Re-fighting the Vietnam War

Richard West

When the British troops arrived in Saigon in September 1945, they found that the Japanese had already surrendered power to a Vietnamese committee owing allegiance to Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. Although the Saigon Communists were not as numerous or as powerful as their comrades to the north, they were nevetheless more powerful than the Trotskyists and the Nationalists w,ho sat with them in the Committee coalition. They had established their offices In the old French mairie, a white, baroque building at the top of a broad boulevard leading down to the river.

Vietnam was the first and the last country in the world where the Communists won Power without civil war and with the apparent consent of the majority of the people Her old enemy, China, to the north, was still shakily ruled by Chiang Kai-shek, although the Communists under Mao Tse-tung were gaining ground in the north. The 'new democracies' as they were called in eastern Europe had been installed, with the exception of Yugoslavia, by Stalin's henchmen backed by the threat of the Red Army. Indeed Ho Chi Minh, far from being a Stalinist creature, had been assisted against the Japanese by friends in the US intelligence service, and was too independent to have survived in a Russian puppet state.

The infant communist state of Vietnam was overthrown by a coup d'etat staged by The British Army in Saigon, presumably acting on orders from Clement Attlee, the Labour Prime Minister. The French in Saigon were given arms which they used to attack the mairie, killing some of the Vietnamese politicians and driving the rest into that armed revolt which was not to end until thirty years .later. The British then armed the Japanese prisoners and joined with them and the newly arrived Gaullist forces against the Viet Minh, or Viet Cong as they P,/ere later called. One of the fiercest battles involving the British was fought in an abattoir on an island in a canal, at the precise spot where I witnessed another battle in

1968.

Why did Britain start the Vietnam war? It is tempting, though specious to point out that British Labour governments have been largely responsible for almost all the civil disturbances since World War II, starting with. Vietnam and going on through IndiaPakistan, Palestine, Biafra-Nigeria, Cyprus, Northern Ireland and, now, Rhodesia. Probably Attlee's principal motive was to re-establish French rule in Indo-China, not only to keep the friendship of General de Gaulle but to demonstrate Britain's own Claim to her far eastern colonies. Although President Roosevelt had been opposed to

the restoration of Asian colonies, his successor Truman thought them preferable to the establishment of communist states.

The British coup d'etat in Saigon caused little interest back in London, and the restoration of French rule was applauded even by left-wing journals such as the New Statesman. Almost the only British journalist in Saigon was the late Lord Bradwell (then plain Tom Driberg) who no doubt ' discovered the infamous 'cottage' which was the gents of the Continental Hotel, but left meagre records of the political events. When I asked him if he had kept his correspondence with Lord Louis Mountbatten, the C-in-C of Far Eastern Command, Toni Driberg replied with enigmatic mischievousness: 'It's funny that you should ask me that, as only yesterday I was looking through some of Mountbatten's old letters, each one beginning "Dear Tom, Please burn this as soon as you have read it" '.

The Vietnamese War was to last thirty years, or three times as long as both the world wars combined, so that most people have grown very bored by it and 'want to put Vietnam behind them', as the Americans say. Those French, Americans and a few outsiders (like this reviewer) who had for long been involved with Vietnam both professionally and emotionally, find it hard to forget, hard to stop scratching that old sore. The authors of post-war books on Vietnam seem to divide, as they did at the time, between those who were against the venture and now say '1 told you so', and those who supported it and now cry in the words of the losing baseball team — 'we wuz robbed!'.

The latter sentiment echoes throughout The Lessons of Vietnam (Macdonald and Jane's/London £10.50) a retrospective seminar on the war by some of the statesmen and generals who had failed to win it. They include General Westmoreland, who commanded American troops in the mid1960s; Edward Lansdale, renowned as a counter-insurgency ace; our own Sir Robert Thompson, who had fought the Communists in Malaya; Robert Komer, the diplomat who headed the 'pacification' programme; and Barry Zorthian, who was in fact if not in title the propaganda chief in Saigon.

The talks and discussions that make up this book were held in 1973-74, before the Communist victory but after the final departure of the Americans; they have been brought up to date by the editors, W. Scott Thompson and Donald D. Frizzell. It is clear that the differences of opinion on how to win the war have survived defeat and are fought out as bitterly as before. There were those who thought that war was an 'art form' and those, headed by MacNamara who wanted to run it like a gigantic computerised indUstry. There were those who favoured 'attriting' the enemy by massive bombardment, especially from the air, and those who favoured guerrilla tactics and 'ground penetration patrols'. There were those who favoured letting the Vietnamese run the war and those who wanted the whole show put in the charge of an American 'Proconsul'.

