about the sham nature of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam
(the famous “NLF” of anti-war chants), its leaders being no more than
figureheads, Nguyen Khac Vien, probably the best known intellectual figure of
North Vietnam in the West, laughed out loud in 1977 on French television: “Hey,
weren’t we good at the deception?”
But we have more than
Vien’s rhetorical question to prove the “aggression from the North.” In a draft
official history of the war “against the U.S. for national salvation,”(1)
completed in 1986—the copy I have seen has the notation “General Vo Nguyen
Giap’s copy” on it—the record was set straight when it is written therein (on
page 28): “In accordance with the line taken by the [Third Party] Congress, on
20 December 1960, the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam was
created.”
More concretely even and of more
relevance to our topic, the following figures came from another document taken
from the Ministry of Defense in Hanoi, which still bears the remark “Lưu Trữ”
meaning, “To Keep in the Files”:
NUMBER OF TROOPS SENT FROM THE
NORTH
TO BEEF UP TROOPS IN THE SOUTH
(Fresh Troops*)
Figures taken from K4 documents
kept at central headquarters,
Ministry of National Defense
Year |
Troops sent South
From the North |
[Remarks] |
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975 |
542
1,217
1,759**
5,521
7,293
8,719
17,475
39,008**
46,796
54,794
94,243
141,081
336,914**
81,092
52,090
49,321
152,974
335,477**
75,600
70,798
117,293
263,691** |
Figures are missing for
the 1965-1975 period for Theaters B3 and B4 (several tens of thousands
of troops).
Furthermore, there were
also units transferred to B Theater with full equipment and fully
deployed. These units are not counted here [possibly because they were
based in the North and only temporarily deployed to the South.-
Translator’s note], one must check with the Organization and
Mobilization Department.
|
|
976,849 |
|
* The Vietnamese term used here,
“Tân Binh,” is ambiguous since it could mean both New Recruits” and “Fresh
Troops.” I have chosen to translate by the latter term since these are fresh
troops introduced into the South, who went in their full formations (battalions
or larger units), and not just new draftees. Two further remarks are called for
here: One is that these “fresh troops” went south for the duration of the war,
hence the very common motto “Sinh Bắc, tử Nam” (“Born in the North [to] die in
the South”), an open secret sometimes even tattooed on one’s arm or chest.
Secondly, the writer Vũ Thư Hiên told me that it was not at all uncommon at the
time to sometimes have two units with the same name, say the 302nd Division, one
fighting in the South and one held in reserve in the North in case it had to go
south and replace the other. This, of course, could discomfit those in charge
of following the battle formations of the enemy.
** In the original chart, these
numbers are found in the same column as copied here. However, if added to the
numbers found right above them for the same year, they would amount to half a
million each for 1968 (Tet Offensive) and 1972 (Easter Offensive), figures that
would seem to be rather excessive. That is why an alternate reading has been
suggested which apparently is the case here: these double-asterisked figures are
simply subtotals for the periods preceding them.
As can be seen from
the table, whose figures are admittedly incomplete, there were already 79,775
NVA troops committed to the South between 1959 and 1964, before U.S. combat
troops were engaged in large numbers. These numbers alone, added of course to
the tens of thousands of NLF troops recruited and trained in the South, help to
refute the contention that the ARVN did not fight before U.S. combat troops were
committed to the battles in South Vietnam (March 1965).
“Their Lions, Our Rabbits”?
In fact, even with
such a large deployment of troops to the southern battlefield, the equivalent of
nearly nine NVA divisions, the communist troops did not feel confident enough to
engage in large unit battles. The first battalion-size battle did not take
place until Ap Bac (January 1963) but the communist side took care to build up
its forces in the South before engaging the Americans. This was because Giap
was extremely wary of the capabilities of U.S. intervention(2) while, upon the
overthrow of President Diem, Hanoi under the increasing influence of Le Duan
foolhardily decided to bring about a “decisive transformation in the balance of
power” between the two sides (December 1963).
