Episode 93: The Second Indochina War, Part 20

Posted on July 12, 2020 by xenohistorian

Better late than never, as the saying goes! Sorry for the delays. This episode covers the war in Vietnam during 1970 and 1971. Also covered are events in the United States at the same time that affected the war: more antiwar protests, and the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

https://blubrry.com/hoseasia/64228638/episode-93-the-second-indochina-war-part-20/

(Transcript)

This episode is dedicated to Ben G., Willem P., and Alejandro F., for the donations they made to the podcast. This time the donations were particularly generous. I don’t know if that was in response to the announcement I made at the beginning of July, about the need to cut back on the time I was spending recording and editing, but I am always thankful, even when the donations are small. Since today’s episode is focused on war stories, may all of you continue to live in peace and prosperity, even in these crazy times. And speaking of war stories, let’s get on with the show!

Episode 93: The Second Indochina War, Part 20

or, Vietnamization Continues

Greetings, dear listeners! If you are a regular listener, you will remember that for the past three episodes, I have been promoting the Intelligent Speech Conference, an online conference of 40 producers of educational podcasts. That took place last Saturday, June 27, 2020, and I certainly had a great time, meeting podcasters I have been listening to for as long as five years. The presentation I gave went well, too; afterwards all the feedback I got for it was positive. I have been informed that the videos made of the presentations will be made available to speakers like myself, but I don’t know how that will work yet. Maybe I will upload my video on YouTube, for the benefit of those who missed it. Go to the podcast’s Facebook page to keep up to date on that.

Alright, what’s in store for today’s show? Today we are resuming the narrative for the part of the Second Indochina War that took place in Vietnam. You probably know this conflict better as the Vietnam War if you are in the United States, or the American War if you are in Vietnam. We broke off the Vietnam narrative in Episode 89, when we reached the end of 1969. So that’s the episode you need to listen to, in order to understand what’s going on in this one. Or if this is the first episode you have listened to in this podcast, in order to catch up on the Second Indochina War, you will need to listen to Episodes 71 through 92, except for 76, 77, and 85.

If you’re still here, I will assume you already listened to the other episodes, and are ready for this one. To the Batmobile, let’s go!

*****

1970

1970 and 1971 were relatively quiet years in Vietnam, compared with what had happened there over the past decade. To be sure, there were still clashes, and some soldiers on both sides would be killed, but the fighting was on a small scale – no major campaigns were launched by any of the four armies active in Vietnam: MACV, the American force, ARVN, the Army of South Vietnam, PAVN, the Army of North Vietnam, and the National Liberation Front, better known as the Viet Cong. During these years, most of the action was not in South Vietnam, but in Cambodia and Laos. Go to the previous episode, Episode 92, for the events in Cambodia at this time, while Episode 79 covered the events in Laos. Now why did the four players hold back in Vietnam?

If you listened to Episode 89, you know why the Americans didn’t want to act – they were winding down their own involvement, and turning over the war’s responsibilities to the South Vietnamese, so they could go home. The South Vietnamese had been training for this, through a program called “Vietnamization,” but they were not confident yet, and thus showed little initiative where the Americans were not around to back them up. By contrast, the North Vietnamese were confident, but they were not ready to act yet. And in the episode on the Tet Offensive, we saw how the Viet Cong had suffered losses so severe that they would not recover for the rest of the war, so instead of acting on their own, they followed the lead of the North Vietnamese.

We noted previously that the United States had gotten five of its allies to send troops to fight alongside them in Vietnam. Of these, South Korea made the largest commitment, and because they had fought communists at home, in the Korean War, the Koreans hated communists, and they fought so hard here that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong learned to fear them. Still, at the peak of their involvement, the South Koreans had 50,000 troops in South Vietnam, about one tenth the number of US servicemen in the peak year, 1969. Now all five allies were following the American lead, and reducing their involvement, too. The Philippines had already withdrawn its troops in December 1969, while Australia, New Zealand and Thailand pulled their troops out by 1972. The last ally to go was – you guessed it – South Korea; they had a few soldiers in South Vietnam until early 1973.

One theater with events related to the war was not in Southeast Asia at all, but in the United States. We will get to those events shortly. Finally, there was Paris, France, where peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam had been deadlocked since 1968. One sticking point was that the communists refused to recognize the legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government, while the South Vietnamese wouldn’t recognize the legitimacy of the Viet Cong. This impasse was resolved by only naming North Vietnam and the United States as participating parties; Viet Cong officials could join the North Vietnam team without being recognized as Viet Cong, while South Vietnamese delegates joined the US team. Aside from that, the only real change was that during the Johnson presidency, the issue of several hundred Americans being held prisoner in North Vietnam was largely ignored, but Richard Nixon’s negotiators now made it a priority to demand the release of those prisoners. A former foreign minister, Xuan Thuy, continued to lead the talks on the North Vietnamese side, while after Nixon became president, the chief American negotiator was always a former ambassador, first Henry Cabot Lodge, and later David Bruce.

Meanwhile, to break the deadlock, Nixon gave his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, a special mission. While the official peace talks continued, Kissinger would meet secretly with another North Vietnamese official, Le Duc Tho. In Episode 89 I mentioned a four-man team running North Vietnam after Ho Chi Minh’s death; since Tho was not part of that team, he ranked as the Number Five member of the Hanoi Politburo. They had their first meeting on August 4, 1969, and a steady series of secret negotiations between them began on February 12, 1970. Here is how Stanley Karnow, Time-Life’s Vietnam War correspondent, described Tho. Quote: “Le Duc Tho, a gray, austere, aloof man then in his late fifties, had none of the charm of Ho Chi Minh, the flair of Vo Nguyen Giap, or the warmth of Pham Van Dong.” End quote.

Le Duc Tho was born in the Red River Delta in 1911, the son of a worker in the French colonial government of Vietnam, so he got to attend French schools, and then became a nationalist upon graduation. When Ho Chi Minh founded the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930, Tho was a charter member. For this, the French imprisoned him twice, from 1930 to 1936 and again from 1939 to 1944. This included time on Poulo Condore Island, the French prison island in the South China Sea; now it’s called Con Son Island. Between prison sentences, Tho spent most of his time running or hiding from the police. After World War II ended, he joined the Viet Minh, and for the First Indochina War, he was in the southernmost part of Vietnam, serving as Deputy Secretary, Head of the Organization Department of Cochinchina Committee Party. With the partition of Vietnam in 1954, Tho had to move to the North, but after the Second Indochina War began, Tho was the senior party member overseeing the communist insurgency in the South. This meant he sneaked into the South from time to time, to supervise the development of the Viet Cong movement; this time, when he hid in jungles or villages, it was to escape the Americans. After the war, he did not talk about what he did in the war, aside from the peace talks, and refused to be interviewed. He died of cancer in 1990, and today we know less about him than about other North Vietnamese leaders.

At the peace talks, Tho saw negotiations as another form of protracted guerrilla warfare. Thus, he would drag out the talks by haggling over the smallest details. Still, Kissinger developed a perverse kind of respect for him. Quote: “I don’t look back on our meetings with any great joy, yet he was a person of substance and discipline who defended the position he represented with dedication.” Unquote. Despite the lack of progress, Kissinger and Tho would keep meeting for secret talks, on and off, for nearly three years. The North Vietnamese liked having a place where they could meet with a senior US official, and not have the South Vietnamese getting in the way, while Kissinger was free from the supervision of Secretary of State William Rogers and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird. Indeed, those two Cabinet members did not know about the secret peace talks until a year after they started. Don’t worry, they didn’t miss anything! On October 7, during a TV speech, President Nixon proposed a "standstill" cease-fire in which all troops would stop shooting and remain in place, to wait for a formal peace agreement. Hanoi did not respond; they weren’t ready yet to cease hostilities in any way. We will come back to the peace talks when the secret talks became known to the public, in 1972.

*****

Meanwhile, Nixon announced on April 20, 1970, that another 150,000 Americans would leave Vietnam within a year. But then just ten days later, Nixon stunned Americans with another announcement, that US troops and South Vietnamese forces would be going into Cambodia to fight North Vietnamese troops there. We covered this action in the previous episode of this podcast; Nixon said the purpose of it was, quote, "…not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam and winning the just peace we desire." Unquote. Many Americans didn’t see the Cambodian incursion this way; they saw it as a step in the wrong direction. A tidal wave of protests followed from politicians, the press, students, professors, clergy members, business leaders, and many average Americans against Nixon and the Vietnam War.

As before, college campuses became hotbeds for antiwar protests. The worst clash was in Ohio, at Kent State University, where on May 4, 1970, National Guardsmen shot student protestors, killing four and wounding nine. In response to this, more than 400 colleges and universities across the United States shut down. In Washington, nearly 100,000 protesters surrounded various government buildings, including the White House and historical monuments. Still, a Gallup poll taken at the time showed that most Americans felt the National Guard wasn’t responsible for the violence; they had acted in self-defense. This encouraged Nixon to feel that by and large, the American people were on his side; he called them the “silent majority.”

On June 22, 1970, American usage of jungle defoliants in Vietnam was halted, after studies were published showing that chemicals like Agent Orange can cause birth defects. Then two days later, the US Congress repealed the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The president would no longer be given a quote-unquote “blank check” by Congress to do whatever he pleased in a war zone. President Nixon pushed back by claiming he had the authority to continue the war to protect American soldiers in Vietnam. Still, the US troops in Cambodia were pulled out by the end of June. In December, the Cooper-Church amendment was added to the US defense appropriations bill, forbidding the use of any more US ground forces in Laos or Cambodia.

Here I will share with you what Stanley Karnow wrote about Nixon’s situation in mid-1970, from his book, Vietnam: A History.

In Vietnam, the last big battle between Americans and North Vietnamese was the battle of Fire Support Base Ripcord. By now, because of troop pullouts, the only American division left in full strength was the famous 101st Airborne Division. To regain the initiative against the enemy, the commander of the 101st, General Ben Harrison, was put in charge of an operation codenamed “Texas Star.” The plan was to go into the A Shau valley, and use helicopters to rebuild an abandoned firebase on four hilltops, Fire Support Base Ripcord. We mentioned the A Shau valley in previous episodes; located just west of the important city of Hue, this was the site of some other battles. Once completed, the firebase would be used as an outpost for a planned offensive by the Marines, to search and destroy North Vietnamese supply lines in the mountains overlooking the valley.

While the 101st Airborne Division was at work, the enemy was gathering intelligence. From the middle of March until the end of June, the North Vietnamese used mortars, anti-aircraft guns and small arms to launch sporadic attacks, and they silently moved as many as 25,000 NVA troops into the A Shau Valley. The main battle began on July 1, 1970, and lasted until July 23. During that time, the firebase was bombarded with mortars, as 30,000 North Vietnamese, a force almost ten times the size of the 101st Division, tried to take the firebase. It was only the high ground and the bravery of its defenders that kept the enemy from overrunning Fire Support Base Ripcord.

The final death toll of the battle was 138 Americans killed and 3 missing in action, versus 422 North Vietnamese killed and six captured. Among the dead was 1st Lt. Bob Kalsu, rookie of the year for the Buffalo Bills in 1968; he was the only active pro football player to die in Vietnam. Another killed in action here was Weiland Norris, brother of the actor Chuck Norris. I know what you’re thinking, Chuck Norris should have been there to save the day! Three Medals of Honor and six Distinguished Service Crosses were awarded to those who took part in the battle. Afterwards, ARVN troops replaced American troops at the northern border of South Vietnam. The Americans supported ARVN’s move with B-52 raids on the Demilitarized Zone.

Next came a campaign called Operation Jefferson Glenn. This was the last US offensive in Vietnam, and the last operation involving the Marines. Begun on September 5, 1970, it involved the 101st Airborne Division, the 1st Brigade of the 5th Infantry Division, and the South Vietnamese 1st Division. Based in Thua Thien, the province containing Hue, the purposes of the operation were to locate and destroy enemy rocket belts around Hue and Da Nang, and to strengthen the defenses of Hue, Da Nang, and Quang Tri. It went on for thirteen months, until October 6, 1971. On the American and South Vietnamese side, the casualty count was 60 killed, 291 wounded, 1 missing, while 2,026 enemy combatants were reported killed in action; of course this was called another victory for anti-communist forces. Finally, it is worth noting that shortly after Operation Jefferson Glenn was finished, the 101st Airborne began preparations to depart South Vietnam, and returned to the United States in March 1972.

For 1970, American troop levels dropped from 428,000 at the year’s beginning to 280,000 by year’s end. 6,173 Americans were killed in action for that year.

1971

February and March of 1971 saw the most ambitious venture ever attempted by ARVN – an invasion of Laos from the area of the Demilitarized Zone. We looked at this operation, called Lam Son 719, in Episode 79. The objective was to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, North Vietnam’s supply line to its forces in the South. Unfortunately the operation was bungled from the start. As Henry Kissinger later described it, quote, “the operation, conceived in doubt and assailed by skepticism, proceeded in confusion.” Unquote. American strategists estimated that sixty thousand soldiers would have been needed for the operation to succeed, but Saigon committed an inexperienced force only half as large. Naturally the prime minister of Laos, Prince Souvanna Phouma, protested at this violation of his country’s sovereignty, and the combatants simply ignored him. The ARVN troops took an abandoned Laotian town, Tchepone, and then the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, ordered them to turn back before they reached the Trail, so the operation was a failure. The Americans could not send ground troops to accompany the South Vietnamese, but they could provide air support, and lost more than one hundred helicopters by the end of the operation.

Afterwards, an upbeat President Nixon declared that, quote, "Vietnamization has succeeded," unquote, but the failed offensive indicated true Vietnamization of the war might be difficult to achieve. As a result, ARVN would never go on the offensive again. The one bit of good news was that the North Vietnamese had to postpone their next campaign in South Vietnam until 1972, because they lost so many men and supplies in Laos.

The last US Marine combat units departed from Vietnam at the end of April 1971. However, those who thought the troops weren’t leaving fast enough continued to hold anti-war demonstrations. In the past, Nixon dismissed the protesters as, quote, "bums blowing up campuses." Unquote. But he couldn’t do it for one group of servicemen called Vietnam Veterans Against the War, who began a week of protests on April 19. Their main demonstration was in Washington, DC, of course, where the high point came the next day, with the appearance of one of the organization’s leaders, Navy Lieutenant John Kerry, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

It was hard to argue with what Kerry said here. However, earlier in the same speech, he also claimed the troops had committed a number of atrocities:

Did you listen to Episode 90, where I discussed the My Lai Massacre? Here Kerry was making it sound like My Lai-style events were the rule, not the exception. After the war Kerry went into politics, becoming a senator from Massachusetts, the Democratic candidate for president in 2004, and a Secretary of State, and a lot of veterans have hated him for what he said, arguing that it not only hurt them, but it was also used in communist propaganda. On April 21, more than 50 veterans marched to The Pentagon, and tried to give themselves up as war criminals. A Pentagon spokesman took their names and turned them away. The fact that the veterans were never prosecuted shows that no American leaders took Kerry’s atrocity claims seriously.

On April 23, another group of veterans, including Kerry, went to the Capitol building to return the medals and ribbons they had been awarded for their service, and when a fence was set up to keep them out, they tossed their medals over the fence. The police were ordered not to arrest any of these demonstrators, because they were widely respected by the American people. As Pat Buchanan, a White House spokesman, put it at the time, quote, “The Crazies will be in town soon enough, and if we want a confrontation, let’s have it with them.” Unquote. Right on cue, another mass demonstration, numbering 200,000 and led by hippies, took place in Washington after the veterans were done. Here more than 7,000 protestors were arrested, for shutting down traffic in Washington on May Day 1971. This was the largest mass arrest in US history, according to the historian L. A. Kauffman. Public opinion polls taken after the demonstration showed that most Americans approved of the police getting tough on these protesters. Meanwhile, membership in Vietnam Veterans Against the War peaked that year, at around 25,000. Membership shrank when American servicemen came home from Vietnam, but the organization is still around today, with about 2,000 members demonstrating against war in general.

*****

On the morning of June 13, 1971, President Nixon picked up the latest edition of The New York Times. The president’s daughter, Tricia Nixon, had gotten married the day before, and on the front page, next to the story about the wedding, was another article, entitled Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces Three Decades of Growing US Involvement. The article was written by Neil Sheehan; you may remember him from Episode 73, when he was the first reporter to call the battle of Ap Bac a defeat for the Americans. This was the first excerpt published from the “Pentagon Papers,” a Defense Department archive of the paperwork involved in decisions concerning Vietnam, made by previous White House administrations. Dated from 1945 to 1967, these papers had been collected by Robert MacNamara, the former Secretary of Defense, so that a future history text could cover how the United States got involved in Vietnam, and they were supposed to be kept secret. The Pentagon Papers did not make Nixon look bad, because they talked about things done by the presidents before him, but Henry Kissinger pointed out that some day the Times might also get its hands on papers discussing Nixon’s activities, so publication of these classified documents infuriated Nixon.

Completed in January 1969, just before Nixon took office, and bound into 47 volumes, the Pentagon Papers were 3,000 pages of narrative combined with 4,000 pages of supporting documents. One of those involved in the project was Daniel Ellsberg, an ex-Marine who had worked as a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation and at the Department of Defense. Ellsberg had originally supported US involvement in Indochina, but later came to oppose the war, feeling it was unwinnable. When Sheehan found out about the papers, he persuaded Ellsberg to photocopy some of them and give the copies to the Times. That was the source of the upcoming articles revealing the most damning information on US policy, including the Kennedy administration’s approval of the coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, and the fact that bombing raids had been carried out over Laos and Cambodia, long before they were reported in the news.

The New York Times published three articles in the series by June 15, when Nixon attempted to stop further publication by obtaining a federal court injunction against the Times, arguing that publication was detrimental to national security. Instead, The Washington Post began its own publication of the Pentagon Papers; Ellsberg had also given them copies of the documents. The legal case quickly went to the Supreme Court, which saw this as a First Amendment issue, and at the end of June it ruled 6-3 in favor of the New York Times and Washington Post, since the information in the papers did not threaten what the United States was doing in Indochina now.

That should have been the end of the matter, but the White House went on to press legal charges against Ellsberg, which took until 1973 to be dismissed. As for the Pentagon Papers themselves, they were declassified on June 13, 2011, the 40th anniversary of the first article taken from them, so they are all available for public viewing today. In response to the Pentagon Papers affair, two Nixon aides, John Ehrlichman and Charles Colson, established a group called the “White House Plumbers,” to investigate Daniel Ellsberg and to “plug” future news leaks. Colson also compiled an “enemies list” featuring the names of 200 prominent Americans considered to be anti-Nixon. One year later, in June 1972, all this would lead to the “Plumbers” breaking into the Democratic Party headquarters, starting the Watergate scandal and eventually causing the downfall of the Nixon presidency, but those are topics for another podcast.

Now let’s go back to South Vietnam, where it was time for new elections. Parliamentary elections were held first, on August 29. Then the presidential election took place on October 2, 1971. Nguyen Van Thieu was worried that the Army’s poor performance in Laos, from earlier in the year, would hurt his chances for re-election, but that fear was groundless. The two candidates who initially challenged him were the vice president, Nguyen Cao Ky, and General Duong Van Minh. We met both Ky and Minh in earlier episodes of the podcast. Thieu and Ky stopped getting along after they had been elected together in 1967, and now they were fierce rivals, while Minh simply wanted to end the war through a peace settlement with North Vietnam. Thieu found a technicality that disqualified Ky from running, and Minh, knowing that he would lose, dropped out of the race, so when their names were taken off the ballot, Thieu was the only candidate left. South Vietnamese who opposed Thieu called this a “one-man election.” Thieu was re-elected easily, with 94 percent of the vote, a much better performance than the one he gave for the 1967 election. However, there was a new vice president; Ky’s replacement was Tran Van Huong, who had been prime minister in late 1964-early 1965. Huong was 67 years old, making him twenty years older than Thieu, and nobody expected him to give any trouble. Little did anyone know, this would be South Vietnam’s last election.

On December 26, 1971, President Nixon ordered the initiation of Operation Proud Deep Alpha, an intensive five-day bombing campaign against military targets in North Vietnam just north of the Demilitarized Zone, citing violations of the agreements surrounding the 1968 bombing halt. 1971 ended with 156,800 American troops left in Vietnam. 2,357 Americans had been killed in action that year. At the same time, almost ten times as many South Vietnamese troops had been killed, and this was cited as more evidence that the Vietnamization program was working.

*****

And that’s all for now. I honestly thought we would get to cover 1972 in this episode, but here we are at the end of 1971, and have run out of time already! After all, we want enough information in each episode to feel that we thoroughly understand the subject matter, and I told you in the past that it’s easier to do several short episodes, than one that takes multiple hours to finish. Currently I estimate we will need three more episodes to finish the Second Indochina War narrative. So join me next time as we continue our coverage of the war into 1972. We are in the home stretch on this story, that’s for sure!

Podcast update: Remember at the beginning of the episode, when I said I was going to upload my presentation from the Intelligent Speech Conference to YouTube? And then I would post a link to the video from the podcast Facebook page? Well, all that has been done already! Several days passed from the time I recorded the beginning of the episode, until I recorded the part you’re hearing now, and the first part sounded good enough that I didn’t want to record it again. I think I will also post a link on the Blubrry.com page hosting this episode. Watch and enjoy! End update.

If you are enjoying the podcast, please consider supporting it financially. You can make a one-time donation through Paypal, or a small monthly donation through Patreon. Go to the page on Blubrry.com hosting this episode, and there you will find links to Paypal, Patreon, and the Podcast Hall of Fame page. If you make a Paypal donation, your first name will be added to the Podcast Hall of Fame page. Meanwhile on the Patreon page, the number of Patrons has risen to nine, which includes one new $10/month contributor, Willem P. again. Way to go, Willem! If you cannot afford to send a donation, you can still help the podcast, by writing a review, liking the History of Southeast Asia Podcast page on Facebook, and by telling your family and friends about the show. Finally, if you made it to the end of this episode, thank you for listening, and come back when the monsoon winds are blowing right!

<Outro>

Episode 92: The Second Indochina War, Part 19

Posted on June 16, 2020 by xenohistorian

Today the podcast looks at the first half of the Cambodian Civil War, the phase of the Second Indochina War in Cambodia, from 1970 to 1972. Also, if you like educational podcasts besides this one, you won’t want to miss a conference coming up on June 27, 2020! Details about that are given at the end of this episode.

https://blubrry.com/hoseasia/62497779/episode-92-the-second-indochina-war-part-19/

(Transcript)

This episode is dedicated to Torsten J., and Russell I., for making donations to the podcast. I never know when donations will come in, but they are always appreciated. Where I live, summer is about to begin, so thank you for starting the season on a positive note. Also, I am getting ready to take part in the 2020 Intelligent Speech Conference, eleven days from the time I record this. Listen to the end of the episode to hear more about that. May your summer be a happy, healthy and prosperous one, wherever you happen to be. And now let’s begin the show.

Episode 92: The Second Indochina War, Part 19

or, The Cambodian Civil War

Greetings, dear listeners, and as I have been saying lately, I hope you’re all safe, happy and healthy! If you’re listening to this sometime after 2020, you should be all right, unless the year you are in has found a way to act even crazier than 2020. At the point when I am recording this, I think I will remember 2020 as the strangest year of my life. And I’m not young; I have already seen quite a bit of wild stuff pass under the bridge. So far in this year, we have had a war scare with Iran, Australia on fire, the Trump impeachment, the death of basketball star Kobe Bryant, rumors that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was dead, the Corona virus pandemic, the quarantine and economic crash caused by the pandemic, murder hornets, riots in American cities, and where I live, an out-of-season freeze. What next, will a monster like Godzilla come out of the sea? Or will aliens come out of the sky and show themselves, proving once and for all that UFOs are real? If only we could bring back the guy who used to do the ShamWow commercials; then every two weeks he would say, “But wait! There’s more!” If you are in the future and have access to a time machine, take my advice: DO NOT go to 2020!

But I’m not recording this to tell you about my troubles. I’m here to give you your latest installment of Southeast Asian history, which for the previous eighteen episodes meant I was talking about the Second Indochina War. If you’re American, you remember that conflict as the Vietnam War, or if you’re Vietnamese, you remember it as the American War. In the latest episode, I set the stage for the phase of the war in Cambodia, by covering Cambodian history from 1953 to 1970. You can call that both a catchup episode and a table-setting episode. We saw the King and head of state, Norodom Sihanouk, play a balancing act to keep the country neutral, and to keep the right-wing and left-wing factions from becoming too strong. If you want to compare Sihanouk with a juggler, in the 1950s and early 60s he managed to keep all the balls in the air, but afterwards his balancing act failed. In a left-leaning moment, he allowed the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong into the country; then, when the communists became a threat to him, he invited the Americans in, and looked the other way when they began bombing raids. Because of these flip-flops, he managed to alienate both the political Right and the Left. That led to the so-called 1970 Coup, where the National Assembly voted on March 18 to remove Sihanouk as head of state. In place of the monarchy came a right-wing government, which renamed Cambodia the Khmer Republic. Lon Nol, the former commander of the armed forces and Sihanouk’s most recent prime minister, became the new Number One person in charge. I broke off the episode there, just before the Cambodian war began.

Podcast footnote: I was wrong when I said last time that the National Assembly voted unanimously to get rid of Sihanouk. One of my sources, the Time-Life book “Fighting For Time,” by Samuel Lipsman and Edward Doyle, said that the vote was 86-3. With a lopsided result like that, though, the vote might as well have been unanimous. End footnote.