The experts agree only in thinking that their way might have won the war. For instance General Keegan believes that 'a bombing campaign like Linebacker II — an eleven-day campaign with B-52s, fighter bombers, F1-11s operating at night at two hundred feet, and jamming — could have brought the war to a close as early as 1965', by blocking North Vietnam's supplies to the south. Most of these experts believe that the Tet Offensive of 1968 was a military catas trophe for the Communists, who could have been routed afterwards but for a failure of nerve in American civilians.

All such claims about what might have been, are based on half-truths or mis conceptions which cannot here be refuted in detail. It suffices to say that General Keegan has still not realised that although it was possible to cut the 'Ho Chi Minh Trail' to the south for days, even weeks, the Communists could afford to be almost end lessly patient, in contrast to the Americans who wanted quick results. None of these experts, in talking about the 'Tet Offensive' recognised that it broke the will not just of US civilians but of the US Army in Vietnam, which was to become a drugged, mutinous and demoralised rabble. That was why Tet was a Communist victory. As for Sir Robert Thompson's defence of the Christmas bombing of 1972, he omits to mention that North Vietnam had already agreed to a settlement which was delayed due to the stubborn resistance of South Viet namese President Thieu. If the 'Christmas bombings' had any motive beside the vin dictiveness of Nixon and Kissinger, it was to show Thieu that the United States had.not gone 'soft on communism'.

Even the final Communist victory is looked upon by these experts as foul play because it was won by the North Viet nam's Army using tanks and artillery in the kind of conventional warfare they had not dared to attempt against the Americans. Yet the fact remains that when the Communists launched their attack in March 1975 they were still outnumbered by more, than three to one in manpower and still more in equipment, in spite of the claims to the contrary issued from Saigon. The South had simply lost the will to go on fighting.

For an old Vietnam hand, it is poignant to read once again those plans for winning the war that ten years ago were uttered with such eager confidence out there in the paddy-fields and the elephant grass. There

is a bitter contribution from Colonel Robert Rheault who led the .Special Forces, or

Green Berets, whose exploits were heralded in a best-selling book, a doleful song and a ludicrous film starring John Wayne, who was shown climbing unharmed out of a blazing helicopter that seemed to have dropped like a stone from 3,000 feet. The Green Berets in their heyday were not only glamorous but won military battles and made themselves popular with the ethnic and religious minorities in Vietnam, especially the Montagnards of the central highlands.

The Green Berets started in Darlac province where in 1967 I got to know some of them well, accompanying patrols on elephant back, swigging quarts of rice wine in the Montagnard long-houses, and quarts of '33' beer in the 'White House' cafe at Ban Me Thuot, the provincial capital. The Green Berets, the aid officials and even the Protestant missionaries were popular with the Montagnards who saw the Americans, as they had seen the French before, as protectors against the Vietnamese.

Some of those Green Berets in Darlac were intelligent, sincere and in army jargon 'highly motivated', meaning that their morale was good and that they believed in what they were fighting for, Later, in other parts of Vietnam I saw Green Berets who had become bitter, murderous thugs who hated the very people they had been charged to protect. Their morale and motivation had been destroyed by the jealous interference of regular army officers who resented the fame and success of these eccentric warriors. In 1969 Colonel Rheault himself was stripped of his command and imprisoned after a Vietnamese double agent was 'terminated with extreme prejudice', a euphemism for throwing him out of a helicopter without a parachute. Although I do not believe that the Green Berets could have won the war, they were certainly more useful and less harmful than was the vast, conscripted army that took their place. It is no coincidence that the Communists started their final offensive at Ban Me Thuot, whose Montagnard population, once pro-American, rose against Thieu's troops and sent them packing out of the highlands.

Just as the regular army took over the military work of the Green Berets, so civil servants took over their work of 'winning the hearts and minds' of the people. Under Ambassador Korner, there sprung up a host of grandiose-sounding schemes such as 'ne* model pacification', 'revolutionary self-help', 'revolutionary development' and 'Phoenix', which last involved murdering thousands of communist suspects in the village. A disgruntled young American officer who had worked six months on Phoenix, told me that in his district during that time they had killed 260 people, of whom not one had been on the list of those they were trying to kill.