By the time the NVA
decided to engage the Americans in large numbers (in the battles of Van
Tuong-Starlite, August 1965, and Ia Drang, November 1965(3)), their troop
strength in South Vietnam already stood at well over 120,000, not counting their
southern auxiliaries. (Bui Tin, therefore, gives us a slight underestimate when
he claims that even by 1966, “the number of NVA soldiers we had infiltrated into
South Vietnam did not quite reach 120,000.”(4) By 1966, in actuality, the NVA
number in the South had already reached over 182,000 troops not counting those
“fully equipped units” temporarily assigned to Theaters B3 and B4.)
With the highlights
of the war action shifting to the Americans and the RVN troops more and more
relegated to defensive positions (during General Westmoreland’s watch), no
wonder that the American media, which had never had a very keen interest in
covering the war from the point of view of the ARVN anyway, started badmouthing
the main ally in the war, further delegitimizing the allied side. The worst
stab in the back of the ARVN came in October 1967 when Newsweek flashed on its
cover the lead article, “Their Lions, Our Rabbits,”(5) which said it all.
This disregard, not
to say contempt, of the main ally in the war was reflected even in the equipment
that was transferred to the ARVN. If by January 1968 for the Tet Offensive the
communist troops, both NVA and NLF units, had all been equipped with AK47s only
the elite units of the ARVN (Marine and Paratrooper divisions, plus some Ranger
units) were similarly equipped with M16s (the equivalent of the AK47 but said by
some to be not as reliable), the rest of ARVN being issued nothing more than
World War II vintage Garant M1s.
Yet under equipped as
they were, the ARVN gave a superb account of themselves in that major
nation-wide battle of the war.(6) Twenty-five out of a total of 44
provinces,(7) including the three major cities of Saigon, Da Nang and Hue, were
attacked in a surprise general offensive that covered the entire territory of
South Vietnam, at a time of cease-fire traditional throughout the war, which
means that most of the ARVN-held posts were undermanned. Nonetheless, in spite
of the initial surprise which normally should favor the enemy, the ARVN repulsed
the attacks throughout the land and within 48 hours, with the exception of Hue
(part of which was held by the NVA for 25 days), dealt a crushing blow to the
enemy. Hanoi tried to follow up what was described as “an occasion that
happened only once in a thousand years” (“nghìn năm một thuở”) with two more
waves, one in May and one in August-September of that year, but that was seen as
militarily desperate moves—something admitted even by observers on the communist
side. The result was that Hanoi, in that one campaign, suffered 58,373
fatalities(8)—in absolute terms comparable to the total amount of American
losses throughout the entire war—and 9461 taken prisoner.
Misreadings
That the Tet
Offensive was a miserable military failure on the part of the communists is
something that no one, even on the communist side and up to now, disputes. Bui
Tin wrote: “After the offensive, the Americans and Saigon launched an immediate
counteroffensive throughout the South accompanied by quick pacification,
resulting in some of the greatest losses for our side in all of 1968, 1969, and
1970… 1968 and 1969 were extremely difficult years for our side, and those
difficulties lasted into 1970-71; we did not recover until 1972.”(9)
Yet that miserable
failure on the part of the enemy came to be seen as a “defeat” on the Allied
side (mostly due to the American press(10)) and led to one of the most fateful
decisions of the war, the withdrawal of Lyndon B. Johnson as presidential
candidate for a second term in November 1968. This, of course, irreversibly
changed the course of the war as Hanoi could easily read that the Americans have
reached the limit of their commitment and were now ready to scale down and “sue”
for peace—in Paris.
Everything that
followed could only be ways to extricate the U.S. from the “Vietnam quagmire”:
No more escalation (the troop level reached its peak of 549,000 U.S. troops in
South Vietnam in 1969 then got scaled down), Nixon’s Vietnamization (launched in
the same year), Kissinger’s understandings with Moscow and Beijing (he flatly
told Zhou Enlai in 1970 that the U.S. was ready to withdraw unilaterally from
Vietnam if need be, leaving South Vietnam to its fate),(11) by the time of the
Easter Offensive (1972) the U.S. combat troops were reduced to 65,000 and no
longer allowed in battle, Nixon’s hands were further weakened by the War Powers
Act (no more bombing of Cambodia), then the U.S. troops were actually drawn down
so that by January 1973 there was no more U.S. combat personnel in the country,
the oil crisis of 1973 which in one stroke cut down in half the amount of
gasoline that Saigon could buy with U.S. money, and finally the total
abandonment of South Vietnam by the U.S. Congress following the Watergate
scandal (1974).
