During the night of 30th January 1968, 70,000 North Vietnamese soldiers, together with guerrilla fighters of the NLF, launched one of the most daring military campaigns in history. The Tet Offensive was the real turning point in the Vietnam War.
The Vietnamese call the war “Chien Tranh Chong My Curu Nuoc”, or “The War against the Americans to save the nation”. In the course of this war, some 58,000 US soldiers were killed in action, as well as 304,000 wounded. But these figures pale in insignificance beside the horrific casualties suffered by the Vietnamese. Almost 1,400,000 North and South Vietnamese were killed in action.
To this we must add 2,100,000 wounded. It was one of the bloodiest wars in history, and one that took a particularly high toll of civilian lives. The total number of Vietnamese people killed in this conflict will never be known but was probably not fewer than three million, and the total number of casualties not fewer than 8 million.
The number of American soldiers in Vietnam rose from 23,300 in 1963 to 184,000 in 1966. In January 1969 the total number of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam reached its peak – 542,000. Despite this the U.S. Army was unable to subdue Vietnam. This was the first time in history that the USA has been defeated in a war (Korea was a draw).
In August 1963 the new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, ordered the first bombing of North Vietnam, operation “Rolling Thunder”. The purpose was to break the Vietnamese will to struggle through “shock and awe”. The number of bombs dropped over Vietnam in this campaign alone was greater than the total dropped during the entire Second World War: the equivalent of roughly 15 kilograms of bombs for every man, woman and child in Vietnam. Chemical weapons defoliated 10 percent of the country’s surface.
But the numbers of dead and wounded do not tell the whole story. The country was devastated by years of carpet-bombing. Thousands of square miles were laid waste. Billions of dollars were wasted. Thousands of acres of forest were destroyed by the dropping of poisonous chemicals by the US air force (“defoliants”). This, in plain English, is known as chemical warfare. Many US soldiers developed serious illnesses through contact with these chemical agents. But for a huge number of Vietnamese it meant generations of deformed babies, miscarriages, cancers and all manner of hideous illnesses.
The origins of the war
The origins of the Vietnam War were rooted in the long and bitter struggle of the Vietnamese people against French colonial rule. In 1932 the puppet Bao Dai returned from France to reign as emperor of Vietnam under the French. Ho Chi Minh and his followers set up the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930. Its main purpose was to fight against French colonial rule, and it always had a heavy nationalist element. As in China, the struggle for social emancipation was inseparably linked to the struggle for freedom from foreign rule.
The Second World War threw everything into the melting pot. In September 1940 Japanese troops occupied Indochina, but allow the French to continue their colonial administration of the area. Japan’s move into southern part of Vietnam in July 1941 sparked an oil boycott by the U.S. and Great Britain. The resulting oil shortage pushed Japan to risk war against the U.S. and Britain. The result was Pearl Harbour and the declaration of war by the USA.
The policy of the USA was dictated by its ambition to dominate Asia and the Pacific. This strategic aim meant that not only Japan but the old imperial powers (Britain and France) also had to be ejected. Washington’s policy after 1945 was dictated by this goal. It is the reason for the apparent friendliness of Washington to Ho Chi Minh at that time. In fact the Americans helped to save his life. In 1945 the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) parachuted a team into his jungle camp in northern Vietnam to treat Ho, who was seriously ill with malaria and other tropical diseases.
In August, 1945 Japan surrendered and the French colonialists returned to reclaim their former possessions. The Vietnamese resisted and a long period of anti-colonial struggle commenced. Ho Chi Minh established the Viet Minh, a guerrilla army, which overthrew Bao Dai in a general uprising. On September 2, 1945 Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam independent after 80 years of colonialism under French rule and established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh attempted to negotiate the end of colonial rule with the French, but without success. French imperialism had no intention of giving up Vietnam. A bitter struggle began, in which the country was divided north and south. The French army shelled Haiphong harbour, killing over 6,000 Vietnamese civilians, and open war between France and the Viet Minh commenced.
By this time the Cold War between the U.S.A and Russia had begun. The Chinese Revolution alerted the USA to the danger of “Communism” in Asia. Washington therefore recognized Boa Dai’s regime as legitimate, and began to subsidize the French in Vietnam. On the other hand, Mao, having won the civil war in 1949, began to supply weapons to the Viet Minh. In the end, the U.S. was bearing half of the cost of France’s war effort in Vietnam. But to no avail. The French imperialists were decisively defeated in the celebrated battle of Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954. Despite substantial American backing, the French finally lost control of their Vietnamese colony. They suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the army of Vo Nguyen Giap, Supreme Commander of the Vietminh. Later Giap was to comment:
“The Dien Bien Phu campaign was a huge victory. It was the first time a poor feudal nation had beaten a great colonial power that had a modern industry and a massive army. The victory meant a lot, not just to us, but to people all over the world.”
The French-Indochina War was at an end. After the humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the French were forced to leave Vietnam after a century of colonial rule. The Geneva Conference on Indochina declared a demilitarised zone at the 17th parallel with the North under the rule of the Vietnamese Stalinists and the South under the leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem.
This division of the country into two halves was supposed to be temporary.
The Vietnamese Communist Party could have easily taken power after Dien Bien Phu. But Stalin, fearing a direct conflict with the USA, put pressure on Ho Chi Minh to agree to a settlement by which the Stalinists would be given the northern part of the country and the French to the South pending the holding of general elections, which would decide who would rule the country.
The beginnings of US intervention
The power that succeeded the French was the United States. US imperialism was already intervening in Vietnam in the 1950s. In June 1954 the CIA established a military mission in Saigon. The same year Bao Dai selected Ngo Dinh Diem, the future dictator, as prime minister of his government. The new regime in North Vietnam modelled itself on the Stalinist regimes in China and Russia. The North Vietnamese embarked on a policy of radical land reforms. The landlords were expropriated and imprisoned. This was unacceptable to Washington, which was embarked on a worldwide confrontation with “Communism”.
It was agreed that countrywide elections would be held in 1956. But America opposed the elections, so they never took place. In his book Mandate for Change President Eisenhower later said that he thought Ho Chi Minh would have obtained 80% of the vote if free elections had been held. General Andrew Goodpastor, aide to President Eisenhower, stated:
“It was felt that the elections could not be free in the North in particular. I would say that was part of it. The other was a sense that even if free elections were held, they probably would be dominated by the Communists and the Communists would gain control.”
This expresses with admirable clarity the conception of democracy held by US imperialism. Elections are very good, as long as they serve to elect governments that are friendly to the United States. But if they do not, they are not to be recommended. This has been the philosophy of Washington ever since. Having deliberately split the country in half, the United States underwrote the vicious dictatorship of President Diem in South Vietnam, a fanatical anti-communist. Diem ruthlessly suppressed any opposition. But Washington nevertheless backed him as a “democrat”.
The decision not to hold elections made war inevitable. The Americans pumped vast economic and military resources into South Vietnam in order to build a puppet state in South Vietnam just as they are doing today in Iraq. The South Vietnamese generals became over-confident as a result of American support. They decided to attack North Vietnam. In 1956 fighting began between the North and the South. The first American combat deaths in Vietnam occurred in 1959 when Vietnamese guerrillas attacked Bien Hoa billets, killing two US servicemen. But the combat only commenced in earnest in the following decade.
In 1960, National Liberation Front (known to its enemies as the “Viet Cong”) was set up by Hanoi in order to fight Diem and to unite the country. This was supported by Moscow. The NLF fighters were making gains in the countryside in the South. In order to cut off the guerrillas from the peasants, Diem’s troops burned entire villages to the ground. The inhabitants were moved into fortified “strategic hamlets,” built under the supervision of American advisers. This policy was carried out with brutal coercion and was extremely unpopular with the peasants, who flocked to the ranks of the guerrillas.
The reasons why the USA became involved in Vietnam had nothing to do with “democracy”, as its actions clearly show. It was dictated by the defence of imperialist interests and strategic questions such as the need to contain Russia and China and halt the advance of “Communism” in Asia. As early as 1954 the article “Why is the US risking a war in Indochina” was published on April 4, 1954 in the “U.S. News and World Report”. The article stated:
“One of the richest areas in the world will be open to the victor in Indochina. This is what lies behind the growing U.S. interest… pewter, rubber, rice, strategic key primary produce are the true reasons for this war. The U.S. considers this an area in which to maintain control – by any means necessary.”
In Washington the fear grew that Vietnam would fall, causing a “domino effect” throughout Asia. Robert McNamara, U.S. secretary of defence at the time, explained:
“The objective was to prevent the dominoes from falling. The loss of Vietnam would trigger the loss of Southeast Asia, and conceivably even the loss of India, and would strengthen the Chinese and the Soviet position across the world.”
In 1961 President John F. Kennedy was elected. As a Democrat, some supposed that he would favour a more peaceful foreign policy. Nowadays, it has become fashionable to paint Kennedy as a progressive and a man of peace. But this is in flagrant contradiction to the facts. Within a year of his election, he backed the invasion of Cuba, which ended in the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba. Smarting from the effects of this humiliation, Kennedy set out to show the strength of US imperialism in Asia.
The first stages of US military involvement in Vietnam were extremely limited and cautious. The U.S. military build-up in Vietnam began with combat advisors. These advisers were initially sent to train the South Vietnamese army in counterinsurgency. However, President Kennedy declared that they would respond if fired upon. They encouraged the use of brutal methods against the insurgents, in which Diem’s troops were already fairly proficient. Indeed, violence was the normal weapon used to prop up a brutal and unpopular regime against its own people. All this was justified by Washington with its customary cynicism. Speaking on May 23, 1962, Robert McNamara said:
“The actions of the ruler, President Diem, have been declared autocratic and perhaps his personal actions are to some degree, but one realizes the chaos he faced, the complete anarchy that existed there, it’s conceivable that autocratic methods within a democratic framework were required to restore order.”
But these “autocratic methods within a democratic framework” were not so popular in Saigon as in Washington. There was a growing opposition. South Vietnamese protesters organized a wave of demonstrations. In the summer of 1963 Buddhist monks burnt themselves to death, in protest at Diem’s religious intolerance. The discontent spread to the tops of the army, where a group of generals plotted a coup against Diem. Washington knew all about the coup but did nothing to stop it, hoping for a stronger pro-US regime in Saigon. It was clear to Washington that the South Vietnamese army could not defeat the guerrillas and this forced America to launch a direct military intervention in Vietnam. As in Iraq, the imperialists were over-confident. According to McNamara, they expected to withdraw the force of 16,000 military advisers by the end of 1965, and that the first unit of withdrawal would be completed within 90 days, by the end of December 1963. Not for the first or last time, the imperialists had miscalculated badly.
On November 1, 1963, the government was overthrown by a group of dissident generals. Diem was murdered by his own soldiers. The people of Saigon came out onto the streets to celebrate Diem’s overthrow. Within three weeks of Diem’s murder, President Kennedy was himself assassinated. His replacement, Lyndon Johnson, was a virulent anti-communist and like Kennedy, totally committed to pursuing the war in Vietnam. Direct military American intervention in Vietnam began in the same year with the declared aim of stopping the South falling into “communist” hands. In August, Lyndon Johnson, who had taken over the American presidency in the wake of the assassination, ordered the first air strikes on the North.
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident
On May 4, 1964 a trade embargo was imposed on North Vietnam. This was a notable stepping up of hostilities. It is sometimes said that trade embargoes are a more satisfactory alternative to war, but in fact, if they are to be effective, trade embargoes usually lead to war. This was no exception.
In South Vietnam, the NLF now had 170,000 men and women in the field. They could move and operate throughout most of the country. They were able to stage attacks in the heart of Saigon whenever they liked. Tran Bach Dang, an activist of the National Liberation Front in Saigon recalled:
“People were fighting back. We would establish contacts with them, and guide them. The protest movement of students and intellectuals, including Catholics and Buddhists, was widespread. When people saw that our methods were effective, they would join us.”
The rottenness of the bourgeois regime in Saigon was clear to all. The government was in a constant state of crisis. One coup followed another. The uninterrupted rise and fall of ministers, each as unpopular and corrupt as the last, was a symptom of the impasse of the regime. Without US support, it would not have lasted one week.
Johnson increased the US military presence in Vietnam. He sent Gen. William Westmoreland, a veteran of Korea and World War II, to take charge of military operations. Johnson was determined to take the American military intervention in Vietnam to a qualitatively different level. But in order to convince the US public of the need for drastic action in South East Asia, Johnson needed an excuse. He found it in the so-called Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which served the same purpose as Pearl Harbour or the 11th September – a causus belli – an excuse for war.
In August 1964, an American destroyer, the USS Maddox, on patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin, exchanged fire with North Vietnamese torpedo boats. President Johnson issued instructions that in the event of a further attack upon US vessels in “international waters” they were to respond with the objective of destroying the attackers. Two days later, the ship’s captain thought he was again coming under attack. But one of the pilots was not so sure. In a television interview, Vice Admiral James Stockdale, who was a pilot at Tonkin, made the following statement:
“Well, I was over that … those destroyers for over an hour and a half, below a thousand feet, lights off, watching everything they did. I could hear ’em chit-chatting on the radio, the Maddox and the Joy, they seemed to have some intermittent radar targets. I took it upon myself to get out there where they thought the boat was and try to kill it if they didn’t. But it was fruitless … and I’d go down there and there was nothing.”
Ignoring the conflicting evidence, the Pentagon insisted there had been a second attack. On August 5, 1964, the U.S. secretary of defence stated:
“In retaliation for this unprovoked attack on the high seas, our forces have struck the bases used by the North Vietnamese patrol craft.”
This was a clear provocation. There was no Vietnamese attack on a US warship. But Johnson used the Tonkin Gulf incident to push a resolution through Congress allowing the president to wage war in Vietnam. On August 7, 1964 Congress approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which allowed the president to take any necessary measures to repel further attacks and to provide military assistance to any South Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) member. Senators Wayne L. Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska cast the only dissenting votes. President Johnson ordered the bombing of North Vietnam. On March 8-9, 1965 the first American combat troops arrived in Vietnam.
Moscow and Beijing
The war was a battle between, on the one side, the most powerful and wealthiest country in the world, and on the other side, a barefoot guerrilla army armed with weapons left over from World War Two. North Vietnam was a poor agricultural country with virtually no industry. Ho Chi Minh was therefore obliged to seek aid from China and the Soviet Union. Moscow agreed to increase military aid to the North Vietnamese. Three weeks after the marines landed, forces of the NLF bombed the American Embassy in Saigon. Johnson blamed China for these attacks. On May 13, 1965 he said:
“Their [China’s] target is not merely South Vietnam – it is Asia. Their objective is not the fulfilment of Vietnamese nationalism, it is to erode and to discredit America’s ability to help prevent Chinese domination over all of Asia.”
There was not a shred of evidence for this accusation. As a matter of fact, it was the Soviet Union and not China that was now supplying most aid to the Vietnamese. North Vietnamese pilots were being trained in the Soviet Union, which was also providing money and arms to Hanoi. Moscow was looking for an advantage over the USA in Asia, and at the same time was anxious to stop Vietnam from falling under the influence of China. This was the period of the Sino-Soviet split in which two rival Stalinist bureaucracies confronted each other and vied for influence in the world “communist” movement.
The Soviet Union gave considerable aid to North Vietnam. Moscow sent missiles to North Vietnam. And more than a thousand Soviet advisers worked on air defences against the Americans. This was a serious factor limiting the possibilities for US aggression against the North. However the scale of this aid was adversely affected by growing tensions between the Russian and Chinese Bureaucracies, which were then engaged in a bitter struggle dictated by the narrow nationalist interests of both sides. Fyodor Mochulski, deputy Soviet ambassador to China comments:
“The Chinese demanded that we hand over all military equipment for Vietnam on the Soviet-Chinese border and that China in its turn would pass it on to the Vietnamese. We discovered later that the Chinese weren’t handing everything over. Some of the equipment they unloaded for themselves.”
This view is supported by Igor Yershov, Soviet military adviser to Vietnam:
“What surprised me was that we could send the newest anti-aircraft missiles to Egypt, a capitalist country, but not to Vietnam. Our commanders used to say that it was because there was a danger they would fall into the hands of the Chinese.”
Operation Rolling Thunder
In March 1965 the first American ground troops landed at Da Nang. The first major military engagement between U.S. and North Vietnamese forces occurred on November 14-16, 1965. The USA was being inexorably sucked into a major war on the Asian mainland. Like Bush at the start of the invasion of Iraq, Johnson and his generals were suffering from delusions of grandeur. They made the mistake of exaggerating their own power and underestimating that of the enemy. They imagined that the mere appearance of the U.S. Marines in Vietnam would terrify the enemy into surrendering. This was a bad mistake. Johnson’s optimistic assessment of the situation in South Vietnam – which closely resembles that of George W. Bush in relation to Iraq – was rapidly falsified by events. The military situation worsened by the day.
In June, a military outpost at Dong Suay was destroyed. An elite South Vietnamese regiment was decimated, and there were many civilian casualties. McNamara returned to Vietnam to reassess the war. A mere glance at the situation was enough to convince him that without the commitment of massive American forces, the puppet government of South Vietnam was doomed. General Westmoreland feared that South Vietnam would be cut in two. The first major battle of the war was fought out in the Ia Drang valley in the Central Highlands. It showed the tremendous fighting capacities of the Vietnamese. The Americans defeated the North Vietnamese at Ia Drang, but casualties were heavy: 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers were killed; and 300 elite American infantry died in the battle. General Vo Nguyen Giap, the commander of the North Vietnamese Forces, commented:
“The battle at Ia Drang was our first big victory. We concluded that we could fight the Americans and win. The key thing was to force the Americans to fight the way we wanted – that is, hand to hand.”
The NLF forces launched an attack on Pleiku airbase in which eight Americans were killed and a hundred more were wounded. Johnson responded by launching Operation Rolling Thunder, a massive campaign of bombing against the North. He hoped it would boost Southern morale and force Ho Chi Minh to the negotiating table. The North was supplying the guerrilla forces in the South through the famous Ho Chi Minh Trail. This complex network of tracks linked the North with the South through the impenetrable jungles of Central Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The Vietnamese, displaying great courage, carried supplies along this trail day and night, constantly changing their tactics to keep ahead of the enemy. One driver on the Trail, Kim Nuoc Quang, recalls the extremely dangerous conditions in which they worked:
“One night we counted 14 cannons firing, reddening and lightening the whole sky with explosions. It was like fireworks night in Hanoi. We were constantly driving through bullets and smoke.”
