Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 Read online

  VWP Vietnamese Workers’ Party, also known as Lao Dong Party; replaced the ICP in 1951 and controlled the DRVN government after 1954; renamed the Vietnamese Communist Party in 1976

  MAP 1. Indochina, 1954–1975

  MAP 2. North Vietnam, 1954–1975

  MAP 3. South Vietnam, 1954–1975

  Introduction

  This study relates the evolution of the strategic thinking on national liberation and reunification of the communist leadership of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) from the signing of the 1954 Geneva accords on Indochina to the onset of American military intervention in Vietnam in March 1965. It addresses that leadership’s gradual shift from a cautious approach centered on nonviolent political struggle to a risky, even reckless strategy predicated on major combat operations and decisive victory over enemy forces. In doing so, the study elucidates the origins of the conflict DRVN authorities called the “Anti-American Resistance for National Salvation,” which Vietnamese today refer to as the American War and Americans have always known as the Vietnam War. Specifically, it sheds light on the elements informing the Vietnamese communist revolutionary strategy and the domestic and foreign policies that strategy produced. It tells the story of how North Vietnamese decision-makers negotiated the Cold War during one of its “hot” phases and exposes—to the extent available sources permit—the mindset of those decision-makers and the worldview that conditioned it. In short, this is a history of the origins of the Vietnam War from the perspective of leaders on “the other side.”

  DRVN leaders accepted the Geneva accords in July 1954 because they hoped their implementation would preclude American military intervention and deliver what an eight-year war against France could not: the reunification of Vietnam under their governance. Because the latter prospect never materialized, they spent the better part of the next decade debating whether to fulfill their core objective by resuming hostilities, and otherwise searching for ways to “liberate” the South without provoking a military showdown with the United States or compromising other vital interests of Vietnam’s revolutionary struggle.

  Western accounts of the origins of the Vietnam War have tended to present DRVN leaders as relatively passive agents, emphasizing instead the pressures exerted upon them by key allies in Beijing and Moscow and the active roles assumed by rivals in Saigon and Washington. As it turns out, those leaders played a central role in shaping the events of 1954–65 in their country. To be sure, they were always mindful of the circumstances and imperatives they confronted, the Cold War context in which they operated, and the needs and desires of the Soviet Union and China, upon whom they depended heavily for political and material support. But despite these constraints, they implacably pursued what they saw as the best interests of the Vietnamese revolution and the so-called world revolution. Those interests included accommodating, or at least appearing to accommodate, the sometimes conflicting demands made on the DRVN by its socialist allies, who were more deeply invested in the global Cold War and, as time went by, increasingly at odds with one another over relations with the West and strategies to advance the global revolutionary process. That DRVN leaders managed their allies with such finesse is one of their impressive achievements. They were never puppets of those allies, and their ability to make autonomous decisions was never seriously compromised. In fact, owing to the Sino-Soviet dispute, whose ramifications in Vietnam are explored in some depth in this study, there were times when the Vietnamese exercised more leverage over their allies than the allies exercised over them. Informed alternately by nationalist, internationalist, and other considerations, the DRVN leadership’s decisions were always its own, and the tragic events that unfolded in Indochina in the decade beginning in 1965 owe as much—if not more—to those decisions as to decisions made in Washington and Saigon.1

  Vietnamese communists involved in the national liberation and reunification struggle did not always agree on strategic and other important matters. As historian Patricia Pelley writes of those who fought against the French, they were “internally divided” and sometimes “struggled violently among themselves.”2 After 1954 as before, sharp differences of opinion over strategy and tactics existed among members and leaders of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP), the communist organ that controlled DRVN decision-making, though these rarely manifested themselves openly. Most notable was the tug-of-war between, on the one hand, those who supported suspension of hostilities in July 1954 and peaceful reunification under the Geneva accords thereafter and, on the other hand, those who believed that those accords unnecessarily abrogated revolutionary gains below the seventeenth parallel and who wanted to continue fighting until complete victory. Whereas the former feared the reaction of Washington and, to a lesser extent, that of their own allies to prolongation and then resumption of hostilities, the latter accepted the risks inherent in choosing war to expeditiously achieve the “liberation” of the South and national reunification under the communist aegis. On the basis of their attitudes and the reasoning behind them, the detractors of armed struggle formed the party’s risk-averse, temporizing “moderate” wing, and its advocates constituted the risk-acceptant, impetuous “militant” wing.3

  As prospects for peaceful reunification faded after 1956—the deadline set by the Geneva accords to hold countrywide elections on the issue—moderates at the helm of the VWP remained wary of American intervention and sought to postpone resumption of war at least long enough to complete the rehabilitation and socialist transformation of the northern economy as well as the reorganization and modernization of the armed forces undertaken following the signing of the accords. Militants, for their part, were at that point keener than ever to resort to war to finish the job in the South, even as the North and its armed forces underwent their makeover.4 The onset of the Sino-Soviet dispute shortly thereafter exacerbated tensions within the VWP, as Moscow’s new revolutionary prescriptions calling for peaceful settlement of disputes between the capitalist and socialist camps validated moderate injunctions against resumption of military struggle in Vietnam, and Beijing’s radical theses on violent national liberation and the inevitability of war between the two camps emboldened militants. Ensconced in Hanoi after October 1954, the party leadership attempted to palliate the resulting discord between the two factions and shaped revolutionary strategy on the basis of majority consensus in the Politburo and Central Committee.

