3 LE DUAN RAISES HIS STAKE
In the course of 1961–62 the North Vietnamese government tilted away from Russia, towards closer links with China, yet still neither power encouraged Hanoi to escalate. The communists felt enmeshed in a sufficiency of turmoil elsewhere – Cuba, Berlin, Albania, Congo. The North’s domestic difficulties persisted: its population was increasing by half a million a year, yet grain production per head had fallen. China was taking a substantial portion of the country’s rice output and three-quarters of its coal in return for a drip-feed of cash. There was a massive migration of hungry peasants towards the cities, and little for them to do when they got there: raw-materials shortages caused factories to languish.
From May 1961 North Vietnam’s allowance of meat, which included cat and dog, fell to barely four ounces a week per person. That summer hunger protesters set fire to rice stocks amid clashes with troops, and in August burned down a bicycle factory. A bomb exploded in the city of Dong Anh. There was a local army mutiny, and on two occasions Hmong tribesmen attacked army convoys. South Vietnam and its US advisers encouraged such acts, and ran a programme of risibly unsuccessful commando stabs into the North. However, the dissent among Ho Chi Minh’s people was overwhelmingly spontaneous, driven by hunger and met with repression, which worked. By October 1961 a French diplomat reported that people had been reduced to ‘passive resignation’. Duong Van Mai said of the Northerners: ‘People were incredibly uninformed. It was as if they were sitting at the bottom of a well, seeing only a patch of sky. The communists had so many mechanisms of control.’
Le Duan now dominated Hanoi’s policy-making, as he would continue to do for the next quarter-century, though the world did not know this. In the Hollywood epic El Cid, the corpse of the eponymous Spanish medieval hero is strapped into the saddle to lead his army to one final victory. Something of the same was true of Ho Chi Minh. He was haunted by fears that Vietnam would become a new Korea, a devastated battlefield on which Americans and Chinese contested mastery. As his health declined and younger men grasped the initiative, he abdicated mastery and even influence on war-making. But he remained an indispensable figurehead, commanding respect across much of the world. Ho and prime minister Pham Van Dong remained the public faces of North Vietnam’s leadership, while Le Duan was almost invisible. The Moscow-leaning Giap became the object of animosity from comrades who deplored his bloated personal staff and lust for celebrity. One called him ‘a show-off and braggart’. The armed forces’ former chief logistician at Dienbienphu hated his old commander, and often complained about him to Ho. Another senior general and cabinet minister, who was also a brother of Le Duc Tho, likened the veteran to an old barrel, growling, ‘The emptier a barrel, the louder it booms.’
Le Duan displayed skill and patience in conducting relations with the Soviets and Chinese. He liked to quote a Vietnamese version of the English proverb ‘When in Rome’: ‘Visiting a pagoda, you must wear the robes of a Buddhist monk, and when you walk with a ghost you must wear paper clothes.’ He and his clique considered the Russians untrustworthy and weak, not least because they had blinked first in the Cuban missile crisis. Among those hard men the Spartan ethic – a willingness to suffer in pursuit of a high purpose – reigned supreme. Le Duan deplored the need to travel repeatedly to Beijing as a suppliant, and to endure its snubs. One of his acolytes claimed that on a 1961 visit Zhou Enlai challenged him, ‘Why are you people conducting armed struggle in South Vietnam? … If the war expands into the North, I am telling you now that China will not send troops to help you fight the Americans … You will be on your own, and have to take the consequences.’
Le Duan sometimes referred to Mao as ‘that bastard’, and when China’s chairman once fantasised aloud before a Hanoi delegation about sending his People’s Liberation Army to liberate the South, he awakened every visceral Vietnamese fear of their neighbour’s imperialistic inclinations. While Le Duan leaned towards China, he forswore direct criticism of the Soviet Union, because Hanoi needed its more sophisticated weapons and plant. He often made cynical remarks about the parsimony of Chinese aid, professing to believe that Beijing regarded the Vietnamese revolution as ‘a bargaining chip in negotiations between China and the US’.