It was the inability of the US army to inflict a serious defeat on the Vietnamese on the ground that led Johnson to step up the massive bombing of the North, although he occasionally ceased the bombing to “encourage” the North Vietnamese to negotiate. But all these stratagems failed. The war continued.
All history shows that bombing alone will not win a war. Hitler’s bombing of British cities did not force Britain to surrender, but only increased the hatred and bitterness of the British people against Nazi Germany. The same process occurred in North Vietnam. In the end, as was predictable, the USA was compelled to commit a large force of ground troops to stop the collapse of the puppet regime in Saigon, which otherwise would have been a foregone conclusion. As McNamara stated:
“It became more and more clear that President Johnson was going to have to choose between losing South Vietnam or trying to save it by introducing U.S. military force and taking over a major part of the combat mission.”
Guerrilla war
Quite early on, the Americans gave up the idea of defending territory, and instead used their superior mobility to launch so-called search and destroy missions. These left behind a bloody trail of death and destruction, of burning villages and dead peasants and livestock. The forces that claimed to be “saving” South Vietnam were systematically destroying it. And this fact, far from weakening the guerrilla forces, only served to strengthen them. This is also true in Iraq.
The French revolutionary leader Robespierre once said that nobody likes missionaries with bayonets. The American soldiers were told then that they had gone to South Vietnam to fight communism, just as the American soldiers are now told that they have been sent to Iraq to fight for democracy. But just as in Iraq today, so in Vietnam the American soldiers met hostility from those they were supposed to be helping.
Mao Zedong said that the guerrilla must learn how to swim among the people like a fish in water. The support of the population is the first and most important conditions for the success of the guerrillas. It is in the nature of a guerrilla war that it is difficult to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. The guerrilla fighters strike suddenly and then melt away into the general population. As in Iraq, so in Vietnam, American troops found it impossible to tell which Vietnamese were friends and which were enemies. The potential is therefore always present for abuses and atrocities against civilians. This in turn tends to drive the population still more firmly into the arms of the guerrillas.
Any army is made up of contradictory elements, like society itself. The officer caste must maintain discipline and keep the killing spirit alive among the troops. In the concrete conditions of a guerrilla war, where the front lines are blurred and the enemy is mixed up with the population, the troops must be hardened to the idea of killing civilians. The American troops in Vietnam were told not to worry too much about who was killed: “if it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC.” That was they were told. The inevitable result was that a lot of civilians who were not guerrilla fighters were killed. This stoked the fires of resentment against the occupying forces.
Despite steadily increasing numbers of American troops in Vietnam, the guerrilla operations continued without a break. In response to the American troop build-up, Hanoi sent thousands of North Vietnamese to join the guerrilla fighters in the South. What the Pentagon thought would be a relatively easy and quick operation turned out to be a protracted and bloody conflict.
In general a guerrilla army involved in a war of national liberation has a great advantage over the occupying forces. They are willing to die. This weapon is potentially far more potent than the most sophisticated modern weapons. This was true in Vietnam and it remains true in Iraq today. What the military planners in the Pentagon could not understand is that when an entire people stands up and says no, no force on earth can force them to submit. This was the lesson the British learned in India and the French had to learn the hard way in Algeria and Dien Bien Phu. The Americans are still learning the same lesson in Iraq. They should have paid more attention to the experience in Vietnam, or even to their own history. After all, the United States itself was born out of a revolutionary war of independence that pitted farmers with hunting muskets against the might of the British army. The latter was one of the most powerful army in the world at the time, but in the end the farmers won.
In many ways the guerrilla struggle in Vietnam has echoes of the present war in Iraq. Just listen to the memories of a former guerrilla fighter, Tong Viet Duong, from the National Liberation Front, Saigon:
“At 8 o’clock in the morning of March 23rd, we hit them. Our artillery destroyed aircraft. We killed not only some guards, but also the American quartermaster. Our commando unit also attacked the police training school. We killed many trainee police officers whilst they were watching a movie.”
In an attempt to justify their brutal rape of Vietnam, the apologists of US imperialism frequently refer to the alleged cruelty of the NLF. It is true that any civil war or national liberation struggle is characterised by cruelty. Let us remind ourselves that there was no lack of savagery displayed in the American Civil War. In part this reflects the conditions of a kind of warfare where there is no clearly defined boundaries, no definite front line, no rules of engagement, no rights and no law. It is a war that most often takes place in the midst of a civilian population.
Furthermore, the guerrilla forces are fighting against a vastly superior professional army in conditions of extreme inferiority. The US forces had all the paraphernalia of modern high-tech warfare. The Vietnamese had to rely on the most primitive methods, such as concealed pits with sharp spikes at the bottom. It is a simple mechanism but very effective, like many other of the methods of guerrilla warfare. And let us not forget that the aim of all warfare is to kill the enemy. In conditions of military inferiority the guerrilla forces cannot renounce any method that achieves this aim and that strikes terror into the hearts of the invader. In any case, the methods used by the American forces – including the indiscriminate use of napalm to incinerate people alive, or the even more indiscriminate use of chemical agents discharged over vast tracts from the air – were infinitely more cruel and devastating than any of the tactics used by the Vietnamese.
The anti-war movement
The war in the South dragged on with no end in sight. At the beginning of 1967, the Americans used B-52s to bomb NLF bases near Saigon in a vain effort to clear the area of guerrillas. By August, in a desperate effort to put more pressure on Hanoi, Johnson extended the bombing of the North to within 10 miles of the Chinese border. This was playing with fire. In vain Johnson argued that this was not aimed against China:
“First I would like to make it clear that these air strikes are not intended as any threat to communist China, and they do not in fact pose any threat to that country. We believe that Peking knows that the United States does not seek to widen the war in Vietnam.”
The official optimism clashed at every step with the crude reality of the casualty lists and the never-ending conflict. As the savagery and futility of the war became clear, there was increasing dissent back home. The US forces were now taking heavy losses. The American casualty rate increased steadily every year. Jack Valenti, aide to President Johnson, recalls the situation:
“I would go in the president’s bedroom, at 7 o’clock in the morning. Every morning, he’d be on the phone, with a 12-hour time difference, checking the casualties of the day before. ‘Mr. President, er, we lost 18 men yesterday, Mr. President, we lost 160 men, we had 400 casualties’ – morning after morning after morning.”
In the end Johnson was utterly undermined by the rapid growth of the anti-war movement in America. One of the most important elements in the equation was the disproportionate number of poor working class and black kids among the casualties. As in every war, it is always the poorest, most oppressed and downtrodden layers of the population that provide most of the cannon fodder. Inside the USA there was a growing swell of discontent. The black Americans were tired of being second-class citizens. In the Southern States, the civil rights movement was engaged in a ferocious struggle against discrimination and racism, for equal rights. But the war in Vietnam highlighted in an extreme form the oppression of the blacks. The two issues became indissolubly linked. On April 15, 1967 black civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. said:
“This confused war has played havoc with our domestic destinies. Despite feeble protestations to the contrary, the promises of the great society have been shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam. The pursuit of this widened war has narrowed the promised dimensions of the domestic welfare programs, making the poor – white and Negro – bear the heaviest burdens both at the front and at home.”
Napoleon explained long ago the vital importance of morale in war. No soldier likes to fight and put his life at risk when he feels that he is not backed by public opinion at home. The American soldiers in Vietnam increasingly felt the backlash of opposition in the USA. They began to feel that they were fighting an unjust and unwinnable war. Lt. Col. George Forrest, U.S. Army recalls:
“When you turned on AFN and you saw riots in the streets, and whatever, and guys were saying: ‘Wait a minute. Why am I fighting here when these guys at home are saying this is the wrong thing to do?'”
The growing opposition to the war even found expression in pop music. There was a very popular song around at that time by “Country Joe” McDonald that contained the words:
“Come on, mothers, throughout the land
Pack your boys off to Vietnam
Come on, fathers, don’t hesitate
Send your sons off before it’s too late
Be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box!“And it’s 1, 2, 3, what are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn.
Next stop is Vietnam.
And it’s 5, 6, 7, open up the Pearly Gates
Yeah, there ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee! We’re all gonna die!”
In April 17, 1965 the first major anti-war rally was held in Washington. By October of the same year anti-war protests are held in about 40 American cities. As is usually the case, the ferment began among the students, who always act as a sensitive barometer of moods in society. 25,000 people gathered in Washington, 20,000 in New York and 15,000 in Berkeley, California, to demonstrate against the war. In April 1967, 300,000 people demonstrated in New York On Oct. 21-23, 1967 50,000 people demonstrated against the war in Washington. The anti-war movement was now spreading fast. More than five million people are estimated to have been involved one way or the other.
The Tet Offensive
It is now generally recognized that Vo Nguyen Giap was one of the brilliant generals of the 20th century. He was trained in the tactics of guerrilla war in the long struggle against French imperialism, in which his small forces were fighting against a bigger, well-trained and well-equipped force. Under these conditions Giap developed a strategy for defeating superior opponents. This was not to simply outmanoeuvre them in the field but to undermine their resolve by inflicting demoralizing political defeats through bold and unexpected tactics. His slogan was that of Danton: “de l’audace, de l’audace et encore de l’audace!” (audacity, audacity and yet more audacity!) Nowhere was this more evident than in the Tet Offensive.
Giap was also a ruthless general. He was always prepared to take a gamble, irrespective of the cost in lives. He must have known that in conventional combat he was at a disadvantage. Whenever they had met the American forces in open battle his divisions had been hammered. In the South the War was not going well. The guerrillas, though still active, were slowly being pushed back. By September 1967 Giap concluded that the war had reached a stalemate and that something needed to be done. On the other hand Hanoi could see the growing anti-war movement in the USA. Giap decided that what was needed was a coup de grace that would break Washington’s will to continue the War.
This was the origin of the Tet offensive – a campaign of breathtaking breadth, speed and scope. It shook US imperialism to its roots and had a dramatic and lasting effect on US public opinion. He carefully planned the offensive, utilising techniques he had learned in the struggle with the French, where he had learned to approach his enemy’s strengths as if they were weaknesses to be exploited. As early as 1944, Giap sent his tiny forces against the French army in Indochina. As with the Tet Offensive, he chose a moment to attack when it was least expected: Christmas Eve. In 1954 at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, Giap lured the overconfident French into a disastrous battle and won a stunning victory by means of brilliant deployments. Now, nearly a quarter of a century later, in 1968, Giap was aiming for a quick and decisive victory to influence the result of the 1968 US Presidential campaign.
He prepared a bold offensive on two fronts. The first was to be an attack on the US Marines’ firebase at Khe Sanh. Simultaneously the NVA and the NLF would stage coordinated attacks on South Vietnam’s major cities and provincial capitals. This would present the Americans with a military dilemma. If they opted to defend Khe Sanh, they would be stretched to the limit when battles erupted all over the South. Giap had set the campaign’s minimum and maximum objectives. As a minimum the Tet outbreak would force the halting of the aerial bombardment of North Vietnam and force the Americans into negotiations. As a maximum the offensive could drive the Americans out of Vietnam all together opening up the path to liberation and unification.
The battle for Khe Sanh
The Vietnamese decided upon a daring but high-risk strategy. They worked out a plan for concerted attacks throughout South Vietnam at the start of 1968. With consummate skill and tremendous audacity, they moved large amounts of weapons, ammunition and supplies to the South for an offensive planned for the Vietnamese New Year – known as Tet. They hoped to spark a general uprising across the country.
One of the bloodiest battles in the offensive took place in Khe Sanh, where there was a small US army base. General Westmoreland believed that Giap’s troops were converging on Khe Sanh as part of the policy to seize control of the northern provinces. He was basing himself on an analogy with the battle of Dien Bien Phu. But the analogy with Dien Bien Phu was misleading. The US was in a far stronger position than the French were in 1954. In “Operation Niagra” the US had unleashed the greatest air attack in military history. B52 bombers caused tremendous losses to the Vietnamese, who suffered as many as 10,000 dead, for the loss of only 500 US marines.
The attack on Khe Sanh was linked to the overall strategy. Once the general offensive was in full swing, the over-stretched American forces would be unable to come to the help of Khe Sanh and prevent the base from being overrun. In this way, Giap might indeed have repeated his triumph of Dien Bien Phu. But that was not the central idea. Actually, the Vietnamese were not trying to re-enact Dien Bien Phu, but had organised a very successful diversion to draw the Americans away from the big towns and cities, leaving them open to attack.
Westmoreland fell into the trap prepared by Giap. As a result, the Americans were caught off guard by the rapidity and scope of the offensive. Years later a West Point textbook compared the US intelligence failure to see what was happening with the shock of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. A 1968 CIA report concluded: “The intensity, coordination and timing of the attacks were not fully anticipated,” adding that the ability of the NLF guerrillas to hit so many targets simultaneously was “another major unexpected point”
The village of Khe Sanh lay in the northwest corner of South Vietnam, close to the Laotian border just below the Demilitarised Zone. It had been garrisoned by the French during the first Indochina war and later became an important US Special Forces base. Due to its proximity to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, US artillery in Khe Sanh could shell the trail and observe NVA traffic moving southwards. In 1967, the Marines took over Khe Sanh and converted it into a large fire base, while the Special Forces moved their base to the Montagnard village of Lang Vei.
Towards the end of 1967, two NVA divisions – the 325th and the 304th – were spotted moving into the Khe Sanh area and a third was positioning itself along Route 9 where it would be able to intercept reinforcements coming in from Quang Tri. The same NVA divisions had fought at Dien Bien Phu. The message was clear and General Westmoreland had no intention of duplicating the French mistakes at Dien Bien Phu. He began to reinforce the base. By late January, some 6,000 Marines had been flown into Khe Sanh and thousands of reinforcements had been moved north of Hue.
This was just what Giap wanted them to do. The NVA continued its build-up: at least 20,000 North Vietnamese were ultimately moved in around Khe Sanh. Some estimates put the number at twice that. The White House and the US media were taken in by this stratagem. They became convinced that they were witnessing the preparations for the decisive battle of the War. Day after day Khe Sanh became lead-story. TV news reports were obsessed with Giap’s alleged replay of Dien Bien Phu. Finally, shortly before dawn on January 21st, the first attack began when the NVA attempted to cross the river running past the base.
The attack was beaten back but followed by an artillery barrage which damaged the runway, blew up the main ammunition stores, and damaged a few aircraft. Other attacks were launched against the US Special Forces at Lang Vel and against the Marines dug-in on the hills surrounding Khe Sanh. These attacks were clearly aimed at testing the defences. But the entire episode was a diversionary tactic that succeeded very well. The attention of the US commanders was concentrated on Khe Sanh, while the NVA and NLF forces were preparing an all-out offensive in South Vietnam’s cities.
The Vietnamese attack on Khe Sanh was defeated only thanks to massive aerial bombardments of NVA positions. B-52’s and strike aircraft dropped tons of bombs and napalm, with great accuracy, within a few hundred feet of Khe Sanh’s perimeter. Despite bad weather and increasing anti-aircraft fire, planes and helicopters kept dropping cargo. The battle settled down into a siege. Khe Sanh was finally relieved on April 6th. Fighting continued around Khe Sanh for a time but any hope of overrunning the base had to be abandoned. But it had served its purpose, which was to act as a feint to cover preparations for a general offensive in the South.
Preparations for the offensive
Up to this time the war had been mainly in the jungles and swamps and rural areas where the NLF guerrillas had their main base of support. They now planned and executed a bold offensive, which was aimed at penetrating South Vietnam’s supposedly impregnable urban areas. The General launched a major offensive against American and South Vietnamese forces on the eve of the Tet lunar New Year celebrations, in order to seize the element of surprise.
Whilst the attention of the world was focused on Khe Sanh, NVA and NLF regulars were also drifting into Saigon, Hue, and most of the other cities of South Vietnam. They came in small groups of twos and threes, disguised as refugees, peasants, workers, and ARVN soldiers on holiday leave. Gradually, roughly the equivalent of five battalions of NVA/NLF infiltrated Saigon without any of the ubiquitous security police noticing, or anyone informing on them. This was a considerable achievement given the sheer scale of the operation.
There was already a guerrilla network in Saigon and the other major cities, which had long stockpiled stores of arms and ammunition drawn from hit-and-run raids or bought openly on the black-market. Through contacts and spies the guerrillas had managed to store arms, ammunition and explosives in a secret location in preparation for the attack. It was common knowledge that the guerrillas on leave from their units drifted in and out of the cities. Some who were captured during the pre Tet build up were mistaken for regular holiday-makers or deserters. In the general noisy crowd of New Year merry-makers, the NLF’s secret army of infiltrators went completely unnoticed.
Weapons were brought in separately in flower carts, jury-rigged coffins, and trucks apparently filled with vegetables and rice. Tong Viet Duong, a guerrilla fighter with the National Liberation Front in Saigon describes the preparations for the Tet offensive:
“Taxis carried chrysanthemums into Saigon for the Tet market. Hidden underneath them were AK-47s. The people supported the revolution. They helped us – we were able to penetrate the security in the city. We changed our clothes and carried fake identity documents. The people of Saigon hid us in their houses.”
Tet had traditionally been a time of truce in the long war and both Hanoi and Saigon had made announcements that this year would be no different – although they disagreed about the duration. US Intelligence had gotten wind that something was brewing through captured documents and an overall analysis of recent events, but Westmoreland’s staff tended to disregard these generally vague reports. At the request of General Frederick Weyand, the US commander of the Saigon area, however, several battalions were pulled back from their positions near the Cambodian border.
General Weyand put his troops on full alert but – due to a standing US policy of leaving the security of major cities to the ARVN – there were only a few hundred American troops on duty in Saigon itself the night before the attack began. Later General Westmoreland claimed that he knew about all these preparations. All the evidence shows that he was not prepared for anything approaching the intensity of the attack that came and that he was still concentrating his attentions on the developing battle at Khe Sanh where he thought Giap would make his chief effort. In reality, the US army was taken completely off guard.