Finally, I introduced the Cambodian communist movement, which was only a small group of revolutionaries until 1970. Like the Pathet Lao in Laos, they initially tended to follow the lead of North Vietnam, but in the 1960s the Soviet Union and Red China were not getting along anymore, so when a second generation of Cambodian communists appeared, led by the mysterious Pol Pot, they distrusted both the Soviets and the Vietnamese, and aligned themselves with the Chinese instead. By the end of the 1960s they had been given a name by Sihanouk which everyone would use from here on – the Khmer Rouge, or “Red Khmers.” Sihanouk opposed them at first, but after he was ousted from power he fled to China, where he was persuaded to join the Khmer Rouge as its symbolic leader.

All right, the stage is set for the war. If you want more details, go back to Episode 91 and listen to it again. Or if you haven’t listened to Episode 91 yet, listen to it anyway, and then come back here. I prefer to start stories from the beginning.

All right, you’re back. Good. Now we can resume the narrative. Roll-em, boys!

*****

Initially, opinions on Sihanouk and his ouster depended on whether a Cambodian lived in the country or in the city. We noted in the previous episode that Cambodia’s peasants still saw him as a god-king, like Jayavarman VII and the other ancient kings of Angkor, while those people in the cities, who had enjoyed a modern education, knew that other countries had different governments, and thus didn’t think Sihanouk was so great. As a result, the urban population approved of the 1970 coup. So did the military, because they wanted a share of the money and equipment the Americans were dumping on Thailand and South Vietnam. The peasants, however, demanded that Sihanouk be reinstated.

From China, Sihanouk made a public appeal on March 23 for Cambodians to revolt against the government. This sparked some demonstrations and riots. The worst unrest happened in the city of Kampong Cham, where the governor’s palace was stormed and several officials, including two National Assembly deputies, were killed by the crowd. Lon Nol sent his youngest brother, Lon Nil, to Kampong Cham to monitor the situation, because Lon Nil owned some rubber plantations around there. But shortly after he left the local airport, Lon Nil was attacked by a mob of workers from a rubber plantation, and beaten to death in the town marketplace. But that wasn’t all they did to Lon Nil; the mob also tore out his liver, took it to a Chinese restaurant, and had it cooked, sliced and served to them, and they ate it.

<Ewww! That’s disgusting!>

Next, around 40,000 peasants began to march on the capital; they were dispersed, with many casualties, by units of the armed forces. At this point, the Cambodian army had 30,000 poorly-equipped men, so Lon Nol called for 10,000 volunteers to enlist. The response was enthusiastic; soon the military was swamped with more than 70,000 recruits.

Now we have some new acronyms to learn, that were coined at the beginning of the war. These are confusing, so I won’t expect you to get them all right, the first time you hear them. The Cambodian government troops were renamed the Khmer National Armed Forces. In French this is Forces Armées Nationales Khmères, and the initials are F-A-N-K, or FANK.

On the other side, Sihanouk first called his government-in-exile the National United Front of Kampuchea. In French this is Front uni national du Kampuchéa, and the initials are F-U-N-K, or FUNK. Sihanouk felt Lon Nol had betrayed him, and said, quote, "I had chosen not to be with either the Americans or the communists, because I considered that there were two dangers, American imperialism and Asian communism. It was Lon Nol who obliged me to choose between them." Unquote.

The North Vietnamese premier, Pham Van Dong, flew to Beijing when he heard that Sihanouk was there, and he did most of the persuading to make Sihanouk join the communists. Pol Pot was also visiting Beijing at the time, but he and Sihanouk did not meet each other. On May 5, the coalition Sihanouk led was given a new name: GRUNK, G-R-U-N-K. This stands for the Gouvernement royal d’union nationale du Kampuchéa, Royal Government of National Union of Kampuchea in English. So there are the acronyms for you. FANK for Lon Nol’s army, and either FUNK or GRUNK for Sihanouk’s government. Got that?

Sihanouk appointed one of his most loyal supporters, Penn Nouth, to be his new prime minister. All the other posts in the coalition government went to the Khmer Rouge. I mentioned a few key members of the Khmer Rouge in the previous episode, and here are the positions they got. Khieu Samphan became deputy prime minister, minister of defense, and commander in chief of the GRUNK armed forces, though the actual military operations were directed by Pol Pot. Hu Nim became minister of information, and Hou Yuon got several responsibilities as minister of the interior, communal reforms, and cooperatives. Ieng Sary handled diplomacy, so you can call him the foreign minister if you like. Pol Pot took no official position; he would remain invisible to everyone outside the Khmer Rouge. After this, the communists who weren’t in Cambodia returned. As for Sihanouk, during the Cambodian Civil War the prince was only in Cambodia once; in early 1973 he visited the quote-unquote "liberated areas" of the country, including Angkor Wat. The rest of the time, he stayed in either Beijing, China, or Pyongyang, North Korea.

For the Khmer Rouge, Sihanouk was most useful as a recruiter. His call for a revolt against the Lon Nol government motivated many peasants to join the Khmer Rouge. So did widespread bombardment by American planes, and Sihanouk’s field trip to Cambodia. Between 1970 and 1973, the size of the Khmer Rouge force grew from 6,000 to 50,000 regular troops. There were also twice as many irregular fighters, waging a guerrilla war against the government.

As you can see from the numbers I quoted, the government started out with an advantage, and for the whole war, the government had more soldiers than the Khmer Rouge did. But bigger is not always better, and the government army, FANK, was always outclassed in training and leadership.
All the way to the end, they had too many recruits to train. Indeed, the United States trained 86 of the battalions for them, approximately 43,000 men, in South Vietnam; that program ended in 1973, when the Vietnam cease-fire agreement ended active American involvement in the war. And the FANK troops faced not only the Khmer Rouge but also PAVN, the army of North Vietnam, and the NLF, better known as the Viet Cong; all three of those opponents were tough and rigidly indoctrinated. To compound the problems of FANK, families followed their soldier-Dads into battle zones, and pre-teen children were enlisted. Finally, the officers leading FANK were corrupt, incompetent, and had little military experience. Many of the soldiers, and even some entire units, existed only on paper. Commanding officers got in the habit of exaggerating the number of the troops they had, so they could pocket the pay of the non-existent troops. Also, the sale of arms and ammunition on the black market (or to the enemy) was commonplace, and as with South Vietnam, much of the aid sent from the United States was stolen. Thus, while individual soldiers and some government units fought bravely, they were always at a disadvantage. Near the end of the war, in 1974 and 1975, FANK claimed to have 250,000 men, but the real number was probably 180,000, due to desertions and payroll padding by the officers.

At the war’s onset, the Khmer Rouge were based in Ratanakiri and Stung Treng, the two provinces in the northeast corner of the country. Their remote location meant that government control over those provinces was always weak, and because they were on the border of both Vietnam and Laos, the North Vietnamese had access. Seventeen to twenty-one minority tribes live here; some are related to the Khmers, and others are descended from the Chams, the people from the ancient kingdom of Champa, in present-day central Vietnam. City-dwelling Cambodians collectively call the tribes Khmer Loeu, meaning upland Khmers. Even today, the tribes keep to themselves; they have no political unit larger than the village, and are underrepresented in the Cambodian government. Pol Pot had lived in this area since 1963, and he was inspired by the primitive lifestyle of the Khmer Loeu; no modern state or organized religion bothered them. Because of that, his ultimate goal would be to make sure all Cambodians lived the same way as the Khmer Loeu did; we will see in a future episode how that turned out!

*****

It was the North Vietnamese who made the first military move. The Number Two man in the Khmer Rouge, Nuon Chea, went to the North Vietnamese and asked for help in fighting Cambodia’s new government. The North Vietnamese did not want a pro-US Cambodia threatening them, and they trusted Nuon Chea more than the other senior Khmer Rouge leaders, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, so they negotiated the terms of North Vietnamese intervention with him. The North Vietnamese invasion was launched on March 29, 1970. Their main goal was to protect the military camps they already had in Cambodia, along the South Vietnamese border. For that reason, they also moved the camps from border areas to locations deep in Cambodian territory. The Viet Cong headquarters was moved as well. In previous episodes I mentioned that one of the American objectives in Vietnam was to capture the Viet Cong headquarters, which was called the Central Office for South Vietnam, or COSVN. The Americans failed to even locate the COSVN, because the Viet Cong had moved their headquarters to Cambodia for safekeeping. Now when the communist offensive captured Kratié, a provincial capital in eastern Cambodia, the Viet Cong established a new command center there.

One consequence of the North Vietnamese invasion was that the Cambodian people turned against the 400,000 ethnic Vietnamese living in the country. Lon Nol thought he could use the Vietnamese as hostages against North Vietnamese and Viet Cong activities, and the military began to round them up for the detention camps. But now that the locations of the detainees were known, Khmer civilians, with the aid of soldiers, came and killed the Vietnamese. On April 15, 800 Vietnamese men were executed at the village of Churi Changwar, and their bodies were dumped into the Mekong, where they floated into South Vietnam. One of the most disturbing parts of the affair was that no Cambodians – not even the Buddhist clergy – denounced the killings. Lon Nol issued an apology to the South Vietnamese government, while explaining that the massacre was likely to happen under any circumstances. Quote: "It was difficult to distinguish between Vietnamese citizens who were Viet Cong and those who were not. So it is quite normal that the reaction of Cambodian troops, who feel themselves betrayed, is difficult to control." End quote.

Of course, with communists openly on the offensive in Cambodia, it wouldn’t be long before the Americans got involved as well. To make sure US intervention would happen, Lon Nol requested military aid from the United States on April 14. On April 29, 1970, nearly 59,000 South Vietnamese soldiers crossed the border into Cambodia. They were joined two days later, on May 1, by 50,000 American soldiers. Their goals were to defeat the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces in Cambodia, which then numbered 40,000, and capture or destroy their bases near the border, including COSVN, the Viet Cong headquarters. The Allies were also thinking of the “Vietnamization” program, in which the Americans were turning the responsibilities of fighting the war over to ARVN, the South Vietnamese army; success here would make the case that Vietnamization was working. During the next three months, the US Army and ARVN conducted thirteen major operations. Together they captured and destroyed large amounts of enemy supplies, but the communists had already moved most of their materiel to their new campsites in Cambodia’s interior. And again, they did not find the Viet Cong headquarters. What’s more, they did not prevent the overrunning of Cambodian army positions by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units. Nor were there any big battles, because the North Vietnamese evaded their opponents.

Speaking of which, by the end of June 1970, three months after the North Vietnamese invasion began, the communists had swept FANK from the entire northeastern third of the country. In other areas, important cities like Kampong Cham had been isolated, and North Vietnamese forces got within fifteen miles of Phnom Penh, the national capital, before they were turned back. After they took an area, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong would turn it over to the Khmer Rouge. Meanwhile in the south and southwest, the Khmer Rouge were able to capture some parts of the countryside by themselves. Later on, when the Khmer Rouge no longer got along with any Vietnamese faction, they would be reluctant to admit they had help at this stage, but it is clear that without North Vietnamese and Viet Cong assistance, the war would have dragged on much longer than it did.

We saw in Episodes 89 and 91 that American bombing missions had been carried out over Cambodia since the spring of 1969. However, they had been limited to targets within 30 miles of the South Vietnamese border. Since the enemy wasn’t camped in that zone anymore, the original operation, Operation Menu, was ended, and on May 19, Operation Freedom Deal took its place. Now targets anywhere in the eastern half of Cambodia were fair game, and the operation would continue until August 1973.

Eventually the Americans and South Vietnamese declared their joint campaign a success, and the Americans withdrew from Cambodia by July 22. However, the South Vietnamese stayed behind, to help Cambodian government forces. South Vietnamese casualties were 809 dead, 3,486 wounded, while American casualties were 338 dead, 1,525 wounded. Communist casualties were reported at 12,354 dead, 1,177 captured, but these figures were disputed by the CIA, who claimed that the total included dead civilians as well as combatants. As with the firefights in Vietnam, the Americans proclaimed victory because there were more casualties on the other side, and because of all the supplies they captured. US President Richard Nixon called the campaign, quote, "the most successful military operation of the entire war." Unquote. General Creighton Abrams, the commander of American forces in Vietnam, agreed, saying that the incursion had bought time for the pacification of the South Vietnamese countryside. As he put it, now US and ARVN forces would not have to worry about any attack from Cambodia during 1971 and 1972, and a “decent interval" had been obtained for the final American withdrawal from Vietnam. However, one South Vietnamese brigadier general, Tran Dinh Tho, was more skeptical. After the war he wrote, quote, "Despite its spectacular results…it must be recognized that the Cambodian incursion proved, in the long run, to pose little more than a temporary disruption of North Vietnam’s march toward domination of all of Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam." End quote.

The end result of the Cambodian incursion was a tactical victory for the United States and South Vietnam, but a strategic victory for North Vietnam and its allies. While the communists had lost some firefights, their losses in men and supplies could be replaced, and in the long run their plans had not been disrupted – only the timeline had been set back. With the Americans on the way out, there would be another day for their opponents. Over in the United States, the Cambodian incursion led to a new round of social unrest, with events like the Kent State massacre. Opponents of the war said the United States was going the wrong way, spreading the war to another country instead of getting out of Vietnam. Expect to hear more about the protests in the next episode.

*****

The North Vietnamese advance slowed down in July 1970, and halted in August; this was the rainy season on the Southeast Asian mainland, after all. At this point, the government army command had a plan of their own. If they could take back large areas of rice-growing land, it would be a big morale-booster for the army. The operation was named Operation Chenla; later it would be called Operation Chenla I because a second operation like it was launched later. Long-time listeners will remember that Chenla was the name of the first Khmer state, that existed from 550 to 795 A.D.; we covered it in Episode 7 of this podcast. For this operation, FANK committed a dozen infantry battalions, supported by armor and artillery; there would also be limited ground and air support from ARVN and the South Vietnamese Air Force.

Operation Chenla I began in late August. Government forces first converged on Route 6, catching the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong by surprise; by early September, they had driven the enemy away from both the road and the rice paddies around Kampong Cham. Then, while resettling refugees and raising a local militia to defend the retaken area, they set out to clear Route 7, between the towns of Skoun and Kampong Thom. However, they could not keep the liberated stretch of Route 6 open for long, and counter-attacks by the North Vietnamese 9th Division along Route 7, in the last months of 1970, meant that the only community recovered there was the village of Tang Kauk.

Operation Chenla I had to be called off because on the night of January 21 and 22, 1971, about a hundred North Vietnamese commandos sneaked through the defense perimeter surrounding Phnom Penh’s airport, Pochentong Airbase. They succeeded in destroying almost all of the Khmer Republic’s air force on the ground, including all the MIG fighters. Other raids at the same time were made on the naval base at Phnom Penh, and on several villages near the capital. Lon Nol responded by extending the current “State of Emergency” for another six months, and recalled some Cambodian Army units from Tang Kauk to protect Phnom Penh. On February 8, Lon Nol, who wasn’t in very good health to begin with, suffered a serious stroke and was flown to a hospital in Hawaii. He spent the next two months recuperating abroad, while Prince Sirik Matak ran the show as acting prime minister. Even after he returned, Lon Nol was often seen in a wheelchair.

Podcast footnote: Lon Nol is the only head of state I can think of whose name is a palindrome. Whether you spell Lon Nol forward or backward, the name looks the same. End footnote.

When Lon Nol returned to Phnom Penh on April 12, 1971, he had another plan to take the offensive against the enemy. Called Operation Chenla II, it would reopen Route 6 and secure the road between Kampong Cham and the isolated garrison at Kampong Thom. By summer, the Cambodian army numbered more than 100,000 men, and generous US aid had replaced the destroyed planes of the air force with up-to-date aircraft. This time ten infantry battalions were organized into three brigade groups, again supported by armor and artillery and the US Air Force; they were going against two North Vietnamese divisions believed to be in central Cambodia.

Operation Chenla II was launched on August 20, 1971, and again the communists were taken by surprise. Over the next fifteen days, all of Route 6 was reopened. But during the rest of September and early October, as the FANK units tried to consolidate their new gains, they came under attack from enemy guerrilla units. The men grew tired, and casualties were heavy; that caused morale to slip. Moreover, they could not find any large North Vietnamese or Viet Cong forces, to engage in a set-piece battle. Lon Nol decided they had been destroyed by US air raids, so on October 25 he declared that the first phase of Operation Chenla II was completed, and it had been a big success. Next he proclaimed two days of celebration, which included beer and opium for the troops. Afterwards the plan was to carry out the second phase of Chenla II: pacification of the civilian population. However, the troops were now too drunk or too stoned to worry about the civilians, who like the enemy forces, were nowhere to be found.

When the North Vietnamese evacuated the area around Route 6, they took the local civilians with them. They struck back on the night of October 26-27, while the government-proclaimed holiday was going on. Sappers blew up the main bridge connecting Route 6 with Phnom Penh, making it impossible for FANK forces to retreat in that direction, or to be reinforced from there. And the rest of the 9th PAVN Division launched an all-out assault on Route 6 from a rubber plantation, catching the FANK troops quite unprepared. The FANK units were cut to pieces, and their command post at Rumlong fell on November 13. After that, the other government army outposts were taken one by one. With the capture of the last one on December 3, Operation Chenla II came to an end. No doubt about it, Chenla II was a decisive communist victory. A general on the government side, Sak Sutsakhan, said this about the casualties. Quote: “There was never an exact count, but the estimate was on the order of ten battalions of personnel and equipment lost plus the equipment of an additional ten battalions.” Unquote. On the other side, Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan boasted, quote, “Of about 20,000 Lon Nol troops thrown into this operation, we killed, wounded or captured over 12,000. Not a single battalion escaped without severe losses.” Unquote. For the rest of the war, the Cambodian government concentrated its efforts on defending the cities and the lower Mekong River

Over the course of 1972, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong pulled out of Cambodia. Their troops were more needed back in Vietnam, because of campaigns like the 1972 spring offensive. The South Vietnamese withdrew for the same reason; they needed to defend themselves from North Vietnamese attacks. Thus, from 1973 onward, the Khmer Rouge fought on their own.

*****

So what ideas did the Lon Nol regime have for 1972, besides defense? They decided to take back Cambodia’s most important national symbol, Angkor Wat, which the Communists had captured in June 1970. This complex, covering 72 acres, had been undergoing restoration work, led by a French archaeologist, at the time of the capture. During the next year and a half, there had been a few stray shell hits, and the communists chiseled off some of the temple carvings and sold them on foreign art markets, to finance their other activities, but otherwise both sides had left the ruins alone. But then in January 1972 the French archaeologist was expelled, and his Cambodian workers were arrested; 20 were executed, quote, “for providing information to the Central Intelligence Agency.” Unquote.

Operation Angkor Chey, meaning “Operation Angkor Victory,” got started on January 29, 1972, with skirmishes on the road between the ruins and Siem Reap, the nearest town. Advancing slowly, government units reached the dikes and moat marking the boundary of the Angkor Wat temple, but then on February 21, their advance stalled. Another attempt was made in May, after FANK received intelligence that the Khmer Rouge units in the Angkor ruins were leaving. During the night of May 17-18, Angkor Chey troops slipped in and after a brief firefight, captured the Phnom Bakheng temple, but when they approached Angkor Wat the following night, communist cross-fire decimated them, and heavy fire from trenches and concrete bunkers forced them back. Cambodian and American planes dropped napalm and high explosives as close as 600 feet from the grand temple, taking out two former tourist hotels about half a mile to the south, but the end result of the fighting was another stalemate.

By now attention had shifted to the other side of the country, to the stretch of the Mekong River between Phnom Penh and the South Vietnamese border, and to Route 5, the main road in the same area. Prey Veng, the capital of the province in the area, and Neak Luong, a ferry-crossing town, were both shelled on March 20. This was followed by a bombardment of Phnom Penh itself, and more attacks on Prey Veng and Neak Luong that took place all through April. Five FANK battalions were hastily pulled out of a US training camp in South Vietnam to hold onto the Mekong corridor, which now provided the only access to Phnom Penh by land or water that did not go through communist-controlled areas. On the coast, where the Cambodian-South Vietnamese border meets the sea, FANK and ARVN forces defended the town of Kampong Trach, but the 1st North Vietnamese Division managed to take it on April 30; that gave the communists a Cambodian seaport.

Podcast footnote: During the war, refugees crowded into Phnom Penh, until the capital’s population tripled, going from half a million in 1965 to one and a half million near the war’s end in 1975. Incredibly, for most of the war, life in Phnom Penh went on as usual. Even luxury goods remained available for those who could afford them. End footnote.

Meanwhile in the capital, political reforms were the order of the day. In March 1972 the National Assembly was renamed the Constituent Assembly, and on April 30 it approved a revised constitution. On June 4 came a round of ballot box stuffing that was called an election, and Lon Nol, who previously held the positions of prime minister and defense minister, was elected president with 55 percent of the vote. Lon Nol’s political party, the Socio-Republican Party, won all the seats in the Constituent Assembly as well. Seeing these results and the political factionalism that followed, General Sutsakhan stated, quote: "The seeds of democratization, which had been thrown into the wind with such goodwill by the Khmer leaders, returned for the Khmer Republic nothing but a poor harvest." Unquote. One example of the factionalism involved Prince Sirik Matak; other senior members of the government didn’t want to work alongside a member of the royal family. During the rest of the year, the prince’s power was gradually undermined by Lon Nol’s brother, Lon Non; he resigned after Lon Non organized a series of demonstrations against him, and he was kept under effective house arrest for several months after that.

Podcast footnote: I mentioned earlier that the Khmer Republic had a problem with corruption for all of its existence. Lon Non was the most corrupt of its leaders, and the way he gathered both money and power reminds me of Ngo Dinh Nhu, the brother of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. If you don’t remember Nhu, go listen to Episode 73 of this podcast again. End footnote.

June saw two more rocket attacks launched on Phnom Penh, and two elite FANK battalions near Neak Luong were ambushed on June 25; of the 600 troops attacked in the ambush, only thirteen made it back to friendly lines. In response, Operation Sorya I, a joint FANK-ARVN action, was launched on July 4. Here the objectives were to clear Route 1, the highway running between Phnom Penh and Saigon, and to seize Kampong Trabek, a town on Route 1. They succeeded in taking Kampong Trabek on July 24, but on August 6, elements of two North Vietnamese divisions struck in that area. Leading this drive were tanks, the first time North Vietnamese tanks had been used in Cambodia; they severed Route 1 and isolated five battalions on it.

FANK and ARVN followed up Operation Sorya I with Operation Sorya II, to rescue the trapped battalions and to finish clearing Route 1. This got underway on August 11, and ARVN units reached the battalions ten days later. But the highway remained cut off to the east, and the communists retook Kampong Trabek on September 8, even though reinforcements arrived from Phnom Penh, led by the president’s brother, Lon Non. October 7 saw 100 or so North Vietnamese commandos take advantage of a Buddhist festival to sneak into the capital and wreak havok, destroying a bridge and wrecking seven armored personnel carriers with plastic explosive, among other things. There was a six-hour firefight when government forces caught up with them, which damaged the nearby French Embassy. After it was over, FANK admitted 23 of its own dead to the enemy’s 83.

*****

We are up to the end of 1972, and have run out of time for today. I think I will cover the Cambodian events of 1973 and 1974 in the same episode that covers events in Vietnam in those years. When cease-fire agreements were signed for Vietnam and Laos, the Khmer Rouge controlled between 50 and 60 percent of Cambodian territory. What happens now? Will the cease-fires inspire the Cambodian factions to make peace, too? We will get to that eventually, but first we should go back to Vietnam and see what was happening there, while the Cambodian Civil War was raging. Join me for that!

And while you’re at it, consider making a donation to the podcast, if you can afford to do so. You can make a one-time donation through Paypal, or a small monthly donation through Patreon. Go to the page on Blubrry.com hosting this episode, and there you will find links to both Paypal and Patreon. If you make a Paypal donation, your first name will be added to the Podcast Hall of Fame page, next to Torsten and Russell. I am thinking of putting all three links, to Paypal, Patreon and the Hall of Fame page, on the podcast’s Facebook page, for those who haven’t seen them yet. And if you cannot afford to send a donation, you can still help the podcast, by writing a review, liking the History of Southeast Asia Podcast page on Facebook, and by telling your family and friends about the show. Again, thank you in advance for your support.

Finally, I want to reach out once more and tell you about the Intelligent Speech Conference, which is scheduled for Saturday, June 27, 2020, a little more than a week and a half after I uploaded this episode. It will be a virtual conference, so you don’t have to travel in real life; just have a broadband Internet connection available. Here from 10 AM to 6 PM Eastern Time in the US, you will meet 40 podcasters who are doing educational podcasts. Currently I am scheduled to give a presentation between 3:15 and 3:55 PM Eastern Time; that’s 7:15 to 7:55 PM Universal Time if you are outside the United States. To hear us all, the admission will only cost ten US dollars if you get your ticket before June 19, after which the cost increases to fifteen US dollars. Tune in to hear all of us, and here is the trailer one more time:

Like I say at the end of each episode, thank you for listening, and come back when the monsoon winds are blowing right!

<Outro>

Episode 91: The Second Indochina War, Part 18

Posted on June 1, 2020 by xenohistorian

After thirteen episodes about the Second Indochina War in Vietnam, and four episodes about the same war in Laos, it is time for the podcast to shift our attention to Cambodia. This episode covers Cambodian history from 1953, when independence from France was achieved, to 1970, when the Indochina War spilled across its borders. The first reign of Norodom Sihanouk is covered, and we meet the Khmer Rouge.

https://blubrry.com/hoseasia/61640294/episode-91-the-second-indochina-war-part-18/

This episode is dedicated to Seamus P. and Louis E., who each made a donation to the podcast. As with the others who have given in this difficult time, I want to thank you for keeping the lights on here, figuratively speaking. What’s more, both of you have donated before. I added Louis’ name to the Podcast Hall of Fame Page with a mention of that. And since Seamus’ first donation came in last year, he has now received the Coveted Water Buffalo icon next to his name on the page! To both of you, may the plans you have made for this year work out successfully, no matter what strange event happens next. And now, if you are ready to begin today’s narrative, so am I.

