The Second Indochina War

Two states after partition (1954–1959)

The Geneva Accords of 1954 ended the war between France and the Viet Minh but left the conflict between two internationally recognised Vietnamese governments unresolved, temporarily dividing the country at the 17th parallel. During the 300-day relocation period up to one million northerners moved south, at least 500,000 of them Catholics. Over 100,000 Viet Minh fighters went north for “regroupment”, leaving 5,000 to 10,000 cadres in the south. The reunification elections promised for 1956 were never held; in 1957 the International Control Commission reported that fair elections were impossible because neither side had honoured the armistice. 1

In the south, Ngô Đình Diệm crushed the Cao Đài, Hòa Hảo and Bình Xuyên armed groups in April–June 1955. In October he ousted Bảo Đại in a referendum run by his brother Ngô Đình Nhu, being credited with 98 per cent and, in Saigon, with votes equal to 133 per cent of the electorate. Diệm proclaimed the Republic of Vietnam with himself as president. The “Denounce the Communists” campaign launched in July 1955 hunted and arrested the cadres left in the south, and in 1956 communist activity was made a capital offence. The North Vietnamese government claimed that by November 1957 over 65,000 people had been imprisoned and 2,148 killed, and political prisoners numbered 40,000 by 1959. In 1959 Law 10/59 made political violence punishable by death. 1 2

In the north, the Vietnam Workers’ Party carried out a land reform in 1953–1956. Scholars have come to accept a figure of about 50,000 executions, while Hungarian diplomatic documents suggest at least 13,500. In 1956 the Hanoi leadership admitted excesses, launched a “correction of errors” and returned much of the land to its owners, and in the same year suppressed the intellectuals’ periodicals Nhân văn and Giai phẩm. The southern leader Lê Duẩn presented “The Road to the South”, a plan to revive the southern insurgency, to the Politburo in March 1956, but it was rejected because China and the Soviet Union opposed confrontation. In January 1959 the party approved a “people’s war” in the south, and in May Group 559 was set up to develop the Ho Chi Minh trail. 1 3

The Liberation Front and the fall of Diệm (1960–1963)

In September 1960 the Third Congress of the Vietnam Workers’ Party authorised the creation of a National Liberation Front in the south while concealing the party’s control. Founded in December at Memot in Cambodia, the Front (called the “Viet Cong” by the United States and the Saigon government) sought to unite all anti-government forces, non-communists included, and stressed the withdrawal of American advisers and influence, land reform and liberalisation of the government, a coalition government and the neutralisation of Vietnam. Clashes between insurgents and government forces rose from 180 in January 1960 to 545 in September. 1 4

The Kennedy administration refused to send combat troops but increased military aid, raising the adviser contingent from Eisenhower’s 900 to 16,000 by November 1963. The Strategic Hamlet Program begun in 1962 forcibly resettled peasants into fortified villages to separate them from the guerrillas, but it had waned by November 1963 and ended in 1964. In July 1962 fourteen nations signed the International Agreement on the Neutrality of Laos. At the Battle of Ấp Bắc on 2 January 1963 Front forces defeated a much larger and better-equipped South Vietnamese force, which lost 83 soldiers and five US helicopters against 18 Front dead. 1 5 6 7

In May 1963 nine Buddhists protesting a ban on flying the Buddhist flag on Vesak were shot dead in Huế, starting the Buddhist crisis. On 11 June the monk Thích Quảng Đức burned himself to death at a Saigon intersection, and in August special forces loyal to Ngô Đình Nhu raided pagodas. The US State Department favoured encouraging a coup, and the CIA told generals planning to remove Diệm that the United States would neither oppose them nor cut off aid. The coup led by General Dương Văn Minh began on 1 November; the next day Diệm and Nhu were captured and killed. South Vietnam then fell into instability as one military government toppled another. 8 9 1

From the Gulf of Tonkin to the ground war (1964–1967)

On 2 August 1964 the destroyer USS Maddox, supporting South Vietnamese commando raids on the northern coast, exchanged fire with North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. A second attack was reported two days later, but a document declassified in 2005 showed that there was no attack on 4 August and that the National Security Agency had skewed intelligence to suggest one. On 7 August Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, 416–0 in the House and 88–2 in the Senate, empowering the president “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression”. Johnson relied on it to expand the war without a declaration of war. 10 11 1

Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing of North Vietnam, began on 2 March 1965 and lasted until 2 November 1968, dropping a million tons of bombs, rockets and missiles on the north over three years. On 8 March 3,500 US Marines landed near Da Nang, beginning America’s ground war; by December the deployment had risen to nearly 200,000. General Westmoreland, commanding US forces in the south, pursued an attrition war in which American troops sought out and destroyed the enemy, with success measured by body count. The Battle of Ia Drang in November 1965 was the first major clash between US forces and the North Vietnamese army. By 1967 the war had made two million South Vietnamese internal refugees. 12 1

Saigon’s politics began to stabilise in mid-1965 with Air Marshal Nguyễn Cao Kỳ as prime minister and General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu as head of state, and Thiệu became president after rigged elections in 1967. Washington asked its SEATO allies for troops: Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and the Philippines agreed, and South Korea joined in return for economic compensation, while Canada and Britain declined. In Laos, bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail began in December 1964 with Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma’s consent; the two million tons dropped on Laos between 1964 and 1973 make it the most heavily bombed country in history per person. 1

Socialist-bloc aid and the Sino-Soviet split

From 1960 Lê Duẩn and Nguyễn Chí Thanh in the Workers’ Party Politburo opposed Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful coexistence, and in 1963 Hanoi formally rejected peaceful coexistence as a strategic principle. As the Sino-Soviet split deepened that year, the North Vietnamese leaders obtained Chinese assurances of support for a more aggressive war, and Beijing, denouncing Soviet “revisionism”, increasingly endorsed Hanoi’s war in the south. About 40,000 troops infiltrated the south in 1961–1963. 1

In summer 1962 China agreed to give Hanoi 90,000 rifles and guns free of charge, and from 1965 it sent anti-aircraft units and engineering battalions to man anti-aircraft batteries and rebuild the roads and railways wrecked by American bombing, freeing North Vietnamese units for combat. China sent 320,000 troops in all and annual arms shipments worth $180 million. The Soviet Union supplied tanks, aircraft, surface-to-air missiles and other weapons as well as medical supplies, worth $450 million a year, and in 1965 Soviet crews fired missiles at US aircraft themselves. After 1991 Russia acknowledged that up to 3,000 Soviet troops had been stationed in Vietnam and that 16 had been killed. 1

The rivalry between the two patrons also shaped the later war. From 1969 China turned towards an alignment with the United States against the Soviet Union, and Nixon pursued détente with Moscow and rapprochement with Beijing; the Soviets nevertheless kept supplying North Vietnam. China began financing the Khmer Rouge as a counterweight to North Vietnam, a choice that fed into the conflicts leading after 1975 to war between Cambodia and Vietnam and to the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979. 1

The Tet Offensive of 1968

In late 1967 the North Vietnamese army drew American forces into the hinterlands at Đắk Tô and Khe Sanh. Lê Duẩn sought a decisive victory that would end the stalemate by sparking uprisings in the cities and defections in the South Vietnamese army. The Tet Offensive began prematurely in some areas on 30 January 1968 and in full on the 31st, as more than 85,000 troops attacked over 100 cities, including the US Embassy in Saigon. Most cities were retaken within weeks, but the former imperial capital Huế was held for 26 days. The occupying forces executed about 2,800 unarmed civilians, prisoners and others in Huế, and American firepower left 80 per cent of the city in ruins. 13 14 1

No general uprising came, and communist forces lost 45,267 killed in the offensives of 1968; Hanoi’s goals had failed at enormous cost. American opinion, however, was badly shaken. Coming after Westmoreland had said in November 1967 that “the end comes into view”, the offensive drove support for the war down from 40 to 26 per cent. Westmoreland was replaced in March, and on 31 March Johnson announced he would not seek re-election and offered negotiations. Peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam opened in Paris on 10 May, and Hanoi adopted a strategy of “talking while fighting, fighting while talking”. 1 13

On 16 March 1968 a US Army unit massacred between 347 and 504 civilians, almost all women, children and old men, at Sơn Mỹ village in Quảng Ngãi province. When it came to light in 1969 it provoked outrage. The anti-war movement grew: in January 1967, 32 per cent of Americans thought sending troops had been a mistake, and by 1970 the figure was 60 per cent. The Vietnam Moratorium of October 1969 drew millions. 15 1 16

Vietnamization and the war across Indochina (1969–1972)