The offensive commences
On the night of 30th January 1968, the North Vietnamese army and the NLF launched the Tet Offensive. The NLF broke the truce they had made for the New Year festivities and fought its way into more than one hundred cities, including the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon. Throughout the country provincial capitals were seized, garrisons simultaneously attacked. Vietnamese irregular soldiers stormed the highland towns of Banmethout, Kontum and Pleiku, they then simultaneously invaded 13 of the 16 provincial capitals of the heavily populated Mekong Delta. The dimension and sweep of the offensive astonished US army generals, one of whom commented that tracking the assault pattern on a map was like a “pinball machine, lighting up with each raid.”
The guerrilla army even succeeded in penetrating the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Through contacts and spies the NLF had managed to store guns, ammunition and explosives at a secret location in preparation for the attack. At 3.15 am a group of guerrilla soldiers drove up to the embassy in a taxi. Within five minutes they had killed the five guards on duty and seized the building. They failed to blast their way through the main Embassy doors with anti-tank rockets and found themselves pinned-down by the Marine guards. An intense fire fight began, which lasted all morning, and ended with the bodies of all nineteen guerrillas scattered around the Embassy courtyard.
Although the damage to the Embassy was slight, this attack on “American soil” was publicized in the USA and throughout the world and had tremendous psychological significance. Other guerrilla squads attacked the Presidential Palace, the radio station, the headquarters of the ARVN Chiefs of Staff, and even Westmoreland’s own compound at Tan Son Nhut airbase. In the heavy fighting that followed, things were so bad that Westmoreland ordered his staff to find weapons and join in the defence of the compound. When the fighting was over, twenty-three Americans were dead, eighty-five were wounded and up to fifteen aircraft had suffered serious damage.
Two NVA/NLF battalions attacked the US air-base at Bien Hoa and crippled over twenty aircraft at a cost of nearly 170 casualties. They fought with great bravery. Guerrilla units fought to the death in the French cemetery and the Pho Tho race track. The suburb of Cholon became an operations base for the guerrilla attacks in Saigon and surrounding area. Fourteen guerrilla soldiers who attacked the main radio station in Saigon were under siege for 18 hours, after which they blew themselves up along with the building.
Everywhere the attacks came as a total surprise. The sheer scale and ferocity of the Tet offensive was as much of a shock to Westmoreland as it was to a stunned American public, which watched with disbelief as their South Vietnamese allies engaged in desperate hand-to-hand fighting with the guerrillas in the streets of Saigon. It took over a week of ferocious fighting to liquidate the pockets of resistance scattered around the city. The entrenched guerrillas fought against tanks, helicopter gunships, and aircraft, which blasted buildings and reduced parts of the city to rubble. Using guerrilla tactics, they fought as long as they could, and then slipped off to fight somewhere else. The radio station, factories, and a large block of low-cost public housing were flattened along with the homes of countless civilians who were forced to flee as the city dissolved into chaos.
Large areas of Saigon and Hue suddenly found themselves liberated. Guerrillas marched through the streets waving guns and proclaiming the revolution while others rounded up prepared lists of collaborators and government sympathizers. The Americans used air power to pulverize the enemy. The B-52 strikes against NV and NLF positions outside Saigon came within a few miles of the city. Even when the guerrillas were finally driven out of Saigon, they continued to put up a determined rearguard action in the surrounding government villages, forcing the US and ARVN to bomb and shell and destroy their own fortified villages, thus further alienating the rural population. A month after the beginning of the offensive, the Americans calculated the number of civilian dead at around 15,000 and the number of new refugees at anything up to two million and the fighting was still continuing.
The battle for Hue
The success of the Tet offensive varied from place to place. In some areas the attacks were beaten back in a short time, but in others there was bitter fighting. In cities like Ban Me Thuot, My Tho, Can Tho, Ben Tre, and Kontum, the insurgents entrenched themselves in the poorer neighbourhoods and stubbornly repelled efforts to push them out. By February 5th most of the fighting within Saigon was over, but it continued in Cholon until the end of the month. Although Cholon was bombed, strafed and shelled, the guerrillas held on with grim determination, and even mounted counter-offensives against the American and ARVN positions within the city. Fighting in the resort city Dalat went on until mid-February and left over 200 guerrillas dead. The total NVA/NLF death total in Saigon during the Tet offensive was nearly 1200.
However, the fiercest battle raged the ancient city of Hue, which had been captured by the insurgents and which the US army only recaptured with great difficulty. Hue was also a sacred city to the Vietnamese and the violent suppression of anti-government protests by Buddhist monks had crisis had alienated the population from the Saigon Government. The insurgents therefore found considerable support among the populace. Insurgents supported by some ten NVA battalions infiltrated Hue, the ancient Vietnamese capital, and within a few hours overrun the entire city except for the headquarters of the ARVN 3rd Division and the garrison of US advisors. Thousands of political prisoners were set free and thousands of government officials and sympathizers were rounded up and many were shot.
US Marines and ARVN counterattacked but resistance was heavy and the bitter street-by-street fighting slow and costly in lives. In the end the US forces and their allies bombarded the historic Citadel, which was ferociously defended by the insurgents backed. Then US forces crossed the Perfume River in a fleet of assault craft and on February 2Oth launched the final assault. Not until February 23rd were the insurgents finally overwhelmed. Even then, resistance in Hue continued in isolated pockets of sniper teams. The fight for Hue ended on February 25th at a cost of 119 Americans and 363 ARVN dead. American wounded during the battle for Hue came to just under a thousand, compared to slightly over 1,200 ARVN. The NVA and insurgent dead was about sixteen times that number.
The big difference in fatalities makes the battle look a one sided affair. But it wasn’t. The difference in casualty figures came largely from the heavy use of artillery and aerial bombardment to devastate NVA/NLF positions. Large sections of the ancient and revered city Hue were reduced the city to piles of rubble strewn with dead bodies. Without this, the US/ARVN casualties would have been much higher. Close to 6,000 civilians were killed, mostly by the indiscriminate bombing and shellfire and nearly 120,000 citizens of Hue had been made homeless. Those parts of Hue that escaped relatively undamaged were later wrecked by days of looting by soldiers from the original ARVN garrison, who had played no role in the fighting.
Did Tet succeed?
The Tet offensive showed a considerable degree of military preparedness, skill and bravery on the part of the Vietnamese. It shook the morale of the US army, which was forcibly made aware of its own vulnerability, and it had a profound effect on US public opinion. However, from a military point of view it must be seen as a defeat for the NLF. One of the main aims was to drive a wedge between the Americans and the South Vietnamese. The Embassy attack was aimed at showing up the vulnerability of the American forces. The NLF hoped that their liberation of towns and cities would lead to an uprising against the Americans by the South’s war-weary soldiers, discontented peasantry and rebellious youth. However this perspective did not materialise, or did so only on a sporadic basis.
It was a bold plan, but the perspective of a nationwide uprising was based on an incorrect reading of the situation. The NLF leadership expected large sections of the urban populace to rise up in revolt. But although the NLF had support in this cities and towns, its main base was the peasantry. The city dwellers of South Vietnam did not support the Saigon Government but were suspicious of the Stalinists. They generally remained inactive and the guerrillas did not get the support they expected. The mass executions of Catholics in Hue also alienated a section of the population that might otherwise have supported them.
When the offensive was over, the Americans remained in control and the NLF had suffered heavy losses. NVA/NLF dead totalled some 45,000 and the number of prisoners nearly 7000, while the Americans and South Vietnamese lost 6000. Within a matter of days they were driven from most of the positions they had conquered. This was both the high point of guerrilla actions in the war and the beginning of their decline. Since the planners of the offensive expected a people upraising, the most secret cells were ordered to emerge from clandestinity. When the offensive was defeated, cell members had to flee to the jungle. Thus, the Tet offensive ended in the destruction of much of the NLF infrastructure in the South. This was a heavy blow. After the Tet offensive, the regular North Vietnamese army did most of the fighting against the U.S.
However, the Tet Offensive brought about a different kind of turning point. It strongly influenced the opinion of the American public. For the first time in a major war, the power of television became apparent. Fifty million people watched the destruction brought on by the war. The U.S. government was no longer able to portray the war as clean, simple and easily won. Johnson and the generals had claimed the enemy was in decline. This was falsified by events. The moment Vietnamese commandos penetrated the American Embassy in Saigon, all the official propaganda crumbled to dust.
During Tet the Americans and their ARVN ally had suffered over 4,300 killed in action, some 16,000 wounded and over 1,000 missing in action. It is true that the enemy suffered far more but to an already skeptical US public this mattered little. What mattered was that the war now seemed never-ending, just like Iraq today. And just like Iraq, it no longer had any definite, realistic objective. The scenes of slaughter and devastation in Saigon, Hue, and other cities horrified the average US citizen, to whom the conflict now seemed senseless. The senselessness of it was reflected in the notorious comment of a US officer who explained the destruction of about one-third of the provincial capital of Ben Tre: “It became necessary to destroy it in order to save it“. The same words could serve pretty well as an epitaph for the invasion of Iraq.
In Washington something akin to panic reigned in high places. Congressmen were now turning on the president. On February 7, 1968 Senator Robert Kennedy, who was preparing himself to assume the mantle of his dead brother, commented:
“It is said the Viet Cong will not be able to hold the cities, and that is probably true. But they have demonstrated that despite all of our reports of progress, of government strength, and of enemy weakness, that half a million American soldiers, with 700,000 Vietnamese allies, with total command of the air, total command of the sea, backed by the huge resources and the most modern weapons, that we are unable to secure even a single city from the attacks of an enemy whose total strength is about 250,000.”
General Westmoreland, supreme commander of US forces, compared the Tet offensive to the Battle of the Bulge in World War Two where the Germans staged a desperate bid to break through the US lines before meeting an inevitable defeat. But this analogy was completely false. It was not the Vietnamese but the Americans who were heading inexorably for defeat. After the war General Giap said:
“For us, you know, there is no such thing as a single strategy. Ours is always a synthesis, simultaneously military, political and diplomatic – which is why quite clearly, the Tet offensive had multiple objectives.”
Although the Tet offensive had failed in its major objectives, it had a profound and lasting effect on the course of the war. The cost in North Vietnamese casualties was horrendous but Giap’s gambler’s throw proved to be a turning point in the War. It was a media disaster for the White House and effectively ended the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, America’s commander in chief. According to US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger:
“Henceforth, no matter how effective our action, the prevalent strategy could no longer achieve its objectives within a period or within force levels politically acceptable to the American people.”
The scale of the offensive shook President Johnson to the core. The shockwave from the fighting undermined his will to carry on. McNamara resigned as Secretary of State for Defence, a disillusioned man, and was replaced with Clark Clifford. But from subsequent statements we learn that the latter had absolutely no idea where he was going:
“I’d ask questions like when is the war going to end? Well, we don’t know. How many more men do you think we’re going to lose? Well, we really don’t know. Then I finally got down to it and said, ‘What is our plan to win the war in Vietnam?’ Turned out there wasn’t any. The plan was just to stay with it and ultimately hoping that the enemy would finally give up.”
To win even a game of chess some kind of strategy is necessary. And war – the most complicated of all equations as Napoleon called it – is far more difficult than a game of chess. A general staff needs a combination of a clear and well-defined strategy and flexible and intelligent tactics. The Americans had neither. The “strategy” outlined above in the words of Mr. Clifford (“to stay with it and ultimately hoping that the enemy would finally give up.”) is the military equivalent of the philosophy of that incorrigible bankrupt Mr. Micawber, who was always “confidently expecting that something will turn up.” This is very bad economics and even worse military doctrine.
The fall of Johnson
In 1963, when he came to power following the assassination of Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson’s approval rating was over 80%. By 1967 it had fallen to 40%. Stanley Karnow wrote: “But then came Tet – and his ratings plummeted – as if Vietnam were a burning fuse that had suddenly ignited an explosion of dissent.” By the beginning of March the popularity of the President was only about 30%, while endorsement for his handling of the war was only 6%. Like George W. Bush, his credibility had collapsed. A 1971 poll showed that 60% of Americans with college degrees were in favour of an American retreat from Vietnam. However, 75% of those with only high-school diplomas and 80% of those without any secondary education supported a retreat. This showed a sea change in the attitude of the American working class.
Even the mule-headed Texan Johnson finally understood that the war could not be won on the battlefield, and that he must negotiate. After years of bombing hell out of North Vietnam, he suddenly announced a cessation of the bombing: “I renew the offer I made last August to stop the bombardment of North Vietnam. We ask that talks begin promptly, that they be serious talks on the substance of peace.” However, despite the opening of negotiations with the North Vietnamese, US, troop levels remained at about 500,000 and the war would drag on for another five years. More American soldiers were killed after Tet than before, and the United States itself would be torn apart by the worst internal upheavals in a century.
Westmoreland was pressuring Washington for 206,000 troops to carry on the campaign in the South and even to make a limited invasion of North Vietnam just above the DMZ. As the battle for Hue died out, Johnson asked Clark Clifford to find ways and means of meeting Westmoreland’s request. Clifford consulted CIA Director Richard Helms who presented him the Agency’s pessimistic forecast. On March 4th Clifford told Johnson that the war was far from won and that more men would not make much difference.
Clifford was not alone. Johnson’s main advisors, including Generals Omar Bradley, Matthew Ridgway, and Maxwell Taylor; Cyrus Vance, Dean Acheson, and Henry Cabot Lodge, had all turned against the war. Recent CIA studies revealed that the programme to win Vietnamese “hearts and minds” was failing in forty of South Vietnam’s forty-four provinces and that the NLF’s manpower was actually twice the number that had been estimated previously.
The extreme right-wingers naturally supported the war, and condemned the Administration for not going all out for victory. But this was an increasingly minority opinion. The CIA’s gloomy reports cooled the enthusiasm of even the most hawkish members of the administration. Johnson was in a dilemma. To meet the generals’ manpower requests would mean either withdrawing American troops from Europe or calling up the active reserves. Neither option was politically feasible. Westmoreland therefore had to settle for half of the over 200,000 additional troops he was demanding.
In the first period of the war any opposition was usually seen as anti-patriotic and anti-American. But now the perception of the American public changed dramatically. Bourgeois liberals like Robert Kennedy achieved overnight popularity by speaking out against the war. Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy, an unknown standing on an anti-war ticket, challenged Johnson for the Presidential nomination. He was supported by thousands of students and young Americans opposed to the war.
At the New Hampshire Democratic primary, Johnson polled only 300 votes more than Eugene McCarthy. This was an unprecedented humiliation. Normally an incumbent President could expect to be re-elected unopposed. The result was the final nail in the coffin for the administration of Lyndon Johnson. On March 31st, Johnson went on TV to announce a bombing halt of the North and America’s willingness to meet with the North Vietnamese to seek a peace settlement. Now hopelessly demoralized, Johnson announced to an astonished world his decision not to stand again as President: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” Johnson said that would spend the rest of his term in a search for peace in Indochina.
Soon after, General Creighton Abrams replaced Westmoreland as head of US forces in Vietnam. Westmoreland was recalled to become Army Chief of Staff – theoretically a promotion, but in practice a move to get him out of the way. Westmoreland’s deputy commander, Abrams had been present at the special CIA briefing that convinced Johnson that a change of course was needed. Abrams was sent to Saigon with a mission: he was to institute a programme of “Vietnamization”, that is to say, to take all necessary measures to enable the ARVN to take on the burden of the fighting, and gradually reduce the American role to that of advisors. This is the very same tactic that they are trying to carry out in Iraq. But ever since 1965 it was quite clear that Saigon was incapable of doing the job. We now see exactly the same pattern emerging in Iraq, and the end result will also be similar.
Nixon escalates the war
The resignation of Johnson did not end the war. In fact, it was actually escalated until it spread throughout the whole of South East Asia. On May 10, 1968 the peace talks between U. S. and Vietnamese officials began in Paris. But the bloody war on the ground continued. The election of the Republican hawk Richard Nixon did nothing to improve matters The American deployment that had started with only 23,300 in 1963 rose inexorably to 184,000 in 1966 and reached a peak of 542,000 in January 1969 under Richard Nixon’s presidency. The war was now costing £30 billion a year: a huge drain of blood and gold even for the richest and most powerful country on earth. And the perception grew among Americans that it was unwinnable. The mood was turning against the war even in the American ruling class. But Richard Nixon belonged to that wing that believed that “one last push” could end the war, or at least compel North Vietnam to negotiate a settlement acceptable to Washington. This reminds one of George Bush and the notorious theory of the “surge” and of the famous remark of Karl Marx: “history repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, and the second time as farce.”
In April 1970 the armies of the U.S. and South Vietnam invaded Cambodia, alleging the presence of North Vietnamese troops on Cambodian soil. The real aim was to disrupt the flow of supplies to the NLF along the The Ho Chi Minh Trail and to intimidate Hanoi. The Trail passed through neutral Laos and Cambodia. As a result both had suffered heavy American bombing. General. William Westmoreland stated:
“Over the years Cambodia, the border area of Cambodia and Laos, were used freely by the enemy, but by virtue of the policy of my government, we could not fight the overt war or deploy troops overtly, military troops, into those countries.”
However, in practice the USA did intervene militarily against Cambodia and Laos, violating their neutrality. In particular, Cambodia was subjected to a savage air bombardment that killed large numbers of Cambodian peasants. This fact is never mentioned as one of the main causes that led to the brutality of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces when they finally entered Phnom Pen. The Americans could not, however, invade North Vietnam for fear of the Russians, as McNamara pointed out:
“On one or two occasions, the chiefs recommended U.S. military intervention in North Vietnam and stated that they recognized this might lead to Chinese and/or Soviet military response, in which case, they said, ‘We might have to consider the use of nuclear weapons.'”
Jack Valenti, aide to President Johnson, said on the same subject:
“The president was worried about China and Russia. He didn’t know … in Korea nobody thought the Chinese were going to cross the Yalu with a million men, and we were caught by surprise. And I remember time after time, when the military would suggest mining Haiphong or having er … sending in war planes to bomb Haiphong, he said, ‘Hell no,’ he said, ‘some damn aviator will drop a bomb down a Russian smokestack and then I’ve got World War III on my hands.'”