Episode 91: The Second Indochina War, Part 18

or, Spillover Into Cambodia

Greetings, dear listeners! You can tell from the title that we are in a long-running series on the Second Indochina War, a conflict better known as the Vietnam War by Americans, and the American War by Vietnamese. It took twenty episodes to cover World War II in and around Southeast Asia, and now it looks like we will need more episodes than that to finish the Indochina conflicts. Of the previous episodes, five covered the initial war between local communists and France, the colonial power that claimed all of Indochina, thirteen covered Vietnam between 1955 and 1969, and the other four covered Laos up to 1974. That leaves one part of Indochina we haven’t talked about lately. Which country is that?

<pause>

Did I hear one of you say “Cambodia?” You go to the head of the class! In fact, since civilization has existed in Cambodia for at least two thousand years, it is surprising we haven’t said more about the place. The only episode we had that was just about Cambodia was Episode 7, where we covered the rise and fall of the Angkor Empire, Southeast Asia’s most impressive nation during the Middle Ages. At the empire’s peak, the Khmers dominated not only Cambodia, but also Laos, and much of present-day Vietnam and Thailand. Those glory days ended in 1431, when a raid from the Thais sacked Angkor, the glorious Khmer capital. After that, the two big neighbors of of the Khmers, Siam and Vietnam, put the squeeze on Cambodia. Both of those powers wanted Cambodia because it contained the lower Mekong River basin, the best place in all of Southeast Asia for growing rice. Vietnam ended up taking away the Mekong River delta in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, so that rich land, which once was part of Cambodia, is now the southernmost part of present-day Vietnam.

Podcast footnote: In Episode 3, I mentioned that Cambodia’s seaport in ancient times was called Oc Eo. Then in Episode 19, I gave you the name of Cambodia’s medieval seaport, Prey Nokor. Both of those ports were taken by the Vietnamese, and Prey Nokor was called Saigon until 1975, when it became Ho Chi Minh City. That left one deep-water port for Cambodia. The traditional name of it is Kompong Som, but since the 1950s it has usually been called Sihanoukville. Whereas the other ports had access to the South China Sea, via the Mekong River delta, Sihanoukville is on the shore of the Gulf of Thailand. End footnote.

By the nineteenth century, the Khmer kings had to buy off Siam and Vietnam, paying both of them tribute to keep their armies away. Then the French arrived on the scene in 1863 and declared Cambodia a protectorate of theirs, adding Cambodia to the colony they were building in Vietnam. Although this sounds bad for the Khmers, it also saved them from being absorbed into either the Vietnamese or the Thai state. If it wasn’t for the French colonial period, from 1863 to 1953, there might be no Cambodian nation today. Instead, the Khmers would be one more of Southeast Asia’s many ethnic minorities, living in an expanded Thailand or Vietnam. You can compare the fate of the Khmers with that of the Chams, who had a kingdom of their own in ancient and medieval times, but now are a minority group of a few hundred thousand people, divided between Vietnam and Cambodia.

The French did not rule Cambodia as harshly as they ruled Vietnam. Because Cambodia was officially a protectorate, rather than an outright colony, the French allowed the Khmers to have their own king. However, the French also decided which member of the Cambodian royal family could be king, to keep the territory pacified. Thus, when the throne became vacant in 1941, the heir to it was a prince named Norodom Suramarit, but the French passed over him and instead crowned Suramarit’s eighteen-year-old son, Norodom Sihanouk, who they figured would be more pliable. Before World War II there was no nationalist movement like the one that developed in Vietnam, so the French did not launch cruel reprisals against the Khmer people in order to keep themselves in charge.

There were no battles in Cambodia during World War II. The Khmers found themselves ruled distantly, first by the Vichy French, then by the Japanese. After the war France regained control, and that was when the first Cambodian nationalists appeared. The early nationalists can be classified in three groups, according to political ideology: right-wing, left-wing, and monarchist. The right-wing nationalists called themselves the Khmer Serei, meaning Free Khmer, and they were anti-monarchy, anti-French, and anti-communist, meaning they probably would have set up a Western-style republic if they had gotten the chance. Many of their members were ethnic Khmers who came not from Cambodia, but from southern Vietnam; they called themselves the Khmer Krom, and besides supporting the platform of the Khmer Serei, they also wanted to return the Mekong delta to Cambodian rule. The Khmer Serei leader was Son Ngoc Thanh, who had briefly been prime minister in 1945.

In the long run, though, the left-wing nationalists were more important. They formed a coalition of six groups, which were collectively called first the Khmer Issarak, meaning pro-independence Khmers, and later the United Issarak Front, or UIF. Four of the six groups were communist, and at least half of the UIF members were monks, showing that the Buddhist clergy favored independence. Because of the current war in Vietnam between the French and the communist Viet Minh movement, the Viet Minh crossed the border into Cambodia a few times to clash with the French.

Communism in Indochina got started in Vietnam first, so when communist groups appeared in Cambodia, they were founded with Vietnamese help, and like the Pathet Lao, the communist movement in Laos, the early Cambodian communists did whatever the Viet Minh told them to do. The most important of these groups called itself the Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party, KPRP for short. By 1952 they claimed to occupy one sixth of Cambodian territory, and by 1954, they claimed half of it. I don’t believe these claims myself, because there were no battles in Cambodia as big as the battles in Vietnam or even in Laos, and the number of Cambodian leftists was small – they probably had no more than three thousand members. For the Geneva peace conference that ended the First Indochina War, the Viet Minh promised the communists in Laos and Cambodia that they would be allowed to participate, but that did not happen, and when the cease-fire agreement was signed, the Cambodian communists got nothing. Zero, nada, zilch. As a result, after this the Cambodian communists trusted their Vietnamese backers a lot less, and would eventually break with them completely.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of the Cambodian people wanted to be ruled by the traditional royal family, so they rooted not for the Khmer Serei or the leftists, but for those nationalists who wanted to keep the monarchy. Eventually King Sihanouk joined them, and by 1953 he had single-handedly persuaded the French to end the protectorate, thereby restoring Cambodia’s independence.

*****
<Ta-da>

Okay, that’s a summary of what we have said about Cambodia in past episodes. If you want more details, I suggest you go back and re-listen to Episodes 34, 64, and 67. For this episode we are going to cover the years when Sihanouk was first in charge, from 1953 to 1970, and that will bring us to the beginning of the all-out war that broke out in 1970. Let’s play a bit of Cambodian music, and then begin today’s narrative!

One of my sources summarized Cambodian history as “the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

All right, we got the idea! The good time was the age of the Angkor Empire, which I said was back in Episode 7. Then the bad time set in, beginning when the empire started its decline in the 13th century, and going on until the mid-twentieth century. You can call the first decade after French rule ended, 1953 to 1963, another good time, because as we shall soon see, Cambodia was independent and neutral. After that came another bad time, as Cambodia was sucked into the Second Indochina War. The years from 1970 to 1993 were definitely ugly; first there was a brutal civil war, then the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge, and finally the Third Indochina War between Cambodia and Vietnam. Cambodia has been making a slow recovery since the ugly time ended. Both the ugly time and the time of recovery are material for future podcast episodes.

Cambodia’s neutral period was not only a time of peace, but also a time of prosperity. King Sihanouk made the expansion of education a priority; before independence, there was only one high school in the whole country. Phnom Penh grew to become a modern capital city, the ancient temples of Angkor became the most popular tourist attraction in Southeast Asia, and Sihanouk played host to the world leaders who came to visit. For a peek at Cambodia during this time, I recommend you check out the October 1964 issue of National Geographic Magazine; the featured article’s title is Cambodia, Indochina’s Neutral Corner, because it emphasized how Cambodia was peaceful while war raged in neighboring Vietnam and Laos.

Before long, Sihanouk grew concerned that the pomp of royal ceremony was taking up too much of his time, and that the constitution restricted what he could do as king. Because of this, in March 1955 he abdicated, giving the throne to his passed-over father, Norodom Suramarit. This was an excellent move, because it showed Sihanouk honored his father, which is always important in Far Eastern countries. Then he proclaimed himself prime minister, which allowed him to keep most of the political power, while Suramarit now took care of the ceremonial duties that he used to do. In the tradition of the French Revolution, Sihanouk stopped calling himself the “Royal Crusader,” switching his title to “Citizen Sihanouk,” and vowing he would never return to the throne.

Next, parliamentary elections were held. Originally scheduled for June 1955, they were postponed until September. A year earlier, Sihanouk had founded his own political party, which he called the Sangkum Reastr Niyum, meaning the People’s Socialist Community, though there was nothing socialist about it. When the voting took place, the Sangkum won all 91 seats in the National Assembly. The leading left-wing party, the Pracheachon Party, got 4 percent of the votes, but no seats were assigned to it. Naturally it and the other parties claimed there had been voter fraud and intimidation, and Sihanouk admitted to this in 1958. In that year new elections were held. Sihanouk published three articles about communism in Cambodia, which emphasized the dependence of Cambodian communists on North Vietnam, a declaration that was sure to make communists look bad in the eyes of the Vietnamese-hating Khmers. After that it was easy to link the country’s leftist opposition with the communists, and again the Sangkum Party won all the available seats. It was the same story for the next election, held in 1962; the Sangkum Party won all the seats for a third time.

In 1959 Sieu Heng, the leader of the Cambodian communist party’s rural faction, defected to the government and provided the security forces with the information they needed to destroy as much as 90 percent of that faction. The leader of the communist networks in the cities, Tou Samouth, now became leader of the whole party, but only a few hundred communists remained active in the country as the 1950s came to an end.

King Norodom Suramarit died in 1960, at the age of 64. This meant Norodom Sihanouk was technically king again, but instead of taking the throne back, he left it vacant, so the outside world continued to call him Prince Sihanouk. In 1963, Sihanouk forced the National Assembly to approve a constitutional amendment that made him head of state with no fixed term of office. This allowed him to continue holding power in a constitutional monarchy, without requiring him to perform the ceremonial duties that would have been expected if he was king. Thirty more years would pass before he claimed the throne for a second time.

*****

When it came to foreign policy, Sihanouk played a dangerous game to keep his country out of war. He wanted the United States to pay the cost of his army, because the Americans were already sending military aid to South Vietnam and Thailand, and that would help to defend Cambodia against communism. But as we have seen, South Vietnam and Thailand were also Cambodia’s historical enemies, and the greatest threat to Cambodia’s existence. Therefore he declared Cambodia neutral and refused to accept any more US aid. He also nationalized several industries, including the rice trade.

Sihanouk never could get along with the Khmer Serei movement, because, as we saw, they were anti-monarchist. Son Ngoc Thanh, the Khmer Serei leader, formed an anti-Sihanouk militia. From 1956 onward this militia received aid from the US Central Intelligence Agency, since in those days the United States would back any group that declared itself anti-Communist. In 1961, Sihanouk severed diplomatic relations with Bangkok because of “Thai support” provided to the Khmer Serei. After that, the militia was only active in the jungles near the Vietnamese border, since Thailand did not support them anymore. Most of all, Sihanouk was annoyed by Khmer Serei propaganda against him and the royal family, which was broadcast into Cambodia from radio stations in South Vietnam.

Over the course of his rule, Sihanouk may have executed as many as 1,000 Khmer Serei suspects. The most notorious example came when Preap In, a Khmer Serei activist, offered to go to the National Assembly and negotiate directly with Sihanouk. Preap In was promised safe passage from Vietnam to Cambodia by his uncle in November 1963. Instead he was arrested, displayed in a cage at the National Assembly, subjected to a military trial, and shot by a firing squad. This execution was filmed as a fifteen-minute newsreel, and shown in all Cambodian cinemas for a month, an event which remained in the memories of Cambodians for many years.

The Khmer Serei failed to win over many new members; most Cambodians with a conservative point of view joined the Sangkum Party instead. In early 1969, five hundred Khmer Serei soldiers based in South Vietnam defected, and joined the Cambodian army. Today there are two theories on why they did this. One theory suggests that Son Ngoc Thanh ordered them to infiltrate the armed forces, the other proposes that the CIA sent them to take part in the 1970 coup against Sihanouk. We will hear more about that shortly.

By May 1965 Sihanouk was convinced that the United States was plotting against him and his family, so he broke diplomatic relations with Washington. Since Cambodia needed to get along with somebody, Sihanouk looked to the Soviet Union and Communist China for economic and military aid. Then, to improve relations with North Vietnam, he allowed the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong to set up campsites on Cambodian territory, for use in their war against South Vietnam and the United States, and he agreed to let ships from communist countries deliver supplies for those camps at the port of Sihanoukville. Soon the communists built a network of trails connecting Sihanoukville to their camps and to the Ho Chi Minh Trail; this came to be known as the “Sihanouk Trail.”

Sihanouk’s initial response to the camps and the trails was to simply ignore them. Pretending that nothing was going on seemed like the best way to avoid antagonizing the North Vietnamese, while at the same time he hoped that the Americans would not expand their military operations beyond Thailand, South Vietnam and Laos. The way he saw it, someday the groups allied with the People’s Republic of China, and not those with the United States, would win the Indochina War, and that, quote, "our interests are best served by dealing with the camp that one day will dominate the whole of Asia – and coming to terms before its victory – in order to obtain the best terms possible." Unquote.

The rapid growth of the communist presence in Cambodia prompted Sihanouk to change his position again. In 1966 he told his pro-American minister of defense, General Lon Nol, that he had the prince’s permission to crack down on leftist activities, discrediting the left-wing political parties by accusing them of subversion and subservience to Hanoi. Long-time listeners will remember that Lon Nol had been Sihanouk’s right-hand man in the early 1950s, when he was working to gain independence from the French. Naturally this alienated Cambodian students, many of whom were educated abroad. In response, Sihanouk began calling his leftist opponents Khmer Rouge, which is French for “Red Khmers”; that name would stick!

*****

Since I just said the name “Khmer Rouge,” this is a good place to introduce the man who would become its most important leader – Saloth Sar, better known by his nom de guerre, Pol Pot. Saloth Sar was born in Kampong Thom, a province in central Cambodia, as the eighth of nine children. My sources give a birth date of May 19, meaning he shared the same birthday with Ho Chi Minh, but they disagree on whether the year of birth was 1925 or 1928 – that shows how mysterious he was. Although his family lived in a small fishing village, they did well by Cambodian standards. An older sister was a concubine of King Sisowath Monivong, Sihanouk’s grandfather, and a brother was a court official. So not only did his siblings earn decent salaries, but the family received gifts from the king’s court. The family house was one of the largest in the village; they owned fifty acres of rice paddies, and they hired their poor neighbors to help with the planting and harvesting work.

When he was six years old, Saloth Sar was sent to a monastery in Phnom Penh; here he served as a novice monk for eighteen months, learned Buddhist teachings and learned to read and write in the Khmer language. In 1935, presumably when he was ten, he began to attend a Catholic primary school. Not being a gifted student, he was held back for two years and finally finished in 1941. Here he learned about Christianity and how to read in French. In the same year a new middle school was founded at Kampong Cham, and he became a boarding student there in 1942. While attending that school, he met Khieu Samphan, born in 1931, and Hu Nim, born in 1932; they would become future partners of his in the Khmer Rouge. Next, in 1945 he began attending the country’s only high school in Phnom Penh, while living with a married brother. It was here that he met his future wife, Khieu Ponnary; they would get married in 1956. Unfortunately he could not stay at the high school long enough to finish, because he failed an exam in 1948, and transferred to a vocational school. There he met another future associate, a Khmer born in Vietnam named Ieng Sary, and then he secured a scholarship at an engineering school in Paris, which he went to in 1949.

My sources disagree on what Saloth Sar studied in Paris; they suggest he majored in radio electronics, printing and typesetting, or civil engineering. According to a Jesuit priest, Father François Ponchaud, he also developed a taste for the classics of French literature, especially the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and the writings of Karl Marx. He and Ieng Sary joined the French Communist Party, and with other Cambodian students they formed a Marxist study group, called Le Cercle Marxiste, or the Marxist Circle. However, he flunked out after failing too many exams, and returned to Cambodia in 1953. As it turned out, though, that was a plus for his career as a revolutionary; because he didn’t have a degree, nobody could call him an intellectual living in a high tower.

So far Saloth Sar and his classmates had little, if any contact with the handful of communists that were already in Cambodia. They joined these communists after coming home, but Saloth Sar felt that they were too dependent on the Viet Minh. From 1956 to 1963, Saloth Sar led a double life. By day he was a professor at Chamraon Vichea, a private college in Phnom Penh, where he taught French literature and was much liked by his students; by night he plotted to replace the monarchy with a communist government.

Meanwhile, Prince Sihanouk began cracking down on leftist political movements. Liberals were upset at him because the government was full of corruption, some of it uncomfortably close to the royal family. In addition, the economic growth since independence had led to extreme wealth inequality; while city dwellers were getting rich, life for the rural population had hardly changed at all. When the Pracheachon Party’s newspapers attacked Sihanouk in 1959, he immediately shut them down, asserting they were run from Hanoi. Then in 1962 Sihanouk got rid of the Pracheachon by arresting fifteen of its leaders, and he complained that the communists in northeastern Cambodia had set up a "spy network" directed by North Vietnam. Also in 1962, the Cambodian communist leader, Tou Samouth, simply disappeared. He may have been the victim of Sihanouk’s police, but an alternate theory suggests that Saloth Sar, who was now the number three man in the party, had him eliminated. By 1963 all of the older party members were dead or arrested, allowing Saloth Sar to become the new Khmer Rouge leader.

To avoid being the next communist arrested, Saloth Sar disappeared without a trace. He changed his name to Pol Pot, which doesn’t mean anything in Cambodian; he just liked the way it sounded. Next, Pol Pot fled into the jungle, and cut all ties to everyone outside the Khmer Rouge who knew him, so his friends, relatives and students had no idea what happened, and assumed he was dead. About fifteen years later, they would find out he was the monstrous dictator who had taken over their country, but that’s a subject for a future episode!

Podcast footnote: I was a teacher from 2001 to 2006; I taught a computer course at the largest community college in Orlando, Florida. During those five years, I only missed three days of classes. The first time I missed class, I had car trouble; the second time, I had jury duty; the third time, I needed to go on a trip out of town and could not change the date. Here is what you need to learn from the story of Pol Pot: if you are a student and your teacher is absent from school quite often, you have a good reason to be concerned! End footnote.

*****

Despite the suppression of radical dissent, Sihanouk lost the support of Cambodia’s conservatives as well, because of the previously mentioned communist presence in the country, and because of his failure to fix the now-deteriorating economy, caused by the loss of rice exports; much of the country’s rice had been smuggled to the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. Now only the peasants, who saw Sihanouk as a god-king, continued to support him.

One more parliamentary election took place in 1966. As in the previous elections, the Sangkum Party won all the seats in the National Assembly, but this time, more than one candidate in the party could run for each seat. A lot of the candidates were not hand-picked by Sihanouk, and many of those didn’t like him. In fact, Sihanouk publicly spoke out against four candidates, and because Sihanouk’s attacks made them famous, all four won their elections easily. Through manipulation and harassment (and to Sihanouk’s surprise), 59 of the 82 seats ended up going to conservative members of the party. Now that they were entrenched, the rightists chose Lon Nol as the next prime minister, and for deputy prime minister, they named Prince Sirik Matak, an ultraconservative cousin of Sihanouk and a long-time enemy of his. On the other side of the political aisle, three communists, Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon, and Hu Nim, managed to get elected to the National Assembly because they were members of the Sangkum Party, too.

Sihanouk’s political balancing act was coming undone. One of the first things Lon Nol did as prime minister was to fix the ailing economy, by halting the illegal sale of rice to the communists. Soldiers were dispatched to the rice-growing areas to collect the harvests at gunpoint, and they paid only the government price, which was far lower than the black market price. There was unrest, especially in Battambang province. Battambang is in the northwest, against the border of Thailand; it grows more rice than any other province, and in the 1960s it was home to many large landowners, with a great discrepancy in wealth between these landowners and the local peasants. On March 11, 1967, while Sihanouk was in France, a rebellion broke out in Samlaut, a district in Battambang, when enraged villagers attacked a rice collection brigade. By the evening of that day, the villagers defeated guards from two other posts and executed a mayor. With the probable encouragement of local communists, the insurrection quickly spread to eleven of the country’s eighteen provinces. Lon Nol, acting in the prince’s absence (but with his approval), responded by declaring martial law. Hundreds of peasants were killed and whole villages were laid waste in the repression that followed. One of my sources reported trucks carrying severed heads drove from Battambang to Phnom Penh, so that Lon Nol would know his orders were being followed.

After returning to Cambodia, Sihanouk changed his political position again, deciding that the leftists were now the greatest threat. He personally ordered the arrest of five leftist deputies, whom he accused of being leaders of the rebellion. Three were Khmer Rouge members, and two of them, Khieu Samphan and Hou Yuon, immediately escaped, joining Pol Pot in the jungles of the northeast. The third Khmer Rouge member, Hu Nim, tried to keep his government job, but after repeated warnings from Sihanouk, he also departed by the end of the year. Sihanouk also ordered the arrest of Chinese middlemen involved in the illegal rice trade; that move raised government revenues and pleased the conservatives. However, at the end of April Lon Nol resigned. We don’t know the reason for his resignation, but rumor has it he suffered from some form of injury during the rebellion. The prince responded to the resignation by appointing new leftists to government positions, to balance the conservatives.

In May and June, the military acted even more brutal, with Royal Cambodian Air Force aircraft bombing villages and jungle hide-outs, while the army burned down villages and massacred their inhabitants. With that done, Sihanouk declared that the Samlaut Rebellion, also called the Battambang Revolt, was over.

When I was doing the research for this episode, two of my sources claimed that the Cambodian Civil War of the early 1970s began with the 1967 Samlaut Rebellion. I don’t agree with that assertion, but you can imagine the uprising as a dress rehearsal for the war to come, because Lon Nol led the fighting on one side, and the communists were at least partially involved on the other side. One tragic consequence of the rebellion is that thousands of peasants escaped the fighting by fleeing into the jungle, where Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were waiting to welcome them as new recruits for the Khmer Rouge. Another consequence was the peasants were reluctant to support the government afterwards; for them the name of Lon Nol became associated with ruthless repression.

*****

The Khmer Rouge launched several small-scale uprisings in January 1968. The objective of these was not to gain territory but to capture weapons and spread propaganda, since they did not yet have enough troops to take on government forces – at this time, they numbered between 4,000 and 5,000. The propaganda campaign won them more recruits, allowing them to launch bigger uprisings in February. The armed forces managed to crush these uprisings by April.

Of course defeating the rebels would have been easier if the prince had the support of a strong, anti-communist power, so he took a new look at his foreign policy. His attempts to build good relations with China had been for nothing. The Chinese were too busy with the Cultural Revolution to take an active role in the outside world at this time; moreover, they did not restrain the North Vietnamese, and they were now the principal backers of the Khmer Rouge. In a 1967 interview with Stanley Karnow, then a Washington Post Vietnam War correspondent, Sihanouk let it be known that he would grant Americans the right of "hot pursuit" against the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in Cambodia–as long as no Cambodians were harmed. In November 1968 he welcomed Lon Nol back into his cabinet as defense minister. Then on May 11, 1969, the prince welcomed the restoration of normal diplomatic relations with the US and created a new “Government of National Salvation,“ with Lon Nol as prime minister.

US President Lyndon Johnson was reluctant to spread the war into Cambodia. The only US troops that went in during his presidency were called “Daniel Boone squads,” covert teams of volunteers and mercenaries, wearing either black peasant pajamas or unidentifiable uniforms, going on intelligence-gathering or sabotage missions. And no, I don’t think John Kerry was one of them. During the 2004 US presidential election, the senator who kept reminding us that he was once in Vietnam claimed that Richard Nixon sent him on a secret mission into Cambodia in 1968, which is absurd because Nixon wasn’t president yet. Anyway, after Nixon succeeded Johnson, Washington became more interested in Cambodia. The first action by Nixon was a campaign to bomb military targets with B-52 raids; we covered that in Episode 88. The bombing campaign was called Operation Menu, and it consisted of six small operations, directed against base areas near the Cambodia-South Vietnam border, from March 18, 1969 to May 26, 1970. The whole operation was kept a tight secret, because the world would be outraged to learn that the Americans were bombing a neutral country. The North Vietnamese kept quiet about it, too, because if they spoke up, it would be a confession that they had troops involved in illegal activities in Cambodia.

Unfortunately there were some civilians living in the areas targeted by the B-52s, so there must have been civilian casualties from the start. Although Sihanouk did not approve of any bombing, and North Vietnam did not give aid to the Khmer Rouge between 1967 and 1969, the prince found that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong made convenient scapegoats, because they were a larger, more dangerous force than the Khmer Rouge, and getting them out of Cambodia would solve several problems for both the prince and the Americans. Therefore he did not break the secret about the bombing, either, and his troops gave the Americans intelligence on the enemy bases.

Sihanouk’s political flip-flops had made him a royal pain in the neck, and one of my sources asserts that he neglected Cambodia’s internal affairs by spending too much time on his hobby – film-making. In January 1970 the prince visited France for medical treatment, which meant a lengthy stay on the Riviera. The prince was still away in March, when anti-Vietnamese riots broke out; mobs sacked the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong legations in Phnom Penh, and killed innocent Vietnamese civilians who happened to be living in the country. Lon Nol had been left in charge, and he decided this was the time to crush the communists. He closed Sihanoukville to North Vietnamese shipping, and he told the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong that they had 72 hours to get out of the country. Since they couldn’t possibly comply with this ultimatum, you may consider it a declaration of war from Lon Nol.

