Authorisation was given to open ‘Strategic Route 559’, a secret path to the battlefield that ran through neutral Laos and evolved into the Ho Chi Minh Trail; three-year military conscription had already been reintroduced. One of those who approved Resolution 15 said later, ‘Only [in 1959] did we finally acknowledge that there would be no general elections; that Diem was massacring our people. There were signs that the US would continue to strengthen its presence [and therefore that] the only path to the unification of our country must lie through violence.’
It was significant that Hanoi was slow to inform the Russians about Resolution 15, because Le Duan and his comrades knew how unwelcome it would be. Moreover, only on 7 May 1959 was word of the new mandate passed to COSVN, communist headquarters in the South. North Vietnam’s leaders remained morbidly fearful of provoking the Americans, perhaps even causing them to strike at their territory. The ideological divide between Russia and China was deepening apace, and this was reflected by rival factions in Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh and Giap leaned towards Moscow; Le Duan led those who inclined towards Beijing.
At the time of Mao Zedong’s catastrophic industrialisation programme the Great Leap Forward, which cost the lives of at least fifty-five million of his own people, Le Duan may have been responsible for Hanoi’s inopportune expression of national ambition: ‘The China of today is the Vietnam of tomorrow.’ Meanwhile he and his comrades still struggled to suppress domestic dissent: Catholics staged demonstrations at which they demanded a right to migrate south. Chants of ‘Down with communism’ prompted troops to open fire, inflicting casualties. Economic woes obliged Hanoi to slash defence spending, from 27 per cent of the national budget in 1955 to 19.2 per cent in 1958, 16 per cent in 1960. Factories languished, and falling agricultural production prompted a cut in the rice ration. The Czech ambassador reported home that much Soviet-bloc aid was being wasted. In June 1959 the British consul in Hanoi reported: ‘The standard of living is sinking into ever shabbier and drabber uniformity. Even the poor are poorer … No member of the Western community has ever met a Vietnamese who was in favour of the regime, except the members of the regime itself.’
In a mirror reflection of Diem’s advancement of loyalists at the expense of honest men, Hanoi promoted war veterans and ideological purists rather than its brightest and best. A French diplomatic observer reported that nine-tenths of the North’s population was ‘ready for an uprising if it had the means’. Yet Le Duc Tho, as head of Party organisation, chose this moment to demand fresh purges of ‘undesirables’, meaning former landlords and ‘rich’ peasants. In its preoccupation with ideological rectitude, the North Vietnamese politburo behaved more like Bolsheviks of forty years earlier than latter-twentieth-century socialists. A new Party statute, denouncing dissenters, was enforced by the Ministry of Public Security, whose chief Tran Quoc Hoan became known to his critics as ‘the Beria of Vietnam’, recalling Stalin’s most notorious enforcer.
Meanwhile in the South, during the months following promulgation of Resolution 15, revolutionaries continued to kill government officials and launched a new round of attacks on South Vietnam’s army, hereafter known by the acronym conferred by its US trainers: the ARVN. A young Vietnamese told an American interviewer: ‘I hated the soldiers … because they were very haughty. The villagers were already very poor, and yet the soldiers commanded them to build roads and bridges … The soldiers carried weapons to protect [Diem] and his regime.’ Symbols of American nation-building became favoured targets: for instance, in the spring of 1959 near the Cambodian border, black-clad attackers blew up two John Deere tractors.
Many young country people, trapped in a relentless cycle of agricultural toil under the petty tyranny of local officials, discovered a romance in revolution. An eighteen-year-old told how an old man who had fought against the French exhorted the teenager to take up arms in his turn. ‘I got excited when he told me about Vietnamese heroes. He told me that Diem had asked the Americans to … help in their plot to put South Vietnam under their rule. He urged me … to perform the duty of a young patriot in fighting for the independence of the country to bring back happiness and prosperity.’ During the weeks of military training that followed, fifteen peasants in his group deserted, demoralised and homesick. He himself, however, stuck it out: ‘I only saw the glory and didn’t think of the hardships.’
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
