Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975. Max Hastings
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1956 there were violent rebellions, which two army divisions were deployed to suppress. One such episode took place in Nghe An province, which a later communist history attributed to three ‘reactionary Catholic priests’, named as Fathers Can, Don and Cat, who barricaded villages, seized weapons, captured cadres and organised demonstrations against land reform.
A communist narrative acknowledges: ‘We were obliged to use military forces … All leaders and their key lackeys were arrested.’ In addition to hundreds who died in hot blood, up to two thousand executions followed, and many more prison sentences. Between 1956 and 1959 there were further disturbances in Lai Chau province. Hanoi professed to blame these on agitation by Chinese Nationalist agents, but the revolts created ‘many difficult political situations … creating fear and worry among the population about socialism and diminishing the people’s confidence in the Party and Government’.
Lan, brother of Nguyen Thi Chinh who had fled south in 1954, was frustrated in his attempt to join the Vietminh, who instead imprisoned him for six years. Thereafter, denied a ration card, he was reduced to selling his blood to hospitals, and became a street porter. Their father’s fate was worse: even when released from imprisonment he was unable to secure a ration card or access to employment, and eventually succumbed to beggary. One night, cold and starving, he knocked at the door of an old friend and novelist named Ngoc Giao. Giao’s wife, on opening the door, took one look at the visitor and implored him to go away: her husband was himself in bad odour with the regime. But Giao came down from the roof where he had been hiding, in expectation that the night visitor was a policeman. He insisted on admitting Cuu, feeding him and allowing him a shower. They talked all night, until the writer said regretfully, ‘I’m afraid you can’t stay here.’ Before Cuu left, he said to Giao, ‘If you ever hear anything of my daughter, please tell her how much I love her.’ Then he vanished into the street. Giao and his wife thereafter provided the only assistance they dared, placing a bag of rice in the back alley early each morning. This was collected for a fortnight or so, then one night was left untaken. Cuu vanished from their lives and from that of Vietnam, dying at a time and place unknown. Chinh secured this glimpse of her father’s latter days only long after the war ended.
North Vietnam became known in Western intelligence parlance as a ‘denied area’. Yet thanks to the prestige of its leader, a figure of unimpeachable anti-imperialist credentials, embodiment of a triumphant revolutionary struggle, his country stood well in the world. Its status as a closed society invited shrugs from most Westerners, that this was merely the communist norm. A Northern intellectual suggested later that Ho’s career should be seen in three distinguishable phases – first as a simple patriot; then as a communist; finally as an apparent nationalist who was in reality pursuing the interests of the Communist International. In the view of a compatriot, he profited greatly from his cosmopolitan experience and ideological ties with China and the USSR, whereas his nationalist rivals knew little of the world outside Indochina. He conducted an extraordinarily skilful balancing act between the two great communist powers, especially after their own relationship turned glacial in the late 1950s.
Hanoi’s politburo was stunned by Nikita Khrushchev’s February 1956 speech to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, denouncing the cult of personality even as Vietnam’s leader was being promoted as a near-deity. Most of Ho’s senior comrades were Stalinists, who had mourned their hero’s 1953 death ‘with tears streaming down our cheeks’, in the words of a Party functionary. Now they were disgusted by Moscow’s renunciation of a military showdown with the West, in favour of a mere economic and ideological contest. The 1956 Hungarian uprising confirmed North Vietnam’s leadership in its view that any indulgence of dissent risked unleashing challenges to its authority.
A Canadian diplomat reported from Hanoi: ‘There is little point in speaking of the possibilities of an economic collapse of North Vietnam, since there is no economic structure.’ At independence, among a population of thirteen million people, there were only thirty qualified engineers and a handful of factories: the country’s rulers were too preoccupied with their domestic predicament to have any stomach for aggressive action in the South. Eighty thousand troops were demobilised and dispatched to swell the rural labour force. Both China and the Soviet Union made it plain that they opposed any armed provocation which might alarm the Americans.
Evidence remains meagre about Hanoi’s 1954–57 Party power struggles. It seems nonetheless plain that Ho Chi Minh and Giap wanted no new war: they believed they could secure a unified communist Vietnam without fighting for it. Their oft-rehearsed commitment to achieving this peacefully was – at that stage – sincere. Other rising men, however, thought differently. As they watched the evolution of Diem’s government in Saigon, they saw scant hope of securing their just inheritance of a unified Vietnam, other than through armed struggle.
2 ‘THE ONLY BOY WE GOT’
The 1954 exodus from North Vietnam was matched by a lesser one from the South. Communist troops marched away, often after emotional send-offs from the communities in which they had been based. In 1954–55, a total of 173,900 Vietminh fighters and 86,000 of their dependants ‘regrouped’ to the North. One veteran revolutionary paid a farewell visit to the Mekong delta before reluctantly obeying the order to join the migration. She told comrades who were staying behind, ‘See you in two years’ – meaning when the country was reunited after the communists’ assured election victory. It became a familiar gesture for Vietminh veterans to hold up two fingers, signifying the time lapse before inevitable fulfilment of their dream. COSVN secretary Le Duan’s wife Nga was pregnant with their second child when her husband dispatched her north on a Polish ship, along with the family of his close comrade Le Duc Tho. He himself stayed. To the end of his days, Le Duan argued that Ho Chi Minh’s two historic mistakes were to acquiesce first in the 1945 return of the French, then in the 1954 partition. He and other hardliners believed that a unified, communist Vietnam would be achieved only by fighting for it. His parting words to Nga were, ‘Tell Ho it will be twenty years before we see each other again.’
In violation of the Geneva Accords, Hanoi ordered ten thousand Vietminh to remain undercover in the South, insurance against a resumption of the armed struggle. Most of the guerrillas who marched North were bewildered and indeed enraged by partition, and became no less so after crossing the new ‘Demilitarized Zone’ – the ‘DMZ’. They experienced hardships greater than they had known in the relatively well-fed South, and many were also gnawed by family separations. Le Duan’s wife found herself living with two small children in a room above a Hanoi garage, writing a column called ‘Vietnamese Women’ for the Party newspaper, and knowing nothing of the fate of her husband at COSVN. Some Southerners proved defiant of Northern authority, and almost all harboured a single ambition: to return whence they had come. Some cadres’ children were meanwhile dispatched to further education in Russia or China.
The new South Vietnam and its government enjoyed considerable advantages: the Mekong delta was the most productive rice-growing area in South-East Asia; the countryside was relatively unscarred; while the Vietminh had commanded widespread support as independence fighters, there was much less enthusiasm for communism; and the Americans were eager that the country should become a showcase for what they called ‘the free world’. A South Vietnamese army officer later reflected on those days: ‘We took our lives for granted. We were not rich, but we were comfortable and had some freedoms. We were soft, as South Vietnamese have always been soft, because they live on rich land. Northerners are tough, because they come from a tough, poor place.’ An exile from the North who rose high in the Saigon civil service wrote: ‘For many of us … the years 1956–60 were among the best of our lives – we were full of expectation and promise.’ Peasant girl Phung Thi Ly, born in 1949, recalled her rustic childhood as ‘a paradise, full of tropical birds and buffalo; dogs and chickens and pigs that we called our pets; rushing rivers to swim in; and wide fields where we could run and laugh’.
Ho Chi Minh had secured mastery of the North after an ordeal by fire. Ngo Dinh Diem, by contrast, was merely the arbitrary nominee of playboy head of state Bao Dai, accorded grudging nods first by the French, then by the Americans. He had some of the qualities that make great leaders: courage, honesty, fluency, passionate commitment to his country. Unfortunately he was