But Nixon was not concerned about such details. Like George W. Bush he was a strange combination of a narrow-minded provincial and an irresponsible adventurer. And like Bush he displayed a pig-headed determination to follow his own agenda, regardless of the consequences. The policies of Nixon and his White House clique set off a chain of events that led to a nightmare for the people of Cambodia and had serious effects inside the USA. The result was a further intensification of the anti-war movement. The invasion of Cambodia sparked off campus protests all over the USA. On November 15, 1969 250,000 people demonstrated against the war in Washington, D.C. On May 4, 1970 National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio. The killings sparked hundreds of protest activities across college campuses in the United States. At the University of New Mexico the police also used murderous violence against the protesters. More than 100 colleges were closed as a result of student demonstrations against the invasion of Cambodia.
US public opinion was further shaken by news of the infamous massacre at My Lai, where American soldiers slaughtered a hundred peasants, including women and children. Early in the morning of March 16 in 1968, a group of American soldiers entered a small village in South Vietnam. In “The My Lai massacre: An American Tragedy” Adam Silverman and Kristin Hill recall the events:
“The American soldiers shot at anything that moved, including cattle, chickens, birds and worse yet: civilians. The villagers did not offer any resistance; still the Soldiers threw hand grenades into huts, shouted orders and killed without distinction. The atrocities continued throughout the morning. Infants were killed, young children shot and women raped at gunpoint. Before long 500 civilians lay dead on the ground. But their work wasn’t finished… after this the village was set on fire. Bodies, homes, supplies, food – everything was burned.”
These events were hushed up until November 13, 1969. In March 1970 Captain Ernest Medina was charged with murder for the massacre at My Lai. This began a chain of events leading up to the My Lai Courts-Martial, ending with the conviction of Lieutenant William Calley on March 29, 1970. When the horrific facts about the My Lai massacre became known, many people’s view of the war changed fundamentally. High-ranking American officers were guilty both of the massacre and the subsequent cover-up. However, in the end only four soldiers were tried and only one of them, Calley, was convicted. This murderer of women and children did not pay a serious price for his war crimes. President Nixon pardoned him after only three years under house arrest.
This was not an isolated case. The brutal massacre of unarmed Vietnamese civilians at My Lai was just the tip of the iceberg of appalling atrocities perpetrated on the Vietnamese people by imperialism. In his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger Christopher Hitchens he writes that the U.S. Army admits to killing 10,899 enemies during operation “Speedy Express” in early 1969, but says that they only seized 784 weapons.
The myth of America’s humanitarian and civilizing mission was dealt a blow from which it never recovered. By this time, not just the American people, but also a growing section of the US ruling class had had enough of the war. Public opinion in the USA, already swinging against the War after Tet, was further alienated by the sickening callousness revealed in the court case. At this point opposition to the war was to be found not only among young people and students but also increasingly among working class Americans.
Inexorably, the USA was being sucked into a wider conflict that was spreading all over South East Asia. In February 1971 South Vietnamese and U.S. troops invaded Laos in an attempt to sever the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This resulted in a further intensification of anti-war activity. The largest demonstrations were held on April 24, 1971. In San Francisco about 300,000 people marched against the war, in Washington between 500,000 and 750,000. These were the biggest political demonstrations in the history of the United States. In December 1972 the US air force commenced its Christmas bombing of Hanoi and North Vietnam in an attempt to force the Vietnamese to the conference table. Towards the end of December the North Vietnamese announced that they would return to Paris if Nixon ended the bombing. The bombing campaign was halted and the negotiators met during the first week of January 1973.
Revolutionary implications
From a military point of view, the U.S. always enjoyed a clear superiority over the Vietnamese. They had complete command of the air and were continuously bombing the country, north and south. Theoretically, the Americans could have stayed in Vietnam for many more years. They might even have won. But in order to do so they would have needed an army of half a million soldiers, and they would have to be soldiers like Hitler’s SS. Such an army did not exist. The changing mood of the working class and the soldiers from working class families made it impossible to continue the war. If the government had had prolonged the war, it would have brought the U.S. to the brink of revolution.
A total of 2,59 million Americans were sent to fight in Vietnam. The harrowing experiences of these soldiers in Vietnam had an extremely demoralizing effect on them. From returning soldiers, first-hand knowledge of the situation in Vietnam slowly began to percolate into many ordinary working class American households, producing a change in the psychology of the working class. There was increasing sympathy for the Vietnamese people. New York Times/CBS News published the results of a poll in June 1977. The question asked was: “If the president would recommend helping Vietnam, would you want your representative in congress to approve aid for Vietnam in the form of food and medicine?” 66% answered yes, and only 29% said no.
In his book Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen describes an experiment he carried out during lectures delivered in the 1990s, when he asked the audience was asked to guess the level of education among those who opposed the Vietnam War in 1971. Most thought that 90% of college graduates were against the war, but only 60% of those with only a high-school education. The real figures are precisely the opposite. The growing opposition to the war among the American working class was the result of hard experience. Kids from poor working class homes were the overwhelming majority of those drafted to fight in Vietnam. They were the ones most likely to be killed and maimed. As in Iraq, a disproportionate number were black or Latino. Rich kids and college students could often avoid getting drafted – as the case of a certain George W. Bush shows.
The anti-war movement in the USA increasingly influenced the mood of the soldiers in Vietnam. It is one thing to fight and die for a just cause, which earns the praise and admiration of the folks back home. It is another thing entirely to risk your life and suffer daily dangers and hardships for a cause in which you no longer believe and which your fellow citizens detest. The demoralization among US troops in Vietnam is well documented. Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr. wrote in The Collapse of the Armed Forces shortly after the US withdrawal from Vietnam:
“The morale, discipline and fighting condition of the armed forces are, with a few exceptions, lower than ever this century and perhaps lower than ever in the history of the United States. In every possible way, the armed forces still in Vietnam are on the brink of collapse. Separate units avoid or refuse battle, kill their officers, are full of drugs and are without enthusiasm when not on the verge of mutiny.
“Although no high ranking officer (especially not while on duty) could openly make a similar assessment, the conclusions… above are almost unanimously backed up by a number of anonymous interviews with high and midlevel commanding officers. As they are by lower ranking officers in all positions.
“In Vietnam the after troops of an army of 500,000 men, formerly the best army ever sent to battle by the U.S., are trying to retreat from a nightmare-like war that they feel has been dumped upon them by smart civilians. Civilians now at universities in America, are writing books about the stupidity of the whole venture.
“One American soldier, stationed at Cu Chi, is cited in the New York Times. He speaks of ‘separate companies for soldiers refusing to fight. It is no longer a big deal to simply refuse to participate in battle. If a soldier is sent somewhere he no longer bothers to go to the trouble of refusing. He’ll simply pack his shirt and goes off to visit a friend at another base. Many guys don’t even wear their uniforms any more… The American garrisons at the larger bases are in effect disarmed. Professional soldiers confiscate their weapons and lock them up.’
“Could this be common or even true? The answer is unfortunately yes. By now “fragging” is the preferred expression among soldiers for murder or attempted murder of authoritarian, unpopular, or aggressive officers. When officers are reported dead there is cheering in the trenches or at the movie-theaters of some regiments.
“In the underground GI publication “GI Says” a reward of $10,000 is offered for killing lieutenant colonel Weldon Honeycutt, shortly after the costly attack at Hamburgar Hill in mid 1969, which was led and initiated by Honeycutt.
“The issue of combat refusal, an official euphemism for refusing battle and the worst crime a soldier can commit, recently surfaced again when Troop B of the First cavalry at the Laotian border refused to retrieve their captain’s commanding vehicle containing communication devices, codes and secret orders. Yet, as early as 1969 a whole company at 196 Light Infantry Brigade officially sat down in the middle of a battlefield. Later that year another unit from the famous First Air Cavalry Division refused – on air on CBS television – to advance on a dangerous footpath.
“Search and evade (when a unit silently avoids battle) is practically a principle by now. The GI expression for this is “CYA (cover your ass) and get home”. That the practice of search-and-evade hasn’t gone unnoticed by the enemy is emphasized by the fact that the Viet Cong delegation at the peace negotiations in Paris stated that: ‘Communist units in Indochina have been told not to attack American units unless provoked’.”
American soldiers were killing their own officers. This practice gave rise to a new word in the English language: “fragging”, derived from “fragmentation bomb.” An unofficial web page of the US military police gives the following estimate of the number of victims:
“Between 1969 and 1973, there was an increased incidence of fragging, says the historian Terry Anderson from Texas A&M University. The U.S. Army does not have any exact statistics on how many officers were killed in this manner. But they do know of at least 600 cases of confirmed fragging and another 1400 where officers died under suspicious circumstances. As a result of this, the U.S. Army was not at war with the enemy in the beginning of 1970. They were at war with themselves.”
This was the main reason why US imperialism was compelled to abandon the war in Vietnam. If they had continued, there could have been revolutionary consequences in the USA itself. The imperialists therefore drew the conclusion and threw in the towel. On January 23, 1973 the United States, South Vietnam, and North Vietnam signed the Paris Peace Accords, ending America’s combat role in Vietnam. The U.S. military draft was ended and five days later a cease-fire went into effect. By the end of March the last of the U.S. combat troops left Vietnam. The war was really over at this point, although the puppet regime in Saigon clung to power for almost another two years. But deprived of American military backing, it was doomed.
The fall of Saigon
Nixon, who was increasingly showing signs of mental instability, looked out of control. The Establishment therefore organized a legal coup d’etat to remove him from power in August 1974, using the Watergate scandal as a convenient excuse to get rid of him. The US ruling class was now looking for some face-saving formula to cut their losses and get out of Vietnam as painlessly as possible. But in the end they were forced to withdraw under the most humiliating circumstances.
On April 21, 1975 Thieu resigned as South Vietnamese President. The rats were already leaving the sinking ship. Just over a week later, on April 30, tanks of the NLF smashed their way through the gates of the presidential palace, the heart of the US-backed Saigon government. The United States finally extricated itself from Vietnam in conditions of incredible chaos, panic and confusion. In a final indignity, the US diplomatic staff had to escape in helicopters from the roof of the embassy in Saigon. All afternoon American helicopters – Chinooks, Hueys, Jolly Green Giants – wheeled above, landing precariously on the tops of high buildings to take off Vietnamese and other evacuees. In an article entitled “US abandons Saigon to Communists”, The Guardian‘s correspondent in Saigon Martin Woollacott reported on Wednesday April 29, 1975:
“More than 80 helicopters ferried the remaining Americans as well as thousands of Vietnamese, including former Vice-President Ky, to an armada of ships in the South China Sea. Pilots were fished out of the water as they ditched their helicopters to make room for more on the landing pad. Thousands more Vietnamese were evacuated in boats form Vung Tau and others left by plane for Thailand and the Philippines. The final departure came on the orders of Washington and at the insistence of President Duong Van Minh. Early this morning a helicopter with 11 US Marines helping in the evacuation finally took off after being delayed by a burst of small arms fire in the US Embassy.”
The Guardian reporter continued:
“The way the Americans went was a spectacle in itself. It is a long time since Vietnam has seen so many helicopters, and they swept in at speed, with Phantoms flying overhead. Orange and red flare smoke mushroomed up from the American Embassy and other pick-up points for US personnel.
“The evacuation was a fantastic scene as the choppers roared in against a grey and leaden sky, sometimes as many as two dozen visible at once from Central Saigon, and the air was filled with the mutter of their blades.
“General Cao Van Vien, Chief of the General Staff, and other senior officers and politicians were reported to have left the city aboard American helicopters, as the North Vietnamese close in for the kill they now seem intent on making.”
Nobody knew whether or not the NLF troops would storm the capital. There were rumours that the Provisional Revolutionary Government and the new Saigon Administration had reached agreement to call a cease-fire. But nobody could confirm or deny anything. The city awaited its fate. Everybody knew that the war was now over and the American occupation in its last death-throes.
The Quislings in Saigon now no doubt regretted the day when they accepted the advice of Richard Nixon to “hang on” in the hope of getting a better deal. Now the only deal open to them was a bumpy ride in an American helicopter and an uncertain future in foreign exile. In a desperate attempt to salvage something from the wreckage, the old regime elected a new leader, President Duong Van Minh, who offered to negotiate. But the time for negotiations had long since passed. Now everything would be settles by force of arms, and the Saigon regime had no arms to use.
Lenin explains that the state in the last analysis is armed bodies of men. And the old state was disintegrating before one’s very eyes. Order was breaking down and chaos reigned as police and militia disappeared from the streets. Amidst scenes of indescribable panic, hundreds of Vietnamese who had collaborated with the occupying forces and the old regime struggled to get into the American embassy. ARVN soldiers roamed the city, destroying property and looting.
The Provisional Revolutionary Government naturally rejected the cease-fire and negotiations offer made by President Minh. Why should they, when all the cards were now in their hands? “At the very least they want Saigon down on its knees,” a Western diplomat said before leaving, “they want to see those M16s stacked up in a surrender.” This task was now not very difficult. The demoralized ARVN soldiers were utterly unable to fight. Most threw their weapons away and ran for their lives or else turned their coats and joined the NLF.
The objective of warfare, as Clausewitz explained long ago, is to disarm the enemy and make him submit to your will.. The only task that remained for the NLF was to liquidate what little was left of the ARVN forces and organize a new state power in Saigon. But such a state in the given conditions would necessarily be modelled on the lines of Stalinist North Vietnam.
One diplomat responsible for evacuating American and Vietnamese – tidying up after- was reported as saying: “I feel like someone with a dustpan and broom,” one said, “but at least we’re trying to fulfil our last obligations.” That is a fairly accurate comment. All that was left after twenty years of American policy in Indo-China was so much useless waste to be swept up as tidily as possible. The US imperialists doubtless fulfilled its obligations to those collaborators fortunate enough to be evacuated to more or less comfortable destinations in the USA. This would apply to the top echelons, but the rest were abandoned unceremoniously to their fate.
After 28 years of war, US imperialism was finally forced out of Vietnam in the most humiliating circumstances imaginable. The fall of Saigon marked the official end to a war. After the expenditure of $150,000 millions and the loss of 50,000 American lives, the USA had been defeated by a small Asian country of poor peasants. The most powerful army in the world was forced to flee from Vietnam with its tail between its legs. What did they leave behind?
The aftermath
“And when they have created a wilderness, they call it Peace” (Tacitus)
The defeat of US Imperialism in Vietnam was a most progressive development and one that was enthusiastically welcomed by the workers of the world and by the Marxist Tendency. It permitted the north and south to reunify and allowed the Vietnamese people to determine their own fate. But a decade of brutal war had reduced Vietnam to rubble, its cities bombed, its industries destroyed, its agriculture, transport and infrastructure dislocated. Most of its largely agrarian population of 82 million remains poor with per capita income hovering around $550 (£288) a year. The expropriation of the landlords and capitalists was a great step forward, although the new regime had nothing in common with the regime of workers’ democracy established by Lenin and Trotsky in Russia after 1917. It was a totalitarian bureaucratic caricature modelled on Stalinist Russia. Nevertheless, thanks to the advantages of a nationalised planned economy, Vietnam made a remarkable recovery from the devastation of war.
Perhaps worst of all was the heritage of chemical war that the US waged against the Vietnamese people. During the Vietnam War, 80 million litres of herbicides with high concentrations of dioxin, known as Agent Orange, were repeatedly sprayed over 12 percent of the rainforest and mangroves of South Vietnam in an attempt to destroy the foliage that provided cover for the Vietcong guerrillas. The inheritors of this chemical war are thousands of Agent Orange children, victims of the poison clouds their parents inhaled. Recent research has linked Agent Orange to a third generation. The Vietnam War is long over, but its toxic legacy is still poisoning the food chain in “hot spots” close to former US bases, causing cancers and birth deformities. Writing in The Guardian thirty years later, Tom Fawthrop writes:
“Tran Anh Kiet, whose feet, hands and limbs are twisted, lives an hour away from Ho Chi Minh City, in Cu Chi district. He is 21, but his body appears to belong to a 15-year-old, and he has a mental age of around six. He has to be spoon-fed and his attempts at speech are confined to grunts.
“Today in Vietnam there are 150,000 children like Kiet, whose parents believe their birth defects are the result of exposure to Agent Orange during the war, or the consumption of dioxin-contaminated food and water since 1975. A further 800,000 Vietnamese are reported to be suffering from dioxin- related diseases, including various cancers.”
Who is responsible for these atrocities? In the first place the US government and armed forces, in the second place the big US companies that supplied these poisonous agents and made fortunes out of them. Yet thirty years later, the USA refuses to accept responsibility for the consequences of chemical warfare. Not long ago a lawsuit was launched in the US courts, accusing chemical companies of complicity in war crimes and demanding compensation. A US judge ruled against the Vietnamese. Meanwhile, two of the companies concerned, Monsanto and Dow Chemical, have been allowed to set up branch offices in Ho Chi Minh City, in line with Vietnam’s desire to attract foreign investors.
Today Vietnam faces a new threat – the threat of capitalist restoration, which is already far advanced in China. Department stores sell French perfumes and Italian shoes to an emerging urban Vietnamese middle class. A French-owned five-star hotel has opened across the street from the US consulate. Even in the annual victory parade some floats, sponsored by Vietnamese banks, sport the logo of American credit card companies. US warships are allowed to visit Vietnamese ports. In Ho Chi Minh City, the renamed capital, a new elite of Vietnamese businessmen is enjoying the good life in trendy bars and restaurants, toasting business success and the new market economy. The privately owned businesses are engaged in the ruthless exploitation of the workers, just as they do now in Russia and China.
The United States has now become Vietnam’s single-largest trading partner. US imperialism may yet achieve through trade and investment what it failed to achieve with bombs and napalm. Was it for this that the workers and peasants of Vietnam fought with such inspiring heroism and defeated the mightiest imperialist power the world has ever seen? Will they allow the bureaucracy to privatise the economy and, like China, lead Vietnam back to capitalism? Or will the working class fight against the pro-capitalist elements and lead Vietnam onto the road of genuine Leninist socialism, based on the democratic control and administration of the working people themselves? This question has not yet been answered by history. It is our fervent hope that it will be the second variant and not the first. The working people of Vietnam deserve no less!