The success of 'pacification' was measured by HES, or Hamlet Evaluation Scheme, an immense computer in Saigon that estimated the state of 'security' of every village in South Vietnam. Since the Vietnamese military governors at corps, . province and district levels won promotion if they could show successful 'pacification', the information fed into 'HES' was almost entirely false, which is why Ambassador !Comer can solemnly claim that by the end of 1971,97 per cent of South Vietnam was 'relatively secure' while only 7,000 people were wholly under VC control. To journalists who travelled about at that time the claim was laughable, and we said so.

Our reports annoyed the American propaganda machine in Saigon, as I know from experience. When some articles or mine appeared in a British magazine, its editor received no less than four separate letters from different US officials complaining that I was wrong, or a Communist and had not been to the places I said I had been. As one sees from, this book, many Americans still choose to believe that their cause had been let down by ignorant or malign reporters for newspapers and TV.

It would not be true to say of these Vietnamese experts that, like the Bourbons, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. They recognise, for example, that they made a grave mistake in ignoring offers of advice from the French on how to fight the Vietnamese communists. During the mid-'sixties, France and the United States were on very bad terms over several issues, in particular France's withdrawal from NATO and her attempt to float the world price of gold. In Robin Moore's novel The Green Berets, which was read by hundreds of thousands of servicemen, the French rubber planters in Vietnam are shown as Communist sympathisers, the Continental Hotel pays VC tax, and one of the 'top VC officers is a huge Frenchman who goes into battle stripped to the waist, wearing levis and cowboy boots.

In an interesting paper, Thomas C. Thayer laments the fact that because of this prejudice, the Americans refused French advice even when this was freely offered: `Their military attache in Saigon circa 1964 was handpicked by the French government because of his exceptional knowledge of the English language and his distinguised record in Indochina and Algeria. He was told to help the Americans in whatever way he could. During the eighteen months of his assignment, the only American who visited him to ask about the war was an American defence contractor of French origin'. However in 1968 a number of French generals were called in discreetly to give advice on the siege of Khe Sanh where the Communists obviously thought they could gain the same kind of victory that they won over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. These Frenchmen, according to General Keegan, were 'brilliantly articulate and extremely helpful', no doubt contributing to what was America's one major victory in the war.

One can see here the genesis of a myth that the war might after all have been won by joint action, with France contributing her expertise and the United States pro

viding the air power that France had so sorely lacked. Yet at the time of Dien Bien Phu, the United States was already and secretly paying three-quarters of France's military costs and was offering every assistance short of ground troops or nuclear weapons. The French lost in Vietnam for the same reason that the Americans lost and any outside power was bound to lose: they were fighting a mass resistance that was, almost alone in Asia, both nationalist and socialist in its inspiration. This lesson was learned the hard way by General de Gaulle who wrote to President Kennedy in 1961: 'The more you commit yourself (in Indochina) against communism, the more communists will appear to be champions of national independence'.

This lesson had been learned by Joseph Buttinger, the author of several historical works on the country who has now written a kind of polemic postscript, Vietnam. The Unforgettable Tragedy (Andre Deutsch, £4.95). A social democrat and a refugee from Europe, Mr Buttinger went to Vietnam in 1954 to work for the refugees from the newly communist Hanoi regime, and for years was a champion of the austere Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem, who was to be killed in a coup d'etat in 1963. As he grew disenchanted with Diem, so Mr Buttinger lost faith in America's involvement and eventually in the future of Vietnam as a western democracy. He has now arrived at the conclusion that if Vietnam had been allowed independence in 1945, not only would there have been no war but Ho Chi Minh might have become an Asian Tito, friendly to the United States. I doubt it, thinking back to the atmosphere of the Cold War, but certainly Vietnam would have been spared hideous suffering. Moreover, the two neighbouring kingdoms, Laos and Cambodia, might have remained Buddhist sanctuaries, filled with the sound of temple gongs and the perfume of joss sticks.

The 'domino theory' that if Indochina fell, so would all South-East Asia, has proved a fallacy, with no sign of communist threat to the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaya or Thailand, apart from the feeble guerrilla bands that have been struggling in some remote districts since World War II. The two nearest dominoes to Vietnam, that is Laos and Cambodia, fell as a consequence not of Communist revolt but of US military intervention. Those who supported America during the war have been disappointed to see that there was not the expected bloodbath in South Vietnam and have therefore turned their attention to Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge have acted with whole-scale savagery. Yet were it not for the US invasion and massive bombing of Cambodia, there would be no Khmer Rouge, these madmen would not be in power, and the country might still be ruled by that great statesman, the Royal Buddhist. Socialist Prince Norodom Sihanouk, whose reported death at the hands of the Khmer Rouge is one more crime to lay at the door of Nixon and the devilish Kissinger.