Nixon began withdrawing troops in 1969 and pursued “Vietnamization”, building up the South Vietnamese army to take over the war. US troop numbers fell to 265,500 in 1970 and 196,700 in 1971. Ho Chi Minh died on 2 September 1969. Because Tet had failed to spark an uprising, the “North-First” faction of Võ Nguyên Giáp and Trường Chinh regained control of military affairs from Lê Duẩn’s “South-First” faction in Hanoi, and large offensives gave way to small-unit attacks. 1 17

In March 1969 Nixon ordered secret bombing of North Vietnamese and Front sanctuaries along the Cambodian border. On 18 March 1970 Cambodia’s National Assembly removed the head of state, Prince Sihanouk, and the pro-American prime minister Lon Nol took power and began rounding up and massacring Vietnamese civilians. In April–May North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia at the Khmer Rouge’s request, and in May US and South Vietnamese forces attacked the border bases. On 4 May four students protesting the widening war were killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University. In February 1971 Operation Lam Sơn 719, a South Vietnamese thrust into Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail, ended in a rout in which half the troops were killed or captured. That year the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s secret history of the war, were published in The New York Times, revealing public deceptions by the government. 1 18 19 16 20

On 30 March 1972 North Vietnam launched the Easter Offensive with 300,000 troops and hundreds of tanks, overrunning the northern provinces and advancing on Saigon from Cambodia. While withdrawing its ground forces, the United States provided air support in Operation Linebacker and in May mined Haiphong harbour. After fierce fighting at An Lộc and Kon Tum the offensive was halted by October, with over 200,000 casualties among soldiers and civilians on both sides. 21 1

The Paris Accords and the war that did not end (1972–1975)

Lê Đức Thọ, the effective head of the North Vietnamese delegation in Paris, held secret talks with Kissinger from February 1970 and reached an agreement in October 1972. When Thiệu demanded changes and the talks deadlocked, Nixon ordered Operation Linebacker II against Hanoi and Haiphong from 18 to 29 December. More than 20,000 tons of ordnance were dropped and at least 1,624 civilians killed. On 27 January 1973 Lê Đức Thọ, Kissinger, the Provisional Revolutionary Government’s foreign minister Nguyễn Thị Bình and a reluctant Thiệu signed the Paris Peace Accords, which provided for a ceasefire, US withdrawal within 60 days and an exchange of prisoners, allowed 200,000 communist troops to remain in the south, and called for elections or a political settlement between the PRG and the Saigon government. All US forces were out by March. 22 23 24 1

That year Lê Đức Thọ was named joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize with Kissinger but declined it, stating that the United States and the Saigon administration continued in grave violation of key clauses of the agreement and that “peace has not yet really been established in South Vietnam”. Both sides had fought to seize land and population right up to the ceasefire, and fighting went on without American participation. The Senate barred renewed intervention with the Case–Church Amendment, and in January 1974 Thiệu announced that the war had restarted and the accords were no longer in effect. Congress cut aid to South Vietnam from $1 billion a year to $700 million. 22 1

In December 1974 North Vietnamese forces attacked Phước Long province, taking its capital on 6 January 1975 without an American response. In March the South Vietnamese army collapsed before the Central Highlands offensive commanded by Văn Tiến Dũng, and the fall of Saigon on 30 April ended the war. The 1975 spring offensive, the fall of Saigon and the reunification of 1976 are covered in “The End of the Vietnam War and Reunification”. That year the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, and in December the Pathet Lao abolished the monarchy of Laos and founded the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. 1

The cost of the war

Death toll estimates vary widely. Estimates of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed range from 970,000 to three million, and one demographic study calculated 791,000 to 1,141,000 war-related deaths for 1965–1975. Vietnamese government figures of 2013 counted 849,018 confirmed military deaths among the North Vietnamese army and the Front for 1955–1975, with a further 232,000 missing. The South Vietnamese army lost an estimated 254,000 killed in 1960–1974. Some 275,000 to 310,000 Cambodians and 20,000 to 62,000 Laotians died, and over 58,000 US military personnel were killed. 1 25

The United States dropped over seven million tons of bombs on Indochina during the war, more than triple the 2.1 million tons it dropped on Europe and Asia in the Second World War, and unexploded ordnance has killed 42,000 people since. In Operation Ranch Hand and related programmes in 1962–1971, 20 million gallons of herbicides such as Agent Orange were sprayed over six million acres of forest and cropland. In 2006 the Vietnamese government estimated over four million victims of dioxin poisoning and the Vietnamese Red Cross up to one million, figures the United States called unreliable while denying a conclusive link. Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, lawyers and academics described the environmental destruction as “ecocide”. 1 26