But even as the U.S.
was abandoning ship like that, the ARVN gave some excellent account of
themselves, fighting off near nation-wide attacks known as the Easter Offensive
of 1972. Not only did the Vietnamese Marines write some of their most glorious
pages in the military annals of Vietnam by fighting inch by inch in order to
take back the near totality of the province of Quang Tri (the retaking of the
Old Citadel in Quang Tri can be likened to Iwo Jima in World War II) and the
defense of An Loc to the north of Saigon by militiamen, ruff-puff (regional and
popular forces), ARVN regular infantry and paratroopers under intense shelling
by the enemy and wave after wave of tank attacks has been called the “Stalingrad
of Vietnam” by an American reporter, P.C. Clarke, the “battle that saved
Saigon.”(12) There were those, of course, who tried to give the credit for the
An Loc battle to just the air support given by U.S. B52s but who has ever heard
of just bombs holding territory(13) and fighting off the enemy?
Mistakes were made
Like in all wars,
mistakes were made and there was also the element of chance, which could cause
havoc but is usually unpredictable. Then there was the proverbial patience of
the Orient as found in the Vietnamese (on both sides) vs. the impatience and
decisiveness of the American character once it had made up its mind to
“cut-and-run.” Given such character, no smooth landing was possible. In the
end, the abandonment of Saigon by the U.S. (Congress and the media, then finally
President Ford) helped serve victory on a silver platter to Hanoi, a totally
undeserved victory, which is why, to this day, Vietnam is still suffering the
consequences of 1975: war until 1989 (i.e. 14 years later), the “boat people”
tragedy which led to the development of the 3-million strong Vietnamese Diaspora
around the world, and the plague of communism that still gives shudders to those
who thought back to the years of privation and misery preceding Doi Moi (1986).
Yes,
mistakes—military ones, too—were made and there was probably no greater mistake
than the decision by President Nguyen Van Thieu, which was not fully thought
out, to abandon the Central Highlands after Ban Me Thuot was attacked in March
1975. Confusion aplenty also occurred in the case of Military Region I and Hue:
Ngo Quang Truong, one of the best generals in the South Vietnamese army, was
told to abandon Hue (when it was still defensible) then countermanded at the
last minute (told to hold on at all cost) when everything had become hopeless.
Yet, at the level of the foot soldier, the ARVN still fought valiantly in some
cases: the paratroopers around Don Duong, the infantry around Sa Huynh, and
especially the admirable defense of Xuan Loc by the 18th Division (under General
Le Minh Dao) against three NVA divisions, almost right at the gate of Saigon.
So if there was a
need to blame—I for one do not believe that such an exercise is very
useful—there was plenty to blame on others than the ARVN, even though like any
other army it had its weak units and its strong divisions, its fine leaders and
its poor generals. Even the casualties it took is an expression of those
troops’ dedication and their courage: the casualty figures given by Bui Tin for
the 1961-75 period were 230,466 NVA dead after they were introduced from the
North and southern Communist fatalities as 51,532, plus 300,000 MIAs, for a
rough total of 600,000; the so-called “rabbits” and their American allies
eliminated those 600,000 “lions” with a loss of 230,000 ARVN fatalities and
58,000 U.S. personnel, or roughly at a ratio of one for two.(14) And this
irregardless of whether the individual battles involved were victories or
defeats depending on one’s definition.