What happened next is called the 1970 Cambodia Coup in most history texts, but it wasn’t a coup so much as an impeachment. There was no fighting in the streets, no executions – the whole affair was bloodless. On March 18, 1970, the National Assembly voted unanimously to invoke an article of the constitution that let them remove the head of state from office. Lon Nol remained acting prime minister, his brother Lon Non played a strong role as Minister of Interior, and Sirik Matak was still deputy prime minister. They kept In Tam, the president of the National Assembly, in that job; In Tam turned out to be the most experienced and politically mature of the senior members in the new, right-wing government. There have been allegations that the CIA was involved in the coup, but no evidence of that has ever been found. Still, Washington approved of the results, just as it approved of the coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963.

The new leaders moved to abolish the monarchy. They dropped the country’s official name, the Kingdom of Cambodia, and for a few months they called it État au Cambodge, which is French for “State of Cambodia.” Then in October 1970 they proclaimed the Khmer Republic, which would have a president instead of a monarch as the head of state. Prince Sihanouk was tried and sentenced to death in absentia, a move which ensured he would not be coming back from his trip anytime soon. The prince had once seen Bao Dai, the last Vietnamese emperor, languishing in exile in France, and he did not want the same fate for himself. Confused and hurt, he went to China, and the Chinese and North Vietnamese persuaded him to form a coalition government with his former enemies, the Khmer Rouge, with himself as its figurehead leader.

*****

The stage is now set for the Cambodian phase of the Second Indochina War, also known as the Cambodian Civil War. Prince Sihanouk, Lon Nol, the Americans and the Khmer Rouge are all in place. However, we have run out of time today, so that conflict will be covered in the next episode. You can expect to see the next episode in the middle of June, real-time; join me again then. Or as Adam West used to say in the old Batman TV series:

<Bat-time clip>

Do you like podcasts? Of course you do. If you are listening to this in June 2020, a podcasters’ conference, called the Intelligent Speech Conference, is coming up on June 27. It is hosted by Roifield Brown, a highly successful podcaster in his own right, and it will be held online, so you don’t need to travel to attend – all you need is a broadband Internet connection. The format for the discussions is still being worked on as I record this, so here is the trailer promoting it again. I plan to record one more episode before the conference takes place; expect me to have more details next time.

Like every successful history podcast, this one is a labor of love, but it needs money to keep running in cyberspace, too. If you can afford to support the podcast at this time, please consider making a donation, either a one-time donation through Paypal, or a monthly donation through Patreon. Go to the page on Blubrry.com hosting this episode, and there you will find links to both Paypal and Patreon. If you make a Paypal donation, you will have your first name mentioned on the Podcast Hall of Fame page, and at the beginning of the next episode recorded after the donation arrives over here. Thank you in advance for your support.

And that’s not all you can do to support the show. You can also write a review, at most of the places where you get your podcasts, and that review can attract new listeners, even years from now. And on Facebook, I have set up the History of Southeast Asia Podcast page, for sharing new episodes and anything related to the show. The page has gotten several new “Likes” since the last episode; thanks for sharing the love! And if you are no longer under quarantine from the Corona virus, spread the word, by telling your family, friends, and any history buffs you meet that you listen to the show! Until we meet again, stay safe, happy and healthy, thank you for listening, and come back when the monsoon winds are blowing right!

<Outro>

Episode 90: The Second Indochina War, Part 17

Posted on May 16, 2020 by xenohistorian

Here is the second episode for May 2020, and this one is a hair-raiser for sure! Today we cover one of the Vietnam War’s most notorious events, the My Lai Massacre.

https://blubrry.com/hoseasia/60645008/episode-90-the-second-indochina-war-part-17/

(Transcript)

This episode is dedicated to Jeremy D., for making a generous donation to the podcast. The past couple months, in fact the whole time since the Corona virus lockdowns began, has been a dry spell for podcast donations, so thank you especially for contributing at this time. I have also appreciated your comments on the podcast’s Facebook page. Naturally I added your first name to the podcast’s Hall of Fame page as well. To everyone else listening to this, if you want to support the podcast too, stay tuned for instructions on how to do that at the end of the show. Now I know you’re all here to listen to this episode’s content, so let’s roll out the opening music!

Episode 90: The Second Indochina War, Part 17

or, The My Lai Massacre

Greetings, dear listeners! This episode was recorded during the Corona virus panic of 2020. It looks like the worst of the virus and the lockdown are behind us now, so I hope you are safe, healthy and happy as you listen to this. And I am glad you have chosen to devote some time to listening. If the virus has forced you to work at home, your commute has been cut down from an hour or so to 15 seconds, but rest assured, podcasters have not stopped talking into microphones. After all, the virus can’t travel from a microphone, to the recorded MP3 file, to your listening device, to you, so you’re as safe as always when listening to your favorite podcasts. In my case, I did not have a day job in the days right before the Corona virus trouble started, and I still don’t have one now, so I can make the case that my life hasn’t changed as much as yours, in recent months.

For today, we will begin with an announcement. The podcast is now available on Spotify! Last week, I finally got around to signing up for a Spotify account. Previously, I wasn’t inclined to do so because I already had enough to listen to from other music-playing websites, like Pandora and Soundcloud. Still, it came to my attention that while Spotify carried podcasts, this show wasn’t one of them. Therefore I submitted the podcast’s RSS feed, and now when you go to Spotify and type "History of Southeast Asia Podcast" into their search box, this show comes up. Happy listening!

Normally I like to record cheerful podcasts. You probably know that because I try to drop at least one music clip and a joke or two into each recording. However, it is hard to stay cheerful when your topic is the Vietnam War; that may be one of the reasons why there wasn’t much recorded in the podcast universe about the war, before I tried it. The other reason is that the war is still a controversial, emotion-gripping subject, forty-five years after it ended. And today’s topic is so grim, I decided to make it a separate episode, rather than talk about it as a footnote in the main narrative.

Atrocities committed are a regular feature of war stories; for that matter, war itself is an atrocity. Here in the United States, when you hear about war atrocities, they are usually committed by the enemy; you can’t tell the story of World War II, for instance, without talking about the atrocities committed by the Germans and the Japanese. Atrocities committed by our side, like the bombing of Dresden in February 1945, are rarely mentioned, and usually we didn’t hear about them until long after the war. Well, today we are talking about an incident where American soldiers, without an excuse, went into a South Vietnamese village and shot 300 to 500 of its residents in cold blood. And there was no way the Americans could claim they were lured into doing this by their communist opponents, because, as we will find out, the communists they were looking for weren’t there. When the news media revealed the massacre, we were shocked; in our eyes, the Americans were always supposed to be the good guys. This was not only the most notorious atrocity in the Vietnam War, but also one of the worst wartime atrocities committed by Americans anywhere.

A major reason for the massacre was fear of the unknown. When Americans fought in the Philippines during World War II, most of the Filipino peasants were on their side. I told you about some American soldiers who hid from the Japanese on Mindanao, the big southern island, and they liked their Filipino companions so much, that they chose to stay there, after the war ended and the Philippines became independent. But as we have seen in this podcast, Vietnam wasn’t like that. When Americans entered a village in Vietnam, they never knew which of the local residents were friendly, or if the village was loaded with booby traps. Those peasants who sympathized with the Viet Cong did not wear the characteristic black pajama uniforms, nor did they fly the red-and-blue Viet Cong flag. What usually happened was that in their search for enemies, traps and contraband weapons, the soldiers learned to shoot first and ask questions later. As a result, they treated the peasants so brutally, that if they weren’t previously with the Viet Cong, they would join them after the Americans moved on.

I will let you know up front, I don’t plan to dwell much on the killing and raping. I want to keep this a family-friendly podcast, so if you’re looking for gratuitous violence and sex, you won’t find that here. I will give you just the facts, as Jack Webb used to say on his TV show.

<“Just the facts, M’aam”>

When we are done you will probably agree with me that justice was denied for the victims. I wish I could say there was a happy ending to this story. If there was a hero on the day of the massacre, it was Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who used his flying machine to prevent further deaths. And speaking of stories, let’s begin. Our previous episode stopped at the end of 1969, so let’s rewind almost two years, to the beginning of the My Lai affair.

Oh, and one more thing. Did you hear in the title that this is Part 17 in our series on the Second Indochina War? If you missed the other episodes and are not familiar with this conflict, the previous episodes are 71 through 89 in this podcast, except for 76, 77, and 85, which covered special topics. Go listen to them and then get onboard for today’s narrative; we’ll wait for you.

*****

It all started during the Tet Offensive in early 1968. If you want to hear the background to the massacre, we covered Tet in Episode 87 of this podcast.

My Lai was one of six hamlets that make up Son My, a village in Quang Ngai Province, on the northern coast of South Vietnam. It was roughly seven miles northeast of Quang Ngai city, and a hundred miles southeast of Da Nang, in an area American soldiers nicknamed “Pinkville” because it was colored pink on military maps, meaning it was a highly populated area. The name Pinkville was also appropriate because this area was a hotbed of Viet Cong activity, and the color pink is a lighter form of red. Bombs and herbicides like Agent Orange had already been dropped here, but as in other battles of the war, the communists came back later, making it necessary to attack them again.

In January 1968, three companies of American troops were assigned to an airborne, search and destroy mission. Their objective was to destroy the 48th Viet Cong Battalion, which was operating very successfully in Quang Ngai Province. US military intelligence assumed the battalion had dispersed and its members were hiding in the six hamlets of Son My. Incidentally, military maps named the hamlets My Lai 1 through 6, though My Lai was actually the name for only one of them. The company sent to the village was Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division of the US Army. It had only recently arrived from the United States, in December 1967, but it had already lost 28 of its members to death or injuries, and thus was down to 105 men.

On March 15, the day before they went into My Lai, Charlie Company’s commander, Captain Ernest Medina, told his men that they would finally be given the opportunity to fight the enemy that had eluded them for over a month. Medina believed that civilians had already left the area for Quang Ngai city, so he directed that anyone found in My Lai should be treated as a Viet Cong fighter or sympathizer. Therefore the soldiers were free to fire at everything and everybody. Moreover, the troops of Charlie Company were ordered to destroy crops and buildings and to kill livestock. Coming from a family of animal lovers, I find the last order especially outrageous, adding insult to injury, so to speak.

First, the village was bombarded by artillery, between 7 and 7:30 AM on March 16. This was supposed to clear a landing area for Charlie Company’s helicopters, but it forced those villagers who were leaving to come back to My Lai in search of cover. Next, Charlie Company’s 1st Platoon, led by Lieutenant William Calley, was inserted just to the west of a hamlet known locally as Xom Lang, but marked as My Lai 4 on maps. However, the Viet Cong weren’t there. In reality, the 48th Viet Cong Battalion was in the western Quang Ngai highlands, more than 40 miles away. Nor were there mines or booby traps in the hamlet. What the soldiers found were women, children and old men; many of them were getting breakfast ready. No military-age males were present.

The soldiers of Charlie Company rounded up the villagers into groups, and searched their huts for weapons. Only a few weapons were found, but Calley ordered his men to shoot the villagers anyway. Most of the villagers, including the children, were machine-gunned at close range. Many of the women were raped before they were killed, and some of the bodies were mutilated. At 9:00 AM Calley ordered the execution of as many as 150 civilians who had been herded into an irrigation ditch. In addition, the soldiers killed the animals they found – cattle, pigs, chickens and ducks – and set the huts on fire.

As the massacre was taking place, a scout helicopter was flying at low altitude overhead. The pilot, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, saw what was happening, marked the locations of wounded civilians with smoke grenades, and radioed for troops on the ground to go those positions and give medical aid. After refueling, Thompson returned to My Lai only to see that the wounded civilians had already been killed. Spotting a squad of American soldiers converging on more than a dozen women and children, Thompson landed his helicopter between the two groups. He then ordered his door gunner, Larry Colburn, and his crew chief, Glenn Andreotta, to fire on the Americans if they continued to attack the civilians. After a tense confrontation with the officer leading the soldiers, Second Lieutenant Stephen Brooks, the Americans broke off their chase. Shortly thereafter, Thompson and his crew called for other helicopters to join them in evacuating the survivors, very likely saving them from serious bodily harm or death. In 1998 Thompson, Colburn, and Andreotta (posthumously) were awarded the Soldier’s Medal for acts of extraordinary bravery not involving contact with the enemy.

By 11:00 AM it was all over. Medina arrived on the scene, ordered Charlie Company to break for lunch, and informed his superiors that the operation had been successful, with scores of Viet Cong killed. The only American casualty was a soldier who shot himself in the foot while trying to clear a jammed weapon.

*****

The massacre at My Lai was only the first act in this story that was uncalled for; the outside world was also outraged by the cover-up that followed. The first mention of the operation in and around My Lai came later on March 16, when an official press briefing, the "Five O’Clock Follies", included this passage. Quote: "In an action today, Americal Division forces killed 128 enemy near Quang Ngai City. Helicopter gunships and artillery missions supported the ground elements throughout the day." End quote. When the official report of the battle of My Lai was released, on March 28, 1968, it stated that 69 Viet Cong soldiers were killed, and said nothing about civilian causalities. In other words, it was seen as another battlefield success.

Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who had saved the day at My Lai, reported when he returned to base that he had witnessed the widespread killing of civilians. Among those he told about the killings, were his aviation unit’s commanding officer, Major Fredric Watke, and the division artillery chaplain, Captain Carl E. Creswell. Watke passed Thompson’s report to Lieutenant Colonel Frank A. Barker, Calley’s battalion commander, and Chaplain Creswell relayed what Thompson had told him to his superior chaplain, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Lewis. That was as far as the story got; Colonel Barker was killed in a helicopter crash the following June, and neither of the chaplains reported the war crime to higher headquarters, though they were required to do so. The official response to Thompson’s report came on April 24, when Colonel Oran Henderson, commander of the 11th Infantry Brigade, concluded that 20 civilians had been accidentally killed at My Lai, either in the opening artillery barrage or in crossfire between American and Viet Cong forces, and he declared that Thompson’s report was false. After that, Thompson found himself assigned to dangerous missions without sufficient air cover; he was shot down five times, breaking his back in the final crash.

And that was all that was heard for more than a year. Back in August 1967, seven months before the massacre, then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had ordered an investigation of the media’s coverage of alleged atrocities committed in South Vietnam. This produced a 200-page report, entitled "Alleged Atrocities by U.S. Military Forces in South Vietnam," and the report’s conclusion was that many American troops did not fully understand the Geneva Conventions. For the US government, that was the last word on the matter, and nothing else involving human rights in Vietnam was done for the rest of 1967 and 1968. That is why I did not talk about My Lai in either of the podcast episodes covering the war in 1968 – most people did not hear of My Lai until 1969 was nearly over.

It was the persistence of another soldier, Ronald Ridenhour, that revealed what really happened at My Lai. Ridenhour was a member of the 11th Brigade who had not been present at the Quang Ngai operation, and several days later, he and his pilot, Warrant Officer Gilbert Honda, flew over My Lai. They saw a scene of complete destruction, and at one point, they hovered over a dead Vietnamese woman with a patch of the 11th Brigade on her body. Over the next few months Ridenhour talked with members of Charlie Company, and learned from them that something "rather dark and bloody did indeed occur" at My Lai. At the end of 1968 he was discharged from the Army, but after returning to the United States he remained disturbed by what he had heard. Therefore he began a campaign to bring the events to light. In March 1969 he wrote letters to President Richard Nixon, the Pentagon, the State Department, Joint Chiefs of Staff and twenty-three congressmen. In the letters he included the name of Michael Bernhardt, an eyewitness who agreed to testify.

Three congressmen responded to Ridenhour’s letters: Representative Morris Udall of Arizona, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, and Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts. Udall urged the House Armed Services Committee to call on Pentagon officials to conduct an investigation. Ridenhour, Medina, Thompson, and Calley were among those interviewed, and the US Army brought murder charges against Lt. William Calley on September 5, 1969. Acting on a tip, Seymour Hersh, an investigative journalist, contacted Calley’s defense team. It was Hersh who broke the story of the massacre on November 12, 1969. His Pulitzer Prize-winning account of “point-blank murder” at My Lai appeared in newspapers, along with photos of the dead victims, shocking the world. From there, the My Lai story quickly became front-page news and an international scandal.

*****

The wheels of justice turn slowly, as the saying goes, and that was the case here. On November 24, 1969, Lt. Gen. W. R. Peers was directed by the Secretary of the Army to review, quote, “possible supression or witholding of information by persons involved in the incident." Unquote. After more than 26,000 pages of testimony from 403 witnesses were gathered, the Peers inquiry recommended that charges should be brought against 28 officers and two non-commissioned officers involved in a cover-up of the massacre.

The conclusion of Peers’ inquiry was that there had been massive command failures all the way up the chain of command. Among the factors cited were poor training in the Law of War and Rules of Engagement, a virulent anti-Vietnamese institutional culture in the 23rd Infantry Division, poor discipline and poor leadership at all levels, excessive fear of the enemy, and poor communications. What it didn’t mention was that the Army’s leadership training and selection process had declined so seriously that a man like Calley, who had never held a permanent job and had flunked out of a junior college, could receive a commission.

The Peers report also found that the brigade commander, Col. Oran Henderson, and the commanding officer, Lt. Col. Frank Barker, had substantial knowledge of the war crime, but did nothing about it. As a result, Army lawyers decided that only 14 officers should be charged with crimes. Meanwhile, a separate investigation by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division concluded that there was evidence to charge 30 soldiers with the crimes of murder, rape, sodomy, and mutilation. Seventeen men had left the Army by this time, and charges against them were dropped. In the end only fourteen men were charged with crimes related to what happened at My Lai.

The US Army brought murder charges against Captain Ernest Medina on March 31, 1970, a little more than two years after the massacre. Charges were also brought against Colonel Oran Henderson, for failing to carry out a thorough investigation of the killings, failing to report possible war crimes to his division commander, Major General Samuel Koster, and lying to a Pentagon inquiry. The military trial of Lt. William Calley, held at Fort Benning, Georgia, began on November 12, 1970, fourteen months after he had first been charged. Subsequent testimony pointed to Lt. Col. Frank Barker as the one who first gave the order to kill the villagers, but since he was already dead, he did not stand trial.

In all the trials that followed, the defendants were successfully able to argue that they simply had been following the orders given to them on March 16, 1968. Most of them were eventually acquitted, including Medina and Henderson. The only exception was Calley, because witnesses had seen him shooting villagers. On March 29, 1971, Calley was found guilty of the murder of 22 My Lai civilians. At first, he was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor; however, the sentence was later reduced to 20 years, then 10 years. Many Americans at the time believed that Calley had been made a scapegoat. For that reason, Calley was paroled on November 19, 1974. He had served only three and a half years, and that time was under house arrest, not in prison. Thus, he is alive and free as I record this episode.

General Koster, who flat-out lied to the investigators, was removed from his choice assignment as Superintendant of cadets at West Point. He was reduced one rank to Brigadier General, stripped of his Distinguished Service Medal, given a formal reprimand, and had his commission revoked as "services no longer required," which gave him an OTH, "Other Than Honorable" discharge, with loss of pension and veterans’ benefits. Most of the other officers who had been charged, and some that were not, found their promotion prospects reduced to zero, received reprimands, had major decorations rescinded, or some combination of the three. Eight enlisted men who had been prominent in the massacre were expelled from the Army with OTH discharges.

In 1976, one year after the war ended, a memorial was raised at My Lai. Over time the site grew to include a museum, gardens, and commemorative statues. There are also stelae, stone slabs, indicating the locations of mass burial sites, and a memorial wall lists the names of the known victims. The hamlet itself has been partially rebuilt, to show how it looked before the day of the massacre.

The actual number killed was never established. It was officially declared at no less than 175, and my sources give numbers ranging from 347 to 504. An official US army investigation came up with the figure of 347, while 504 is the number of names listed on the My Lai memorial wall.

I mentioned in previous episodes that morale among American soldiers slipped, when they realized they were not going to win the war. Now the revelations of the My Lai massacre caused morale to plummet even further, as GIs wondered what other atrocities their superiors were hiding. In the United States, the brutality of the My Lai massacre and the efforts made by higher-ranking officers to cover it up increased both the anti-war sentiment and the bitter feelings regarding the continuing US military presence in Vietnam.

*****

Whew, I wish I could end this story on a happy note, but that’s the way it was. Join me next time as we look at a new front that opened in the Indochina War at the end of the 1960s – in Cambodia. It has been a long time since I had much to say about Cambodia, since Episode 67, in fact, so the next episode will be the time to catch up on that country.

Also, I have a special announcement. Six weeks from the day when I upload this, on June 27, 2020, there will be a podcasters’ convention, called the Intelligent Speech Conference. Last year it was held in New York City. This year, because of the Corona virus lockdown, it is being held online, so you won’t have to travel to attend it. I was invited to be one of the speakers in the panel discussions, so I am filling out the paperwork now. Here is the first trailer promoting it, to give you the details so far:

If you want to attend, virtually that is, start making plans.

Almost every episode of this podcast has been recorded without commercials; nor does it receive a government grant or an endowment from an institution. Therefore the show depends on listener support to keep the narrative running. If you are enjoying these episodes and can afford to support the show, I hope you will do so. To make a one-time donation, go to Paypal. I placed the gold Paypal donation button on each page of Blubrry.com that hosts an episode of the show. The URL to go to is spelled https://blubrry.com/hoseasia/. One-time donors also get their first names added to the podcast’s Hall of Fame page. Or if you would rather donate a small amount each month, visit my Patreon page and sign up to become a Patron. The URL for my Patreon page is https://www.patreon.com/HistoryofSoutheastAsia . Since the previous episode went up, we have lost one Patron but gained two more, so the number of Patrons is now 7.

Of course, if you are hurting for money during the current crisis, because your income has been reduced or cut off completely, wait for better times to donate; I’ll understand. As my local weatherman likes to say every time he makes a forecast, every day we move forward is a day closer to a return to our ordinary world. Take care of each other; we’ve got this!

I will finish with a few words on what else you can do to support the show, while you are waiting for the next episode. You probably won’t be able to do this if you get this podcast from Blubrry, but if you get it anywhere else, write a review! That way others will know what you discovered, and maybe they will be encouraged to listen, too. And if you’re on Facebook, visit the History of Southeast Asia Podcast page, so you can see what else is going on that’s podcast-related. Finally, I would like you to tell your family and friends about the show, but if you’re still shut-in, we can wait until you are ready to go out again. In the meantime, thank you for listening, stay healthy and happy, and come back when the monsoon winds are blowing right!

<Outro>

Episode 89: The Second Indochina War, Part 16

Posted on May 1, 2020 by xenohistorian

A new month has begun, and you know what that means — it’s time for a new podcast episode! This episode covers events in the Second Indochina War, also called the Vietnam War, in 1969. In the United States there is a new president, Richard M. Nixon, and he starts the process of removing the Americans from the war, while on the streets of American cities, antiwar protests reach their peak. And over in North Vietnam, we say goodbye to Ho Chi Minh, who has been an important character in the narrative since Episode 35.

https://blubrry.com/hoseasia/59822233/episode-89-the-second-indochina-war-part-16/

(Transcript)

Episode 89: The Second Indochina War, Part 16

or, Now It’s Nixon’s War

Greetings, dear listeners! If this is the first time you listened to this podcast, I’m glad you’re here, or if you have listened to it before, welcome back! I recorded this during the Corona virus pandemic of 2020, so if you are listening around that time, I also hope you are staying safe, whether you are at home, or out working at one of the jobs the government considers quote-unquote “essential.” Along that line, listening to podcasts is one of the safer things you can do right now; recently I heard another podcaster call them “staycasts.”

Now here’s a great suggestion I saw on Facebook the other day. If you are one of those staying home, don’t say, “I can’t go out because of the virus.” That sounds weak, whiny and boring. The blood of our mighty ancestors may be running thin with this generation, but I for one don’t need another reminder of it. Try this instead: “I’ve sworn an oath of solitude until the pestilence is purged from the lands.” Sounds more valiant and heroic, right? Something a Viking would say. People might even think you are carrying a sword, like one of the real or mythological heroes of the past.

You can probably tell from this episode’s title that we have been covering the Second Indochina War, also called the Vietnam War in the United States, for a long time. If you are getting tired of this narrative, rest assured, we are more than halfway through the war, and after the events of this episode, an end to it will be in sight. In the past, I tried to give a quick summary of the events from previous episodes before resuming the narrative. The story has gotten so long that I won’t do that today; instead I will just give you the numbers of the episodes you need to listen to, if you haven’t caught them already.

Episodes 64 through 68 covered the First Indochina War, the previous conflict that set the stage for the one we are looking at now.

Episodes 71 through 73 looked at the early events of the Second Indochina War in Vietnam, up to the end of 1963.

Episodes 74, 75, 78 and 79 covered the part of the Second Indochina War in Laos. The episodes in the middle, 76 and 77, were about special topics unrelated to the war narrative.

And all of the episodes from 80 to 88, except for 85, have been about the Second Indochina War in Vietnam, from 1964 to 1968. If you haven’t listened to all of those episodes already, I recommend you go back and hear them now.

Okay, since you’re still here, I will assume you are ready to move on with the story, so let’s go!

*****

Well, we now have a new group in charge in Washington. In the previous episode, we saw Lyndon Johnson’s presidency come to an end, and Richard Milhous Nixon won the election to succeed him. Nixon made a reference to the war in his inaugural address when he declared, quote,”…the greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker. This honor now beckons America…” Unquote. After Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson all had their turns at it, Nixon was the fifth President who would have to cope with Vietnam; we saw in the previous episode that he had successfully campaigned by promising, quote, “peace with honor.” Unquote.

