Diem the past.
By the beginning of 1960, it was claimed that VC armed propaganda units had killed seventeen hundred government officials, village chiefs, teachers, hospital workers, and had seized another two thousand. Uprisings took place in the Central Highlands. Diem’s troops fought back, recapturing lost ground. Under the terms of a draconian new Treason Law, thousands of dissidents and members of religious minorities were rounded up, along with communist suspects. The guillotine was reintroduced as the preferred tool of government executioners.
Many Vietcong were frustrated by the refusal of COSVN – and, ultimately, of Hanoi – to authorise escalation to full-scale open warfare. Local cadres made renewed appeals for weapons to resist Saigon’s ‘cruel terrorism’. Without the stimulus of action, many men found intolerable the boredom and privations of a covert existence. A fighter with a unit based in the Mekong delta spoke later of the awesome, sinister silence of the wilderness, broken only by its wild creatures: ‘Because of the jungle vastness, the polluted waters and malaria, it was sad all the time.’ A company commander exploded before senior officers, pounding his chest and saying, ‘I’d rather die than live like this! Let’s start the armed struggle!’
At last, in September 1960, COSVN gave the order that its supporters had waited so long to receive: there were to be coordinated uprisings against government forces. Thereafter, the revolution’s territories expanded with remarkable speed. One-third of South Vietnam’s population, an estimated six million people, were soon estimated to be living under open or secret communist control. Cadres embarked upon energetic land redistribution. Guerrilla activity increased steeply, especially in the delta, where insurgents exploited local people’s intimate knowledge of river and tide conditions. Ambushes were set on bends of streams and canals; underwater mines buoyed with driftwood, wired to electrical detonators ashore. While North Vietnam was now a fiercely disciplined, regulated society, in response to terrorism the South became an oppressively militarised one. Nine-tenths of US aid was spent not on economic or agricultural development, but instead on arms to sustain the regime. The American advisory group focused on creating a conventional army, capable of resisting an invasion from the North such as South Korea had faced. Meanwhile, in one province of six hundred thousand inhabitants there were six hundred police, nine Civil Guard companies and twenty-four militia platoons manning thirty fortified posts and guarding 115 villages. Yet still the communist tide rose.
In 1960 Cold War tensions increased across the world. In April the South Korean dictatorship of Syngman Rhee collapsed, prompting exultation in Hanoi, hopes that this was the precursor of a similar fate awaiting Diem. A week later the Russian shootdown of an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft blew apart East–West détente. The Sino–Soviet split was ever more visibly reflected in North Vietnam’s politics, with Ho Chi Minh making a vain attempt to mediate. Le Duan, Le Duc Tho and their pro-Chinese faction achieved dominance in the politburo. For Hanoi, the political imperative to support the Vietcong’s armed struggle had become irresistible. The only issue was how much aid should be provided, how quickly: Le Duan faced the prospect of supporting the war that he wanted almost entirely from his own country’s resources.
Meanwhile in Saigon, on 26 April 1960, eighteen prominent anti-communist South Vietnamese met at a well-known hotel, after which they issued the ‘Caravelle Manifesto’, signed by ‘a group of patriots’, calling on the government to change course. Later that year US ambassador Elbridge Durbrow submitted a memo to Diem which itemised reforms Washington considered essential: publication of government decisions and budgets; scrutiny of all branches by elected representatives; liberalisation of press laws and improved relations with the foreign media; radio ‘fireside chats’ with the peasantry; more generous credit for farmers. These were all sensible, perhaps indispensable, measures for a functioning democracy, but wholly unacceptable to Diem. Just as he ignored the ‘Caravelle Manifesto’, so he received this shopping list as a manifestation of American condescension. He might also have responded to Durbrow by asking how much of his liberal wish-list was fulfilled by the Northern politburo.
The US remained overwhelmingly preoccupied with the armed struggle. Washington responded to the Vietcong upsurge by dispatching several hundred additional military advisers, raising the total number from 342 to 692, in breach of the limit on such personnel set by the Geneva Accords. Their commanders, notably including Gen. Sam Williams of the MAAG – Military Aid and Assistance Group – viewed the guerrillas solely as a security problem, to be addressed from the business end of a gun.
At the end of 1960 the communists formally rebranded the Southern resistance movement as the National Liberation Front, or NLF. Importantly, though all its leaders were communists, it sought to project itself as a nationalist coalition. Here, incoming US president John F. Kennedy would be told, was a political force that constituted an unacceptable threat to freedom and democracy in South-East Asia. The avowed objectives of the NLF were to bring social unity to the South; overthrow Diem; evict the Americans; impose land redistribution; unify the country by negotiation. This prospectus admitted nothing of Le Duan’s unswerving intention to create a Stalinist society.
In the years that followed the Geneva Accords, it was the misfortune of both Vietnams to fall into the hands of cruel and incompetent governments. Had Southern peasants known the plight of their Northern brethren, they might have thought less harshly of their own: at least few of Diem’s people went hungry. His American sponsors entirely misjudged the attitudes of Moscow and Beijing, supposing their leaderships guilty of fomenting the rising insurgency. Instead, until 1959 resistance to the Saigon regime was spontaneous and locally generated. For some time thereafter, it received only North Vietnamese rather than foreign support.
Le Duan was the principal personality driving renewal of the unification struggle: it is hard to exaggerate his personal role in what followed. As for his politburo comrades, it seems legitimate to speculate that some favoured war in the South as a means of escaping acknowledgement of the failure of their policies at home; of instilling a new sense of purpose in Ho Chi Minh’s threadbare people. It was their good fortune that the ‘imperialist’ foe, indispensable to such a regime as their own, had harnessed its fortunes to Ngo Dinh Diem, a dead donkey if ever there was one. The war that now gained momentum was such as neither side deserved to win.
6
1 ‘THEY’RE GOING TO LOSE THEIR COUNTRY IF …’
When Dwight D. Eisenhower briefed his successor John F. Kennedy about the issues that he would confront on assuming the presidency, it was not Vietnam – of which he said nothing – but neighbouring Laos that evoked stridency from the old warhorse. Eisenhower said he had been warned by the State Department that Laos was ‘a nation of homosexuals’, which bemused Kennedy. This was the first domino, asserted the outgoing president, key to South-East Asia, loss of which could threaten neighbouring Thailand. Here would come a test of the new commander-in-chief’s resolve, a rite of passage. Such a view seems fanciful in the eyes of posterity, but appeared real at the time. Laos, Laos, Laos, once known as ‘the land of a million elephants’, made headlines around the world as a collision point between communist and anti-communist forces. In 1960 the New York Times devoted three times more space to this tiny country, a wilderness with few and very poor inhabitants, than it did to Vietnam.
The Lao people, or the multiplicity of ethnic groups that comprise them, have perplexed the outside world by appearing to giggle their way through the past century of political upheavals, famines, civil wars and foreign-fostered tragedies. They love parties and priapic jokes, especially at the spring rocket festival when everybody makes their own fireworks, some enormous, and launches them at mortal risk to life and property. In the late 1950s the Americans began to throw money at Laos, to which France ceded independence in October 1953, and which had since become an alleged focus of Chinese and North Vietnamese meddling. A visiting Wall Street Journal reporter described the leadership as ‘ecstatically drowning in American aid’, big cars and iceboxes, while the rest of the country subsisted on an average annual income of $US150. The CIA began to take an interest, not