Need for a fresher reading of
the war
In fact, the debate
about the lessons of Vietnam is far from over. For one thing, the war blew away
all sorts of myths about the “guerrilla war” that it was supposed to be: for
instance, there was Sir Robert Thompson’s formula learned from the Malayan
emergency that one needed a ratio 10 to 1(15) in order to fight effectively a
guerrilla war. Since this ratio was never obtained in Vietnam, does that mean
that it was doomed from the start? I think that the above casualty figures and
the up-and-downs of the conflict show that there was not much reality to that
ratio.
Then there was the
question of how limited the Vietnam conflict was supposed to be. True, we did
not have to go to nuclear weapons (as it was discussed earlier in 1954 in
reference to Dien Bien Phu) and even the enemy never had air power to use in the
South until almost the very end, but was Vietnam just a local conflict or a
regional one? We have touched upon this earlier but it could be said that not
only a regional perspective(16) makes more sense, and that in some way to see it
as a world contest between the two Cold War blocs was even a better way of
reading that conflict.
On this question, we
have no better testimony than the one given by Bui Tin: “At first I thought the
war was a simple struggle for national independence… It [turns out that it] is
not easy to assert that the war was right or wrong; a good or bad cause; a
nationalist struggle or an imperialist aggression; a facet of the cold war or
the hot war; an ideological war or simply a territorial grab; a national,
religious, or class struggle; a sacred war or a blitzkrieg; a mistake or a
crime.
“When I was… young…,
I took it for granted that ours was a sacred and righteous cause, that… it was a
national salvation effort… At a later stage, when I had been further educated
and indoctrinated by the Communist Party to become a faithful Communist, I saw
the struggle as a war waged to protect the whole socialist camp… against
U.S.-led ‘imperialist aggression.’ … We became inebriated with those ideals and
threw ourselves into the struggle. Here I am, each of us thought, holding my
gun and standing on the very forefront of the socialist camp, of all progressive
mankind, fulfilling both my national obligations and my international duty.”(17)
Only an international
reading of the Vietnam War(18) could explain the persistent popularity of that
conflict in some quarters, and only a Cold War interpretation can explain the
support given by both the Soviet Union, China and other members of the
international communist bloc throughout the war. Now we know that Soviet
weaponry (including tanks and MiGs) was the backbone of the NVA equipment and
that Soviet air intelligence was involved, that a variety of Chinese troops
(mostly engineering troops and anti-aircraft units, numbered at 320,000 by
Chinese sources) were involved in tours of duty stationing in North Vietnam,
that some 801 North Korean pilots were engaged in direct combat with U.S.
fighters(19) over North Vietnam’s air space, that the East German STASI trained
Hanoi’s security forces, that Kalashnikovs all came from Czechoslovakia, and
that Cuban interrogators were used in exploiting U.S. POWs. With the U.S.
troops withdrawn from Vietnam, the international cover blew up on the communist
side: Beijing effectively became a pro-temp ally of the U.S. in facing the
Soviet threat and soon, three erstwhile communist “allies” were at each other’s
throats (China, Vietnam, and Cambodia). This was no doubt a major factor that
eventually brought down the Soviet bloc.
So it became the
tragic fate of South Vietnam and its armed forces, despite their heroism(20) and
sacrifices, to fall victims of the Cold War but it could also be said that their
suffering and sacrifices were not in vain. The Vietnam War, in fact, saved the
world in the Cold War era from a higher-level hot conflict that could have
engulfed the whole world.
Notes
Viện Lịch sử quân sự Việt Nam
[Vietnam Institute of Military History], Tóm tắt Dự thảo Tổng kết cuộc kháng
chiến chống Mỹ cứu nước của dân tộc Việt Nam (“A Summary Draft on Summing Up the
Vietnamese Nation’s Anti-U.S. Resistance for National Salvation,”) Hà Nội, 1986.
Bui Tin, From Enemy to Friend: A
North Vietnamese Perspective on the War, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press,
2002, page 14. “I well remember Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap’s pronouncement to some
Quan Doi Nhan Dan (People’s Army) reporters back in 1965: ‘If the Americans
bring in only 140,000-150,000 troops, we already have quite a task on our hands
in the southern battlefield. If the number tops 200,000 or more we will have an
extremely serious situation unfavorable to our side.’ ” It was pronouncements
like this which led to the rumor, spread by rival Le Duan’s clique and
maintained even in Tran Phuong’s memoir written in 1991, that Giap was at heart
a “coward.”
