In the course of 1959, Vietcong attacks grew steadily in intensity. On the evening of 8 July, American advisers with 7th Southern Infantry Division near Bien Hoa were watching the opening credits roll at a screening of The Tattered Dress, starring Jeanne Crain, when six VC launched a gun and grenade attack in which thirty-eight-year-old Major Dail Ruis and Master-Sergeant Chester Overnand, forty-four, were killed. These were the first Americans to die at communist hands in what became known as the Second Indochina War. The tempo of guerrilla attacks increased nationwide: in early-morning darkness one day in December, a VC platoon stopped a bus on Route 4 in the delta. They ejected the passengers, clambered in with their weapons and forced the driver to take them to a government fortified post. They arrived at dawn, to find the gates opened to allow soldiers to visit the market. When the attackers stormed in, a policeman and several defenders were quickly shot down; the rest of the garrison surrendered. The guerrillas collected weapons and wrecked the post before disappearing into the jungle with the village chief, whom they killed.
The VC objective was to show an ability to strike at will. A cadre proclaimed exultantly, ‘The Tiger has awakened!’ Villagers found themselves obliged to make ever more perilous calculations about the local balance of power, in which a misjudgement cost at best all that they owned; at worst, their lives. Almost all paid secret taxes to the communists, whose imaginative propaganda much exaggerated their reach and power. Cadres cited proverbs beloved of Vietnamese: ‘Better the head of a rat than the tail of an elephant’; ‘No matter how hard you try to shed your horns, you will always remain a water buffalo.’ They staged rallies that sometimes mustered a thousand peasants, under varying degrees of compulsion, accompanied by a cacophony of gongs, megaphones and ‘wooden fish’ – the clackers of temple bells. Government flags were torn down, tree trunks plastered with posters and slogans. Reports were spread about the VC’s supposedly mystical powers: their magic rice-cookers, inflatable boats carried in knapsacks, ‘sky horses’ and guns that could kill fifty men at a discharge: credulous peasants embraced such fairy tales. Guerrillas sometimes paraded through villages in daylight, merely to show that they could.
Some of the many victims of 1960 murders were tried and dispatched with machetes in front of village crowds, just as in the Vietminh era: one woman was hacked to death because she had two sons in the ARVN. A man being buried alive shrieked repeatedly, ‘I’m going to die! I’m going to die!’ before his cries faded beneath a rising mound of earth. Another was killed merely because he drank with the local policeman. For every peasant who backed the communists out of belief, two did so from fear. Yet real support also existed, partly because the revolution offered the poor a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves: it conferred pride on humble folk. Prudence was a factor too – a growing belief that the communists represented the future, Diem the past.
By the beginning of 1960, it was claimed that VC armed propaganda units had killed seventeen hundred government officials, village chiefs, teachers, hospital workers, and had seized another two thousand. Uprisings took place in the Central Highlands. Diem’s troops fought back, recapturing lost ground. Under the terms of a draconian new Treason Law, thousands of dissidents and members of religious minorities were rounded up, along with communist suspects. The guillotine was reintroduced as the preferred tool of government executioners.
Many Vietcong were frustrated by the refusal of COSVN – and, ultimately, of Hanoi – to authorise escalation to full-scale open warfare. Local cadres made renewed appeals for weapons to resist Saigon’s ‘cruel terrorism’. Without the stimulus of action, many men found intolerable the boredom and privations of a covert existence. A fighter with a unit based in the Mekong delta spoke later of the awesome, sinister silence of the wilderness, broken only by its wild creatures: ‘Because of the jungle vastness, the polluted waters and malaria, it was sad all the time.’ A company commander exploded before senior officers, pounding his chest and saying, ‘I’d rather die than live like this! Let’s start the armed struggle!’
At last, in September 1960, COSVN gave the order that its supporters had waited so long to receive: there were to be coordinated uprisings against government forces. Thereafter, the revolution’s territories expanded with remarkable speed. One-third of South Vietnam’s population, an estimated six million people, were soon estimated to be living under open or secret communist control. Cadres embarked upon energetic land redistribution. Guerrilla activity increased steeply, especially in the delta, where insurgents exploited local people’s intimate knowledge of river and tide conditions. Ambushes were set on bends of streams and canals; underwater mines buoyed with driftwood, wired to electrical detonators ashore. While North Vietnam was now a fiercely disciplined, regulated society, in response to terrorism the South became an oppressively militarised one. Nine-tenths of US aid was spent not on economic or agricultural development, but instead on arms to sustain the regime. The American advisory group focused on creating a conventional army, capable of resisting an invasion from the North such as South Korea had faced. Meanwhile, in one province of six hundred thousand inhabitants there were six hundred police, nine Civil Guard companies and twenty-four militia platoons manning thirty fortified posts and guarding 115 villages. Yet still the communist tide rose.
In 1960 Cold War tensions increased across the world. In April the South Korean dictatorship of Syngman Rhee collapsed, prompting exultation in Hanoi, hopes that this was the precursor of a similar fate awaiting Diem. A week later the Russian shootdown of an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft blew apart East–West détente. The Sino–Soviet split was ever more visibly reflected in North Vietnam’s politics, with Ho Chi Minh making a vain attempt to mediate. Le Duan, Le Duc Tho and their pro-Chinese faction achieved dominance in the politburo. For Hanoi, the political imperative to support the Vietcong’s armed struggle had become irresistible. The only issue was how much aid should be provided, how quickly: Le Duan faced the prospect of supporting the war that he wanted almost entirely from his own country’s resources.
Meanwhile in Saigon, on 26 April 1960, eighteen prominent anti-communist South Vietnamese met at a well-known hotel, after which they issued the ‘Caravelle Manifesto’, signed by ‘a group of patriots’, calling on the government to change course. Later that year US ambassador Elbridge Durbrow submitted a memo to Diem which itemised reforms Washington considered essential: publication of government decisions and budgets; scrutiny of all branches by elected representatives; liberalisation of press laws and improved relations with the foreign media; radio ‘fireside chats’ with the peasantry; more generous credit for farmers. These were all sensible, perhaps indispensable, measures for a functioning democracy, but wholly unacceptable to Diem. Just as he ignored the ‘Caravelle Manifesto’, so he received this shopping list as a manifestation of American condescension. He might also have responded to Durbrow by asking how much of his liberal wish-list was fulfilled by the Northern politburo.
The US remained overwhelmingly preoccupied with the armed struggle. Washington responded to the Vietcong upsurge by dispatching several hundred additional military advisers, raising the total number from 342 to 692, in breach of the limit on such personnel set by the Geneva Accords. Their commanders, notably including Gen. Sam Williams of the MAAG – Military Aid and Assistance Group – viewed the guerrillas solely as a security problem, to be addressed from the business end of a gun.
At the end of 1960 the communists formally rebranded the Southern resistance movement as the National Liberation Front, or NLF. Importantly, though all its leaders were communists, it sought to project itself as a nationalist coalition. Here, incoming US president John F. Kennedy would be told, was a political force that constituted an unacceptable threat to freedom and democracy in South-East Asia. The avowed objectives of the NLF were to bring social unity to the South; overthrow Diem; evict the Americans; impose land redistribution; unify the country by negotiation. This prospectus admitted nothing of Le Duan’s unswerving intention to create a Stalinist society.
In the years that followed the Geneva Accords, it was the misfortune of both Vietnams to fall into the hands of cruel and incompetent governments. Had Southern peasants known the plight of their Northern brethren, they might have thought less harshly of their own: at least few of Diem’s people went hungry. His American sponsors entirely misjudged the attitudes of Moscow and Beijing, supposing their leaderships