In the early hours of 31stJanuary 1968, 70,000 North Vietnamese soldiers, together with guerrilla fighters of the NLF, launched one of the most daring military campaigns in history. The Tet Offensive was the real turning point in the Vietnam War. On its 40thanniversary, Alan Woods analyses the events that led to the Vietnam War and the significance of the Tet Offensive in bringing about the defeat of US imperialism, and draws some parallels with Iraq.
The Vietnamese call it “Chien Tranh Chong My Curu Nuoc” or “The War against the Americans to save the nation.” In the course of this war, some 58,000 US soldiers were killed in action, as well as 304,000 wounded. But these figures pale in insignificance beside the horrific casualties suffered by the Vietnamese. Almost 1,400,000 North and South Vietnamese were killed in action.
To this we must add 2,100,000 wounded. It was one of the bloodiest wars in history, and one that took a particularly high toll of civilian lives. The total number of Vietnamese people killed in this conflict will never be known but was probably not fewer than three million, and the total number of casualties not fewer than 8 million.
The number of American soldiers in Vietnam rose from 23,300 in 1963 to 184,000 in 1966. In January 1969 the total number of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam reached its peak – 542,000. Despite this the U.S. Army was unable to subdue Vietnam. This was the first time in history that the USA has been defeated in a war (Korea was a draw).
In August 1963 the new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, ordered the first bombing of North Vietnam, operation “Rolling Thunder”. The purpose was to break the Vietnamese will to struggle through “shock and awe”. The number of bombs dropped over Vietnam in this campaign alone was greater than the total dropped during the entire Second World War: the equivalent of roughly 15 kilograms of bombs for every man, woman and child in Vietnam. Chemical weapons defoliated 10 percent of the country’s surface.
But the numbers of dead and wounded do not tell the whole story. The country was devastated by years of carpet-bombing. Thousands of square miles were laid waste. Billions of dollars were wasted. Thousands of acres of forest were destroyed by the dropping of poisonous chemicals by the US air force (“defoliants”). This, in plain English, is known as chemical warfare. Many US soldiers developed serious illnesses through contact with these chemical agents. But for a huge number of Vietnamese it meant generations of deformed babies, miscarriages, cancers and all manner of hideous illnesses.
The origins of the war
The origins of the Vietnam War were rooted in the long and bitter struggle of the Vietnamese people against French colonial rule. In 1932 the puppet Bao Dai returned from France to reign as emperor of Vietnam under the French. Ho Chi Minh and his followers set up the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930. Its main purpose was to fight against French colonial rule, and it always had a heavy nationalist element. As in China, the struggle for social emancipation was inseparably linked to the struggle for freedom from foreign rule.
The Second World War threw everything into the melting pot. In September 1940 Japanese troops occupied Indochina, but allow the French to continue their colonial administration of the area. Japan’s move into southern part of Vietnam in July 1941 sparked an oil boycott by the U.S. and Great Britain. The resulting oil shortage pushed Japan to risk war against the U.S. and Britain. The result was Pearl Harbour and the declaration of war by the USA.
The policy of the USA was dictated by its ambition to dominate Asia and the Pacific. This strategic aim meant that not only Japan but the old imperial powers (Britain and France) also had to be ejected. Washington’s policy after 1945 was dictated by this goal. It is the reason for the apparent friendliness of Washington to Ho Chi Minh at that time. In fact the Americans helped to save his life. In 1945 the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) parachuted a team into his jungle camp in northern Vietnam to treat Ho, who was seriously ill with malaria and other tropical diseases.
In August, 1945 Japan surrendered and the French colonialists returned to reclaim their former possessions. The Vietnamese resisted and a long period of anti-colonial struggle commenced. Ho Chi Minh established the Viet Minh, a guerrilla army, which overthrew Bao Dai in a general uprising. On September 2, 1945 Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam independent after 80 years of colonialism under French rule and established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh attempted to negotiate the end of colonial rule with the French, but without success. French imperialism had no intention of giving up Vietnam. A bitter struggle began, in which the country was divided north and south. The French army shelled Haiphong harbour, killing over 6,000 Vietnamese civilians, and open war between France and the Viet Minh commenced.
By this time the Cold War between the U.S.A and Russia had begun. The Chinese Revolution alerted the USA to the danger of “Communism” in Asia. Washington therefore recognized Boa Dai’s regime as legitimate, and began to subsidize the French in Vietnam. On the other hand, Mao, having won the civil war in 1949, began to supply weapons to the Viet Minh. In the end, the U.S. was bearing half of the cost of France’s war effort in Vietnam. But to no avail. The French imperialists were decisively defeated in the celebrated battle of Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954. Despite substantial American backing, the French finally lost control of their Vietnamese colony. They suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the army of Vo Nguyen Giap, Supreme Commander of the Vietminh. Later Giap was to comment:
“The Dien Bien Phu campaign was a huge victory. It was the first time a poor feudal nation had beaten a great colonial power that had a modern industry and a massive army. The victory meant a lot, not just to us, but to people all over the world.”
The French-Indochina War was at an end. After the humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the French were forced to leave Vietnam after a century of colonial rule. The Geneva Conference on Indochina declared a demilitarised zone at the 17th parallel with the North under the rule of the Vietnamese Stalinists and the South under the leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem.
This division of the country into two halves was supposed to be temporary.
The Vietnamese Communist Party could have easily taken power after Dien Bien Phu. But Stalin, fearing a direct conflict with the USA, put pressure on Ho Chi Minh to agree to a settlement by which the Stalinists would be given the northern part of the country and the French to the South pending the holding of general elections, which would decide who would rule the country.
The beginnings of US intervention
The power that succeeded the French was the United States. US imperialism was already intervening in Vietnam in the 1950s. In June 1954 the CIA established a military mission in Saigon. The same year Bao Dai selected Ngo Dinh Diem, the future dictator, as prime minister of his government. The new regime in North Vietnam modelled itself on the Stalinist regimes in China and Russia. The North Vietnamese embarked on a policy of radical land reforms. The landlords were expropriated and imprisoned. This was unacceptable to Washington, which was embarked on a worldwide confrontation with “Communism”.
It was agreed that countrywide elections would be held in 1956. But America opposed the elections, so they never took place. In his book Mandate for ChangePresident Eisenhower later said that he thought Ho Chi Minh would have obtained 80% of the vote if free elections had been held. General Andrew Goodpastor, aide to President Eisenhower, stated:
“It was felt that the elections could not be free in the North in particular. I would say that was part of it. The other was a sense that even if free elections were held, they probably would be dominated by the Communists and the Communists would gain control.”
This expresses with admirable clarity the conception of democracy held by US imperialism. Elections are very good, as long as they serve to elect governments that are friendly to the United States. But if they do not, they are not to be recommended. This has been the philosophy of Washington ever since. Having deliberately split the country in half, the United States underwrote the vicious dictatorship of President Diem in South Vietnam, a fanatical anti-communist. Diem ruthlessly suppressed any opposition. But Washington nevertheless backed him as a “democrat”.
The decision not to hold elections made war inevitable. The Americans pumped vast economic and military resources into South Vietnam in order to build a puppet state in South Vietnam just as they are doing today in Iraq. The South Vietnamese generals became over-confident as a result of American support. They decided to attack North Vietnam. In 1956 fighting began between the North and the South. The first American combat deaths in Vietnam occurred in 1959 when Vietnamese guerrillas attacked Bien Hoa billets, killing two US servicemen. But the combat only commenced in earnest in the following decade.
In 1960, National Liberation Front (known to its enemies as the “Viet Cong”) was set up by Hanoi in order to fight Diem and to unite the country. This was supported by Moscow. The NLF fighters were making gains in the countryside in the South. In order to cut off the guerrillas from the peasants, Diem’s troops burned entire villages to the ground. The inhabitants were moved into fortified “strategic hamlets,” built under the supervision of American advisers. This policy was carried out with brutal coercion and was extremely unpopular with the peasants, who flocked to the ranks of the guerrillas.
The reasons why the USA became involved in Vietnam had nothing to do with “democracy”, as its actions clearly show. It was dictated by the defence of imperialist interests and strategic questions such as the need to contain Russia and China and halt the advance of “Communism” in Asia. As early as 1954 the article “Why is the US risking a war in Indochina” was published on April 4, 1954 in the “U.S. News and World Report”. The article stated:
“One of the richest areas in the world will be open to the victor in Indochina. This is what lies behind the growing U.S. interest… pewter, rubber, rice, strategic key primary produce are the true reasons for this war. The U.S. considers this an area in which to maintain control – by any means necessary.”
In Washington the fear grew that Vietnam would fall, causing a “domino effect” throughout Asia. Robert McNamara, U.S. secretary of defence at the time, explained:
“The objective was to prevent the dominoes from falling. The loss of Vietnam would trigger the loss of Southeast Asia, and conceivably even the loss of India, and would strengthen the Chinese and the Soviet position across the world.”
In 1961 President John F. Kennedy was elected. As a Democrat, some supposed that he would favour a more peaceful foreign policy. Nowadays, it has become fashionable to paint Kennedy as a progressive and a man of peace. But this is in flagrant contradiction to the facts. Within a year of his election, he backed the invasion of Cuba, which ended in the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba. Smarting from the effects of this humiliation, Kennedy set out to show the strength of US imperialism in Asia.
The first stages of US military involvement in Vietnam were extremely limited and cautious. The U.S. military build-up in Vietnam began with combat advisors. These advisers were initially sent to train the South Vietnamese army in counterinsurgency. However, President Kennedy declared that they would respond if fired upon. They encouraged the use of brutal methods against the insurgents, in which Diem’s troops were already fairly proficient. Indeed, violence was the normal weapon used to prop up a brutal and unpopular regime against its own people. All this was justified by Washington with its customary cynicism. Speaking on May 23, 1962, Robert McNamara said:
“The actions of the ruler, President Diem, have been declared autocratic and perhaps his personal actions are to some degree, but one realizes the chaos he faced, the complete anarchy that existed there, it’s conceivable that autocratic methods within a democratic framework were required to restore order.”
But these “autocratic methods within a democratic framework” were not so popular in Saigon as in Washington. There was a growing opposition. South Vietnamese protesters organized a wave of demonstrations. In the summer of 1963 Buddhist monks burnt themselves to death, in protest at Diem’s religious intolerance. The discontent spread to the tops of the army, where a group of generals plotted a coup against Diem. Washington knew all about the coup but did nothing to stop it, hoping for a stronger pro-US regime in Saigon. It was clear to Washington that the South Vietnamese army could not defeat the guerrillas and this forced America to launch a direct military intervention in Vietnam. As in Iraq, the imperialists were over-confident. According to McNamara, they expected to withdraw the force of 16,000 military advisers by the end of 1965, and that the first unit of withdrawal would be completed within 90 days, by the end of December 1963. Not for the first or last time, the imperialists had miscalculated badly.
On November 1, 1963, the government was overthrown by a group of dissident generals. Diem was murdered by his own soldiers. The people of Saigon came out onto the streets to celebrate Diem’s overthrow. Within three weeks of Diem’s murder, President Kennedy was himself assassinated. His replacement, Lyndon Johnson, was a virulent anti-communist and like Kennedy, totally committed to pursuing the war in Vietnam. Direct military American intervention in Vietnam began in the same year with the declared aim of stopping the South falling into “communist” hands. In August, Lyndon Johnson, who had taken over the American presidency in the wake of the assassination, ordered the first air strikes on the North.
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident
On May 4, 1964 a trade embargo was imposed on North Vietnam. This was a notable stepping up of hostilities. It is sometimes said that trade embargoes are a more satisfactory alternative to war, but in fact, if they are to be effective, trade embargoes usually lead to war. This was no exception.
In South Vietnam, the NLF now had 170,000 men and women in the field. They could move and operate throughout most of the country. They were able to stage attacks in the heart of Saigon whenever they liked. Tran Bach Dang, an activist of the National Liberation Front in Saigon recalled:
“People were fighting back. We would establish contacts with them, and guide them. The protest movement of students and intellectuals, including Catholics and Buddhists, was widespread. When people saw that our methods were effective, they would join us.”
The rottenness of the bourgeois regime in Saigon was clear to all. The government was in a constant state of crisis. One coup followed another. The uninterrupted rise and fall of ministers, each as unpopular and corrupt as the last, was a symptom of the impasse of the regime. Without US support, it would not have lasted one week.
Johnson increased the US military presence in Vietnam. He sent Gen. William Westmoreland, a veteran of Korea and World War II, to take charge of military operations. Johnson was determined to take the American military intervention in Vietnam to a qualitatively different level. But in order to convince the US public of the need for drastic action in South East Asia, Johnson needed an excuse. He found it in the so-called Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which served the same purpose as Pearl Harbour or the 11th September – a causus belli – an excuse for war.
In August 1964, an American destroyer, the USS Maddox, on patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin, exchanged fire with North Vietnamese torpedo boats. President Johnson issued instructions that in the event of a further attack upon US vessels in “international waters” they were to respond with the objective of destroying the attackers. Two days later, the ship’s captain thought he was again coming under attack. But one of the pilots was not so sure. In a television interview, Vice Admiral James Stockdale, who was a pilot at Tonkin, made the following statement:
“Well, I was over that … those destroyers for over an hour and a half, below a thousand feet, lights off, watching everything they did. I could hear ’em chit-chatting on the radio, the Maddox and the Joy, they seemed to have some intermittent radar targets. I took it upon myself to get out there where they thought the boat was and try to kill it if they didn’t. But it was fruitless … and I’d go down there and there was nothing.”
Ignoring the conflicting evidence, the Pentagon insisted there had been a second attack. On August 5, 1964, the U.S. secretary of defence stated:
“In retaliation for this unprovoked attack on the high seas, our forces have struck the bases used by the North Vietnamese patrol craft.”
This was a clear provocation. There was no Vietnamese attack on a US warship. But Johnson used the Tonkin Gulf incident to push a resolution through Congress allowing the president to wage war in Vietnam. On August 7, 1964 Congress approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which allowed the president to take any necessary measures to repel further attacks and to provide military assistance to any South Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) member. Senators Wayne L. Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska cast the only dissenting votes. President Johnson ordered the bombing of North Vietnam. On March 8-9, 1965 the first American combat troops arrived in Vietnam.
Moscow and Beijing
The war was a battle between, on the one side, the most powerful and wealthiest country in the world, and on the other side, a barefoot guerrilla army armed with weapons left over from World War Two. North Vietnam was a poor agricultural country with virtually no industry. Ho Chi Minh was therefore obliged to seek aid from China and the Soviet Union. Moscow agreed to increase military aid to the North Vietnamese. Three weeks after the marines landed, forces of the NLF bombed the American Embassy in Saigon. Johnson blamed China for these attacks. On May 13, 1965 he said:
“Their [China’s] target is not merely South Vietnam – it is Asia. Their objective is not the fulfilment of Vietnamese nationalism, it is to erode and to discredit America’s ability to help prevent Chinese domination over all of Asia.”
There was not a shred of evidence for this accusation. As a matter of fact, it was the Soviet Union and not China that was now supplying most aid to the Vietnamese. North Vietnamese pilots were being trained in the Soviet Union, which was also providing money and arms to Hanoi. Moscow was looking for an advantage over the USA in Asia, and at the same time was anxious to stop Vietnam from falling under the influence of China. This was the period of the Sino-Soviet split in which two rival Stalinist bureaucracies confronted each other and vied for influence in the world “communist” movement.
The Soviet Union gave considerable aid to North Vietnam. Moscow sent missiles to North Vietnam. And more than a thousand Soviet advisers worked on air defences against the Americans. This was a serious factor limiting the possibilities for US aggression against the North. However the scale of this aid was adversely affected by growing tensions between the Russian and Chinese Bureaucracies, which were then engaged in a bitter struggle dictated by the narrow nationalist interests of both sides. Fyodor Mochulski, deputy Soviet ambassador to China comments:
“The Chinese demanded that we hand over all military equipment for Vietnam on the Soviet-Chinese border and that China in its turn would pass it on to the Vietnamese. We discovered later that the Chinese weren’t handing everything over. Some of the equipment they unloaded for themselves.”
This view is supported by Igor Yershov, Soviet military adviser to Vietnam:
“What surprised me was that we could send the newest anti-aircraft missiles to Egypt, a capitalist country, but not to Vietnam. Our commanders used to say that it was because there was a danger they would fall into the hands of the Chinese.”
Operation Rolling Thunder
In March 1965 the first American ground troops landed at Da Nang. The first major military engagement between U.S. and North Vietnamese forces occurred on November 14-16, 1965. The USA was being inexorably sucked into a major war on the Asian mainland. Like Bush at the start of the invasion of Iraq, Johnson and his generals were suffering from delusions of grandeur. They made the mistake of exaggerating their own power and underestimating that of the enemy. They imagined that the mere appearance of the U.S. Marines in Vietnam would terrify the enemy into surrendering. This was a bad mistake. Johnson’s optimistic assessment of the situation in South Vietnam – which closely resembles that of George W. Bush in relation to Iraq – was rapidly falsified by events. The military situation worsened by the day.
In June, a military outpost at Dong Suay was destroyed. An elite South Vietnamese regiment was decimated, and there were many civilian casualties. McNamara returned to Vietnam to reassess the war. A mere glance at the situation was enough to convince him that without the commitment of massive American forces, the puppet government of South Vietnam was doomed. General Westmoreland feared that South Vietnam would be cut in two. The first major battle of the war was fought out in the Ia Drang valley in the Central Highlands. It showed the tremendous fighting capacities of the Vietnamese. The Americans defeated the North Vietnamese at Ia Drang, but casualties were heavy: 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers were killed; and 300 elite American infantry died in the battle. General Vo Nguyen Giap, the commander of the North Vietnamese Forces, commented:
“The battle at Ia Drang was our first big victory. We concluded that we could fight the Americans and win. The key thing was to force the Americans to fight the way we wanted – that is, hand to hand.”
The NLF forces launched an attack on Pleiku airbase in which eight Americans were killed and a hundred more were wounded. Johnson responded by launching Operation Rolling Thunder, a massive campaign of bombing against the North. He hoped it would boost Southern morale and force Ho Chi Minh to the negotiating table. The North was supplying the guerrilla forces in the South through the famous Ho Chi Minh Trail. This complex network of tracks linked the North with the South through the impenetrable jungles of Central Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The Vietnamese, displaying great courage, carried supplies along this trail day and night, constantly changing their tactics to keep ahead of the enemy. One driver on the Trail, Kim Nuoc Quang, recalls the extremely dangerous conditions in which they worked:
“One night we counted 14 cannons firing, reddening and lightening the whole sky with explosions. It was like fireworks night in Hanoi. We were constantly driving through bullets and smoke.”