The battle of Ia Drang is most
extraordinarily retold in all its gruesome and glorious details in We Were
Soldiers Once… and Young by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.) and Joseph L.
Galloway, New York: HarperTorch, 1992, which did justice to both the U.S. army
and its North Vietnamese enemy. But Ia Drang was preceded by the battle of Plei
Me, fought entirely by ARVN, which blunted the massive attempt made by the NVA
to try to cut South Vietnam into two halves, from around Pleiku down to Qui
Nhon. Plei Me, however, is unsung in American accounts of the war simply
because it was not an American action. See Tin Nguyen’s presentation, “The
Truth about the Plei Me Battle,” at the Vietnam Center Conference on the ARVN,
March 17-18, 2006.
Bui Tin, ibid., page 14.
Perry, M.D., “Their Lions, Our
Rabbits,” Newsweek, October 9, 1967.
Palmer, Dave R., Summons of the
Trumpet: U.S.-Vietnam in Perspective, San Rafael, Ca: Presidio Press, 1978.
Although Palmer faults the U.S.-South Vietnam side for intelligence failures
before the Tet attacks, a point disputed by other authors, he nonetheless
concludes: “Believing that they would be greeted as liberators and hoping to see
the dissolution of the ARVN, the communist leaders were frustrated on both
counts. The ARVN, although caught unawares and at half-strength or even less,
fought like they never fought before. Instead of bringing about the
disintegration of the Saigon forces, the general offensive had the contrary
effect of reinforcing the ARVN ranks. Fighting to defend their homes and
cities, the South Vietnamese soldiers showed a high and mighty fighting spirit
that surprised all observers, especially the NVA. The general uprising turned
out to be a total myth. The South Vietnamese population did not step forward to
greet their Spring guests. They stood up instead in panic to oppose the
aggressors.”
This figure is a conservative
estimate, which did not include those provinces where no major attacks
occurred. John Prados, The Hidden History of the Vietnam War, Chicago: Ivan R.
Dee, 1995, page 142, quotes much higher figures: “North Vietnamese and Viet Cong
units committed between 67,000 and 84,000 troops in attacks on 39 of 44
provincial capitals, 71 district seats, Saigon, every ARVN headquarters and
several major air bases—altogether some 166 cities and towns.” Phillip B.
Davidson, in Vietnam at War, The History 1946-1975, Oxford University Press,
1991, page 447, also said: “The overwhelming weakness of Giap’s plan was to base
it on assumptions which turned out to be not just invalid, but dead wrong. ARVN
did not defect, desert, or dissolve under the hammer blows of the Communists at
Tet. ARVN, as a whole, fought with more courage and effectiveness than it had
ever done before or would do again. The people did not join the Vietcong
attackers; they did not revolt against the Thieu government; and they did not
turn against the Americans.”
Nguyễn Đức Phương, Chiến tranh
Việt Nam Toàn Tập: Từ trận đầu (Ấp Bắc – 1963) đến trận cuối (Sài Gòn – 1975)
(“A Complete History of the Vietnam War, from the first major engagement, Ap Bac
– 1963, to the final battle, Saigon – 1975”), Toronto, Canada: Làng Văn, 2001,
page 407, quoting from the official RVN version of the battle, Phạm Văn Sơn and
Lê Văn Dương, Cuộc Tổng Công Kích – Tổng Khởi Nghĩa của Việt Cộng Mậu Thân 1968
(“The Communist General Offensive and General Uprising of Mau Than 1968”),
Saigon: Phòng 5/BTTM, 1968. It should be said that John Prados considers this
last work to be the best contemporary detailed account in any language of the
Tet offensive. The standard account in English of this campaign and its
subsequent actions from the point of view of ARVN is given in Hoang Ngoc Lung,
The General Offensives of 1968-69 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Military
History, 1981).