But there would have to be still more fighting before peace could come. I mentioned in a previous episode that the Vietnam War is more difficult to follow than a straight conventional conflict like World War II. Whereas World War II’s main events were set-point battles and large-scale amphibious assaults against enemy-held beaches, Vietnam featured one named operation after another, endless patrols, and search and destroy missions that all blended together, because the outcome was usually the same: most of the casualties suffered were on the communist side, but the Americans and their allies usually failed to follow up on their “victories.” That being said, here’s the first operation for 1969.

On January 18, 1969, even before Nixon took office, Operation Dewey Canyon, the last major operation by US Marines, began in the Da Krong and A Shau valleys. Da Krong was in Quang Tri province, near the Marine bases just south of the Demilitarized Zone, while A Shau was west of the city of Hue. These valleys had been abandoned by American forces a year earlier, and since then had become a major North Vietnamese supply line for communist forces in South Vietnam. A successful campaign here would starve the North Vietnamese Army of much needed ammunition and men. Operation Dewey Canyon consisted of 3 phases that would end with the re-occupation of the valleys.

Leading the way were 2,200 Marines from the 9th Marine Regiment, and the 2nd Battalion from the 12th Marine Regiment. Supporting actions by the Army’s 101st Airborne Division and the South Vietnamese Army 2nd Regiment were run east of the operations area to keep communist reinforcements out of the valleys. Phase 1, from January 18th-25th, succeeded in establishing the fire bases around the objective. Phase 2, from January 31st-February 5th, involved aggressive patrolling around the fire bases in an effort to engage the North Vietnamese Army. After several clashes with the North Vietnamese and enduring the shelling of Firebase Cunningham on February 2nd, the Marines set up two more fire bases. Phase 3, the longest phase of the operation, lasted from February 11th until March 18th, and involved a raid on the North Vietnamese Army supply chain infrastructure in Laos. It ended with the Marines pulling back into South Vietnam. The Marines reported 130 of their own killed and 932 wounded throughout the campaign. As for the North Vietnamese, 1,617 of their bodies were found; again the number of wounded is unknown.

Though Operation Dewey Canyon was a tactical victory for the Marines, it failed to cut the North Vietnamese Army’s supply line. Nevertheless, there was little more that the Marines could do. Washington had given in to the pressure of public opinion, and would now start replacing the American troops involved in the war with South Vietnamese soldiers. One officer, 1st Lieutenant Archie Biggers, was awarded the Silver Star for his valor in Operation Dewey Canyon, and the entire 9th Marine Regiment was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation.

Nixon called his policy for the war “Vietnamization,” and it’s easy to explain. Here American military forces would withdraw gradually, and South Vietnamese armed forces would take over responsibility for national defense. So far the South Vietnamese army, called ARVN, for Army of the Republic of Vietnam, had not proven it could fight and win when left alone, and both Nixon and the American commander in Vietnam, General Creighton Abrams, knew it would take time to build up and train South Vietnam’s armed forces. Those of you who listened to the First Indochina War episodes may remember that the French had recruited the first ARVN troops, with the goal of creating an army that was pro-French and anti-communist. The French called this policy jaunissement, meaning “yellowing,” and yes, the term was as racist as you’re probably thinking. It didn’t work then; will “Vietnamization” work now, or will we have an example of history repeating itself?

The trickiest part of Vietnamization was that the Americans had to time their withdrawal correctly. If the pullout took too long, increased casualties, antiwar protests in the United States, and foreign pressure would force Washington to withdraw more quickly, before South Vietnamese forces were ready to stand up to both a hostile neighboring state and a domestic insurgency. On the other hand, if the Americans got out too soon, the result would be the same – an easy Communist victory. Thus, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong did not make it easy for the Americans to leave.

For that reason, North Vietnamese regular forces and Viet Cong guerrillas launched a new offensive on February 23, 1969. We sometimes call it Mini-Tet or Tet 1969, because it resembled a small-scale version of the Tet Offensive from a year earlier. Whereas Tet was an all-out effort to win the war, by capturing cities, Mini-Tet was a coordinated series of 125 sapper attacks and 400 artillery or rocket bombardments against military targets across South Vietnam. Because the Viet Cong never recovered from the losses it had suffered in 1968, this time the objective was to make the Americans’ lives miserable, and hopefully persuade them to quit the war sooner. Intelligence operatives had traced large movements along the Ho Chí Minh trail in January and early February, so General Abrams knew the enemy was planning a surprise attack somewhere, and was ready for it. As a result, the Americans and South Vietnamese defeated this offensive, too, but the campaign was costly: more than 1,140 Americans and 1,500 South Vietnamese were killed during three weeks of fighting. One of the bloodiest attacks came on February 25, when the North Vietnamese raided Fire Support Bases Neville and Russell, two Marine camps near the Demilitarized Zone; 36 Marines were killed here. In response, US troops went on the offensive in the Demilitarized Zone on March 15, the first time they entered the DMZ that year.

Nixon’s response to Mini-Tet was to issue a threat on March 4, to resume bombing North Vietnam. He didn’t carry out this threat until 1972, but he did something else at this time and did not warn anyone about it first. Over the past few years, the North Vietnamese had built an extension of the Ho Chi Minh Trail into Cambodia, with base camps for communist troops. The Cambodian prince, Norodom Sihanouk, knew about the trail and the camps, but ignored them because he didn’t want the Indochina War to spill over into the last part of Indochina that was technically at peace. However, now Nixon decided that attacks on Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia would help to protect South Vietnam from Northern aggression, and buy time to build up the South Vietnamese military. Therefore on March 17, he secretly authorized Operation Menu, a year-long series of air strikes by B-52 bombers on the part of Cambodia adjacent to South Vietnam. He got away with this for two months, but then in May The New York Times broke the news of the secret bombing of Cambodia. What happened in Cambodia, at this time and afterwards, will be the topic of a future episode. For now I will say that it intensified the antiwar movement in the United States. And later, Nixon regretted that he had bombed the wrong targets in 1969. Long after he left the White House, Nixon wrote that his failure to respond to the Mini-Tet offensive with a massive bombing of North Vietnam had been the greatest mistake of his presidency.

Another consequence of The New York Times breaking the story of the Cambodian bombing was that Nixon ordered FBI wiretaps on the telephones of four journalists, along with 13 government officials, to determine the source of the news leak. Later on Nixon would spy on his perceived enemies again. In that sense, we can say that if the Vietnam War had not happened during Nixon’s watch, there would have been no Watergate, either.

*****

US troop levels in Vietnam reached their all-time peak at the end of April 1969, with 543,482 American servicemen stationed there. The last troops to arrive had been ordered to come over before Nixon became president. By now 33,641 Americans had been killed in Vietnam, a total greater than for the whole Korean War.

So what would the last arrivals do, now that American leaders had decided they were not going to win the war? One possible assignment for them was Operation Apache Snow, a joint operation by the US Army and ARVN, to eliminate North Vietnamese units in the previously mentioned A Shau Valley. A little over a mile from the Laotian border was a 3,000-foot-high mountain that the North Vietnamese had heavily fortified, so the US command, MACV, ordered its capture first. The North Vietnamese called this high point Dong Ap Bia, meaning “the mountain of the crouching beast.” The Americans at first called it simply Hill 937, but the battle that followed became a proverbial meat grinder, so the site has been called Hamburger Hill since then. As 19-year-old Sergeant James Spears explained it to a reporter, quote, “Have you ever been inside a hamburger machine? We just got cut to pieces by extremely accurate machine gun fire.” Unquote.

With an American paratroop unit, the 101st Airborne, going first, it was thought that Hamburger Hill would be taken in a matter of hours. Instead, the battle lasted for ten days, from May 10 to May 20, and it took eleven assaults, supported by air and artillery bombardments, before the North Vietnamese were persuaded to withdraw into Laos. Bad weather was another factor; May is the beginning of the rainy season for the Southeast Asian mainland. Before the battle, this area looked like a typical Southeast Asian highland, covered with jungle. Afterwards it looked more like a barren moonscape; Meredith Lair, an associate professor of history at George Mason University, compared it with the devastated battlefields on the Western Front during World War I.

31 South Vietnamese and 72 Americans were killed in the battle for Hamburger Hill, while 630 North Vietnamese bodies were found afterwards. Chalk up another victory for the South Vietnamese and Americans–wait a minute! On June 5, just two weeks after the hill was taken, the troops were ordered to abandon it by their commander. After the Allies left, the North Vietnamese returned and recovered the hill unopposed.

The costly assault on Hamburger Hill, and its confused aftermath, provoked a political outcry back in the US that American lives were being wasted in Vietnam. Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy called the assault, quote, “senseless and irresponsible.” Unquote. The battle also eroded what support remained for the war. Thus, it was the beginning of the end for America in Vietnam; Washington now ordered General Abrams to avoid clashes like this in the future. ‘Hamburger Hill’ was the last major search and destroy mission by US troops during the war; small unit actions were used after this.

A long period of decline in morale and discipline began among American troops, who no longer knew what they were doing there.

This was especially the case for the draftees, who had been sent to Vietnam against their will. Many turned against their officers, when ordered to do actions they considered suicidal. Reporters called these attacks “fragging,” because some mutinous soldiers did it by throwing fragmentation grenades into the tents of said officers, a tactic that left no fingerprints. Drug usage became a serious problem, as nearly 50 percent experimented with marijuana, opium, or heroin, drugs that were easy to find on the streets of Saigon. American military hospitals later became deluged with drug-related cases; as the war wound down for the Americans, the hospitals had more drug abuse casualties than casualties from the war.

On the other side, the North Vietnamese changed their fighting strategy, too. At this point they knew they did not have to beat the Americans, they just had to outlast them. And we have seen in this podcast that nobody can outlast an enemy like the Vietnamese can. Hanoi was confident that if they waited until the Americans were gone, the next time they pushed, the Saigon regime would crumble. Indeed, it probably would have happened in early 1965, had the Americans not intervened.

*****

Because peace talks to end the war had begun under the Johnson administration, Nixon had another way to get the Americans out; if they could reach an agreement before the US troop withdrawal was complete, he would be able to bring the boys home sooner. On the first day of 1969, Nixon appointed Henry Cabot Lodge, who had twice been the ambassador to South Vietnam, as chief of the American negotiating team in Paris. Then on January 25, the talks resumed. This time the United States and North Vietnam were not the only parties involved; delegates from South Vietnam and the Viet Cong were in attendance, too.

Although Nixon had matured politically since the days when he was vice president in the Eisenhower administration, he remembered that Eisenhower also negotiated while fighting was going on, during the Korean War, and Eisenhower kept the talks moving by hinting he would resort to using nuclear weapons if he did not like how things were going. At first the Paris talks made no progress, just as they had failed to move in 1968, so Nixon considered using the nuclear threat. Here is how he explained it to his White House Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman. Quote:

Unquote.

Fortunately Nixon did not issue the nuclear threat, or carry it out. If he had, we probably wouldn’t be here. Instead, he kept calm for now. On May 14, he gave his first TV speech on Vietnam, where he presented a peace plan in which America and North Vietnam would simultaneously pull out of South Vietnam over the next year. The offer was rejected by Hanoi. Next, on June 8, Nixon met with the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, on Midway Island, a tiny coral atoll in the middle of the North Pacific, known mainly for the World War II battle fought there. Nixon informed Thieu that US troop levels would soon be sharply reduced, and at the press briefing after the meeting, he announced the withdrawal of 25,000 men, as the first step of the “Vietnamization” policy.

The first withdrawal of American troops took place on July 8, 1969, when 800 men from the 9th Infantry Division were sent home. The phased troop withdrawal occurred in 14 stages, lasting from July 1969 through November 1972. President Thieu was nervous as the first American troops left, but since he had no choice in the matter, he let them go. Three weeks later, on July 30, Nixon came to South Vietnam, to meet with Thieu again and to visit American soldiers. This was Nixon’s only trip to Vietnam during his presidency.

When nothing else broke the deadlock in the peace talks, Nixon decided to play a special ace that he had up his sleeve. Here is where I will introduce Nixon’s most important negotiator, Henry Alfred Kissinger. Kissinger was born to a Jewish family in Germany in 1923. Those of you familiar with European history will recognize this as the time of the Weimar Republic, the unsuccessful, unpopular government that ran Germany after World War I. Ten years later, the Weimar Republic was replaced by the Third Reich, definitely a bad time and place to be a Jew. It was during the 1930s that Kissinger developed his negotiation skills, by talking Aryan bully boys out of beating him up. Then in 1938 his family escaped Nazi persecution completely, by emigrating to the United States. When World War II broke out he was drafted into the infantry, and there he was spotted by another German immigrant, Fritz Kraemer, who recruited him for the US military administration that would run part of Germany after the war. Kissinger did so well in this job that Kraemer next suggested he attend Harvard when he returned to the United States; he did so, and there he met another mentor, William Yandell Elliott, a professor of government who named him head of a summer seminar for promising foreign-born Americans. This made him a member of the Harvard faculty, while he was still a student. He graduated summa cum laude, won an award for his doctoral dissertation, and on Elliott’s suggestion, joined both the National Security Council and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Kissinger wanted most to become one of the shapers of US foreign policy. He was ready to do that in the 1960s, but the Democrats in charge weren’t interested in him; they had enough eggheads working for them already. Instead, Kissinger became a foreign policy advisor to Nelson Rockefeller, a Republican candidate for president, and between elections he continued to teach at Harvard. For the 1968 election, Nixon was his least favorite candidate. Shortly before Nixon won the Republican nomination, Kissinger called him, quote, “the most dangerous, of all the men running, to have as president.” Unquote. Here he was expressing the typical opinion of a Harvard professor, but when it began to look like Nixon would get elected, his ambition became more important. He made contacts with members of Nixon’s staff, and after the election, when Nixon offered him the position of National Security Advisor, he accepted. As he took the job, Kissinger confidently said, quote, “We will not make the same old mistakes. We will make our own.” Unquote, and remember that line!

Podcast footnote: You would think Nixon would have picked a foreign policy expert like Henry Kissinger to be Secretary of State, but he did not trust the State Department. Instead, his first choice for Secretary of State was William P. Rogers, a lawyer who had been Eisenhower’s Attorney General. Rogers knew nothing about foreign affairs and wasn’t interested in them; Nixon knew that as long as Rogers was in charge of the State Department, it would not give him any trouble. It wasn’t until 1973, after Nixon’s second term as president began, that Kissinger replaced Rogers as Secretary of State. End footnote.

The first assignment Nixon gave to Kissinger regarding Vietnam was to conduct secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese. The official peace talks in Paris had been going on for a year by now, and had not accomplished anything; they were too public, too exposed to media scrutiny, and too politicized. Therefore, on August 4, 1969, Kissinger went to his first secret meeting with Xuan Thuy, the chief negotiator for the North Vietnamese, while the official peace talks continued openly. The place for this meeting was the apartment of Jean Sainteny, an elder statesman. I probably should have mentioned Sainteny in a previous episode, so I will mention him now. He was the highest-ranked French official in Indochina at the end of World War II, so he was the one who accepted the Japanese surrender on behalf of France, and when Ho Chi Minh negotiated with France in early 1946 concerning Indochina’s future, Sainteny led the French negotiating team. We will have to leave Kissinger for now; progress will not happen here until after 1969. Indeed, on December 20, a frustrated Henry Cabot Lodge quit his job at the official Paris peace talks. What all the peace talks produced will be a subject for another episode.

*****

Meanwhile, Nixon tried one more idea. In July he personally wrote a letter to Ho Chi Minh, urging that all parties “move forward at the conference table” to settle “this tragic war.” This letter was passed from Henry Kissinger to Jean Sainteny, because Sainteny remained a friend of Ho after the 1946 negotiations ended, and Sainteny made sure the letter was delivered to Hanoi. Nixon also asked Sainteny to deliver an ultimatum to North Vietnam’s government; if there wasn’t real progress towards peace by November 1, the first anniversary of former President Johnson’s halt to the bombing, he would resort, quote, “to measures of great consequence and force.” Unquote. Ho’s reply to the letter reached Washington on August 31, and all it did was repeat the lines North Vietnam had given previously, the main one being that the South Vietnamese government must be replaced with a coalition government that included the Viet Cong as part of it.

We now believe Ho Chi Minh did not write that letter; he may not have even seen the letter from Nixon. By 1969 he was 79 years old, and he started suffering from heart failure early in the year. In August he became so sick that he stopped working in his office. Then on the morning of September 2, he died. As communist governments tend to do, Hanoi waited a day before announcing his death; by then rumors of his passing were already circulating. Once the news was out, there was widespread mourning all over North Vietnam for the man they called “Uncle Ho.”

The day of Ho’s death also happened to be the 24th anniversary of the date when he declared Vietnam’s independence. Now in the same city square of Hanoi where Ho made that speech, Le Duan, the current leader of the Vietnamese Communist Party, publicly read the last will of Ho Chi Minh, urging the North Vietnamese to fight on, quote, “until the last Yankee has gone.” Unquote. Ho Chi Minh has been an important player in our podcast narrative since Episode 35 – that’s more than two years ago in real time – and here we say goodbye to him.

Ho stated in his will that he wished to be cremated, but instead his associates gave him the “Lenin treatment.” Experts were brought in from Moscow, who had kept the body of Vladimir Lenin preserved since his death in 1924, and they embalmed Ho, too. Then a grand mausoleum, looking like the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, was built in the middle of Hanoi; if you go there today you can see Ho’s 130-year-old body in a glass case.

From a practical standpoint, few changes came with Ho’s death, because as we noted before, he delegated his powers to others at the beginning of the 1960s, while keeping the ceremonial job of president for the last years of his life. Most of the power went to Pham Van Dong, the premier and his closest follower, and to Le Duan. Meanwhile, Vo Nguyen Giap continued to lead the armed forces. Finally, Truong Chinh, Le Duan’s predecessor as Party boss, stuck around in an advisory role. This four-man team would run North Vietnam for the rest of the war, and after the war they would manage a reunited Vietnam until the mid-1980s.

To replace Ho Chi Minh as president, Ton Duc Thang, another veteran Communist Party member, took that job. At the age of 81, Thang was even older than Ho. He came from the Mekong delta, the southernmost part of Vietnam, and his presence at meetings with Ho Chi Minh was a message to everyone that Ho never gave up on his dream of reuniting the North and the South. Thang would serve as a figurehead president until his death in 1980. Then the office of president was abolished; Vietnam has not had a president since 1980.

Aside from Ho, none of the individuals I mentioned ever gained a following, nor was a cult of personality allowed to spring up for any of them. In present-day Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh is the only political leader for which statues and portraits are permitted.

*****

In the United States, President Nixon followed up on the first troop withdrawal from Vietnam, with orders for the withdrawal of 35,000 more on September 16, along with an order to reduce the number of draft calls. Then on December 15, he ordered the withdrawal of an additional 50,000 troops. Most Americans at this time felt he was doing the right thing; a public opinion poll taken in October reported that 71 percent of Americans approved of Nixon’s Vietnam policy.

Still, for the antiwar movement, the troop pullouts were not coming fast enough: American soldiers were still dying in Vietnam, even if there weren’t any big battles in the second half of 1969. On October 15, they staged the biggest mass demonstration in US history, called the “Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam,” Moratorium Day for short. In 200 towns and cities across the country, more than two million people took part in religious services, school seminars, street rallies and meetings; the one common denominator among them were the black armbands they wore, to pay tribute to the Americans that had been killed in the war. The largest events were in New York City and Washington DC, involving a quarter million protestors each, and in Boston, where another hundred thousand took part. Some soldiers who had fought in Vietnam went to the events, and they were not viewed as enemies of the movement — in fact, many were actually part of it. This was followed up with the “Mobilization” peace demonstration on November 15, a massive march in Washington where half a million people participated, making it the largest single protest event ever held in the United States.

Previously, North Vietnam did not say anything to the antiwar movement, but these demonstrations were too big to ignore. Premier Pham Van Dong wrote a letter to the protest organizers, saying, quote, “…may your fall offensive succeed splendidly.” Unquote. The letter infuriated American conservatives, including Vice President Spiro Agnew, who called the protesters Communist “dupes” comprised of, quote, “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” Unquote.

President Nixon delivered his response in the form of a major TV speech on November 3, asking for support from, quote, “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans,” unquote. As he put it, quote, “…the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris…North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.” Unquote. A majority of Americans viewed this speech favorably; a poll taken afterwards gave Nixon a 68 percent approval rating.

By the end of 1969, America’s fighting strength in Vietnam had been reduced by 115,000 men, meaning there were 428,000 troops still on the scene. 40,024 Americans have now been killed in Vietnam since the start of the war. To take their place, South Vietnam drafted more men to serve in ARVN, in accordance with the “Vietnamization” program.

Okay, that takes care of another year in our timeline of the Second Indochina War. However, we won’t be moving on to 1970 right away. There were two special events in 1968-1969 I have barely mentioned so far: the My Lai Massacre and the spread of the war into Cambodia. We are going to need at least one, more likely two episodes, to cover them, so join me for that next time. And then we won’t need too many episodes after that to finish up this war series.

*****

Unfortunately there have not been any donations to the show since the previous episode was released. That’s not a total surprise, due to people’s incomes going down during the Corona virus crisis. Still, don’t forget that this podcast is completely listener-supported. It currently does not have a sponsor; nor does it receive an endowment from an institution, or a grant from a government. If you are enjoying these episodes and can afford to support the show, please consider doing so. There are two ways to make a financial contribution. The first way is by making a secure donation through Paypal. Go to the Blubrry.com page for any episode of this podcast, and click on the gold button that says “Donate.” For the pages of the episodes recorded in 2020, you will see links to the Podcast’s Hall of Fame page and to my Patreon page, next to the gold button. Those who donate will get their first name or initial added to the Hall of Fame page; and thus be remembered for as long as this podcast is available online. If you donated before 2020, make another donation this year and you will get the coveted Water Buffalo icon placed next to your name, on the Hall of Fame page!

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<Outro>

Episode 88: The Second Indochina War, Part 15

Posted on April 17, 2020 by xenohistorian

If you can read this, it’s time to download/listen to another episode in the History of Southeast Asia Podcast! Last time, we came to the Tet Offensive, which many consider the climax of the Second Indochina War. However, we still have a long way to go before the Vietnam story is finished. Today’s episode covers events in the rest of 1968, in Vietnam and the United States.

https://blubrry.com/hoseasia/58899898/episode-88-the-second-indochina-war-part-15/

(Transcript)

This episode is dedicated to Louis E. and Louis C., for donating to the podcast. Thanks to both of you for keeping the lights on, at a time when so many people can’t go out to work. Both of your names have been added to the podcast’s new Hall of Fame page, of course. And since Louis C. donated last year, he has now qualified for the coveted water buffalo icon! Both of you are among those who can keep your heads when most other people are losing theirs. May both of you also be among the few who can prosper in these troubled times.

Episode 88: The Second Indochina War, Part 15

or, Should the Americans Stay or Should They Go?

Greetings, dear listeners! Actually, the correct question about American involvement in this episode is, “Should they win or should they quit?” Anyway, if you are listening in the spring of 2020, around the time I recorded this episode, you are probably staying home most of the time, to avoid the Corona virus, while outside it seems that the world has gone crazy. For example, if you walk into a bank, now you’re expected to wear a mask. Who’d have thought that would happen?

Are you looking for something to do that won’t infect you with the virus, or violate the new rules on “social distancing?” Then you’ve come to the right place! Podcasts are still a safe form of information, entertainment, or just a good way to pass the time. Now I have heard that listenership to podcasts is down, and I’m not sure why; maybe people who are used to listening to them elsewhere have forgotten about them while at home. And some podcasters have cut back on the amount of recording they are doing, due to the need to make money or simply stay alive in this troubled time. Well don’t worry listeners, the History of Southeast Asia Podcast is alive and well! Because I wasn’t working a day job when the trouble started, this podcast is as active as ever.

Unless this is the first time you have listened to this show, you know that for several episodes we have been covering the wars that occurred in Indochina during the mid-twentieth century. “Indochina” is the name usually given to the part of Southeast Asia that France conquered in the nineteenth century, when several Western nations went overseas to build colonial empires for themselves. Today Indochina is three countries: Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. The First Indochina War, which we covered in Episodes 64 through 68, finished with the expulsion of the French and independence for all three countries, but it also led to Vietnam’s division, into communist North Vietnam and anti-communist South Vietnam. Because of that, most of the fighting which came after 1954 took place in Vietnam; here in the United States we call it the Vietnam War.

In the previous episode, we reached the Tet Offensive in early 1968. Many consider this the climax of the war; although the Americans and their South Vietnamese partners won the battles, scenes of death and destruction from those battles also convinced the American people that they could not win the war. Now Americans would look for a way to quit their involvement in the war, preferably through a negotiated settlement with North Vietnam.

After the climax of a story comes the denouement, and the denouement for this story is not a short one. Americans will remain active in Vietnam for almost five more years, and the war will continue for two years after that. And the number of American servicemen in Vietnam will increase, before it starts to decrease. Here are the previous episodes in this podcast’s Second Indochina War series, in case you missed any:

Episodes 71 through 73 covered Vietnam from 1954 to 1963, telling how the war got started there.

Then we went to one of the countries next door, Laos. Episodes 74 and 75 covered the war breaking out in that country, up until 1964.

For Episodes 76 and 77 we took a break from the narrative, covering special topics instead. After that we returned to the war in Laos for Episodes 78 and 79. That brought the Laotian narrative up to the year 1974, so the only thing left to talk about concerning the war in Laos is to tell how it ended. I’m saving that for an episode where we cover how the war ended in all of Indochina.

Next, we went back to Vietnam, where it was time for the Americans to get involved completely. We did that with Episodes 80 through 84, had another special episode with 85, and then continued the story with Episodes 86 and 87. That brought us up to April 1968.