It was the inability of the US army to inflict a serious defeat on the Vietnamese on the ground that led Johnson to step up the massive bombing of the North, although he occasionally ceased the bombing to “encourage” the North Vietnamese to negotiate. But all these stratagems failed. The war continued.
All history shows that bombing alone will not win a war. Hitler’s bombing of British cities did not force Britain to surrender, but only increased the hatred and bitterness of the British people against Nazi Germany. The same process occurred in North Vietnam. In the end, as was predictable, the USA was compelled to commit a large force of ground troops to stop the collapse of the puppet regime in Saigon, which otherwise would have been a foregone conclusion. As McNamara stated:
“It became more and more clear that President Johnson was going to have to choose between losing South Vietnam or trying to save it by introducing U.S. military force and taking over a major part of the combat mission.”
Guerrilla war
Quite early on, the Americans gave up the idea of defending territory, and instead used their superior mobility to launch so-called search and destroy missions. These left behind a bloody trail of death and destruction, of burning villages and dead peasants and livestock. The forces that claimed to be “saving” South Vietnam were systematically destroying it. And this fact, far from weakening the guerrilla forces, only served to strengthen them. This is also true in Iraq.
The French revolutionary leader Robespierre once said that nobody likes missionaries with bayonets. The American soldiers were told then that they had gone to South Vietnam to fight communism, just as the American soldiers are now told that they have been sent to Iraq to fight for democracy. But just as in Iraq today, so in Vietnam the American soldiers met hostility from those they were supposed to be helping.
Mao Zedong said that the guerrilla must learn how to swim among the people like a fish in water. The support of the population is the first and most important conditions for the success of the guerrillas. It is in the nature of a guerrilla war that it is difficult to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. The guerrilla fighters strike suddenly and then melt away into the general population. As in Iraq, so in Vietnam, American troops found it impossible to tell which Vietnamese were friends and which were enemies. The potential is therefore always present for abuses and atrocities against civilians. This in turn tends to drive the population still more firmly into the arms of the guerrillas.
Any army is made up of contradictory elements, like society itself. The officer caste must maintain discipline and keep the killing spirit alive among the troops. In the concrete conditions of a guerrilla war, where the front lines are blurred and the enemy is mixed up with the population, the troops must be hardened to the idea of killing civilians. The American troops in Vietnam were told not to worry too much about who was killed: “if it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC.” That was they were told. The inevitable result was that a lot of civilians who were not guerrilla fighters were killed. This stoked the fires of resentment against the occupying forces.
Despite steadily increasing numbers of American troops in Vietnam, the guerrilla operations continued without a break. In response to the American troop build-up, Hanoi sent thousands of North Vietnamese to join the guerrilla fighters in the South. What the Pentagon thought would be a relatively easy and quick operation turned out to be a protracted and bloody conflict.
In general a guerrilla army involved in a war of national liberation has a great advantage over the occupying forces. They are willing to die. This weapon is potentially far more potent than the most sophisticated modern weapons. This was true in Vietnam and it remains true in Iraq today. What the military planners in the Pentagon could not understand is that when an entire people stands up and says no, no force on earth can force them to submit. This was the lesson the British learned in India and the French had to learn the hard way in Algeria and Dien Bien Phu. The Americans are still learning the same lesson in Iraq. They should have paid more attention to the experience in Vietnam, or even to their own history. After all, the United States itself was born out of a revolutionary war of independence that pitted farmers with hunting muskets against the might of the British army. The latter was one of the most powerful army in the world at the time, but in the end the farmers won.
In many ways the guerrilla struggle in Vietnam has echoes of the present war in Iraq. Just listen to the memories of a former guerrilla fighter, Tong Viet Duong, from the National Liberation Front, Saigon:
“At 8 o’clock in the morning of March 23rd, we hit them. Our artillery destroyed aircraft. We killed not only some guards, but also the American quartermaster. Our commando unit also attacked the police training school. We killed many trainee police officers whilst they were watching a movie.”
In an attempt to justify their brutal rape of Vietnam, the apologists of US imperialism frequently refer to the alleged cruelty of the NLF. It is true that any civil war or national liberation struggle is characterised by cruelty. Let us remind ourselves that there was no lack of savagery displayed in the American Civil War. In part this reflects the conditions of a kind of warfare where there is no clearly defined boundaries, no definite front line, no rules of engagement, no rights and no law. It is a war that most often takes place in the midst of a civilian population.
Furthermore, the guerrilla forces are fighting against a vastly superior professional army in conditions of extreme inferiority. The US forces had all the paraphernalia of modern high-tech warfare. The Vietnamese had to rely on the most primitive methods, such as concealed pits with sharp spikes at the bottom. It is a simple mechanism but very effective, like many other of the methods of guerrilla warfare. And let us not forget that the aim of all warfare is to kill the enemy. In conditions of military inferiority the guerrilla forces cannot renounce any method that achieves this aim and that strikes terror into the hearts of the invader. In any case, the methods used by the American forces – including the indiscriminate use of napalm to incinerate people alive, or the even more indiscriminate use of chemical agents discharged over vast tracts from the air – were infinitely more cruel and devastating than any of the tactics used by the Vietnamese.
The anti-war movement
The war in the South dragged on with no end in sight. At the beginning of 1967, the Americans used B-52s to bomb NLF bases near Saigon in a vain effort to clear the area of guerrillas. By August, in a desperate effort to put more pressure on Hanoi, Johnson extended the bombing of the North to within 10 miles of the Chinese border. This was playing with fire. In vain Johnson argued that this was not aimed against China:
“First I would like to make it clear that these air strikes are not intended as any threat to communist China, and they do not in fact pose any threat to that country. We believe that Peking knows that the United States does not seek to widen the war in Vietnam.”
The official optimism clashed at every step with the crude reality of the casualty lists and the never-ending conflict. As the savagery and futility of the war became clear, there was increasing dissent back home. The US forces were now taking heavy losses. The American casualty rate increased steadily every year. Jack Valenti, aide to President Johnson, recalls the situation:
“I would go in the president’s bedroom, at 7 o’clock in the morning. Every morning, he’d be on the phone, with a 12-hour time difference, checking the casualties of the day before. ‘Mr. President, er, we lost 18 men yesterday, Mr. President, we lost 160 men, we had 400 casualties’ – morning after morning after morning.”
In the end Johnson was utterly undermined by the rapid growth of the anti-war movement in America. One of the most important elements in the equation was the disproportionate number of poor working class and black kids among the casualties. As in every war, it is always the poorest, most oppressed and downtrodden layers of the population that provide most of the cannon fodder. Inside the USA there was a growing swell of discontent. The black Americans were tired of being second-class citizens. In the Southern States, the civil rights movement was engaged in a ferocious struggle against discrimination and racism, for equal rights. But the war in Vietnam highlighted in an extreme form the oppression of the blacks. The two issues became indissolubly linked. On April 15, 1967 black civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. said:
“This confused war has played havoc with our domestic destinies. Despite feeble protestations to the contrary, the promises of the great society have been shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam. The pursuit of this widened war has narrowed the promised dimensions of the domestic welfare programs, making the poor – white and Negro – bear the heaviest burdens both at the front and at home.”
Napoleon explained long ago the vital importance of morale in war. No soldier likes to fight and put his life at risk when he feels that he is not backed by public opinion at home. The American soldiers in Vietnam increasingly felt the backlash of opposition in the USA. They began to feel that they were fighting an unjust and unwinnable war. Lt. Col. George Forrest, U.S. Army recalls:
“When you turned on AFN and you saw riots in the streets, and whatever, and guys were saying: ‘Wait a minute. Why am I fighting here when these guys at home are saying this is the wrong thing to do?'”
The growing opposition to the war even found expression in pop music. There was a very popular song around at that time by “Country Joe” McDonald that contained the words:
“Come on, mothers, throughout the land
Pack your boys off to Vietnam
Come on, fathers, don’t hesitate
Send your sons off before it’s too late
Be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box!“And it’s 1, 2, 3, what are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn.
Next stop is Vietnam.
And it’s 5, 6, 7, open up the Pearly Gates
Yeah, there ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee! We’re all gonna die!”
In April 17, 1965 the first major anti-war rally was held in Washington. By October of the same year anti-war protests are held in about 40 American cities. As is usually the case, the ferment began among the students, who always act as a sensitive barometer of moods in society. 25,000 people gathered in Washington, 20,000 in New York and 15,000 in Berkeley, California, to demonstrate against the war. In April 1967, 300,000 people demonstrated in New York On Oct. 21-23, 1967 50,000 people demonstrated against the war in Washington. The anti-war movement was now spreading fast. More than five million people are estimated to have been involved one way or the other.
The Tet Offensive
It is now generally recognized that Vo Nguyen Giap was one of the brilliant generals of the 20th century. He was trained in the tactics of guerrilla war in the long struggle against French imperialism, in which his small forces were fighting against a bigger, well-trained and well -equipped force. Under these conditions Giap developed a strategy for defeating superior opponents. This was not to simply outmanoeuvre them in the field but to undermine their resolve by inflicting demoralizing political defeats through bold and unexpected tactics. His slogan was that of Danton: “de l’audace, de l’audace et encore de l’audace!” (audacity, audacity and yet more audacity!) Nowhere was this more evident than in the Tet Offensive.
Giap was also a ruthless general. He was always prepared to take a gamble, irrespective of the cost in lives. He must have known that in conventional combat he was at a disadvantage. Whenever they had met the American forces in open battle his divisions had been hammered. In the South the War was not going well. The guerrillas, though still active, were slowly being pushed back. By September 1967 Giap concluded that the war had reached a stalemate and that something needed to be done. On the other hand Hanoi could see the growing anti-war movement in the USA. Giap decided that what was needed was a coup de grace that would break Washington’s will to continue the War.
This was the origin of the Tet offensive – a campaign of breathtaking breadth, speed and scope. It shook US imperialism to its roots and had a dramatic and lasting effect on US public opinion. He carefully planned the offensive, utilising techniques he had learned in the struggle with the French, where he had learned to approach his enemy’s strengths as if they were weaknesses to be exploited. As early as 1944, Giap sent his tiny forces against the French army in Indochina. As with the Tet Offensive, he chose a moment to attack when it was least expected: Christmas Eve. In 1954 at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, Giap lured the overconfident French into a disastrous battle and won a stunning victory by means of brilliant deployments. Now, nearly a quarter of a century later, in 1968, Giap was aiming for a quick and decisive victory to influence the result of the 1968 US Presidential campaign.
He prepared a bold offensive on two fronts. The first was to be an attack on the US Marines’ firebase at Khe Sanh. Simultaneously the NVA and the NLF would stage coordinated attacks on South Vietnam’s major cities and provincial capitals. This would present the Americans with a military dilemma. If they opted to defend Khe Sanh, they would be stretched to the limit when battles erupted all over the South. Giap had set the campaign’s minimum and maximum objectives. As a minimum the Tet outbreak would force the halting of the aerial bombardment of North Vietnam and force the Americans into negotiations. As a maximum the offensive could drive the Americans out of Vietnam all together opening up the path to liberation and unification.
The battle for Khe Sanh
The Vietnamese decided upon a daring but high-risk strategy. They worked out a plan for concerted attacks throughout South Vietnam at the start of 1968. With consummate skill and tremendous audacity, they moved large amounts of weapons, ammunition and supplies to the South for an offensive planned for the Vietnamese New Year – known as Tet. They hoped to spark a general uprising across the country.
One of the bloodiest battles in the offensive took place in Khe Sanh, where there was a small US army base. General Westmoreland believed that Giap’s troops were converging on Khe Sanh as part of the policy to seize control of the northern provinces. He was basing himself on an analogy with the battle of Dien Bien Phu. But the analogy with Dien Bien Phu was misleading. The US was in a far stronger position than the French were in 1954. In “Operation Niagra” the US had unleashed the greatest air attack in military history. B52 bombers caused tremendous losses to the Vietnamese, who suffered as many as 10,000 dead, for the loss of only 500 US marines.
The attack on Khe Sanh was linked to the overall strategy. Once the general offensive was in full swing, the over-stretched American forces would be unable to come to the help of Khe Sanh and prevent the base from being overrun. In this way, Giap might indeed have repeated his triumph of Dien Bien Phu. But that was not the central idea. Actually, the Vietnamese were not trying to re-enact Dien Bien Phu, but had organised a very successful diversion to draw the Americans away from the big towns and cities, leaving them open to attack.
Westmoreland fell into the trap prepared by Giap. As a result, the Americans were caught off guard by the rapidity and scope of the offensive. Years later a West Point textbook compared the US intelligence failure to see what was happening with the shock of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. A 1968 CIA report concluded: “The intensity, coordination and timing of the attacks were not fully anticipated,” adding that the ability of the NLF guerrillas to hit so many targets simultaneously was “another major unexpected point”
The village of Khe Sanh lay in the northwest corner of South Vietnam, close to the Laotian border just below the Demilitarised Zone. It had been garrisoned by the French during the first Indochina war and later became an important US Special Forces base. Due to its proximity to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, US artillery in Khe Sanh could shell the trail and observe NVA traffic moving southwards. In 1967, the Marines took over Khe Sanh and converted it into a large fire base, while the Special Forces moved their base to the Montagnard village of Lang Vei.
Towards the end of 1967, two NVA divisions – the 325th and the 304th – were spotted moving into the Khe Sanh area and a third was positioning itself along Route 9 where it would be able to intercept reinforcements coming in from Quang Tri. The same NVA divisions had fought at Dien Bien Phu. The message was clear and General Westmoreland had no intention of duplicating the French mistakes at Dien Bien Phu. He began to reinforce the base. By late January, some 6,000 Marines had been flown into Khe Sanh and thousands of reinforcements had been moved north of Hue.
This was just what Giap wanted them to do. The NVA continued its build-up: at least 20,000 North Vietnamese were ultimately moved in around Khe Sanh. Some estimates put the number at twice that. The White House and the US media were taken in by this stratagem. They became convinced that they were witnessing the preparations for the decisive battle of the War. Day after day Khe Sanh became lead-story. TV news reports were obsessed with Giap’s alleged replay of Dien Bien Phu. Finally, shortly before dawn on January 21st, the first attack began when the NVA attempted to cross the river running past the base.
The attack was beaten back but followed by an artillery barrage which damaged the runway, blew up the main ammunition stores, and damaged a few aircraft. Other attacks were launched against the US Special Forces at Lang Vel and against the Marines dug-in on the hills surrounding Khe Sanh. These attacks were clearly aimed at testing the defences. But the entire episode was a diversionary tactic that succeeded very well. The attention of the US commanders was concentrated on Khe Sanh, while the NVA and NLF forces were preparing an all-out offensive in South Vietnam’s cities.
The Vietnamese attack on Khe Sanh was defeated only thanks to massive aerial bombardments of NVA positions. B-52’s and strike aircraft dropped tons of bombs and napalm, with great accuracy, within a few hundred feet of Khe Sanh’s perimeter. Despite bad weather and increasing anti-aircraft fire, planes and helicopters kept dropping cargo. The battle settled down into a siege. Khe Sanh was finally relieved on April 6th. Fighting continued around Khe Sanh for a time but any hope of overrunning the base had to be abandoned. But it had served its purpose, which was to act as a feint to cover preparations for a general offensive in the South.
Preparations for the offensive
Up to this time the war had been mainly in the jungles and swamps and rural areas where the NLF guerrillas had their main base of support. They now planned and executed a bold offensive, which was aimed at penetrating South Vietnam’s supposedly impregnable urban areas. The General launched a major offensive against American and South Vietnamese forces on the eve of the Tet lunar New Year celebrations, in order to seize the element of surprise.
Whilst the attention of the world was focused on Khe Sanh, NVA and NLF regulars were also drifting into Saigon, Hue, and most of the other cities of South Vietnam. They came in small groups of twos and threes, disguised as refugees, peasants, workers, and ARVN soldiers on holiday leave. Gradually, roughly the equivalent of five battalions of NVA/NLF infiltrated Saigon without any of the ubiquitous security police noticing, or anyone informing on them. This was a considerable achievement given the sheer scale of the operation.
There was already a guerrilla network in Saigon and the other major cities, which had long stockpiled stores of arms and ammunition drawn from hit-and-run raids or bought openly on the black-market. Through contacts and spies the guerrillas had managed to store arms, ammunition and explosives in a secret location in preparation for the attack. It was common knowledge that the guerrillas on leave from their units drifted in and out of the cities. Some who were captured during the pre Tet build up were mistaken for regular holiday-makers or deserters. In the general noisy crowd of New Year merry-makers, the NLF’s secret army of infiltrators went completely unnoticed.
Weapons were brought in separately in flower carts, jury-rigged coffins, and trucks apparently filled with vegetables and rice. Tong Viet Duong, a guerrilla fighter with the National Liberation Front in Saigon describes the preparations for the Tet offensive:
“Taxis carried chrysanthemums into Saigon for the Tet market. Hidden underneath them were AK-47s. The people supported the revolution. They helped us – we were able to penetrate the security in the city. We changed our clothes and carried fake identity documents. The people of Saigon hid us in their houses.”
Tet had traditionally been a time of truce in the long war and both Hanoi and Saigon had made announcements that this year would be no different – although they disagreed about the duration. US Intelligence had gotten wind that something was brewing through captured documents and an overall analysis of recent events, but Westmoreland’s staff tended to disregard these generally vague reports. At the request of General Frederick Weyand, the US commander of the Saigon area, however, several battalions were pulled back from their positions near the Cambodian border.
General Weyand put his troops on full alert but – due to a standing US policy of leaving the security of major cities to the ARVN – there were only a few hundred American troops on duty in Saigon itself the night before the attack began. Later General Westmoreland claimed that he knew about all these preparations. All the evidence shows that he was not prepared for anything approaching the intensity of the attack that came and that he was still concentrating his attentions on the developing battle at Khe Sanh where he thought Giap would make his chief effort. In reality, the US army was taken completely off guard.
