Vietnam. Max Hastings
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such ‘liberated areas’ expanded rapidly in the confusion following the death of Diem. Southern troop morale slumped, and even supposedly elite formations showed little appetite for engaging the enemy. The strategic hamlets programme collapsed. With astonishing suddenness, across large areas of the country the NLF found themselves in the driving seat. Americans enjoyed a black joke about an alleged conversation between Lodge and ‘Big’ Minh, in which the ambassador urged the general to promote reassurance among the Vietnamese just as Lyndon Johnson did with his televised address after Kennedy’s assassination. Minh said: ‘Fine. Give us TV.’
The fall of Diem prompted a crisis meeting of Hanoi’s central committee, which began on 22 November. Ho Chi Minh offered to moderate, but the hawks rebuffed this suggestion: there is an unconfirmed claim that he stormed out, in dismay or disgust. Such a gesture would have been uncharacteristic, though a month later he is alleged to have told the Soviet ambassador that he was retiring from politics. What is certain is that the meeting marked the end of Ho’s significant influence upon events – though not of his status as the personification of his country in the eyes of the world – and confirmed Le Duan as foremost power in Hanoi, with Le Duc Tho his most influential subordinate. Le Duan enjoyed an immense advantage over his foes both in his own country and in the US: he was the only important player whose objective was clear and unwavering – to create a unified, Stalinist Vietnam. It is worthy of notice that less than thirty years before the collapse of the Soviet empire, he displayed no glimmer of understanding of the epochal failure of its economic model.
Relations with Beijing – now more Stalinist than Stalin’s Soviet successors – had become much closer: on 2 August in Beijing, the Chinese had signed an agreement promising direct military support for North Vietnam in the event of a US invasion. Whether Mao would have honoured this is highly debatable, but in the autumn of 1963 the pact greatly strengthened the hand of Le Duan and his activist comrades in the politburo. China’s president Liu Shaoqi, visiting Hanoi, offered more active encouragement for the Southern liberation struggle than had any recent Beijing leader. Chinese weapons began to arrive in quantity, and to flow southwards, while 7,850 troops from the North made the epic trek to ‘Battlefield B’, as Hanoi designated the South. November’s Party central committee meeting ended with an unequivocal commitment to a new proactive, aggressive, explicitly military campaign.
Le Duan and his colleagues thought the new Saigon regime would quickly implode, and thus that the Americans were unlikely to dispatch ground troops in support of a lost cause. Anxiety to fill the power vacuum in the South caused them to decide upon an urgent escalation, expressed in Resolution 9, formulated in December 1963 and enshrined in two documents of which one was published on 20 January 1964, the other remaining secret: ‘Strive to Struggle, Rush Forward to Win New Victories in the South’. Meanwhile at home, the hardliners launched a new purge of ‘rightist deviationists’, some of them heroes of the Vietminh era: thousands of officials, journalists and intellectuals were dispatched for re-education.
Resolution 9 represented a historic commitment to wage an armed struggle to the bitter end. While Moscow and Beijing were troubled by its possible consequences, and for some months Soviet aid was near-zero and the Russians had no ambassador in Hanoi, both became reluctantly convinced that they must be seen to support the cause of revolution and liberation with ever more generous arms supplies. Hanoi roused its supporters: ‘The time has come for North Vietnam to increase its assistance to the South … The enemy … is using his armed forces to kill and plunder the people … The only way to smash them is through armed struggle, which hereafter becomes decisive.’ Though the Mekong delta witnessed the most immediate increase in guerrilla activity, the epicentre of the struggle would progressively shift towards the Central Highlands and the area north-west of Saigon. The communists’ ambitious new objective was to engage, maul and break the spirit of the South Vietnamese army.
Some historians believe that in 1962–63 important opportunities were missed to make a peace deal. This may be true, insofar as the North Vietnamese, and Le Duan himself, for a season considered negotiating an American exit, followed by neutralisation. It is wildly unlikely, however, that President Diem would have accepted a deal that involved sharing power with the NLF. Moreover, had a bargain been struck, this would have provided only the briefest pause before Vietnam became a unified communist state: neither Hanoi nor COSVN would have renounced violence in exchange for anything less.
Hindsight may suggest that such an outcome, such a surrender, would have been preferable to the decade of murderous strife that instead ensued. Most South Vietnamese, and especially the Buddhist leadership, would have chosen peace on any terms; it was their American sponsors who rejected such an outcome, arguing that to sentence the people of South Vietnam to share the dismal economic, social and political fate of their Northern brethren would represent a historic betrayal.
The communists and the United States rightfully share responsibility for the horrors that befell Vietnam after the death of John F. Kennedy, because both preferred to unleash increasingly indiscriminate violence, rather than yield to the will of their foes. American field artillery officer Doug Johnson said: ‘The first major turning-point in the war was the assassination of Diem. From that day, we had lost the moral high ground. Everyone knew that we were complicit. Who was going to trust us? Serving in Vietnam, I thought: “I will do the best I can, and I wish these people well, without much hope that this will end in a good way.”’
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