Now if you haven’t listened to all of the episodes I just mentioned, you know what your assignment is. Go download or listen to those episodes, from wherever you got this one, and then come back here. As for those of you who are ready to move on in the narrative, move on out!

*****

For the United States, 1968 was one of the most turbulent years in its history. To start with, there had been racial unrest for the past few years, and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King on April 4 sparked a new round of riots in more than 100 American cities. And protests against the Vietnam War grew more frequent, and got worse every year; now the idea among Americans that the Tet Offensive had been a defeat added fuel to the fire.

In New York City, students at Columbia University had been protesting the University’s plan to build a new gymnasium since late March. The gym was to be built at the edge of the community of Harlem, on land that had been recreational space for Harlem’s residents. Since this was public land, the university promised this would be a gym for everyone, but when the building plans were revealed, the only part of the gym that would be open to the public was the basement, and the public had to go through a back door to get to it; the rest of the gym was only for students and faculty. Harlem residents, who didn’t want the gym in the first place, considered this both an insult and an act of segregation; they called the back door the “gym crow door,” with “Jim” spelled G-Y-M.

At first the protests were on the site where the gym would be built, Morningside Park, and the protesters came from the Student Afro-American Society, or SAS, a black student organization. Soon they were joined by the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, an anti-war group made up mostly of white students. Then on April 23, when the New York Police Department drove them away from the gym’s proposed site, 150 SAS and SDS students moved to the center of campus, and rushed into Hamilton Hall, the building holding Columbia’s administrative offices and some classrooms. They took over the building and took Henry Coleman, the acting dean, as a hostage, holding him for one day before letting him leave unharmed.

Over the next few days, a total of five buildings were occupied. Some students held counterprotests, calling for university life to return to normal. There was also a fallout between the two groups leading the protests; the SDS was more interested in opposing the war than advocating civil rights, and soon the SAS ordered the SDS to leave Hamilton Hall. Attempts to negotiate and mediate followed, with the administration agreeing to suspend work on the gym, but it refused amnesty for the protesters. Then on April 30, police moved in and cleared the buildings, arresting 712 students. More than 100 students, four faculty members and a dozen police were injured by the time it was over. Students called a strike, and the campus shut down for the rest of the semester. The project to build the gym was also canceled, so you can say the SAS won eventually.

Meanwhile in the rest of the United States, hundreds of thousands of Americans took part in demonstrations in seventeen cities on April 27, because that day happened to be a Saturday. Most of the demonstrations were against the war, and some were against racism as well. The largest demonstration was in New York City, where more than 100,000 people marched in four separate parades to protest the war. By contrast, a May Day parade, held in another part of the city on the same day, was intended to show support for America and the troops, but it only attracted a crowd of 2,700. The other cities with demonstrations included Albany, NY, Austin, TX, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Cleveland, Boston, Seattle, and Portland, OR.

We saw in the previous episode that on the last day of March 1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run for president again. By the end of May, the Democratic presidential campaign had turned into a race between three candidates, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Minnesota Senator Eugene J. McCarthy. Kennedy and McCarthy were against the war, while Humphrey either called for continuing the war or beginning peace talks; in other words, Humphrey wanted to continue whatever Johnson was doing. On June 4, Kennedy won the primary elections in California and South Dakota, while McCarthy won in New Jersey; this meant Kennedy was now the candidate most likely to get the nomination. But then the next day, he was shot and mortally wounded in Los Angeles. With Kennedy gone, his supporters either switched to McCarthy, or went to a new candidate, South Dakota Senator George McGovern. The Democratic Convention for 1968 was probably the most violent in American history. 15,000 protesters came to Chicago to disrupt the convention; opposing them were 12,000 police, 6,000 Army troops, 6,000 National Guardsmen, and 1,000 intelligence agents. Revulsion against the protesters prompted the convention delegates to nominate the Democratic candidate the protesters liked the least, Humphrey.

To complete the election picture for 1968, the Republicans also nominated their most recent vice president, Richard M. Nixon. He consistently promised to end the war under his watch if elected, but many old-timers remembered he had been fiercely anti-communist in the 1940s and 1950s, and now they feared he would get violent if peace talks did not go the way he wanted. But the most conservative candidate running was not Nixon; it was Alabama Governor George Wallace. Wallace entered the race as a third party candidate, and while he was mainly interested in domestic issues, he showed he wanted to wage the war aggressively, by picking a fighting general, Curtis LeMay, for his vice presidential candidate. However, Wallace also promised to get out of the war immediately, if he could not find a way to win after 90 days in office.

*****

Now let’s get back to what was happening in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese wanted to infiltrate the South by blazing a trail straight across the Demilitarized Zone, but as we saw in the last two episodes, several bases manned by US Marines on the south side of the DMZ blocked their way. In late April they tried to take out Dong Ha, the base which held the 3rd Marine Division headquarters, meaning it was the most important base in the area. Near Dong Ha was an abandoned village named Dai Do, so the resulting battle is called either Dai Do or Dong Ha. Leading the communists were two regiments from North Vietnam’s elite 320th Division, a force numbering between 6,000 and 10,000 men; some 600 guerrillas came with them as well. ARVN, the South Vietnamese Army, had two battalions of the 2nd Regiment, 1st Infantry Division patrolling around the mouth of the Cua Viet River, but it failed to catch the enemy sneaking past them, nor did they catch the enemy building bunkers around Dai Do. The North and South Vietnamese had their first clash on April 29, about four and a half miles north of Dong Ha. The next day, a North Vietnamese unit at the junction of the Bo Dieu and Cua Viet Rivers fired on a US Navy patrol boat, forcing it to return to Dong Ha.

The nearest American unit, the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Marines, was sent to investigate. This unit had been nicknamed the “Magnificent Bastards” for the previous battles they participated in, and because they were now understrength, a platoon from the 1st Amphibian Tractor Battalion, which included two T-48 medium tanks, was sent with them. A platoon from the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines, was sent separately, as well an Army unit, the 3rd Battalion of the 21st Infantry, and some boats from a Navy assault group. This meant the American force had a strength of 250 men, and they were going against an enemy force 24 to 40 times larger.

At Dai Do and Dong Huan, another abandoned village, the Marines ran into heavy enemy fire. The leader of the “Magnificent Bastards,” Lieutenant Colonel William “Wild Bill” Weise, launched an attack to clear the area. But Weise soon found out he was heavily outnumbered, and the Marines were forced to fall back to defensive positions north of the Cua Viet River. Still, he had stopped the enemy advance, and it was the North Vietnamese turn to retreat when the Army battalion arrived and occupied Nhi Ha, a village to the northeast. On May 3, the 1st Battalion of the 3rd Marines joined the battle, only to find out the North Vietnamese had fled.

The battle of Dai Do counts as a victory, because if the “Magnificent Bastards” and their partners had failed to stop their opponents, the North Vietnamese would have gone on to take Dong Ha and maybe even Quang Tri, thereby undermining all Allied defenses along the DMZ. However, the cost was high. The Marines suffered 81 casualties and another 297 seriously wounded; among the wounded was Colonel Weise, who received a Navy Cross for his leadership under fire. The Army battalion at Nhi Ha sustained 29 deaths and 130 wounded. But the enemy suffered even greater losses; they left 1,568 bodies on the battlefield.

I mentioned in the previous episode that North Vietnam gave up its plan to invade South Vietnam with a conventional force in 1968, because of the heavy losses it and the Viet Cong suffered in the Tet Offensive. However, they also dropped the idea because they could not break through the defenses along the DMZ. They could still infiltrate the South by sending troops and supply trucks down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but that road was unsuitable for tanks. The North Vietnamese Army will wait four years, until 1972, before trying again; by then most of the Americans will be gone. And (spoiler alert!) it will actually take seven years, until 1975, for the conventional invasion to succeed.

Another major battle, the battle of Kham Duc, took place a few days later, and about 120 miles to the south. During the Tet Offensive, the North Vietnamese 2nd Division had tried unsuccessfully to take Da Nang, and after it was driven off, it moved southwest, into Quang Nam Province. The Americans knew where the 2nd Division was, but they did not know its intentions. This prompted the American commander in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, to upgrade the defenses at Kham Duc, a Special Forces camp located ten miles from the border of Laos. An isolated base, Kham Duc had been established in 1963 to monitor North Vietnamese infiltration. 260 South Vietnamese troops were flown in, as well as 125 engineers to lengthen the runway on the air strip, clear underbrush that the enemy could hide in, and build a perimeter defense. Unlike Khe Sanh, the remote base attacked in the previous episode, Kham Duc looked like an easy target, because it was surrounded by jungle-covered high ground and it lacked supporting artillery. The North Vietnamese were so confident they could take the base that they brought along a film crew, to record the “devastating defeat of American forces at Kham Duc”; such a victory would put them in a position of strength before the peace talks began. A Viet Cong battalion, from the VC 1st Regiment, also took part in the assault on Kham Duc.

Near Kham Duc was an outpost named Ngok Tavak, defended by a multinational crew of Americans, South Vietnamese, and hill tribesmen or Montagnards. Three Australian officers led this garrison, and the commander among them was Captain John White. In early May, an artillery platoon of 43 Marines, with a Navy hospital corpsman and two 105 mm howitzers, were sent to strengthen Ngok Tavak. This prompted the North Vietnamese to attack Ngok Tavak first, with a mortar bombardment before dawn on May 10.

Captain White had made one Montagnard unit camp outside the perimeter, because it contained Viet Cong agents and he did not trust it. Now when the battle began, this unit came to the entrance, called out, quote, “Don’t shoot, friendly,” unquote, and then they threw explosive-filled satchels, killing several Marines inside the garrison and knocking the howitzers out of commission. Next, North Vietnamese with flamethrowers surged forward and lit a vehicle on fire. An AC-47 helicopter gunship saved the day when it arrived overhead and fired its three multi-barrel machine guns on the attackers. The North Vietnamese tried to use tear gas, but the wind blew it back onto their own positions. Half the attackers then withdrew, turning their attention to Kham Duc, leaving only the Viet Cong force to deal with Ngok Tavak’s remaining defenders.

Marine helicopters brought reinforcements from Kham Duc, but rocket-propelled grenades hit two of them on the landing zone, ruining both the helicopters and the landing zone. White had 70 wounded that his men could not carry out on foot, so he called for a medevac helicopter to pick them up. 5th Special Forces headquarters ordered White to hold out for more reinforcements, but he knew that was impossible. The outpost was surrounded, and water and ammunition were running short. Therefore White called for napalm strikes on the pathway of the main attack and broke out with his surviving troops—83 Montagnards, three Australians, five Special Forces and 14 Marines—running along the burning pathway. Marine helicopters picked up the escapees and took them to Kham Duc that evening. The attack on Ngok Tavak killed 16 Americans and wounded 23. Among the Montagnards, 30 were killed or wounded and 64 were missing, including those who deserted.

By the end of May 10, the US Air Force had flown in 628 more men and two howitzers to Kham Duc, which was now encircled by the North Vietnamese division. The North Vietnamese in turn managed to score a direct hit on one of the howitzers, killing two and wounding 35. More reinforcements were sent in on May 11, but at the same time, the top American generals in Vietnam took a look at the situation, and they recommended to General Westmoreland that the camp at Kham Duc be “relocated,” because of its poor defensive position. At first the generals decided to undertake a three-day evacuation, starting on May 12, but when the enemy captured all seven outposts surrounding the base, orders were changed to a one-day evacuation.

Most of the airlifting would be done with the big cargo carrier among helicopters, the CH-47 Chinook. However, one Chinook was shot down when it was just above the runway, and though the crew escaped, this burning wreck had to be cleared off the runway before any planes could land or take off. Moments after the runway was cleared, a C-130 cargo plane landed under heavy fire, which shot out one tire and damaged the wing fuel tanks. The pilot, Lt. Colonel Daryl Cole, was airlifting in supplies; he had not heard that the mission had been changed to an evacuation, and now a horde of hysterical Vietnamese civilians, the families of the Montagnard soldiers, swarmed aboard. The C-130 could not take off, thanks to the combined weight of the cargo and passengers and the damage it had suffered. After the families were removed, and two hours of repair work was done on the plane, it was able to take off again; this time the only passengers were three members of the Air Force Combat Control Team, whose radio equipment had been destroyed. However, when this plane reached Cam Ranh Bay, the Combat Control Team was ordered to return to Kham Duc to manage the evacuation of everyone else. By the time they arrived, the evacuation was all but done. The pilot of the C-123 plane that was supposed to evacuate the three men did not see them, and had to leave before his plane came under enemy fire, but as he took off, a crew member spotted the Combat Control Team on the ground, so they alerted the next C-123 coming in. Although the camp was now being over-run by the North Vietnamese, and two C-130s had already been shot down, the pilot of this C-123, Lt. Colonel Joe M. Jackson, landed on the air strip under intense fire, gathered all three controllers, and took off. For this rescue, Jackson would be awarded the Medal of Honor.

*****

While the battle of Kham Duc was happening, Hanoi announced that it was ready to talk with the Americans. Negotiations began in Paris on May 13. The American team was led by William Averell Harriman, a statesman with an impressive resume; among other things, he had been a governor of New York, a former ambassador, a former Secretary of Commerce, and most recently the Under-secretary of State for Political Affairs. For the other side, the chief negotiator was Xuan Thuy, who had been North Vietnam’s foreign minister from 1963 to 1965. When he attended the Geneva conference on Laos in 1961 and 62, an American diplomat described him as, quote, "a top-drawer negotiator, a dreadful fellow to face across the table day after day." Unquote.

Unfortunately, the initial talks got nowhere. The United States insisted that all North Vietnamese troops be withdrawn from South Vietnam, while Hanoi declared it had no troops below the 17th Parallel. Hanoi also insisted that, before serious negotiations could begin, the United States would have to halt all bombing raids over Vietnam, and it called for a coalition government in South Vietnam, which would make the Viet Cong partners of the Saigon regime. Because of the stubbornness on both sides, it would take nearly five years for the peace talks to produce an agreement. Most of the time, all sides simply restated their positions and refused to make any concessions. For a while in 1968 the negotiators even argued over whether the table they used for their meetings would be rectangular, which would represent two sides, or round, which would make everyone look equal; in the end they went with a round table.

Meanwhile, President Johnson decided it was time to put a new general in charge of the war. Westmoreland’s pursuit of a war of attrition increased the body count all around, but now he had been in command for four years and looked no closer to winning than when he started. Looking back with hindsight, it appears clear to me that Johnson and Westmoreland should have known better. We saw in Episode 68 that the last French commander in Vietnam, General Henri Navarre, tried to win with a war of attrition, and that led to the disaster at Dienbienphu. Anyway, Johnson recalled Westmoreland to Washington in June, promoting him to Chief of Staff of the Army. To take his place in Vietnam, Johnson made Westmoreland’s deputy, General Creighton W. Abrams, the new commander.

Whereas Westmoreland was a “fuss and feathers” general, who was immaculately groomed and always spoke with optimism when he made a public appearance, Abrams was not inclined to hold press conferences; when he did, he was gruff and sometimes disheveled. He inspired the troops with his competence, plain talk and combat record. During World War II, he was a tank commander under George Patton, and a hero of the Battle of the Bulge; he received two Distinguished Service Crosses, America’s second-highest award for valor, and Patton called him the best tank commander in the US Army. For those reasons, the tank used by the US Army today, the M-1 Abrams, is named after him. The troops serving under Abrams considered him a soldier’s soldier. And while Westmoreland was fond of search-and-destroy missions, which got the troops out quickly after the fighting was done, Abrams believed it was more important to secure populated areas and win over the hearts of the civilians. Thus, he would be the ideal general to have when the Americans began to turn over the whole war effort to ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.

The first important operation to take place under Abrams was the Phoenix Program, which began on July 1. The Vietnamese name for it was Phung Hoang, meaning “All Seeing Bird.” Formulated and paid for by the US Central Intelligence Agency, this was a program where American, South Vietnamese and Australian forces would work together to destroy the Viet Cong infrastructure across South Vietnam, using infiltration, torture, capture, counter-terrorism, interrogation, and assassination. Previously, the South Vietnamese government had set up several intelligence agencies to locate and root out Viet Cong agents, and they ended up competing with each other for power and money. The American solution to this problem was to centralize all anti-Viet Cong activities that weren’t being carried out by the armed forces under one program, and to put a department of MACV, the US military command in Vietnam, in charge of the program. This department was called Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support, CORDS for short. The head of CORDS, Robert Komer, did more than anyone else to get the Phoenix Program approved by his superiors, including President Johnson, but it was most active and successful under William E. Colby, the CIA executive who replaced Komer in 1968. According to its own figures, in 1969 alone the Phoenix Program “neutralized” 19,534 Viet Cong members; 6,187 of them were killed, while the rest were either captured or persuaded to switch sides.

South Vietnamese paramilitary forces in the Phoenix Program were organized into special police units called Provincial Reconnaissance Units, or PRUs. Created, trained, equipped, and managed by the CIA, the PRUs worked in secret, so all kinds of stories were made up about them, and while the PRUs were declared counter-terror units, we may never know what they really did.

Unfortunately, Americans involved in the Phoenix Program described it as being like agencies in the South Vietnamese government and army; full of inefficiency, corruption, and abuse. South Vietnamese officials resisted working together, stole much of the US aid assigned to the program, and were so easy to bribe that 70 percent of the Viet Cong suspects captured were able to buy their freedom. Even worse, the program assigned monthly quotas to villages, and village officials would meet those quotas by announcing that anyone killed in a local skirmish was a Viet Cong member. Sometimes they would round up innocent peasants, with the intention of declaring them all Viet Cong and turning them over to the police, but then released those who could pay them off. And other times they would torture suspected peasants, when the only evidence against them came from jealous neighbors.

In the United States, the Phoenix Program generated huge controversy when reports leaked out of alleged assassinations of suspected Viet Cong operatives, by South Vietnamese trained by the US. Antiwar activists, who got part of their information from North Vietnamese propaganda, denounced the Phoenix Program as “mass murder.” This eventually led to Congressional hearings in 1971, and the termination of the program in the same year. When he testified before Congress about this, Colby stated, quote, "The Phoenix program was not a program of assassination. The Phoenix program was a part of the overall pacification program." Unquote. Colby declared that 20,587 Viet Cong had been killed, quote, "mostly in combat situations…by regular or paramilitary forces." Unquote. No more than 14 percent of the Viet Cong victims had been killed by PRUs.

In fact, despite its shortcomings and excesses, the Phoenix Program turned out to be one of the most successful things the Americans tried in Vietnam. After the war, communist leaders admitted that it had eliminated around sixty thousand authentic Viet Cong members. Madame Nguyen Thi Dinh, a veteran Viet Cong leader, told Time-Life correspondent Stanley Karnow in an interview that the Phoenix Program had been, quote, “very dangerous,” unquote, and added, quote, “We never feared a division of troops, but the infiltration of a couple of guys into our ranks created tremendous difficulties for us.” Unquote. A deputy commander of the Viet Cong, General Tran Do, described the Phoenix Program as, quote, "extremely destructive." Unquote. Colonel Bui Tin, a North Vietnamese officer we will hear from again at the end of the war, called it a “devious and cruel” operation that cost, quote, “the lives of thousands of our cadres.” Unquote. The former VC minister of justice wrote in his memoirs, quote: "In some locations… Phoenix was dangerously effective. In Hau Nghia Province, for example, …the [VCI] infrastructure was virtually eliminated." End quote.

Finally, Nguyen Co Thach, a senior North Vietnamese diplomat during the war, and a foreign minister after the war, stated, quote, "We had many weaknesses in the South because of Phoenix. In some provinces, 95 percent of the communist cadre had been assassinated or compromised by the Phoenix operation." Unquote. He further stated that Phoenix had, quote, "wiped out many of our bases." Unquote. That action alone caused many North Vietnamese and Viet Cong to flee across the border, to their secret bases in Cambodia. Afterwards, the Viet Cong was no longer able to operate effectively. When North Vietnam launched the Easter Offensive in 1972, and the Ho Chi Minh Campaign in 1975, the Viet Cong were only minor participants.

*****

To keep the South Vietnamese government informed of what was happening at the peace talks, President Johnson met once more with President Nguyen Van Thieu and Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, in Honolulu, Hawaii on July 19, 1968. In October the US and South Vietnamese navies launched Operation Sealord, the largest combined naval operation of the war. Here more than 1,200 American and South Vietnamese Navy gunboats and warships targeted North Vietnamese supply lines, along the coast of Cambodia and in the Mekong River delta. They also successfully disrupted communist supply camps in the delta and along other waterways during the two-year operation.

Because the peace talks were deadlocked, Johnson came under pressure to make a concession to the North Vietnamese, because real progress towards peace would help Hubert Humphrey win the presidential election in November. On October 31, Johnson gave in; he announced a complete halt to the US bombing of North Vietnam, thereby ending the bombing campaign, Operation Rolling Thunder. During the three and a half years that Operation Rolling Thunder went on, US planes had dropped a million tons of bombs on North Vietnam, the equivalent of 800 tons per day, with little actual success in halting the flow of soldiers and supplies into the South or in damaging North Vietnamese morale. In fact, the opposite happened as the North Vietnamese patriotically rallied around their Communist leaders during the onslaught. Bombing campaigns almost never break morale. The only case I can think of where one did was during the Kosovo phase of the Yugoslav Civil War, when US planes bombed Serbia for ten weeks in 1999. Anyway, by the time Operation Rolling Thunder ended, many towns south of Hanoi had been leveled, with a US estimate of 52,000 civilian deaths. In return, using sophisticated, Soviet-made air defense equipment, the North Vietnamese managed to shoot down 922 US fighters and bombers.

The concession did not work as planned. On Election Day, Republican Richard Nixon narrowly defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey, to become the next president. I will finish today’s narrative with a disclaimer. Most of my sources claim that Nixon won by pulling a trick with the peace talks, the first of a series of “October surprises” that Republicans and Democrats have accused each other of doing since then. Supposedly Nixon did it with the help of Anna Chennault, one of his supporters and the widow of General Claire Chennault, the leader of the Flying Tigers squadron during World War II. I mentioned General Chennault in Episode 64, when Ho Chi Minh had a meeting with him. Anna was a personal friend of South Vietnamese President Thieu, and so the story goes, she passed him secret messages from Nixon, urging him to stay out of the peace talks because if he did so, Nixon would give him a better deal after he became president. Thus, Thieu did not participate in the talks, and Nixon went to the White House.

Later on, at least by the time of the Watergate scandal, Nixon would look like the type of scoundrel who would undermine a peace agreement to get elected, but the truth of the matter is that in 1968, there was no peace agreement to scuttle. Nobody at this date – not Johnson, Humphrey, Nixon, Thieu, or the North Vietnamese leaders, would have accepted a peace agreement, unless it was completely on their terms. Thieu had no intention of participating if the Viet Cong were going to be there, and the North Vietnamese Communist Party Boss, Le Duan, only would have accepted an agreement that called for a complete withdrawal of American forces and a dismantling of the Saigon government. Of course the Americans in charge at this point would not accept an agreement like that, since the purpose of American involvement in Vietnam for nearly twenty years had been to support a non-communist government in Saigon.

Lien-Hang Nguyen, a professor at the University of Kentucky, and author of the book Hanoi’s War,is an expert on North Vietnam’s foreign ministry records, and in a 2015 interview, she stated that Le Duan, quote, “wasn’t ready to negotiate seriously until the summer of 1972,” unquote. It took the defeat of the Easter Offensive to convince him that North Vietnam could not win, as long as the Americans were around. Still, he gained an advantage by demanding unacceptable terms in 1968. When Nixon took office, he would find himself stuck with a bombing halt hindering his war effort, and peace talks that had no chance of success.

Okay, that brings us to the end of 1968. Lately I have ended each year of the Second Indochina War with a series of numbers to tell you how the war was going. For 1968, the year ended with 495,000 American troops – almost half a million! – in Vietnam. This was the most expensive year in the war for the Americans; they spent $77.4 billion, which is worth $569 billion in 2020 dollars – almost half of what was spent on the entire war. 1968 was also the bloodiest year for the Americans and their allies. More than 1,000 Americans were killed each month, for a year-end total of 14,000 – almost half of the 30,000 American deaths suffered to date. The South Vietnamese suffered nearly twice as many losses; 27,915 ARVN soldiers were killed. For the other side, it was estimated that around two hundred thousand communists were killed, roughly five of them for every American and South Vietnamese soldier lost.

An estimated 150,000 soldiers from North Vietnam infiltrated the South via the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1968. Although the US conducted up to 200 air strikes against the trail each day, up to 10,000 North Vietnamese trucks were driving on it at any given time. And we saw with Operation Sealord that North Vietnamese soldiers and supplies were now sneaking in by way of Cambodia, too, but I couldn’t find any figures on how much got to the Viet Cong that way.

*****

I think you will agree with me when I say this about 1968: “That was certainly a busy year, wasn’t it?” Not only did it take two whole episodes to cover wartime events in 1968, there were plenty of other events unrelated to the war, from the Olympics in Grenoble, France and Mexico City, to Apollo 8, the first manned flight to the moon. Twenty years later, Time Magazine printed a special issue all about memories from 1968, entitled “The Year That Shaped a Generation.” So join me next time when we move on to 1969 and see a new administration take over the American side of the war. What will they do that is different? We will say goodbye to one of the key players on the North Vietnamese side as well, though that won’t affect them as much as the change in presidents will affect the United States.

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<Outro>

Episode 87: The Second Indochina War, Part 14

Posted on April 1, 2020 by xenohistorian

Today is April Fool’s Day and a new podcast episode is available for your listening pleasure. That’s no joke! This episode covers what many people consider the climax of the Second Indochina War — the Tet Offensive. Here the Americans won all the battles, but they may have lost the war here as well. Also covered are the battle of Khe Sanh, and the beginning of the end of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.

https://blubrry.com/hoseasia/57922321/episode-87-the-second-indochina-war-part-14/

(Transcript)

This episode is dedicated to Deren T., for generously donating to the podcast. This podcast is entirely listener-supported; it has not had a sponsor in more than a year. Thank you for sticking with us in these difficult times, and that’s no joke, even though today is April Fool’s Day! May you and your family come out of the Corona virus pandemic stronger than you were previously.