The offensive commences
On the night of January 31, 1968 the North Vietnamese army and the NLF launched the Tet Offensive. The NLF broke the truce they had made for the New Year festivities and fought its way into more than one hundred cities, including the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon. Throughout the country provincial capitals were seized, garrisons simultaneously attacked. Vietnamese irregular soldiers stormed the highland towns of Banmethout, Kontum and Pleiku, they then simultaneously invaded 13 of the 16 provincial capitals of the heavily populated Mekong Delta. The dimension and sweep of the offensive astonished US army generals, one of whom commented that tracking the assault pattern on a map was like a “pinball machine, lighting up with each raid.”
The guerrilla army even succeeded in penetrating the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Through contacts and spies the NLF had managed to store guns, ammunition and explosives at a secret location in preparation for the attack. At 3.15 am a group of guerrilla soldiers drove up to the embassy in a taxi. Within five minutes they had killed the five guards on duty and seized the building. They failed to blast their way through the main Embassy doors with anti-tank rockets and found themselves pinned-down by the Marine guards. An intense fire fight began, which lasted all morning, and ended with the bodies of all nineteen guerrillas scattered around the Embassy courtyard.
Although the damage to the Embassy was slight, this attack on “American soil” was publicized in the USA and throughout the world and had tremendous psychological significance. Other guerrilla squads attacked the Presidential Palace, the radio station, the headquarters of the ARVN Chiefs of Staff, and even Westmoreland’s own compound at Tan Son Nhut airbase. In the heavy fighting that followed, things were so bad that Westmoreland ordered his staff to find weapons and join in the defence of the compound. When the fighting was over, twenty-three Americans were dead, eighty-five were wounded and up to fifteen aircraft had suffered serious damage.
Two NVA/NLF battalions attacked the US air-base at Bien Hoa and crippled over twenty aircraft at a cost of nearly 170 casualties. They fought with great bravery. Guerrilla units fought to the death in the French cemetery and the Pho Tho race track. The suburb of Cholon became an operations base for the guerrilla attacks in Saigon and surrounding area. Fourteen guerrilla soldiers who attacked the main radio station in Saigon were under siege for 18 hours, after which they blew themselves up along with the building.
Everywhere the attacks came as a total surprise. The sheer scale and ferocity of the Tet offensive was as much of a shock to Westmoreland as it was to a stunned American public, which watched with disbelief as their South Vietnamese allies engaged in desperate hand-to-hand fighting with the guerrillas in the streets of Saigon. It took over a week of ferocious fighting to liquidate the pockets of resistance scattered around the city. The entrenched guerrillas fought against tanks, helicopter gunships, and aircraft, which blasted buildings and reduced parts of the city to rubble. Using guerrilla tactics, they fought as long as they could, and then slipped off to fight somewhere else. The radio station, factories, and a large block of low-cost public housing were flattened along with the homes of countless civilians who were forced to flee as the city dissolved into chaos.
Large areas of Saigon and Hue suddenly found themselves liberated. Guerrillas marched through the streets waving guns and proclaiming the revolution while others rounded up prepared lists of collaborators and government sympathizers. The Americans used air power to pulverize the enemy. The B-52 strikes against NV and NLF positions outside Saigon came within a few miles of the city. Even when the guerrillas were finally driven out of Saigon, they continued to put up a determined rearguard action in the surrounding government villages, forcing the US and ARVN to bomb and shell and destroy their own fortified villages, thus further alienating the rural population. A month after the beginning of the offensive, the Americans calculated the number of civilian dead at around 15,000 and the number of new refugees at anything up to two million and the fighting was still continuing.
The battle for Hue
The success of the Tet offensive varied from place to place. In some areas the attacks were beaten back in a short time, but in others there was bitter fighting. In cities like Ban Me Thuot, My Tho, Can Tho, Ben Tre, and Kontum, the insurgents entrenched themselves in the poorer neighbourhoods and stubbornly repelled efforts to push them out. By February 5th most of the fighting within Saigon was over, but it continued in Cholon until the end of the month. Although Cholon was bombed, strafed and shelled, the guerrillas held on with grim determination, and even mounted counter-offensives against the American and ARVN positions within the city. Fighting in the resort city Dalat went on until mid-February and left over 200 guerrillas dead. The total NVA/NLF death total in Saigon during the Tet offensive was nearly 1200.
However, the fiercest battle raged the ancient city of Hue, which had been captured by the insurgents and which the US army only recaptured with great difficulty. Hue was also a sacred city to the Vietnamese and the violent suppression of anti-government protests by Buddhist monks had crisis had alienated the population from the Saigon Government. The insurgents therefore found considerable support among the populace. Insurgents supported by some ten NVA battalions infiltrated Hue, the ancient Vietnamese capital, and within a few hours overrun the entire city except for the headquarters of the ARVN 3rd Division and the garrison of US advisors. Thousands of political prisoners were set free and thousands of government officials and sympathizers were rounded up and many were shot.
US Marines and ARVN counterattacked but resistance was heavy and the bitter street-by-street fighting slow and costly in lives. In the end the US forces and their allies bombarded the historic Citadel, which was ferociously defended by the insurgents backed. Then US forces crossed the Perfume River in a fleet of assault craft and on February 2Oth launched the final assault. Not until February 23rd were the insurgents finally overwhelmed. Even then, resistance in Hue continued in isolated pockets of sniper teams. The fight for Hue ended on February 25th at a cost of 119 Americans and 363 ARVN dead. American wounded during the battle for Hue came to just under a thousand, compared to slightly over 1,200 ARVN. The NVA and insurgent dead was about sixteen times that number.
The big difference in fatalities makes the battle look a one sided affair. But it wasn’t. The difference in casualty figures came largely from the heavy use of artillery and aerial bombardment to devastate NVA/NLF positions. Large sections of the ancient and revered city Hue were reduced the city to piles of rubble strewn with dead bodies. Without this, the US/ARVN casualties would have been much higher. Close to 6,000 civilians were killed, mostly by the indiscriminate bombing and shellfire and nearly 120,000 citizens of Hue had been made homeless. Those parts of Hue that escaped relatively undamaged were later wrecked by days of looting by soldiers from the original ARVN garrison, who had played no role in the fighting.
Did Tet succeed?
The Tet offensive showed a considerable degree of military preparedness, skill and bravery on the part of the Vietnamese. It shook the morale of the US army, which was forcibly made aware of its own vulnerability, and it had a profound effect on US public opinion. However, from a military point of view it must be seen as a defeat for the NLF. One of the main aims was to drive a wedge between the Americans and the South Vietnamese. The Embassy attack was aimed at showing up the vulnerability of the American forces. The NLF hoped that their liberation of towns and cities would lead to an uprising against the Americans by the South’s war-weary soldiers, discontented peasantry and rebellious youth. However this perspective did not materialise, or did so only on a sporadic basis.
It was a bold plan, but the perspective of a nationwide uprising was based on an incorrect reading of the situation. The NLF leadership expected large sections of the urban populace to rise up in revolt. But although the NLF had support in this cities and towns, its main base was the peasantry. The city dwellers of South Vietnam did not support the Saigon Government but were suspicious of the Stalinists. They generally remained inactive and the guerrillas did not get the support they expected. The mass executions of Catholics in Hue also alienated a section of the population that might otherwise have supported them.
When the offensive was over, the Americans remained in control and the NLF had suffered heavy losses. NVA/NLF dead totalled some 45,000 and the number of prisoners nearly 7000, while the Americans and South Vietnamese lost 6000. Within a matter of days they were driven from most of the positions they had conquered. This was both the high point of guerrilla actions in the war and the beginning of their decline. Since the planners of the offensive expected a people upraising, the most secret cells were ordered to emerge from clandestinity. When the offensive was defeated, cell members had to flee to the jungle. Thus, the Tet offensive ended in the destruction of much of the NLF infrastructure in the South. This was a heavy blow. After the Tet offensive, the regular North Vietnamese army did most of the fighting against the U.S.
However, the Tet Offensive brought about a different kind of turning point. It strongly influenced the opinion of the American public. For the first time in a major war, the power of television became apparent. Fifty million people watched the destruction brought on by the war. The U.S. government was no longer able to portray the war as clean, simple and easily won. Johnson and the generals had claimed the enemy was in decline. This was falsified by events. The moment Vietnamese commandos penetrated the American Embassy in Saigon, all the official propaganda crumbled to dust.
During Tet the Americans and their ARVN ally had suffered over 4,300 killed in action, some 16,000 wounded and over 1,000 missing in action. It is true that the enemy suffered far more but to an already skeptical US public this mattered little. What mattered was that the war now seemed never-ending, just like Iraq today. And just like Iraq, it no longer had any definite, realistic objective. The scenes of slaughter and devastation in Saigon, Hue, and other cities horrified the average US citizen, to whom the conflict now seemed senseless. The senselessness of it was reflected in the notorious comment of a US officer who explained the destruction of about one-third of the provincial capital of Ben Tre: “It became necessary to destroy it in order to save it“. The same words could serve pretty well as an epitaph for the invasion of Iraq.
In Washington something akin to panic reigned in high places. Congressmen were now turning on the president. On February 7, 1968 Senator Robert Kennedy, who was preparing himself to assume the mantle of his dead brother, commented:
“It is said the Viet Cong will not be able to hold the cities, and that is probably true. But they have demonstrated that despite all of our reports of progress, of government strength, and of enemy weakness, that half a million American soldiers, with 700,000 Vietnamese allies, with total command of the air, total command of the sea, backed by the huge resources and the most modern weapons, that we are unable to secure even a single city from the attacks of an enemy whose total strength is about 250,000.”
General Westmoreland, supreme commander of US forces, compared the Tet offensive to the Battle of the Bulge in World War Two where the Germans staged a desperate bid to break through the US lines before meeting an inevitable defeat. But this analogy was completely false. It was not the Vietnamese but the Americans who were heading inexorably for defeat. After the war General Giap said:
“For us, you know, there is no such thing as a single strategy. Ours is always a synthesis, simultaneously military, political and diplomatic – which is why quite clearly, the Tet offensive had multiple objectives.”
Although the Tet offensive had failed in its major objectives, it had a profound and lasting effect on the course of the war. The cost in North Vietnamese casualties was horrendous but Giap’s gambler’s throw proved to be a turning point in the War. It was a media disaster for the White House and effectively ended the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, America’s commander in chief. According to US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger:
“Henceforth, no matter how effective our action, the prevalent strategy could no longer achieve its objectives within a period or within force levels politically acceptable to the American people.”
The scale of the offensive shook President Johnson to the core. The shockwave from the fighting undermined his will to carry on. McNamara resigned as Secretary of State for Defence, a disillusioned man, and was replaced with Clark Clifford. But from subsequent statements we learn that the latter had absolutely no idea where he was going:
“I’d ask questions like when is the war going to end? Well, we don’t know. How many more men do you think we’re going to lose? Well, we really don’t know. Then I finally got down to it and said, ‘What is our plan to win the war in Vietnam?’ Turned out there wasn’t any. The plan was just to stay with it and ultimately hoping that the enemy would finally give up.”
To win even a game of chess some kind of strategy is necessary. And war – the most complicated of all equations as Napoleon called it – is far more difficult than a game of chess. A general staff needs a combination of a clear and well-defined strategy and flexible and intelligent tactics. The Americans had neither. The “strategy” outlined above in the words of Mr. Clifford (“to stay with it and ultimately hoping that the enemy would finally give up.”) is the military equivalent of the philosophy of that incorrigible bankrupt Mr. Micawber, who was always “confidently expecting that something will turn up.” This is very bad economics and even worse military doctrine.
The fall of Johnson
In 1963, when he came to power following the assassination of Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson’s approval rating was over 80%. By 1967 it had fallen to 40%. Stanley Karnow wrote: “But then came Tet – and his ratings plummeted – as if Vietnam were a burning fuse that had suddenly ignited an explosion of dissent.” By the beginning of March the popularity of the President was only about 30%, while endorsement for his handling of the war was only 6%. Like George W. Bush, his credibility had collapsed. A 1971 poll showed that 60% of Americans with college degrees were in favour of an American retreat from Vietnam. However, 75% of those with only high-school diplomas and 80% of those without any secondary education supported a retreat. This showed a sea change in the attitude of the American working class.
Even the mule-headed Texan Johnson finally understood that the war could not be won on the battlefield, and that he must negotiate. After years of bombing hell out of North Vietnam, he suddenly announced a cessation of the bombing: “I renew the offer I made last August to stop the bombardment of North Vietnam. We ask that talks begin promptly, that they be serious talks on the substance of peace.” However, despite the opening of negotiations with the North Vietnamese, US, troop levels remained at about 500,000 and the war would drag on for another five years. More American soldiers were killed after Tet than before, and the United States itself would be torn apart by the worst internal upheavals in a century.
Westmoreland was pressuring Washington for 206,000 troops to carry on the campaign in the South and even to make a limited invasion of North Vietnam just above the DMZ. As the battle for Hue died out, Johnson asked Clark Clifford to find ways and means of meeting Westmoreland’s request. Clifford consulted CIA Director Richard Helms who presented him the Agency’s pessimistic forecast. On March 4th Clifford told Johnson that the war was far from won and that more men would not make much difference.
Clifford was not alone. Johnson’s main advisors, including Generals Omar Bradley, Matthew Ridgway, and Maxwell Taylor; Cyrus Vance, Dean Acheson, and Henry Cabot Lodge, had all turned against the war. Recent CIA studies revealed that the programme to win Vietnamese “hearts and minds” was failing in forty of South Vietnam’s forty-four provinces and that the NLF’s manpower was actually twice the number that had been estimated previously.
The extreme right-wingers naturally supported the war, and condemned the Administration for not going all out for victory. But this was an increasingly minority opinion. The CIA’s gloomy reports cooled the enthusiasm of even the most hawkish members of the administration. Johnson was in a dilemma. To meet the generals’ manpower requests would mean either withdrawing American troops from Europe or calling up the active reserves. Neither option was politically feasible. Westmoreland therefore had to settle for half of the over 200,000 additional troops he was demanding.
In the first period of the war any opposition was usually seen as anti-patriotic and anti-American. But now the perception of the American public changed dramatically. Bourgeois liberals like Robert Kennedy achieved overnight popularity by speaking out against the war. Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy, an unknown standing on an anti-war ticket, challenged Johnson for the Presidential nomination. He was supported by thousands of students and young Americans opposed to the war.
At the New Hampshire Democratic primary, Johnson polled only 300 votes more than Eugene McCarthy. This was an unprecedented humiliation. Normally an incumbent President could expect to be re-elected unopposed. The result was the final nail in the coffin for the administration of Lyndon Johnson. On March 31st, Johnson went on TV to announce a bombing halt of the North and America’s willingness to meet with the North Vietnamese to seek a peace settlement. Now hopelessly demoralized, Johnson announced to an astonished world his decision not to stand again as President: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” Johnson said that would spend the rest of his term in a search for peace in Indochina.
Soon after, General Creighton Abrams replaced Westmoreland as head of US forces in Vietnam. Westmoreland was recalled to become Army Chief of Staff – theoretically a promotion, but in practice a move to get him out of the way. Westmoreland’s deputy commander, Abrams had been present at the special CIA briefing that convinced Johnson that a change of course was needed. Abrams was sent to Saigon with a mission: he was to institute a programme of “Vietnamization”, that is to say, to take all necessary measures to enable the ARVN to take on the burden of the fighting, and gradually reduce the American role to that of advisors. This is the very same tactic that they are trying to carry out in Iraq. But ever since 1965 it was quite clear that Saigon was incapable of doing the job. We now see exactly the same pattern emerging in Iraq, and the end result will also be similar.
Nixon escalates the war
The resignation of Johnson did not end the war. In fact, it was actually escalated until it spread throughout the whole of South East Asia. On May 10, 1968 the peace talks between U. S. and Vietnamese officials began in Paris. But the bloody war on the ground continued. The election of the Republican hawk Richard Nixon did nothing to improve matters The American deployment that had started with only 23,300 in 1963 rose inexorably to 184,000 in 1966 and reached a peak of 542,000 in January 1969 under Richard Nixon’s presidency. The war was now costing £30 billion a year: a huge drain of blood and gold even for the richest and most powerful country on earth. And the perception grew among Americans that it was unwinnable. The mood was turning against the war even in the American ruling class. But Richard Nixon belonged to that wing that believed that “one last push” could end the war, or at least compel North Vietnam to negotiate a settlement acceptable to Washington. This reminds one of George Bush and the notorious theory of the “surge” and of the famous remark of Karl Marx: “history repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, and the second time as farce.”
In April 1970 the armies of the U.S. and South Vietnam invaded Cambodia, alleging the presence of North Vietnamese troops on Cambodian soil. The real aim was to disrupt the flow of supplies to the NLF along the The Ho Chi Minh Trail and to intimidate Hanoi. The Trail passed through neutral Laos and Cambodia. As a result both had suffered heavy American bombing. General. William Westmoreland stated:
“Over the years Cambodia, the border area of Cambodia and Laos, were used freely by the enemy, but by virtue of the policy of my government, we could not fight the overt war or deploy troops overtly, military troops, into those countries.”
However, in practice the USA did intervene militarily against Cambodia and Laos, violating their neutrality. In particular, Cambodia was subjected to a savage air bombardment that killed large numbers of Cambodian peasants. This fact is never mentioned as one of the main causes that led to the brutality of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces when they finally entered Phnom Pen. The Americans could not, however, invade North Vietnam for fear of the Russians, as McNamara pointed out:
“On one or two occasions, the chiefs recommended U.S. military intervention in North Vietnam and stated that they recognized this might lead to Chinese and/or Soviet military response, in which case, they said, ‘We might have to consider the use of nuclear weapons.'”
Jack Valenti, aide to President Johnson, said on the same subject:
“The president was worried about China and Russia. He didn’t know … in Korea nobody thought the Chinese were going to cross the Yalu with a million men, and we were caught by surprise. And I remember time after time, when the military would suggest mining Haiphong or having er … sending in war planes to bomb Haiphong, he said, ‘Hell no,’ he said, ‘some damn aviator will drop a bomb down a Russian smokestack and then I’ve got World War III on my hands.'”