Bui Tin, ibid., pages 63-64. The
official history mentioned in footnote 1 above gives the following assessment on
page 97: “[It can be seen] that through what took place in the two years of 1969
and 1970, in the face of determined enemy counteroffensives aimed at our
loosened grasp of the countryside and of the highlands, which had many gaps, the
enemy obtained some successes while inflicting upon us protracted
difficulties.” One could cite several other communist sources such as the
memoirs of Tran Van Tra (general commander of the NLF troops), Le Minh (the
commander of the Hue battle), Hoang Van Hoan (Politburo member who fled to China
in 1979), etc. All of them are agreed that Tet 1968 set back the North’s
conquest of the South by at least four years. Former U.S. Secretary of Defense
Melvin Laird, writing in the November/December 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs
(“Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam”), believes that ARVN did not lose one
single major battle from 1968 until the final collapse. In his estimation, Tet
1968 was a “victory” for the South and a “military disaster” for the North
costing it “289,000 casualties” in 1968 alone.
For all the terrible
misconstructions of the truth about Tet 1968, one should consult Peter
Braestrup’s monumental work, Big Story, 2 vols, Denver, CO: Westview Press,
1977. The one-volume abridged edition of this work (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1983), unfortunately, does not contain the chapter in the
fuller version in which Braestrup describes how three American reporters who
took time out to go into operations with ARVN all had positive things to report
about the ARVN units they covered. Davidson, op. cit., pages 483-492, gives a
summary of the effect of the press on the conduct of the war which he
characterizes as “a flash flood of confusion and dismay, overwhelming all who
would attempt to guide or stem it.” (page 483)
Kissinger’s exact statement to
Zhou Enlai came to light recently after the minutes of secret talks held in
Beijing were declassified and sent to the National Archives.
Clarke, P.C., “The Battle That
Saved Saigon: An Loc,” Reader’s Digest, March 1973, pages 151-156. On the
accuracy and balance of American media reporting on the ARVN, one could cite the
otherwise superb book, Reporting Vietnam, American Journalism 1959-1975 (New
York: The Library of America, 2000, 853 pages), the sixty-one pieces of which
contain only seven on ARVN and only one of them somewhat complimentary. In
fact, the one on the Easter Offensive of 1972 by John Saar in Life (April 28,
1972), “Report from the Inferno,” had this to say from An Loc at the height of
the battle, put though through the voice of “a junior U.S. adviser”: “Things are
getting worse and worse and the Vietnamese just aren’t doing anything. The
smell inside the town got so bad they bulldozed a mass grave for 300 dead ARVN.
The NVA shelled the hospital and destroyed it with captured 155s and killed 61.
Now they don’t have a hospital or enough medical supplies and there are 500 to
600 ARVN wounded they can’t get out.” The “Chronology” at the end of the book
(page 787) told a different story as it had this for 1972: “North Vietnamese
launch massive invasion of South Vietnam (‘Easter Offensive’) on March 30, using
hundreds of tanks, truck-drawn heavy artillery pieces, and surface-to-air
missiles in cross-border attacks into Quang Tri, Binh Long [where An Loc was
located, emphasis added.- NNB], and Kontum provinces… Binh Long offensive
begins with capture of Loc Ninh, April 4-6… North Vietnamese move south from
Loc Ninh and surround An Loc on April 7… South Vietnamese repulse attack on An
Loc on April 13 with intense U.S. air support… South Vietnamese repulse attacks
on An Loc, May 11-14.” ARVN likewise kicked the NVA out of Kontum, May 14-30,
broke the siege on An Loc on July 11 and retook most of Quang Tri province by
September 15. It should be recalled also that at the peak of the fighting, An
Loc, which was about 6 km2, received up to 30,000 enemy shells per day. To get
one of the most gripping accounts of the battle of An Loc, one must read Phan
Nhật Nam’s Mùa Hè Đỏ Lửa (“Summer of Fire,” Saigon, 1972) and a diary written
during the battle by a Vietnamese military doctor that became available only a
few years ago.