Episode 87: The Second Indochina War, Part 14

or, The Tet Offensive

Greetings, dear listeners! If you have listened to the other episodes about the First and Second Indochina Wars, I hoped you noticed the overall trends, from the end of World War II to the point where the previous episode broke off, at the end of 1967. American involvement started during the First Indochina War, when US President Harry Truman decided the United States would pay for the French war effort. Though the United States spent $3 billion, the French lost. Then the ink was barely dry on the cease-fire agreement ending the First Indochina War when the Second Indochina War, alias the Vietnam War in the United States and the American War in Vietnam, broke out. Truman’s successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, responded the same way as Truman, by giving military and financial aid to the faction fighting communism in Vietnam, which now was the South Vietnamese government. However, that didn’t get results, so the next president, John F. Kennedy, sent military advisors to go with the military aid, and then the commitment to winning the war increased every year, as more money, equipment and advisors were sent. This didn’t work either, and the South Vietnamese army and government seemed unable, and even not very willing, to defend themselves.

By 1965 the next US president, Lyndon B. Johnson, saw this as a case of “If want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.” Therefore he committed ground troops to the action. Again, the new commitment did not change the course of the war, though more and more soldiers were sent every year, and American leaders, both in Washington and in South Vietnam, declared that the Americans and South Vietnamese were winning. Likewise, the introduction of bombing missions, over North Vietnam and Laos, proved equally ineffective. By the end of 1967 there were nearly half a million American servicemen in Vietnam, and victory was no closer than before. It is at this point that today’s narrative begins.

At this point I need to ask the listeners, have you listened to the rest of the episodes about the Second Indochina War? If not, you need to go to where you got this episode, and listen to the rest of the story. Here are the episodes in the series:

For the part of the war in Vietnam, Episodes 71, 72, 73, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, and 86.

And for the part of the war in Laos, Episodes 74, 75, 78, and 79. Now go get ‘em!

Oh, are you still here? Then you must be ready for today’s narrative. Let’s go!

*****

On the first day of 1968, a radio broadcast from Hanoi featured Ho Chi Minh, the founder of the Vietnamese Communist Party, reading a poem that called on his people to march to the ultimate victory, when North and South Vietnam would be reunited. Because of this broadcast, and because other messages sent from Hanoi to Viet Cong units had been intercepted, the Americans and South Vietnamese knew that North Vietnam was planning a major action in the near future, but they did not know any of the details. The American military commander in Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, thought the action would happen sometime in January, and that the North Vietnamese goal was to capture Khe Sanh, the American base in the northwest corner of South Vietnam, near the borders of both North Vietnam and Laos. We saw the first battle for Khe Sanh in the previous episode, the so-called “Hill Fights”; now between 20,000 and 30,000 North Vietnamese troops gathered in the area, to go against 5,000 US Marines at Khe Sanh. The Americans knew the North Vietnamese were there; Operation Niagara I, a series of air reconnaissance missions, was launched in January 1968 to locate where the enemy forces were concentrated; extra supplies and artillery rounds were sent to Khe Sanh as well. Westmoreland also guessed correctly that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong would stage attacks in other parts of South Vietnam around the same time, but he incorrectly dismissed these as diversions, intended to draw American attention away from Khe Sanh.

One of the generals under Westmoreland was Frederick Weyand, who had served in the China-Burma-India theater during World War II. Weyand had disagreed with parts of Westmoreland’s strategy in the past. Now Weyand’s troops were stationed along the Cambodian border, and because he also expected attacks in places besides Khe Sanh, he requested that his troops be pulled back to the area around Saigon; Westmoreland reluctantly granted the request. That decision would help a lot, when the troops were needed to defend Saigon during the upcoming offensive; Weyand later earned the nickname “the Savior of Saigon” for moving the troops. As it turned out, Westmoreland got the enemy strategy backward; the attack on Khe Sanh would be a distraction from the attack on Saigon, not the other way around.

The battle for Khe Sanh began on January 21, 1968, as the North Vietnamese troops around the outpost isolated it, beginning a 77-day siege. This attracted enormous media attention back in America. Observers on both sides compared Khe Sanh with the battle of Dien Bien Phu, where in 1954, Vietnamese communists besieged and captured that French outpost, thereby persuading the French to abandon Vietnam completely. If you don’t remember Dien Bien Phu, go listen to Episode 68 of this podcast for the details.

In Washington the US president, Lyndon Johnson, anxiously told the Joint Chiefs Chairman, General Earle Wheeler, quote, "I don’t want any damn Dinbinfoo." Unquote. Johnson sent Marine reinforcements to Khe Sanh, with special orders to hold the base, while declaring, quote, "…the eyes of the nation and the eyes of the entire world, the eyes of all of history itself, are on that little brave band of defenders who hold the pass at Khe Sanh…" Unquote. Then Johnson demanded a guarantee "signed in blood" from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the Marines would succeed.

The aerial portion of Khe Sanh’s defense was called Operation Niagara II. It got that name because it dropped a “waterfall of bombs” on the enemy. In all about 2,000 aircraft were used, of which as many as 800 could be in the air at one time. The airplanes ranged from B-52 bombers to A-1 Skyraiders, one-man fighters; lots of helicopters saw action here, too. At the peak of the battle, North Vietnamese soldiers were hit around the clock every 90 minutes by groups of three B-52s apiece, which dropped more than 110,000 tons of bombs during the siege. This would be one of the most concentrated applications of aerial firepower in the history of warfare. As for artillery, official records report that the Americans fired 142,081 rounds at the North Vietnamese, with some estimating that as many as 200,000 rounds were fired. Together the Marines and the Air Force destroyed nearly every living thing within one kilometer of the base. Here is how one American Air Force pilot described the destruction, in the book The Limits of Intervention, by Townsend Hoopes.

(Read quote)

Podcast footnote: In the previous episode I told you what the North Vietnamese strategy was, for late 1967 and 1968. Here it is again, to refresh your memory. It was thought up by the Communist Party boss in Hanoi, Le Duan, and though Vo Nguyen Giap, the military commander, opposed it, he tried his best to carry it out. The first phase of the plan was to launch a series of attacks against remote outposts, to lure American and South Vietnamese troops away from South Vietnam’s cities, especially Saigon. These were the so-called “Border Battles,” of which Khe Sanh was the latest one. The second phase of the plan, what would come to be known as the Tet Offensive, was an attack against the cities themselves by Viet Cong forces aided by North Vietnamese troops, in the hope of “liberating” as many villages, hamlets and towns as possible, which would ignite a "general uprising" to overthrow the government of South Vietnam. Finally, for the third phase, North Vietnamese troops and tanks would invade South Vietnam, joining the Viet Cong for the final victory. End footnote.

*****

In Vietnam, the most important day of the year is New’s Years Day, which they call Tet. Tet is short for Têt Nguyên Ðán, which means "Feast of the First Morning of the First Day." Like Chinese New Year, it falls on the first day of the year, according to the Chinese lunar calendar. Because lunar calendars have 354 days, rather than 365 days, the date wanders around on the Gregorian calendar used by most Western nations, but it always takes place sometime in January or February. For example, in this year, 2020, Tet fell on January 20, and next year it will fall on February 12.

Podcast Footnote: I told you in previous episodes that I used to live in Orlando, Florida, which has a good-sized Vietnamese community. They own all the shops in one neighborhood on the north side of Orlando, and my wife and I used to go there to get special ingredients for her cooking. After we moved away, the Vietnamese purchased an additional shopping center on the west side, of which the largest store used to be a Publix supermarket. The owners of those shops are hardworking folks, who are open almost every day of the year; even if you go there on Christmas Day, you are likely to find them open. The one holiday the shops are certain to be closed for is Tet. End footnote.

In 1967 both sides agreed to a truce so they could observe Tet, and they kept it for four days. Because that had worked out well, they agreed to a Tet truce for 1968 as well. This time, Tet was scheduled to begin on January 31. Thus, on January 30, most South Vietnamese soldiers went home for the holiday, while North Vietnamese soldiers below the Demilitarized Zone celebrated in their camps, giving each other gifts and candy. They celebrated a day early because they would launch a massive attack on the next day, catching their enemies completely off guard.

At 3 AM on the morning of January 31, 1968, 84,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops struck at more than 120 cities, towns, hamlets and bases in South Vietnam. The targets included 36 of South Vietnam’s 44 provincial capitals. Most surprising of all was the attack on Saigon, a city supposedly safe from the communists. Here North Vietnamese units entered Cho Lon, the Chinese neighborhood of Saigon, while the Viet Cong attacked the presidential palace, Tan Son Nhut Airport, the Phu Tho racetrack, and the headquarters of ARVN, the South Vietnamese army. Seventeen Viet Cong commandos even broke into the US Embassy compound, before American soldiers arrived and killed them. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker was asleep at his residence a few blocks away, and when he woke up he was rushed to the home of a subordinate, where he would be safer. Allen Wendt, a junior economic specialist who was in charge during the night shift, escaped by locking himself in the fortified code room.

There also was a battle for the main radio station in Saigon, where the Viet Cong rammed a car full of dynamite through the gate and then wiped out the platoon guarding the station, catching most of the guards while they were sleeping. The invaders brought a tape-recorded speech from Ho Chi Minh, which they planned to broadcast, but it never went on the air; the transmitter was located fourteen miles from the station, and the attack triggered a signal at the transmitter that cut off the station. Then, until the radio station was recovered, South Vietnamese technicians at the transmitter played what music they had: Viennese waltzes, Beatles hits, and South Vietnamese marching songs.

Around the capital city, 35 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong battalions battled 50 battalions of American and Allied troops. General Weyand launched a counter-attack at Tan Son Nhut on February 1, that broke the Viet Cong in the neighborhood and saved both the headquarters of ARVN and MACV, the American military command, from possible capture.

By February 1, the Americans and their allies had prevailed in the rest of Saigon. There were just a few enemy soldiers left to be rooted out. The last of them were killed or captured at the Phu Tho racetrack, three weeks later; since Phu Tho was a venue for sporting events, it provided plenty of hiding places.

Naturally, General Westmoreland, President Johnson, and other American commanders declared this a victory. However, TV crews had filmed the fighting in the US Embassy, as well as bloody scenes from other areas showing American soldiers under fire, dead and wounded. Their footage was quickly relayed back to the states for broadcast on the evening news programs, giving Americans at home a front row seat to the assaults against their fathers, sons and brothers, ten thousand miles away.

Podcast footnote: I remember my family got our first color TV in 1968. Because color TV sets were now becoming common in American homes, viewers saw the Vietnam carnage “in living color,” as we said in those days. 1968 was definitely a busy year, and we saw a lot of its other key events in color as well, from the presidential election to the flight of Apollo 8 around the moon. End footnote.

*****

For Americans, one of the most gruesome scenes of the war also happened on February 1. A South Vietnamese general, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, was walking the streets of Saigon, looking for ways to strengthen the city’s defenses. We first saw Loan in Episode 83, as one of the leaders who put down the Buddhist revolt in 1966. Now he was the national chief of police. Near a pagoda, a patrol brought a prisoner to him; this was Nguyen Van Lem, a Viet Cong fighter who was trying to hide by wearing civilian clothing, but was captured anyway. Loan drew a revolver, and waved away bystanders in the line of fire. Then he held the pistol to the prisoner’s head, and shot him, in full view of Eddie Addams, an Associated Press photographer, and Vo Suu, an NBC news cameraman. Adams clicked the shutter of his camera right when Loan pulled the trigger, and that photo, which became the most famous photo taken during the war, appeared on the front page of most American newspapers the next morning. Vo Suu filmed a video of the execution with his camera, and it appeared on the NBC news. Võ Suu reported that after the shooting Loan went to a reporter and said, quote, ”These guys kill a lot of our people, and I think Buddha will forgive me.” Unquote.

The general impression one gets from looking at the picture taken by Adams is that Loan was a cold-blooded killer. There is more to the story, though. When he was captured, Lem was accused of cutting the throats of a South Vietnamese colonel, Nguyen Tuan, his wife, their six children and the colonel’s 80-year-old mother. And Loan claimed in a later interview that he shot Lem because the prisoner was not wearing a uniform, so the rules of the Geneva Convention about treating captured enemy soldiers did not apply to Lem.

At the end of the war, Loan escaped to the United States. Settling in Virginia, he opened a restaurant called Les Trois Continents, which served French and Vietnamese food, plus hamburgers and pizza. The restaurant stopped earning a profit when the public found out who the owner really was. Loan died in 1998, and Eddie Adams said this about him. Quote: "The guy was a hero. America should be crying. I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything about him." Unquote.

And here is what Adams wrote about Loan for Time Magazine. Quote:

“The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn’t say was, "What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?" End quote.

Finally, here is another relevant quote. It comes from Don Oberdorfer’s 1971 book Tet!; The Turning Point in the Vietnam War. Quote:

"It says something about this war that the great picture of the Tet Offensive was Eddie Adam’s photograph of a South Vietnamese general shooting a man with his arms tied behind his back, that the most memorable quotation was Peter Arnett’s damning epigram from Ben Tre, ‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it’ and that the only Pulitzer Prize specifically awarded for reporting an event of the Tet [sic] offensive was given two years later to Seymour M. Hersh, who never set foot in Vietnam, for exposing the U.S. Army massacre of more than a hundred civilians at My Lai."

End quote.

Two of the references in the last quote need explaining. You have probably heard of Peter Arnett, because of his controversial coverage of the more recent wars in Iraq, Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom, while working for CNN and NBC respectively. Well, at the beginning of his career in the 1960s, he was an Associated Press reporter stationed in Vietnam. Ben Tre was the capital of a province in the Mekong delta, and like Saigon, Ben Tre came under attack during the Tet Offensive. In that battle, 328 Viet Cong were killed, but to drive them out, Allied commanders ordered the bombing and shelling of the town, so 528 civilians were killed as well, and more than 5,000 homes were destroyed. In his report of the battle, Arnett quoted a US major as saying, quote, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” unquote, but he never gave the officer’s name, so we can’t verify if the officer really said it. Arnett’s quote rapidly spread through the rest of the American media, and was altered into the famous phrase, “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.” In this form, the quote became a popular slogan for the anti-war movement.

As for the My Lai massacre, I will have to talk about that another time. In fact, it deserves its own episode. A year and a half ago, I listened to another podcast that devoted two episodes to My Lai, each more than two hours long.

*****

While the media concentrated its attention on Saigon, the fiercest battle of the Tet Offensive took place in Hue. Veteran listeners will remember that Hue had been the capital of a united Vietnam from 1802 to 1884; go to Episodes 25 and 26 to hear what I said about Vietnam in those years. With a population of 140,000, Hue was the third largest city in South Vietnam, and though it was only about 62 miles from the Demilitarized Zone, this historical city had escaped serious damage from the war – until 1968. Nevertheless, the communists wanted it; capturing Hue would be a great psychological victory for them.

On January 31, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops stormed the city together; their numbers would eventually grow to 12,000. Some of them were infiltrators who had joined the Tet holiday crowds; the invaders quickly pushed aside the small ARVN garrisons and occupied the massive old fortress, called simply “the Citadel.” The only areas they did not capture were the ARVN headquarters, located in the Citadel, and the headquarters of MACV, the American military command, which was in the part of the city south of the Perfume River. Then they rounded up between 4,000 and 6,000 “enemies of the people”: mostly South Vietnamese government officials, captured South Vietnamese officers, Catholic priests, doctors, teachers and foreigners. The bodies of 3,000 were later found in mass graves, and the fate of the rest is unknown; they simply disappeared. Although Western reporters came to Hue after the fighting started, few had anything to say about the executions, and some denied they even happened.

To take back Hue, the Allies committed 11 ARVN battalions, 4 US Army battalions, and 3 US Marine battalions, with the US Air Force backing them up. This led to the kind of battle conventional armed forces try to avoid, if possible – an urban battle. They recovered the city slowly, advancing house by house, street by street, aided by American air and artillery strikes. For the Citadel, there was twenty-six days of nonstop fighting, tank attacks, reinforcements, and more air strikes; by the time it was over, the Citadel had been almost completely destroyed. And because the Viet Cong were a guerrilla army, the Americans and South Vietnamese did not always recognize the enemy when they were seen – until the enemy shot at them. An elite South Vietnamese unit, the Black Panther Company, was given the honor of taking back the imperial palace.

The last enemy troops were expelled from Hue by March 2. Allied losses were 142 Marines killed, 857 Marines wounded, 74 US Army soldiers killed and 507 wounded, and 384 South Vietnamese killed and 1,830 wounded. The number of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong killed was reported at 5,113. If you just go by the numbers, it was a great victory for the Americans and South Vietnamese; for every soldier they lost, they killed 8.5 enemy fighters. But those who saw the media’s coverage of the battle saw a different story. News stories showed pictures of American soldiers who were filthy, exhausted, wounded, or dead, with hollow-eyed refugees and a city laid waste. As one reporter put it, quote, "All that was left of Hue was ruins divided by a river." Unquote. This coverage undermined efforts by American officials to convince the public that the enemy was demoralized and near collapse, and that the end of the Vietnam War was within sight.

*****

Now let’s go back to the battle that started before the Tet Offensive began, at Khe Sanh. As it turned out, the American and South Vietnamese forces stationed in and near Khe Sanh enjoyed a much stronger position than the French had at Dien Bien Phu, mainly because of the massive bombing of the surrounding hills. Moreover, the French only had eight artillery batteries to defend Dien Bien Phu, based directly on the site, while the Americans not only had plenty of mortars and howitzers at Khe Sanh, but also long-range guns that could blast enemy positions from beyond Khe Sanh’s defense perimeter. So far the operation to defend Khe Sanh had been called Operation Scotland I. At the end of March, General Westmoreland replaced it with Operation Pegasus, a joint Army, Marine and ARVN ground advance. This reopened the road to the base, Route 9. Another Operation, known as the Super Gaggle, ended the resupply crisis by blanketing North Vietnamese positions with massive firepower, tear gas and smoke screens, while helicopters swooped down to drop supplies onto the hill outposts.

Podcast footnote: We saw in previous episodes that Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese military commander, had learned the lessons of being a general by making mistakes that cost thousands of his own soldiers’ lives. When Giap heard the first casualty reports from Khe Sanh, the numbers shocked him so much that he personally flew to the front in late January, so he could see the situation for himself. While there, he almost became one of those casualties – a flight of 36 B-52s dropped 1,000 tons of bombs near his field headquarters. Giap hadn’t been able to keep his visit secret. The Americans suspected, after intercepting communist radio traffic, that a V.I.C., a very important communist, was in the area, so Westmoreland ordered a larger than usual air strike in an attempt to get him. End footnote.

On April 8, North Vietnamese troops withdrew from the area, ending the eleven-week siege of Khe Sanh. At the base itself, the Americans had suffered 274 killed and 2,541 wounded. For Operations Scotland I and Pegasus, there were 730 dead, 2,641 wounded, and 7 missing. ARVN casualties were 229 killed, 436 wounded. Because this area was on the border of Laos, some royal Laotian troops were involved here, too, but I couldn’t find any casualty figures for them. Likewise, my sources do not agree on the number of North Vietnamese casualties. While 1,602 enemy bodies were counted, US officials estimated that between 10,000 and 15,000 North Vietnamese were killed in action, while a secret MACV report estimated 5,550 were killed. The North Vietnamese in turn reported 1,436 wounded before mid-March, and 2,469 killed from January 20 to July 20. Why did they mention casualties until July, if the battle ended in April? There was still activity in the area. In the middle of April, Operation Scotland II was launched, a search-and-destroy mission to get those North Vietnamese who might still be in the vicinity. It lasted until the end of February 1969; over the course of that operation, 435 Americans and 3,304 North Vietnamese were killed. Put all of these numbers together, and they mean that for the Americans, Khe Sanh was the bloodiest battle of the whole war.

President Johnson praised the American troops, saying, quote, "…they vividly demonstrated to the enemy the utter futility of his attempts to win a military victory in the South." Unquote. However, the perception that Khe Sanh was a victory was shattered in early July as American forces abandoned the base, destroying anything that they could not take with them. What the North Vietnamese could not destroy in months of fighting, the Americans now destroyed in a matter of hours. The Marines stationed at Khe Sanh were furious and almost revolted when they heard their new orders; as long as they held the base, they felt their buddies had not died in vain. Afterwards, to many Americans Khe Sanh would be a symbol of the pointless sacrifice and muddled tactics that would eventually doom US war efforts in Vietnam. The abandonment also meant that General Westmoreland’s claims that Khe Sanh was indispensable to the US war effort were false. A North Vietnamese official would label the closing of Khe Sanh air base as America’s "gravest defeat" so far.

For the North Vietnamese, the Tet Offensive was both a military and political failure. By February 2, all of their attacks had ended, except for those against Saigon, Hue and Khe Sanh. All of the land captured on the first day of the offensive was recovered. Even worse, not a single ARVN unit deserted or defected to the other side, and there was no "general uprising" among South Vietnamese peasants against the Saigon government. After all, most South Vietnamese did not want to live under communism; many of them were refugees who had fled the North when Vietnam was divided in 1954. After the war, many communist veterans would confess that their worst memories of the war came from the Tet Offensive.

There were three more attacks on Saigon, from February 18 to 19, May 5 to 12, and May 25 to June 18. Although each was smaller than the Tet attack, they succeeded in leveling half the city. Late April and May also saw smaller attacks near Da Nang, and in Binh Dinh and Kontum provinces. Together these attacks are called Mini-Tet, and this time the goal was not to overthrow the Saigon government or gain territory; just create as much chaos as possible. Because the North Vietnamese Army was now the main force involved on the communist side, rather than the Viet Cong, Mini-Tet was much bloodier than the initial phase of the Tet Offensive. US casualties across South Vietnam for the month of May 1968 were 2,169 killed, making this the deadliest month of the entire Vietnam War for US forces. The South Vietnamese also had heavy losses, at 2,054 killed. Eventually the communists were driven away again and Saigon was secure once more.

While American and South Vietnamese casualties had been heavy, communist casualties were appalling. Of the 84,000 communists that took part in the Tet Offensive and Mini-Tet, 58,000 were killed, wounded or captured. Every unit that took part was decimated; some companies only had two or three men left. The Viet Cong could only count 45,000 fighters left, and during the remaining years of the war, they never recovered to the strength they had before 1968. As a result, the North Vietnamese Army took over most of the fighting. Henceforth the war would be more of a conventional conflict than a guerrilla one. And the third phase of the offensive which Hanoi had been planning, an invasion of South Vietnam with conventional forces, was canceled for the time being. That wouldn’t happen until 1972.

*****

Tet’s only success for the communists was an unexpected one; it broke the will of the American people and Congress to continue the war indefinitely. American support for the war had been steadily slipping in 1967, because of mounting casualties, rising taxes to pay for the war, and the feeling that there was no end to it in sight. After Tet, the general American attitude was that it was a mistake to get involved in Vietnam in the first place, but now that they were there, they should win – or get out. One of those disillusioned Americans was CBS news anchorman Walter Cronkite, the so-called “most trusted man in America." Cronkite visited Vietnam in February 1968, and came back convinced that the war was unwinnable. On February 27, Cronkite gave a special report on TV, called "Report from Vietnam: Who, What, When, Where, Why?" He finished it with this editorial from his executive producer, Ernest Leiser. This is a long quote, so bear with me. Quote:

“We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. They may be right, that Hanoi’s winter-spring offensive has been forced by the Communist realization that they could not win the longer war of attrition, and that the Communists hope that any success in the offensive will improve their position for eventual negotiations. It would improve their position, and it would also require our realization, that we should have had all along, that any negotiations must be that – negotiations, not the dictation of peace terms. For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer’s almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation; and for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”

End quote.

As the first phase of the Tet Offensive wound down, General Westmoreland requested more soldiers again, this time asking for 206,000. General Wheeler passed on this request to President Johnson. Because the number of soldiers available at home was depleted, this would mean calling more than a hundred thousand from the reserves, meaning another draft. Meanwhile in Washington, Johnson appointed Clark Clifford, a well-known Washington lawyer and an old friend of his, as the new Secretary of Defense. The first thing Clifford did was conduct an intensive study of the entire situation in Vietnam. He discovered there was no concept or overall plan anywhere in Washington to win the war, so he reported to Johnson that the United States should not escalate the war anymore. Quote: "The time has come to decide where we go from here." Unquote.

General Westmoreland’s latest request for troops was kept secret until March 10, when The New York Times revealed it with a headline that declared in all caps, quote:

WESTMORELAND REQUESTS
206,000 MORE MEN, STIRRING
DEBATE IN ADMINISTRATION

End quote. I’m not surprised that the Times would do that. The story gave no details besides what was in the headlines, but the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, denied it anyway. Nevertheless, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called Rusk to testify, and he was grilled for two days on live TV about the troop request and the overall effectiveness of Johnson’s war strategy. After all, if both the president and the commanding general called the Tet Offensive a victory, why were so many troops needed? Johnson sent General Wheeler to meet secretly with Westmoreland in the Philippines on March 23, and here Wheeler gave the president’s answer. Instead of 206,000 more troops, Westmoreland would only get 13,500. General Wheeler also instructed Westmoreland to urge the South Vietnamese to expand their own war effort. For example, the Saigon government had only recently begun to draft eighteen-year-olds for military service, while Americans of the same age had been fighting in Vietnam for nearly three years.