But Nixon was not concerned about such details. Like George W. Bush he was a strange combination of a narrow-minded provincial and an irresponsible adventurer. And like Bush he displayed a pig-headed determination to follow his own agenda, regardless of the consequences. The policies of Nixon and his White House clique set off a chain of events that led to a nightmare for the people of Cambodia and had serious effects inside the USA. The result was a further intensification of the anti-war movement. The invasion of Cambodia sparked off campus protests all over the USA. On November 15, 1969 250,000 people demonstrated against the war in Washington, D.C. On May 4, 1970 National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio. The killings sparked hundreds of protest activities across college campuses in the United States. At the University of New Mexico the police also used murderous violence against the protesters. More than 100 colleges were closed as a result of student demonstrations against the invasion of Cambodia.
US public opinion was further shaken by news of the infamous massacre at My Lai, where American soldiers slaughtered a hundred peasants, including women and children. Early in the morning of March 16 in 1968, a group of American soldiers entered a small village in South Vietnam. In “The My Lai massacre: An American Tragedy” Adam Silverman and Kristin Hill recall the events:
“The American soldiers shot at anything that moved, including cattle, chickens, birds and worse yet: civilians. The villagers did not offer any resistance; still the Soldiers threw hand grenades into huts, shouted orders and killed without distinction. The atrocities continued throughout the morning. Infants were killed, young children shot and women raped at gunpoint. Before long 500 civilians lay dead on the ground. But their work wasn’t finished… after this the village was set on fire. Bodies, homes, supplies, food – everything was burned.”
These events were hushed up until November 13, 1969. In March 1970 Captain Ernest Medina was charged with murder for the massacre at My Lai. This began a chain of events leading up to the My Lai Courts-Martial, ending with the conviction of Lieutenant William Calley on March 29, 1970. When the horrific facts about the My Lai massacre became known, many people’s view of the war changed fundamentally. High-ranking American officers were guilty both of the massacre and the subsequent cover-up. However, in the end only four soldiers were tried and only one of them, Calley, was convicted. This murderer of women and children did not pay a serious price for his war crimes. President Nixon pardoned him after only three years under house arrest.
This was not an isolated case. The brutal massacre of unarmed Vietnamese civilians at My Lai was just the tip of the iceberg of appalling atrocities perpetrated on the Vietnamese people by imperialism. In his book The Trial of Henry KissingerChristopher Hitchens he writes that the U.S. Army admits to killing 10,899 enemies during operation “Speedy Express” in early 1969, but says that they only seized 784 weapons.
The myth of America’s humanitarian and civilizing mission was dealt a blow from which it never recovered. By this time, not just the American people, but also a growing section of the US ruling class had had enough of the war. Public opinion in the USA, already swinging against the War after Tet, was further alienated by the sickening callousness revealed in the court case. At this point opposition to the war was to be found not only among young people and students but also increasingly among working class Americans.
Inexorably, the USA was being sucked into a wider conflict that was spreading all over South East Asia. In February 1971 South Vietnamese and U.S. troops invaded Laos in an attempt to sever the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This resulted in a further intensification of anti-war activity. The largest demonstrations were held on April 24, 1971. In San Francisco about 300,000 people marched against the war, in Washington between 500,000 and 750,000. These were the biggest political demonstrations in the history of the United States. In December 1972 the US air force commenced its Christmas bombing of Hanoi and North Vietnam in an attempt to force the Vietnamese to the conference table. Towards the end of December the North Vietnamese announced that they would return to Paris if Nixon ended the bombing. The bombing campaign was halted and the negotiators met during the first week of January 1973.
Revolutionary implications
From a military point of view, the U.S. always enjoyed a clear superiority over the Vietnamese. They had complete command of the air and were continuously bombing the country, north and south. Theoretically, the Americans could have stayed in Vietnam for many more years. They might even have won. But in order to do so they would have needed an army of half a million soldiers, and they would have to be soldiers like Hitler’s SS. Such an army did not exist. The changing mood of the working class and the soldiers from working class families made it impossible to continue the war. If the government had had prolonged the war, it would have brought the U.S. to the brink of revolution.
A total of 2,59 million Americans were sent to fight in Vietnam. The harrowing experiences of these soldiers in Vietnam had an extremely demoralizing effect on them. From returning soldiers, first-hand knowledge of the situation in Vietnam slowly began to percolate into many ordinary working class American households, producing a change in the psychology of the working class. There was increasing sympathy for the Vietnamese people. New York Times/CBS News published the results of a poll in June 1977. The question asked was: “If the president would recommend helping Vietnam, would you want your representative in congress to approve aid for Vietnam in the form of food and medicine?” 66% answered yes, and only 29% said no.
In his book Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen describes an experiment he carried out during lectures delivered in the 1990s, when he asked the audience was asked to guess the level of education among those who opposed the Vietnam War in 1971. Most thought that 90% of college graduates were against the war, but only 60% of those with only a high-school education. The real figures are precisely the opposite. The growing opposition to the war among the American working class was the result of hard experience. Kids from poor working class homes were the overwhelming majority of those drafted to fight in Vietnam. They were the ones most likely to be killed and maimed. As in Iraq, a disproportionate number were black or Latino. Rich kids and college students could often avoid getting drafted – as the case of a certain George W. Bush shows.
The anti-war movement in the USA increasingly influenced the mood of the soldiers in Vietnam. It is one thing to fight and die for a just cause, which earns the praise and admiration of the folks back home. It is another thing entirely to risk your life and suffer daily dangers and hardships for a cause in which you no longer believe and which your fellow citizens detest. The demoralization among US troops in Vietnam is well documented. Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr. wrote in The Collapse of the Armed Forces shortly after the US withdrawal from Vietnam:
“The morale, discipline and fighting condition of the armed forces are, with a few exceptions, lower than ever this century and perhaps lower than ever in the history of the United States. In every possible way, the armed forces still in Vietnam are on the brink of collapse. Separate units avoid or refuse battle, kill their officers, are full of drugs and are without enthusiasm when not on the verge of mutiny.
“Although no high ranking officer (especially not while on duty) could openly make a similar assessment, the conclusions… above are almost unanimously backed up by a number of anonymous interviews with high and midlevel commanding officers. As they are by lower ranking officers in all positions.
“In Vietnam the after troops of an army of 500,000 men, formerly the best army ever sent to battle by the U.S., are trying to retreat from a nightmare-like war that they feel has been dumped upon them by smart civilians. Civilians now at universities in America, are writing books about the stupidity of the whole venture.
“One American soldier, stationed at Cu Chi, is cited in the New York Times. He speaks of ‘separate companies for soldiers refusing to fight. It is no longer a big deal to simply refuse to participate in battle. If a soldier is sent somewhere he no longer bothers to go to the trouble of refusing. He’ll simply pack his shirt and goes off to visit a friend at another base. Many guys don’t even wear their uniforms any more… The American garrisons at the larger bases are in effect disarmed. Professional soldiers confiscate their weapons and lock them up.’
“Could this be common or even true? The answer is unfortunately yes. By now “fragging” is the preferred expression among soldiers for murder or attempted murder of authoritarian, unpopular, or aggressive officers. When officers are reported dead there is cheering in the trenches or at the movie-theaters of some regiments.
“In the underground GI publication “GI Says” a reward of $10,000 is offered for killing lieutenant colonel Weldon Honeycutt, shortly after the costly attack at Hamburgar Hill in mid 1969, which was led and initiated by Honeycutt.
“The issue of combat refusal, an official euphemism for refusing battle and the worst crime a soldier can commit, recently surfaced again when Troop B of the First cavalry at the Laotian border refused to retrieve their captain’s commanding vehicle containing communication devices, codes and secret orders. Yet, as early as 1969 a whole company at 196 Light Infantry Brigade officially sat down in the middle of a battlefield. Later that year another unit from the famous First Air Cavalry Division refused – on air on CBS television – to advance on a dangerous footpath.
“Search and evade (when a unit silently avoids battle) is practically a principle by now. The GI expression for this is “CYA (cover your ass) and get home”. That the practice of search-and-evade hasn’t gone unnoticed by the enemy is emphasized by the fact that the Viet Cong delegation at the peace negotiations in Paris stated that: ‘Communist units in Indochina have been told not to attack American units unless provoked’.”
American soldiers were killing their own officers. This practice gave rise to a new word in the English language: “fragging”, derived from “fragmentation bomb.” An unofficial web page of the US military police gives the following estimate of the number of victims:
“Between 1969 and 1973, there was an increased incidence of fragging, says the historian Terry Anderson from Texas A&M University. The U.S. Army does not have any exact statistics on how many officers were killed in this manner. But they do know of at least 600 cases of confirmed fragging and another 1400 where officers died under suspicious circumstances. As a result of this, the U.S. Army was not at war with the enemy in the beginning of 1970. They were at war with themselves.”
This was the main reason why US imperialism was compelled to abandon the war in Vietnam. If they had continued, there could have been revolutionary consequences in the USA itself. The imperialists therefore drew the conclusion and threw in the towel. On January 23, 1973 the United States, South Vietnam, and North Vietnam signed the Paris Peace Accords, ending America’s combat role in Vietnam. The U.S. military draft was ended and five days later a cease-fire went into effect. By the end of March the last of the U.S. combat troops left Vietnam. The war was really over at this point, although the puppet regime in Saigon clung to power for almost another two years. But deprived of American military backing, it was doomed.
The fall of Saigon
Nixon, who was increasingly showing signs of mental instability, looked out of control. The Establishment therefore organized a legal coup d’etat to remove him from power in August 1974, using the Watergate scandal as a convenient excuse to get rid of him. The US ruling class was now looking for some face-saving formula to cut their losses and get out of Vietnam as painlessly as possible. But in the end they were forced to withdraw under the most humiliating circumstances.
On April 21, 1975 Thieu resigned as South Vietnamese President. The rats were already leaving the sinking ship. Just over a week later, on April 30, tanks of the NLF smashed their way through the gates of the presidential palace, the heart of the US-backed Saigon government. The United States finally extricated itself from Vietnam in conditions of incredible chaos, panic and confusion. In a final indignity, the US diplomatic staff had to escape in helicopters from the roof of the embassy in Saigon. All afternoon American helicopters – Chinooks, Hueys, Jolly Green Giants – wheeled above, landing precariously on the tops of high buildings to take off Vietnamese and other evacuees. In an article entitled “US abandons Saigon to Communists”, The Guardian‘s correspondent in Saigon Martin Woollacott reported on Wednesday April 29, 1975:
“More than 80 helicopters ferried the remaining Americans as well as thousands of Vietnamese, including former Vice-President Ky, to an armada of ships in the South China Sea. Pilots were fished out of the water as they ditched their helicopters to make room for more on the landing pad. Thousands more Vietnamese were evacuated in boats form Vung Tau and others left by plane for Thailand and the Philippines. The final departure came on the orders of Washington and at the insistence of President Duong Van Minh. Early this morning a helicopter with 11 US Marines helping in the evacuation finally took off after being delayed by a burst of small arms fire in the US Embassy.”
The Guardian reporter continued:
“The way the Americans went was a spectacle in itself. It is a long time since Vietnam has seen so many helicopters, and they swept in at speed, with Phantoms flying overhead. Orange and red flare smoke mushroomed up from the American Embassy and other pick-up points for US personnel.
“The evacuation was a fantastic scene as the choppers roared in against a grey and leaden sky, sometimes as many as two dozen visible at once from Central Saigon, and the air was filled with the mutter of their blades.
“General Cao Van Vien, Chief of the General Staff, and other senior officers and politicians were reported to have left the city aboard American helicopters, as the North Vietnamese close in for the kill they now seem intent on making.”
Nobody knew whether or not the NLF troops would storm the capital. There were rumours that the Provisional Revolutionary Government and the new Saigon Administration had reached agreement to call a cease-fire. But nobody could confirm or deny anything. The city awaited its fate. Everybody knew that the war was now over and the American occupation in its last death-throes.
The Quislings in Saigon now no doubt regretted the day when they accepted the advice of Richard Nixon to “hang on” in the hope of getting a better deal. Now the only deal open to them was a bumpy ride in an American helicopter and an uncertain future in foreign exile. In a desperate attempt to salvage something from the wreckage, the old regime elected a new leader, President Duong Van Minh, who offered to negotiate. But the time for negotiations had long since passed. Now everything would be settles by force of arms, and the Saigon regime had no arms to use.
Lenin explains that the state in the last analysis is armed bodies of men. And the old state was disintegrating before one’s very eyes. Order was breaking down and chaos reigned as police and militia disappeared from the streets. Amidst scenes of indescribable panic, hundreds of Vietnamese who had collaborated with the occupying forces and the old regime struggled to get into the American embassy. ARVN soldiers roamed the city, destroying property and looting.
The Provisional Revolutionary Government naturally rejected the cease-fire and negotiations offer made by President Minh. Why should they, when all the cards were now in their hands? “At the very least they want Saigon down on its knees,” a Western diplomat said before leaving, “they want to see those M16s stacked up in a surrender.” This task was now not very difficult. The demoralized ARVN soldiers were utterly unable to fight. Most threw their weapons away and ran for their lives or else turned their coats and joined the NLF.
The objective of warfare, as Clausewitz explained long ago, is to disarm the enemy and make him submit to your will.. The only task that remained for the NLF was to liquidate what little was left of the ARVN forces and organize a new state power in Saigon. But such a state in the given conditions would necessarily be modelled on the lines of Stalinist North Vietnam.
One diplomat responsible for evacuating American and Vietnamese – tidying up after- was reported as saying: “I feel like someone with a dustpan and broom,” one said, “but at least we’re trying to fulfil our last obligations.” That is a fairly accurate comment. All that was left after twenty years of American policy in Indo-China was so much useless waste to be swept up as tidily as possible. The US imperialists doubtless fulfilled its obligations to those collaborators fortunate enough to be evacuated to more or less comfortable destinations in the USA. This would apply to the top echelons, but the rest were abandoned unceremoniously to their fate.
After 28 years of war, US imperialism was finally forced out of Vietnam in the most humiliating circumstances imaginable. The fall of Saigon marked the official end to a war. After the expenditure of $150,000 millions and the loss of 50,000 American lives, the USA had been defeated by a small Asian country of poor peasants. The most powerful army in the world was forced to flee from Vietnam with its tail between its legs. What did they leave behind?
The aftermath
“And when they have created a wilderness, they call it Peace” (Tacitus)
The defeat of US Imperialism in Vietnam was a most progressive development and one that was enthusiastically welcomed by the workers of the world and by the Marxist Tendency. It permitted the north and south to reunify and allowed the Vietnamese people to determine their own fate. But a decade of brutal war had reduced Vietnam to rubble, its cities bombed, its industries destroyed, its agriculture, transport and infrastructure dislocated. Most of its largely agrarian population of 82 million remains poor with per capita income hovering around $550 (£288) a year. The expropriation of the landlords and capitalists was a great step forward, although the new regime had nothing in common with the regime of workers’ democracy established by Lenin and Trotsky in Russia after 1917. It was a totalitarian bureaucratic caricature modelled on Stalinist Russia. Nevertheless, thanks to the advantages of a nationalised planned economy, Vietnam made a remarkable recovery from the devastation of war.
Perhaps worst of all was the heritage of chemical war that the US waged against the Vietnamese people. During the Vietnam War, 80 million litres of herbicides with high concentrations of dioxin, known as Agent Orange, were repeatedly sprayed over 12 percent of the rainforest and mangroves of South Vietnam in an attempt to destroy the foliage that provided cover for the Vietcong guerrillas. The inheritors of this chemical war are thousands of Agent Orange children, victims of the poison clouds their parents inhaled. Recent research has linked Agent Orange to a third generation. The Vietnam War is long over, but its toxic legacy is still poisoning the food chain in “hot spots” close to former US bases, causing cancers and birth deformities. Writing in The Guardian thirty years later, Tom Fawthrop writes:
“Tran Anh Kiet, whose feet, hands and limbs are twisted, lives an hour away from Ho Chi Minh City, in Cu Chi district. He is 21, but his body appears to belong to a 15-year-old, and he has a mental age of around six. He has to be spoon-fed and his attempts at speech are confined to grunts.
“Today in Vietnam there are 150,000 children like Kiet, whose parents believe their birth defects are the result of exposure to Agent Orange during the war, or the consumption of dioxin-contaminated food and water since 1975. A further 800,000 Vietnamese are reported to be suffering from dioxin- related diseases, including various cancers.”
Who is responsible for these atrocities? In the first place the US government and armed forces, in the second place the big US companies that supplied these poisonous agents and made fortunes out of them. Yet thirty years later, the USA refuses to accept responsibility for the consequences of chemical warfare. Not long ago a lawsuit was launched in the US courts, accusing chemical companies of complicity in war crimes and demanding compensation. A US judge ruled against the Vietnamese. Meanwhile, two of the companies concerned, Monsanto and Dow Chemical, have been allowed to set up branch offices in Ho Chi Minh City, in line with Vietnam’s desire to attract foreign investors.
Today Vietnam faces a new threat – the threat of capitalist restoration, which is already far advanced in China. Department stores sell French perfumes and Italian shoes to an emerging urban Vietnamese middle class. A French-owned five-star hotel has opened across the street from the US consulate. Even in the annual victory parade some floats, sponsored by Vietnamese banks, sport the logo of American credit card companies. US warships are allowed to visit Vietnamese ports. In Ho Chi Minh City, the renamed capital, a new elite of Vietnamese businessmen is enjoying the good life in trendy bars and restaurants, toasting business success and the new market economy. The privately owned businesses are engaged in the ruthless exploitation of the workers, just as they do now in Russia and China.
The United States has now become Vietnam’s single-largest trading partner. US imperialism may yet achieve through trade and investment what it failed to achieve with bombs and napalm. Was it for this that the workers and peasants of Vietnam fought with such inspiring heroism and defeated the mightiest imperialist power the world has ever seen? Will they allow the bureaucracy to privatise the economy and, like China, lead Vietnam back to capitalism? Or will the working class fight against the pro-capitalist elements and lead Vietnam onto the road of genuine Leninist socialism, based on the democratic control and administration of the working people themselves? This question has not yet been answered by history. It is our fervent hope that it will be the second variant and not the first. The working people of Vietnam deserve no less!