  Whether of moderate or militant inclination, DRVN leaders never wanted military confrontation with the United States. It is therefore paradoxical that the eventual conflict between Hanoi and Washington—the Vietnam War—was precipitated by the outcome of a Central Committee meeting that convened in late 1963. Until then, Hanoi’s cautiousness had precluded the introduction of American combat forces and a wider war, which seemed avertable for the immediate future. However, the final resolution adopted at the conclusion of the meeting, which called for unrestricted military struggle in the South and comprehensive commitment of the North to that struggle, proved to be a seminal development in the coming of the Vietnam War, producing as it did a drastic escalation of the ongoing insurgency below the seventeenth parallel in 1964. In light of that development, it is not unreasonable to consider the deployment of American combat forces to South Vietnam in massive numbers the following year as a response to—and not the source of—the onset of “big war” on the Indochinese peninsula. It was, of course, the Lyndon Johnson administration that decided to Americanize hostilities that year. But that decision was not made in a vacuum, and the prior decision of the VWP Central Committee hastened it and warranted, in Washington’s view, mass deployments of American ground and other forces to Vietnam.5

  Obviously, the United States cannot be exonerated for its role in creating the circumstances that produced the Vietnam War. However, it is important to understand that those who led the Vietnamese communist campaign against it and the regime in Saigon were neither passive nor innocent in that process. It is equally important to dispel the myth that th
ose leaders were actually mere nationalists forced by circumstances to jump on the communist bandwagon and resort to war to protect their country against yet another foreign aggressor.6 That is the narrative DRVN authorities at the time propagated in the West with great success, and which far too many Americans who write and teach about the Vietnam War have helped to perpetuate. The essence of that narrative is false, and this study exposes the deficiencies in its central tenets.

  Why does the story of Hanoi in the 1954–65 period matter? Because during that time North Vietnam became a crucible of the global Cold War, of the postwar international environment shaped by the intersection of the Soviet-American rivalry, the Sino-Soviet dispute, and ardent political activism in the Third World. The DRVN was a proud member of the socialist camp, but it was also a newly decolonized polity engaged in a national liberation struggle below the seventeenth parallel. After signing the Geneva accords, its leaders contended with not just the United States and the regime it abetted in Saigon, but also socialist allies, whose support was desperately needed to build socialism in the North. The DRVN played a—if not the—leading role in the socialist camp’s attempts to mediate Sino-Soviet discord, which was remarkable, considering that it was among that camp’s youngest members. It also concerned itself with nonaligned and Third World states, considered ideological kith and kin to whom the DRVN hoped to be an example of the possibilities of national liberation.

  In hindsight, North Vietnam after 1954 may well have been, as its leaders insisted at the time, “the center of big contradictions in the world.” Thus, studying Hanoi, attempting to see the world through its eyes, enables us to better understand the currents and tendencies that conditioned politics globally and locally in the socialist camp and the Third World during an important phase of the Cold War. Despite the unique and singular aspects of its story—and they are many—Hanoi proposed to act as a standard-bearer for national liberation or, alternatively, a promoter of nonalignment, while fashioning itself as a vanguard for Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism. “The most powerful states dominate international politics,” historian Jeremy Suri writes, “but the small places in between define the fate of the world.”7 The DRVN certainly left an indelible mark on the world after 1954.

  • • •

  The best-known English-language study of Hanoi’s decision-making during the period covered of this study is William Duiker’s The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam, published more than three decades ago.8 While still useful, Duiker’s work, even in its second edition, is now dated because it rests on a narrower array of sources than is currently available. It is also largely descriptive; that is, it narrates a story of party and government policies without probing deeply into the motives and circumstances behind them. The same may be said of Carl Thayer’s War by Other Means, a richly detailed story focusing on the period 1954–60.9 More recent and also useful are works by Ang Cheng Guan, including The Vietnam War from the Other Side and Vietnamese Communists’ Relations with China and the Second Indochina Conflict, 1956–1962 . The former is a concise, well-researched account of the origins and early stages of the Vietnam War with a focus on military strategy and operations; the latter is the only in-depth study of Hanoi’s relationship with China prior to the onset of war.10 Lien-Hang Nguyen’s Hanoi’s War focuses on the 1965–73 period but provides excellent information about DRVN leaders’ personalities and attitudes on war and diplomacy prior to the war against the United States.11 Few scholars today understand the thinking of the Vietnamese communist leadership before and during the war better than Ang and Nguyen, and their contributions to our understanding of that thinking are the most valuable since Duiker’s and Thayer’s. The second edition of William Turley’s The Second Indochina War covers both the Vietnamese communist and American perspectives, and it is the best book on the war.12 Turley draws heavily from Vietnamese sources and offers revealing insights into DRVN decision-making. And there are several other works useful for making sense of Hanoi’s policies and relations with its allies and enemies alike.13

  This study is intended not to supersede these earlier works but to supplement and update them on the basis of new documentary evidence and interpretations. It builds on the contributions of Duiker, Thayer, Ang, Nguyen, and Turley especially, and cites their findings and assessments often—and gratefully. In tracing the evolution of the communist road to the Vietnam War, this study demonstrates how ideology informed the view that the leadership in Hanoi had of itself and its purposes and tasks in governing the country, furthering the Vietnamese revolution, navigating the Cold War, and meeting international obligations.14 More than previous works, this study addresses the diplomatic dimensions of Hanoi’s revolutionary strategy.

