On 30 April 1975, Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam was captured by North Vietnam. Ever since it is marked as Reunification Day. This process began with the signing of the Paris Accord ending US involvement in South Vietnam on 27 January 1973. Richard Nixon’s administration (1969-74) proclaimed it to be “peace with honour” and immediately after, on 29 March, the US troops exited Vietnam. Nixon assured the South Vietnamese government that the US would intervene if the peace accord was broken by North Vietnam.
Significantly Nixon’s promise came before the Watergate scandal which led to his resignation, his successor, Gerald Ford had to stick to the timetable of withdrawal as the US Congress was unwilling to support any further escalation. A resurgent North Vietnam was inspired by the heroic leadership of Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969) and the Viet Minh, a disciplined force of communist fighters which earlier liberated Vietnam from Japanese occupation in 1945. More significantly after the Japanese surrender the Viet Minh preserved its independence fighting the French when Britain tried to put France back as the ruler. This led to the first Indo-China War from 1946 to 1954 when the French Navy bombed Viet Minh soldiers at Haiphong port on 23 November 1946 maiming and slaying thousands.
Viet Minh retaliated with the killing of some French citizens on 19 December 1946. Winston Churchill had already declared in his famous speech at Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946 the descendance of the Iron Curtain in Europe. The Cold War seemed inevitable. President Harry Truman, a year later, distinguished between free institutions, elected government by free elections with constitutional protection of individual freedom with rule of terror and repression, and a controlled press with no individual liberty. The US looked at the first Indo-China War with a lot of interest. With a strong anticommunist bias the Truman administration (1945-53) analysed it more as a fight against communism rather than a nationalist war of Independence. It is ironic that the US moved away from the Atlantic Charter of 1941 which was committed to the liberation of the colonies within five years. The Eisenhower administration (1953- 61) put forward the domino theory that stated that if one country fell to communism, its neighbouring countries would then fall like dominoes, one after another, ultimately leading to the takeover of the region by communists.
This provided the basis of the Containment theory. On the basis of this doctrine, President Eisenhower supported the South Vietnamese government and though it violated the earlier agreement of holding an election for the whole of Vietnam, the Eisenhower administration continued to support Diem’s regime by increasing military and economic aid and successfully convincing US policy makers that the communists were behind all the mischief. On 7 May 1954, a French force of 11,000 was encircled in the Dien Bien Phu Valley and surrendered to the Viet Minh.
It was a humiliating defeat for the French and the West. On 21 July 1954, the Geneva Peace Accord was signed. It ended the First Indochina War and temporarily divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel, a communist zone in the north and a non-communist zone in the south. The agreement between the Western powers and the Communists granted full independence and neutrality to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam which were previously French colonies. Ceasefire was established in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam and a demilitarised zone was created allowing for regrouping of forces. It also mandated free elections in Vietnam to be held in July 1956 to unify the country.
The Ho Chi Minh-led communists were expected to win overwhelmingly. Ironically these agreements were between the French and the Viet Minh but the US and the South Vietnam governments were not signatories giving them a window to abandon its terms. The US’ unhappiness stemmed from the possibility of the establishment of a legitimate communist government in Vietnam and therefore it put all its might to check this from happening in violation of the agreement. A parallel non-communist state in the South, the Republic of Vietnam was established with total American support with the hope that this regime would be able to withstand the challenge from North Vietnam. The new leader was Ngo Dinh Diem who became the president. With American support he eliminated all his political rivals.
Diem’s regime was rickety from the beginning as within South Vietnam two religious groups organized their own communities making it a state within the state. It had a formidable membership of about 2 million. They had their own governmental structures, schools, hospitals, postal services, armies, administering them with tax collection. In the first Indo-China war the French administration allowed them autonomy because both of them were anti-communists and were instrumental in preventing the communist takeover of the south. But Diem finding them to be serious internal challenges brought them under his authoritarian rule. The national liberation front, the Viet Cong sprang up in 1960 when the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese communists organized a national liberation fro – nt with planned insurgency against Diem. The supply route of these forces used part of the territory of Laos and Cambodia, a long 16,000 kilometre route called the Ho Chi Minh trail that saw severe bombing by the Americans more than anywhere else. Diem with the assistance of the US army tried to create groups of villages as strategic hamlets with an aim to separate the rural population from the Viet Cong. This strategy followed the practice that the British followed in Malaya in 1948-60 but was a miserable failure in Vietnam as the villagers complained of virtual imprisonment and abuses of power from the soldiers stationed in their villages. Consequently, the villagers started cooperating with the Viet Cong.
By 1963, the apparent failure of an authoritarian and unpopular dictator came to surface and Diem’s unwillingness to reform led to a military coup on 2 November 1963 in which he was killed. A series of coups followed, ultimately a civilian government was formed in 1967 after elections. In order to isolate the Vietcong, President John F Kennedy (1961-63) proposed an anti-guerrilla campaign to create ‘safe villages’ in which local peasants were moved en masse to fortified villages. He sent 16,000 advisors, helicopters and other military hardware. This policy ended in failure as the Viet Cong consisted mostly of peasants and had no problem in carrying out their mission inside the villages successfully. By 1964, the Viet Cong and the NLF controlled roughly forty per cent of South Vietnamese villages and enjoyed widespread support of the local people.
President Lyndon Johnson (1963-69) assumed that the Viet Cong was controlled and directed by Ho Chi Minh and ordered bombing of its supply routes. In an unprecedented situation, in the coming seven years, North Vietnam was heavily bombed, the bombing being more than all the bombs dropped in Germany during World War II. In addition, more than half a million US troops were sent to South Vietnam from 1965. But even such massive deployments could not stop the Viet Cong advance. Johnson started bombing rural areas of South as well as North Vietnam. By February 1968, the Viet Cong controlled 80 per cent of all towns and villages in South Vietnam. However, many of these areas were recovered by the US assisted South Vietnamese troops, and yet the US public opinion was building against the war and there was increasing demand to withdraw from Vietnam. Johnson rejected the demand of withdrawal but suspended bombing of North Vietnam in March 1968.
(The writers are retired Professors of Political Science, University of Delhi)