In 1961–62 the North Vietnamese saw risks in pushing a new US president too hard: though they increased their commitment in the South, they remained anxious to avoid provoking the Americans to dispatch combat troops. They agonised about whether to enter negotiations, and urged their Southern comrades through COSVN to focus on the political struggle. In one of Le Duan’s ‘letters to the South’, dated 7 February 1961, he acknowledged, ‘We are weaker than the enemy.’ It was important, he said, to emphasise the autonomy of the National Liberation Front, and not allow it to be branded as Hanoi’s tool. It was a contradiction of this period that while North Vietnam gave its Southern comrades far less support than they wanted, on the international stage its leaders’ rhetoric became ever more bellicose: Le Duan was bent upon establishing his credentials as a standard-bearer for worldwide revolution. His stridency antagonised India, to name but one, which no longer viewed North Vietnam as a fellow-crusader against imperialist oppression, but instead as a menace to regional stability.
In 1962, Hanoi at last authorised large numbers of ‘returnees’ – Vietminh who had gone north in 1954 – to head South, where Communist Party membership was once more resurgent. Everywhere the NLF held sway, its cadres laboured to change the habits of centuries. Education programmes challenged Vietnamese fatalism – and the subordination of women. When couples married, the village Party secretary often supplanted the old matchmaker. In primary schools, children were invited to address such problems in arithmetic as ‘There were fifty soldiers in a government post. We attacked it and killed twenty of them. How many were left?’ An occasional nervous voice dared to enquire when the NLF or the Communist Party would provide insecticide, loans, pumps, tractors and animal-breeding advice such as the Saigon regime offered. Cadres assured peasants that all these good things would descend from the North, as soon as the revolution triumphed.
Until 1963 the Vietcong’s main sources of arms were captures from government forces: at the end of 1961 there were reckoned to be only twenty-three thousand serviceable weapons in guerrilla hands. Assassinations required little firepower, however. Between 1957 and 1960 a credible estimate suggested that 1,700 Saigon village and provincial officials were murdered. In 1961 this figure rose to 1,300: beyond the usual eliminations of village chiefs and suchlike, there were high-profile victims, such as a Southern colonel – Saigon’s senior liaison officer with the ICC – snatched and tortured to death. Such killings peaked at two thousand in 1963, then fell to five hundred, because the communists had liquidated most of their accessible local foes. Surviving officials and landlords took care not to place themselves in harm’s way, which meant – much to the detriment of Saigon’s authority – that they physically distanced themselves from the peasantry, taking refuge in towns and cities. The NLF appropriated the lands of those who fled, presenting them to friends of the revolution who thus found themselves with a tangible stake in its success.
Throughout the war American soldiers veered between contempt for ‘the dinks’, ‘the gooks’, as a primitive enemy, and an exaggerated belief in their superhuman skills and powers of endurance. Grunts recalled the old Wild West story about a cavalryman who rode a horse a hundred miles in pursuit of an Apache, then when it dropped shifted his saddle to another animal and kept chasing; meanwhile the Apache doubled back, rode the foundered mount a further hundred miles, then ate it. In reality, the Vietcong’s performance was uneven and sometimes outright clumsy, its units as vulnerable to human frailties as any army in the world. Nam Kinh, a local commander in the delta respected as a tactician but also notoriously harsh, was shot in the back by one of his own men whom he forbade to marry an attractive local widow. Thanh Hai – ‘Blue Ocean’ – a landlord’s son aged around thirty, was one of the most popular VC commanders both for his military skill and his human weaknesses. Hai was repeatedly demoted for drinking and womanising, the latter exemplified by his climbing under the mosquito net of a young conscript’s wife.
One fighter spoke for many when he complained about interminable indoctrination sessions: ‘Talking to me about political