  In doing so, this study relies on Vietnamese as well as western primary sources to document Vietnamese policy and decision-making and will hopefully encourage students of these subjects to reassess long-standing assumptions about and understandings of Hanoi’s strategic thinking, as well as its relationship with other important actors during the period leading to the war. Hopefully, too, this study will infuse new meaning into many details of a story now generally familiar, at least in its overall contours.

  Chapter 1 examines DRVN policymaking between the signing of the Geneva accords in 1954 and the end of 1956. Despite opposition from within, the VWP resolved to abide by the accords because Ho Chi Minh and other key leaders thought they would likely eventuate in peaceful national reunification under their governance. To those ends, in September 1954 they instructed operatives and supporters in both halves of Vietnam to respect the accords, undertaking no activity that might undermine them or provoke or justify noncompliance by the enemy. Meanwhile, they committed themselves to economic recovery and consolidation in the area above the seventeenth parallel, to a “North-first” policy. These decisions, including the mandatory regroupment to the North of the bulk of southern Viet Minh forces, particularly frustrated Le Duan and other militant southern communists who considered suspension of armed struggle and the accords generally detrimental to the long-range goals of the communist revolution. After the deadline for national elections passed in mid-1956, Hanoi continued to adhere to peaceful political struggle in the South because it was by then consumed with the task of transforming the economy and the society in the North along socialist lines. In the meantime, the Ngo Dinh Diem regime in Saigon established itself as the sole vector of power in the South and nearly annihilated the remnants of the communist movement there. In late 1956, the VWP Central Committee authorized southern communists to conduct acts of terrorism against the regime and its supporters but would not sanction an actual military struggle despite pleas from southern militants, including the fiery and indignant Le Duan.

  Chapter 2 considers the period from 1957 to 1959, when Hanoi authorized the resort to revolutionary violence in the South and permitted, albeit reluctantly, armed struggle on a limited scale and with only minimal support from the North. Resolution 15, as the authorizing document was called, and the guidelines for implementing it represented the first important revision of the party’s revolutionary strategy in nearly five years. They spawned an insurgency in the South that enabled communists there to better protect themselves from Diem’s regime but achieved little else. Chapters 3 to 5 relate the ups and downs of the southern insurgency as well as other pertinent developments between 1960 and the collapse of the Geneva accords on Laos in late 1962, including the implications of the Sino-Soviet dispute in Vietnam. Despite having revised its revolutionary strategy in 1959, the DRVN leadership for much of this period treaded cautiously both domestically and internationally as it sought to offset seemingly irreconcilable pressures. While southern militants took liberties in using violence and clamored for unrestricted military struggle and greater DRVN involvement below the seventeenth parallel, the Soviet Union—and China too for a period—exhorted Hanoi to avoid provoking the Americans in the South and concentrate instead on building socialism in the North. As these p
ressures mounted, Washington extended its interference in the South, as well as in Laos and Cambodia, both of which Hanoi had hoped would remain neutral.

  By 1963, DRVN decision-makers faced a pressing dilemma: whether to respond favorably to the pleas of party militants and risk provoking the Americans or indulge Moscow’s call for the peaceful settlement of Cold War disputes, thus maintaining the current course in the South and the “North-first” policy to the likely detriment of the reunification struggle. That dilemma produced a critical development in the coming of the Vietnam War—the VWP’s internal debate on revolutionary strategy of late 1963. Until that point, moderates had for all intents and purposes dictated party policymaking. But the coup that overthrew Diem that year brought to a head the conflict between them and their militant detractors. A Central Committee meeting held immediately after the coup in Saigon produced a resolution sanctioning war in the South with full DRVN backing and shifted control of party decision-making to militants. Led by Le Duan, who was first secretary of the VWP by this time, the militants actually staged a coup of their own in Hanoi, overhauling the party leadership and changing the balance of power there through a purge of leading moderates and others opposed to war as a policy for liberating the South. The following year, communist-led forces began major combat operations below the seventeenth parallel. After the so-called Tonkin Gulf incident in August, the Politburo authorized the deployment of the first units of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) to the South, effectively instigating the Vietnam War. These and related developments are the subject of chapter 7.

  The epilogue explores the effects in Hanoi of Washington’s decisions in the spring of 1965 to deploy American combat forces to South Vietnam and initiate sustained aerial and naval bombardments of the North. It also considers communist plans for defeating American forces in the South and neutralizing the impact of the bombings, and reflects on the relevance of the subject matter of this study for understanding the course and outcome of the Vietnam War.