Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975. Max Hastings
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vain. Lan and his friend pedalled away.
Distraught, she wakened her father. He decided that she must leave as planned, while he stayed behind to search for Lan. A few hours later she found herself among a pushing, shouting, desperate mob at the airport, boarding a cargo plane. Her father at their parting gave her a gold bracelet. On arrival in Saigon she was consigned to a refugee camp, where through the weeks that followed she sobbed relentlessly. At last she encountered a kindly family friend who said, ‘Come and stay with us’; two years later she married his son. She would hear no more of her brother for almost forty years.
Tran Hoi, serving as an apprentice with the French Air Force, had no hesitation about moving to Saigon with his squadron. His mother, however, determined that she must stay behind to sell their house and the family bus company. Hoi flew south aboard a C-47: ‘I cried all the way – Vietnamese never abandon their relations.’ He would have sobbed louder had he known that he would have no further contact with his kin until 1998. He embarked on a life in the South that was always tinged with sorrow, because on holidays and feast days he could never again make the pilgrimage to a family home.
By bus, train, car and on foot, families trekked to Haiphong to board ships, mostly provided by the Americans. It was later claimed that US agents staged a propaganda campaign to frighten Northerners into flight. That there was propaganda is beyond dispute, including atrocity stories fabricated by the American conservative ‘hero’ Dr Tom Dooley, author of a mendacious best-selling memoir Deliver Us From Evil. Equally well-attested, however, are the tragedies that befell many of those who remained, accepting the false assurances of Ho Chi Minh that they had nothing to fear.
Landlord’s son Nguyen Hai Dinh was eighteen when his only sister joined the flight southward. He himself remained. ‘Why? Because I was very stupid … We had thought the French were colonial oppressors until the communists took over, then we started to think of the French as our friends.’ All those possessed of property or education became marked for exclusion, even death, under the new order. Dinh found that his class background made him ineligible to attend university, or to occupy any responsible job. His new ideology teacher said: ‘In the past this country was feudal: now it belongs to the peasants and workers. You have no country.’ His father was stripped of citizenship rights for five years as an ‘anti-social element’, and obliged to scratch a living as a cook for Party cadres. Dinh came to hate everything about his own society, above all the impossibility of saying what he thought. He dated a student named Phuong, but through the five years of their dalliance he never dared to discuss any political subject: ‘Everybody was watching everybody else. Anyone could be an informer.’ He was deemed eligible only for manual labour.
In some tribal areas armed resistance persisted, using weapons provided by France’s special forces before the ceasefire. Bernard Fall claimed that several French officers serving with the tribes could not be retrieved from remote districts, and were abandoned until they were progressively rounded up or killed. He describes a Frenchman radioing desperately as late as the summer of 1956: ‘You sons-of-bitches, help us! Help us! Parachute us at least some ammunition so that we can die fighting instead of being slaughtered like animals.’ Fall asserts that nothing was done: ‘There was no “U-2” affair, no fuss: France did not claim the men, and the communists were content to settle the matters by themselves.’ The Hanoi weekly People’s Army reported in September 1957 that in the two years following the ceasefire, their forces in the mountains east of the Red River had killed 183 and captured three hundred ‘enemy soldiers’, while forcing the surrender of 4,336 tribesmen. Probably not more than a handful of these were Frenchmen, but the report confirms the persistence of resistance.
Meanwhile the new government set about implementing land reform. The Party daily Nhan Dan called on cadres to ‘banish selfish and pacifist doctrine’ and ‘resolutely lead the peasantry to crush the whole landlord class’. The Indian representative on the ICC reported that those who supposed the regime mere nationalists and socialists were naïve. Hanoi’s leadership, he said, bore an ‘indisputably communist character’. Northern media poured forth strident anti-American propaganda. Pierre Asselin, noting that all totalitarian governments require enemies, has written: ‘demonization of the United States … created a “useful adversary” that facilitated gaining and maintaining public support … for advancing the Vietnamese revolution’.
The draconian land-reform programme introduced between 1954 and 1956 pleased some peasants, who saw their old landlords dispossessed, but imposed so many hardships that despite the benefits generated by the cessation of armed strife, many Vietnamese found themselves continuing to face chronic hunger, and later near-starvation. Duong Van Mai, daughter of a former colonial official, observed: ‘The state had removed an incentive for hard work by paying peasants according to their labour’. When collectivisation was later superimposed, ‘shortages became a way of life.’
Adults were accorded rations of twenty-eight pounds of rice a month, ten ounces of meat and the same weight of sugar, and a pint of fish sauce. They received four yards of cloth a year, and two sets of underwear. Yet even in the darkest days, Party leaders and their families fared much better. The Northern elite enjoyed nothing like the riches that soon accrued to their Southern counterparts, but they never went hungry. In 1955, only deliveries of Burmese rice averted a famine as grave as that of a decade earlier. Hanoi’s principal sources of cash were $US200 million provided by China, and another $100 million from Russia. These sums were not gifts, however, but mere payments for commodities shipped abroad, desperately missed at home.
Credible statistics have never been published about the cruelties and executions perpetrated by North Vietnam’s rulers in the early years of revolution. Significant admissions were made in a 29 October 1956 speech by Giap, by then deputy prime minister: ‘We indiscriminately viewed all landowners as enemies, which led us to think there were enemies everywhere … In suppressing enemies we adopted strong measures … and used unauthorized methods [a communist euphemism for torture] to force confessions … The outcome was that many innocent people were denounced as reactionaries, arrested, punished, imprisoned.’ Estimates of executions range up to fifteen thousand. While Ho Chi Minh is alleged to have wrung his hands about the excesses, he never deployed his huge prestige to prevent them.
Not only were large portions of landlords’ holdings confiscated, but in many cases the new regime demanded that they should repay to their tenants money collected over years in ‘excessive’ rents. Assets and draught animals were seized at will, so that Duong Van Mai’s elderly uncle found himself attempting to till his residual patch of paddy with a plough strapped to his own shoulder. Space in another uncle’s big house was ‘reallocated’: revisiting forty years later, she found it occupied by forty people. Northerner Doan Phuong Hai’s grandmother seemed to age before his eyes as she suffered indictment as a landlord, followed by interrogation, denunciation, and property confiscation. The old woman refused her son’s offer to take her to Hanoi for medical treatment, merely coughing and wheezing to a premature grave.
The entire landlord class suffered institutionalised humiliation, designed to boost the self-regard of the peasantry as much as to abase owners of property. Even an ardent communist such as Dr Nguyen Thi Ngoc Toan admitted later: ‘Many things happened that I thought didn’t make sense.’ For years she herself was denied promotion, despite her devotion to the Party: ‘everything required the right family background’. By this she meant that those of peasant origins were favoured over people such as herself, from educated and allegedly ‘privileged’ backgrounds. Dissent, diversity, freedom of information were alike abolished. North Vietnam adopted the Stalinist approach to truth, which became whatever the politburo decreed that it should be.
Truong Nhu Tang, later a secret cadre, acknowledged that many of the executed ‘enemies of the people … so-called landlords … had simply been poor peasants who happened to own slightly larger plots than their neighbours, all the holdings being minuscule to begin with’. He also notes that the Party has never expressed remorse