After the battle of An Loc was
over, the American press made a strong case for B52 bombings as the determinant
factor in repulsing the communist attacks. However, in one of the Letters to
the Editor carried by the Washington Post, a Vietnamese student then in the
U.S., Nguyen Thi Ngan, refuted that assertion by challenging anyone to show that
bombs could ever hold territory.
Lewy, Guenther, America in
Vietnam, Oxford University Press, 1978. See, in particular, the appendices for
comparative figures. It should be noted that in an interview granted to Italian
journalist Oriana Fallaci in Interviews with History in 1972, Vo Nguyen Giap
already admitted to losing half a million men in the war up to then.
Thompson, Robert, Defeating
Communist Insurgency, Frederick A. Praeger, 1966, page 48.
Brackman, Arnold, The Third Front
in Southeast Asia, 1967. It was Brackman’s contention that in late 1964 the
U.S. and its allies were confronting a situation known as the vertical axis
which was forming linking Beijing to Hanoi, Phnom Penh and Djakarta. Had the
communist putsch in Indonesia the following year succeeded, it would have turned
China into the dominant power in East and Southeast Asia. It was probably this
fear which decided Johnson and the British to intervene decisively to break up
that axis by a quick horizontal move: the British brought in paratroopers to
help Malaysia, Singapore and Borneo defeat Sukarno’s konfrontasi policy while
the U.S. despatched combat troops to Vietnam and the CIA later that year helped
the Indonesian generals to crush the communist plot before it could hatch. Seen
in that light, U.S. intervention in Vietnam saved much of Southeast Asia from
communism until today and likely forever, thus changing the course of world
history.
Bui Tin, ibid., pages 4-5.
Smith, Ralph, An International
History of the Vietnam War, London: MacMillan, Vol. I (1983), Vol. II (1985).
Apparently, Volume III is already out but I am unable to get hold of a copy.
Ralph Smith, unfortunately, died before he could complete the work that would go
to four volumes altogether. However, after the fall of Communism in Soviet
Russia in 1991, many archives of the USSR became accessible for research and
Ralph Smith felt that some of his earlier conclusions were no longer valid and
needed to be corrected. Despite all of that, his approach to the Vietnam War as
an international conflict pitting East and West is more than justified.
In private conversations and in a
variety of written communications, Bui Tin disputes these figures. He believes
that the Chinese count each tour of duty as one soldier involved, so that the
320,000 figure does not refer to 320,000 individuals so much as it is comparable
to the figure of 2.8 million U.S. troops which had been rotated in and out of
Vietnam. He also pooh-poohs their effectiveness saying that the Chinese
anti-aircraft units did not shoot down one single American plane and claims that
the Korean pilots had so much difficulty communicating with ground control
(because there was no common language) that it became hopeless. This, even if
true, does not eliminate the fact that the Chinese troops stationed in the late
1960s in North Vietnam north of Bac Giang to the Chinese border did allow for
the release many large NVA units for use in offensives in the South. In fact,
this was precisely what Ho Chi Minh himself argued, in a one-on-one conversation
with Mao in 1965, when he pleaded for the sending of these Chinese troops to
Vietnam (Woodrow Wilson Center, 77 Conversations, which were produced as part of
the Cold War History Project). Bui Tin provides extra proof of North Korean
involvement when he told me that besides the inefficient pilots, there were also
North Koreans sent to I Corps to try psychological warfare on South Korean
troops, trying to win them over to the communist cause by encouraging them to
defect. But here too, the North Koreans were totally incompetent and soon had
to be dismissed.
Recent official figures from
Hanoi seem to give an even higher rate of casualties. The “Chronology” found in
Reporting Vietnam, on page 793, has this to say about the losses of the two
Vietnamese sides: “South Vietnam lost at least 220,000 military dead… In 1995
the Vietnamese government [i.e. Hanoi] stated that 1,100,000 North Vietnamese
and Viet Cong soldiers died between 1954 and 1975.” This would change the ratio
of ARVN deaths to NVA/VC deaths to at least 1 to 4. Thus it would appear to be
odd indeed that an army often seen as incompetent or reluctant to fight would
end up killing that four times more “lion”-like enemies!

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