*****

One of the last victims of the Tet Offensive was Johnson’s presidency. In November 1967 an open opponent of the war effort, Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, announced he would run against Johnson as a Democratic candidate for president, and Democrats who wanted to get out of Vietnam began to rally around him. Then when Johnson heard about Walter Cronkite’s report on Vietnam, he supposedly said, quote, "If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America." Unquote. March 12, 1968 saw the first round of voting in the 1968 presidential election, the New Hampshire primary. With Johnson running for re-election as the incumbent, he should have won easily, but the result was a squeaker; out of 50,000 votes cast, Johnson finished only 300 votes ahead of McCarthy. This indicated that political support for Johnson was a lot weaker than it had been in the past. Around the same time, public opinion polls revealed Johnson’s overall approval rating had slipped to 36 percent, while approval of his Vietnam war policy had slipped to 26 percent. Other polls indicated that Senator Robert F. Kennedy, a brother of the former president, was more popular than Johnson, so on March 16, Kennedy announced he was running for president, too. Like McCarthy, RFK campaigned on an anti-war platform. As an advisor to his brother, he had been one of those who helped form President John F. Kennedy’s Vietnam policy, but now he repented of that, saying, quote, "past error is no excuse for its own perpetuation." Unquote. Johnson’s advisors began to tell him he was not likely to win if he ran against both McCarthy and Kennedy.

In this time of stress, Johnson turned to the group of advisors he trusted the most. These were fourteen elder statesmen from the East Coast establishment who together were simply called the “Wise Men.” Among them were Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, Truman’s United Nations envoy, Arthur Goldberg, the former ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, and three retired generals: the hero of D-Day, Omar Bradley, Matthew Ridgeway, and Maxwell Taylor.

Clark Clifford convened the “Wise Men” first, for a dinner at the State Department on March 25. Here he had three experts on Vietnam give a blunt assessment of the situation. Their conclusion was that because the Saigon government was corrupt and unpopular, and because ARVN was incompetent when left by itself, it would take five, maybe ten years, to achieve real progress. Everyone listening was shocked – they knew the American people would not want to wage a war for that long. The next day, the "Wise Men" gathered at the White House for lunch with the President. Led by Dean Acheson, the man who had persuaded Truman to finance the French armed forces during the First Indochina War, they now called for a US withdrawal from Vietnam, with only four of those present dissenting from that opinion.

Johnson was scheduled to give a televised speech about Vietnam on the night of March 31. In it, he urged that peace talks begin at once, declaring, quote, "We are prepared to move immediately toward peace through negotiations." Unquote. He also announced an end to the bombing of North Vietnam above the 20th Parallel, meaning that Hanoi and Haiphong were no longer targets; the US Air Force would only continue to bomb places less than 210 miles from the Demilitarized Zone. Most of the speech was written by the president’s speechwriters, but the last words were written by Johnson himself, and those stunned the world. Johnson ended the speech by announcing that he was ending his campaign for re-election as president. Quote:

End Quote.

Deteriorating health, as well as declining popularity, had moved him to make this decision. Although he would remain in office until his second term ended in January 1969, after his abdication speech he was what observers of American politics call a “lame duck.” Soon the war in Vietnam would become someone else’s war.

*****

And with that, we’ve run out of time for today. In fact, we went a few minutes over, compared with how long these episodes usually run. I don’t need to tell you that we are living in an extraordinary year. Recently I saw someone mention on Facebook that for the first time in history, we can save the world by sitting on our couches and watching TV – so don’t mess this up! Heck, both my daughter and her husband are now working from home, thanks to today’s distance technology. Myself, I plan to keep on recording for the time being.

Like many other folks, my income has dropped since the Corona virus scare hit my community, so if you are getting anything out of this podcast and can afford to give it your financial support, please do so. This podcast depends on your financial support to keep running, and to justify all the work I put into it. One way you can support it is by making a secure donation through Paypal. Go to the Blubrry.com page for any episode of this podcast, and click on the gold button that says “Donate.” I think of the button as being like the tip jar in a bar or restaurant, for a musician or a specialty chef. Next to the button, you will also find a link to the Podcast’s Hall of Fame page. Those who donate will get their first name or initial added to the Hall of Fame page, and if you donate in more than one year, you will get the coveted Walter the Water Buffalo icon placed next to your name!

If you think the podcast is worth more than a one-time donation, you can also become a patron of it. Recently I set up a Patreon page for that, where you can pledge to give $1, $3, $5, or $10 at the beginning of each month. Follow the links to it on the Blubrry.com pages for the latest episodes, or put this URL in your browser: https://www.patreon.com/HistoryofSoutheastAsia . Patreon is spelled P-A-T-R-E-O-N, and “History of Southeast Asia” is all one word. Whether you donate through Paypal or Patreon, thank you in advance for your support.

In the past, I requested that you write a review of the podcast, if you listen to it on a website or app which allows reviews. And I said to “like” the History of Southeast Asia Podcast page if you are a Facebook user. If you are now stuck at home with free time on your hands, and haven’t done those things already, now is the time to get them done.

Thanks, Larry! I also asked you in the past to tell your family, friends, and even your enemies about the show. With so many of us under lockdown, you probably will have to hold off on that for now, but rest assured, there will be life after the Corona virus pandemic. Just ask someone who has recovered from it already, like the wife of the Canadian prime minister.

*****

That’s all for now. You probably see the events of this episode as the climax of the Vietnam War. Together the Tet Offensive and the battle of Khe Sanh displayed the incompetence of the Allied high command, the bravery and discipline of American soldiers, especially the Marines, the astonishing technological superiority of the Air Force, the sacrifices the communists endured in order to do better at a later date, and the complete hysteria of much of the Western media, which concentrated its attention on how much the Americans and their allies were suffering, while often ignoring the destruction they inflicted on the other side. Perhaps the best summary of how Tet was both a victory and a defeat comes from the former South Vietnamese ambassador to the United States, Bui Diem. This quote comes from the 1996 book, The Tet Offensive, by Marc Gilbert and William Head. Quote:

End quote.

Join me next time as we cover the events occurring over the rest of 1968, and maybe we’ll get started on the events of 1969 as well.

I said in the previous episode that listening to podcasts is one of the safest things you can do with the current virus scare. And I hope you won’t stop listening because you used a mobile device, but now you’re not mobile, you’re cooped up at home! This podcast sounds just as good from a computer as it does from a cell phone, tablet or MP3 player. Maybe even better, because you can now listen with large speaders plugged in. For those of you who just started listening because you are avoiding the Corona virus, we’re glad you joined us, and hope you will be back again. Thank you for listening, and come back when the monsoon winds are blowing right!

<Outro>

Episode 86: The Second Indochina War, Part 13

Posted on March 16, 2020 by xenohistorian

With the previous episode of the podcast, we took a break from the narrative and had a question and answer session. Now with Episode 86, we resume our ongoing narrative about the Second Indochina War, also known as the Vietnam War. Today we finish looking at the events of 1967, and that will get us ready for the Tet Offensive next time.

https://blubrry.com/hoseasia/57384680/episode-86-the-second-indochina-war-part-13/

(Transcript)

This episode is dedicated to Alexei K., for making a donation to the podcast. Alexei, thank you for doing your part to keep the lights on, figuratively speaking. We’re probably going to get many new listeners while the Corona virus panic is going on, because it is still safe to listen to podcasts, as I will comment about at the end of the show; thank you for helping those listeners as well. With spring about to begin in the northern hemisphere, may you enjoy this season to the fullest. And to anyone else listening to this, I’m glad you’re here. Now let’s go to the regularly scheduled episode.

Episode 86: The Second Indochina War, Part 13

or, Prologue to Tet

Greetings, dear listeners! If you have listened to the previous episodes, you know that lately the podcast has been covering the Second Indochina War, also known as the Vietnam War in the United States, and the American War in present-day Vietnam. With Episode 84 we made it as far as the middle of 1967, and then for Episode 85 we took some time out for a question and answer session, where you the listeners decided what I would talk about. Now it’s time to return to the narrative, and finish the events of 1967!

As you heard a minute ago, this is the thirteen episode in the podcast’s series on the war. If you haven’t listened to the other twelve episodes yet, what are you waiting for? Go back to the website or app where you got this episode, and download or listen to the rest! It will take you some time, but the episodes are free! By now we have covered too much material to do a quick recap, and I trust you don’t want to start the story in the middle of it. That would be like watching “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back,” without watching “Star Wars: A New Hope” first. Still, there were some interruptions to the sequence of episodes, as I inserted some special episodes, so here is the rest of the series:

For the war in Vietnam, Episodes 71, 72, 73, 80, 81, 82, 83, and 84.

And for the war next door in Laos, Episodes 74, 75, 78, and 79.

If you made it this far, I assume you’re ready for today’s show. Let’s go!

*****

In Episode 84, we saw the American strategy for the war: bring in more soldiers, more guns, more bombs, more ironmongery, until the American advantage in numbers and technology shattered communist forces, the way it had shattered the forces of the Axis during World War II. By 1967, the American commander in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, thought he had what he needed to win, and whenever there was a firefight, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong suffered more casualties than the Americans and their allies did, but the Communists showed no signs of giving up. Nor did they want to talk peace, which would have allowed the Americans to leave without achieving a victory.

Meanwhile in Hanoi, the North Vietnamese leadership, the Politburo, developed its own plans for the war. This was largely the work of Le Duan, the head of the Communist Party. Le Duan wanted to launch an offensive so big that it would throw the Americans and the South Vietnamese into “utmost confusion.” The main goal was to cause the South Vietnamese government to collapse; failing that, the offensive would convince the Americans that the war was unwinnable. He did not give the offensive a special name, but just called it, quote, "General Offensive, General Uprising." Unquote.

There was opposition to the plan, especially from Ho Chi Minh and from Vo Nguyen Giap, the commander of the armed forces. Both of them felt the war was going their way, and they should not sacrifice the lives of their troops to win the war more quickly. In the end Le Duan had his way, because his opponents were ill in the summer of 1967, and they had to go abroad for medical treatment they couldn’t get at home. Giap went to Hungary in July, while Ho Chi Minh was treated in China in September. Other opponents of Le Duan’s offensive, even some decorated veterans of the war with the French, were locked up in the Hanoi Hilton, the same prison that held captured American pilots.

The initial plan for the offensive consisted of three phases. The first phase would be a series of attacks against remote outposts, in an effort to lure American and South Vietnamese troops away from South Vietnam’s cities, especially Saigon. These attacks kept the Americans busy for the rest of 1967, and in that way the North Vietnamese gained the initiative, though the Americans did not know it at the time. The second phase of the plan, what we call the Tet Offensive today, was an attack against the cities themselves by Viet Cong forces aided by North Vietnamese troops, in the hope of “liberating” as many villages, hamlets and towns as possible, thereby igniting a "general uprising" to overthrow the government of South Vietnam. That would set the stage for the third phase, a direct invasion of South Vietnam by troops and tanks coming from North Vietnam. Above all this, the ultimate goal of the offensive was to win the war while Ho Chi Minh, the founder of Indochinese communism, was alive. As an unnamed North Vietnamese officer explained it after the war, quote, “Uncle Ho was very old and we had to liberate the south before his death.” Unquote.

*****

The first battles we will be covering today took place in Quang Tri and Thua Thien, the two northernmost provinces of South Vietnam and the two provinces farthest from Saigon. US Marines and one of their partners in the war, South Korea, had nine bases between Quang Tri City and the Demilitarized Zone, which were named Dong Ha, Gio Linh, Con Thien, Cam Lo, Camp Carroll, The Rockpile, Khe Sanh, Ca Lu, and Cua Viet. All of them were near Route 9, a road running from Dong Ha to the Vietnam-Laos border; we mentioned that road in Episode 79, when covering the 1971 South Vietnamese invasion of Laos.

This area had been the site of Operation Hastings in July 1966. To prevent further communist infiltration across the DMZ, the Demilitarized Zone, Operation Prairie was launched here in August. It lasted until the end of January 1967, with the result being that 226 Marines were killed versus 1,397 North Vietnamese killed. It was proclaimed a big success, but with hindsight, it was only a success for the short run. The enemy troops that got away fled across the DMZ to North Vietnam, where they regrouped, re-equipped themselves, and sneaked back into South Vietnam later in 1967. Thus, the Marines immediately had to follow up Operation Prairie with three operations so similar that they were given almost the same name. Operation Prairie II went on from February 1 to March 18, Operation Prairie III lasted from March 20 to April 19, and Operation Prairie IV ran from April 20 to May 17, 1967.

In the middle of all this, on April 6, Quang Tri City was attacked by 2,500 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. They briefly overran and occupied the city, holding it just long enough to break into the Quang Tri provincial jail, where they freed more than 200 prisoners.

Next came the first battle of Khe Sanh, also called the Hill Fights. I introduced Khe Sanh in Episode 73, when the American base was built here. Located in the northwest corner of South Vietnam, it is in a hilly area just seven miles from the Vietnamese-Laotian border, and ten miles south of the DMZ. On April 24, North Vietnamese troops started ambushing Americans in the hills around Khe Sanh, hence the name “Hill Fights.” Over the next few days, the North Vietnamese also cut Route 9 more than once, between Cam Lo and Khe Sanh, in an effort to isolate the latter. There were also diversionary mortar, rocket and artillery attacks, on Gio Linh, Camp Carroll, and Dong Ha. The fighting went on until May 11, when the Marines drove the last of the enemy away. The casualty count was 940 North Vietnamese killed, 155 Americans killed and 425 Americans wounded. But we’re not done with Khe Sanh yet; there will be even bloodier battles here later!

Among the Marine bases, the one with the most strategic value was Con Thien, because it was less than two miles below the DMZ, and because it was on top of a hill 525 feet high; this allowed observers to look into much of the DMZ and even into North Vietnam. On May 8, the thirteenth anniversary of the fall of Dienbienphu, the North Vietnamese tried to take this outpost. They were driven off by fierce hand-to-hand combat along the base perimeter. Up until now, Americans had not been allowed in the DMZ, but as a result of the battle of Con Thien, Washington lifted this prohibition. American and South Vietnamese troops entered the Demilitarized Zone for the first time on May 18, in a series of missions called Operations Hickory, Lam Son 54, Belt Tight, and Beau Charger. Over the next eight days, they engaged in several firefights with the North Vietnamese, causing heavy losses for both sides.

More assaults on the bases near the DMZ, especially Con Thien, took place for the rest of 1967. Alas, we don’t have time in this episode to cover all the firefights, or the actions the Marines undertook to hold the bases. I’ll just give the names of the defensive operations conducted in the area: Operation Cimarron in June, Operation Buffalo and Operation Hickory II in early July, Operation Kingfisher from mid-July to the end of October, and Operation Kentucky. Operation Kentucky lasted the longest, from November 1967 to February 1969. It resulted in 520 Marines killed and 2,698 wounded, while 3,839 North Vietnamese were killed, and 117 were captured.

For the Americans, the worst part of the Con Thien siege was the second half of Operation Kingfisher, from September 11 to October 31. That period saw a massive long-range artillery duel between North Vietnamese and American guns, as the North Vietnamese fired 42,000 rounds at the Marines, and the Americans responded with 281,000 rounds and B-52 air strikes to lift the siege.

Podcast footnote: I am trying to imagine what more than a quarter million artillery shells would look like. It reminds me of a World War I photo I saw, where Allied soldiers stood around an enormous pile of shell casings, after an artillery bombardment at the battle of Verdun. End footnote.

The Marine Corps rotated battalions in and out of Con Thien every thirty days. The constant shelling and the threat of assaults took a psychological toll on the Marines; they nicknamed the base "Our Turn in the Barrel" and "the Meat Grinder", while the DMZ came to be called the "Dead Marine Zone."

*****

On the political front, the US president, Lyndon Johnson, held another meeting with South Vietnam’s prime minister, Nguyen Cao Ky, this time on the island of Guam in March. Up until now, he had supported the corrupt South Vietnamese government for the same reasons that Washington had supported anti-communist dictators in other parts of the world. His predecessors had explained that policy with these crude words, quote: “They may be sons of bitches, but they’re our sons of bitches.” Unquote.

Podcast footnote: We will see the same US policy in action in a future episode, when we look at the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. Boy, will I have fun telling you that story! End footnote.

When Johnson met Ky in 1966, he got the impression that Ky wanted to turn South Vietnam into a US-style democracy. Now, with growing opposition to the war in the United States, Johnson felt such a transformation would solve South Vietnam’s political problems, and it would justify continued support of South Vietnam. So he told Ky that he wanted to see South Vietnam get a new constitution and hold a truly free election. He put the request in the form of a personal favor, saying, quote: “My birthday is in late August. The greatest present you could give me is a national election.” Unquote.

Work on the constitution was already underway at the time of the meeting. The main changes from the previous constitution were that it created a bicameral legislature, replaced the prime minister with a vice president, and transferred political power to the president. The election was scheduled for September 3, 1967. Nguyen Cao Ky and the latest president, Nguyen Van Thieu, were willing to run together on the same ticket, but they argued over what their roles would be, since both of them wanted to be president under the new system. Eventually South Vietnam’s generals reached a compromise, where Thieu would run for president and Ky would run for vice president; to balance them out, Ky was also put in charge of a secret military council that would shape government policy from behind the scenes.

Thieu and Ky did not rig the election, the way Ngo Dinh Diem did in 1955, but the way it was set up wasn’t fair to the other candidates. Candidates from a civilian background were disqualified if they held pro-communist or neutralist opinions; one of those banned had simply called for a cease-fire. Also, when campaigning, the candidates had to travel together on a plane loaned to them by the generals. When the election took place, 80 percent of the voters participated. As they cast their ballots, their identity cards were punched; that way those who did not vote could be accused of obeying the Viet Cong call to boycott the election.

The Thieu-Ky ticket performed much worse than expected, winning only 35 percent of the vote, and most of those votes came from districts where army officers were managing the election. Ky later wrote in his memoirs that if he had been the presidential candidate, he would have rigged the election, and won with 60 or 70 percent of the vote.

The candidate who came in second place was a creepy lawyer who no one took seriously, Truong Dinh Dzu. This character had once put up his wife as collateral for a loan, and after he was qualified as a candidate, he broke the rules by campaigning with a peace dove as his symbol, and promised negotiations with the Viet Cong if elected. He managed to get 17 percent of the vote, almost half as much as Thieu, and this was seen more as a protest against continued military rule than actual support for his platform. Thieu promptly had Dzu jailed on charges of illicit currency transactions, a crime much of Saigon’s population had gotten away with, and thus was able to become president without the need for a runoff election. Afterwards, Thieu got around the attempt to balance power between him and Ky, by finding ways to concentrate authority in his own hands. Over in Washington, President Johnson could say he had gotten the birthday present he wanted, so US aid continued to go to South Vietnam.

*****

If President Johnson was happy with how things were going in Vietnam, General Westmoreland was not. In July 1967 he requested an additional 200,000 soldiers to be sent as reinforcements. 475,000 had been assigned to go to Vietnam by the end of 1967, so Westmoreland’s request would have boosted the US total to 675,000. In the past, President Johnson gave the general whatever he asked for; this time he only agreed to send 45,000 troops. US involvement in Vietnam has not reached its peak yet, but we’re getting close.

So far in today’s show we have mainly talked about battles near the border between North and South Vietnam. But that wasn’t the only place that saw fighting in late 1967. The communists hadn’t given up on the territory directly north and northwest of Saigon, where major battles had been fought in 1966 and early 1967. At the end of September 1967, the US 1st Infantry Division launched Operation Shenandoah II to secure and repair Highway 13, an important road running from Saigon to the Cambodian border. There was a small battle in mid-October, when two companies of the 2/28th Infantry stumbled upon a Viet Cong camp at Ong Thanh, and were ambushed by VC snipers. They succeeded in killing 56 Americans, but the Viet Cong regiment involved also suffered heavy losses and fled to Cambodia.

A more important battle came near the end of October, when the Viet Cong 9th Division gathered near the towns of Loc Ninh and Song Be. By intercepting radio traffic, South Vietnamese and American troops not only learned about the enemy buildup, but also that the Viet Cong was building a field hospital in the area. This activity couldn’t be ignored, because US Special Forces had a base at Loc Ninh, and an ally of the Americans, South Korea, had a base at Song Be. When General Westmoreland heard about these activities, he suspended some operations and ordered his subordinate to plan for a major defensive operation around Loc Ninh and Song Be. Five days later, on October 27, the Viet Cong attacked Song Be, and were driven off largely by American artillery and armed UH-1B Huey helicopters. The most effective weapons were artillery rounds with proximity fuses, designed to explode just above the trees; the defenders in their bunkers were safe from the shrapnel these rounds produced, but the Viet Cong, caught in the open, had no protection. After the battle, 135 enemy bodies were found, while the defenders suffered eight dead and 33 wounded.

Then on October 29 came the attack on Loc Ninh. At first the advantage was with the Viet Cong; they had two regiments going against 11 Special Forces soldiers, 400 Civilian Irregular Defense Group soldiers, and about 200 South Vietnamese regulars. But then on November 1 reinforcements arrived, from ARVN, the South Vietnamese army, and from the American 1st Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division. On November 7, the Viet Cong abandoned the fight, leaving 850 dead, while the defenders in turn had lost 50.

Another place where American troops could be lured away from Saigon was the Central Highlands. Especially the western part of Kontum province, an area of jungle-covered mountains where the borders of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia meet. Here in the summer of 1967, Major General William Peers launched Operation Greeley, by bringing in troops from the US 4th Infantry Division and 173rd Airborne Brigade, along with ARVN’s 42nd Infantry Regiment, 22nd Division, and various Airborne units. They carried out search and destroy missions in July and August, and then they stopped finding North Vietnamese units, and assumed the enemy had withdrawn. But then in October the North Vietnamese returned, and built the size of their force in the area up to 6,000. They were back because currently the Ho Chi Minh Trail ended in Kontum province, and they wanted to destroy two Special Forces camps nearby, at Ben Het, about five miles east of the Cambodian border, and at Dak To, some 10 miles east of Ben Het.

To deal with the North Vietnamese buildup, General Peers directed the 3rd Battalion of the 12th Infantry and the 3rd Battalion of the 8th Infantry to launch Operation MacArthur on November 3. He was helped by the defection of a North Vietnamese soldier, Sergeant Vu Hong, who provided key information on enemy unit locations and what they were planning. Around Dak To, the North Vietnamese had prepared elaborate defensive positions on the hills and ridges. To deal with this, massive artillery and air strikes were launched against each unit, followed by an infantry assault to secure the objective. Thus, the battle of Dak To was a series of clashes, not just one. Because of the unforgiving terrain, some of the most difficult fighting in the whole war took place here. For the Americans and South Vietnamese, the worst incident came on November 12, when rockets and artillery destroyed two C-130 Hercules transports and detonated the base’s ammunition and fuel depots, causing the loss of 1,100 tons of ordnance. Then came an especially tough clash from November 19 to 23; during those five days the two sides fought over a single hill, called Hill 875. At the end of November the North Vietnamese withdrew into Laos and Cambodia, and the campaign ended.

Podcast footnote: I said previously in the podcast that I am old enough to remember the Vietnam War. To be exact, I remember the latter part of it, from 1967 onward. The oldest event from the war I remember hearing on the news was the battle of Dak To. Because I was eight years old at the time, Dak To, like Vietnam itself, was only a name to me; it wasn’t until a few years later that I learned what they meant. “And that’s the way it is,” as Walter Cronkite used to say. End footnote.

My sources disagreed on the number of casualties at Dak To, except to say that again the communists got the worst of it. I’ll go with Wikipedia’s numbers here; it states that 361 Americans were killed, and 1,441 were wounded, while among the South Vietnamese, 73 were killed, 290 were wounded, and 18 were missing. Estimates of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong dead range from 1,000 to 1,664, and the wounded were somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000. The US military command in Vietnam, MACV, later declared that of the four North Vietnamese regiments that fought at Dak To, three were so badly battered that they did not take part in the Tet Offensive of early 1968.

Three members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, Pfc. John A. Barnes III, Pfc. Carlos Lozada, and the unit chaplain, Maj. Charles J. Watters, all posthumously received the Medal of Honor for their actions during the battle.

General Westmoreland gave credit to both air power and the infantry for winning the battle. Quote: "Along with the gallantry and tenacity of our soldiers, our tremendously successful air logistic operation was the key to the victory." Unquote.

Speaking of Westmoreland, he was only in Vietnam for the first part of the battle of Dak To. In mid-November President Johnson called him back to America to give some talks concerning the war. Westmoreland didn’t want to go on a public relations tour, but he obeyed orders. The trip was carefully planned to avoid putting him in front of critics of the war. Instead, he attended a White House banquet with members of Congress who had supported the war before, but were wavering now. Here and at his other stops, Westmoreland gave the perfect optimistic message. At the Pentagon he said, quote, “The ranks of the Viet Cong are thinning steadily,” unquote, while to the National Press Club he promised, quote, “We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.” Unquote. Johnson said the same thing after Westmoreland’s appearance at the White House, when he went on TV and told the American people, quote, "We are inflicting greater losses than we’re taking…We are making progress." Unquote.

President Johnson spent the last days of 1967 on a world tour to meet with the leaders of friendly nations. Going to Australia first, he then made a stop in Vietnam on December 23, where at Cam Ranh Bay he was greeted by a crowd of cheering US servicemen. To them he gave another upbeat message. Quote: "…all the challenges have been met. The enemy is not beaten, but he knows that he has met his master in the field." Unquote. Then he met briefly with Westmoreland, before moving on to a US base in Thailand. This was the President’s second and final trip to Vietnam during his presidency.

The battles at Song Be, Loc Ninh and Dak To encouraged Westmoreland and other American military officials to believe that at long last the enemy was trying to use conventional tactics. Westmoreland said as much during his US tour. In a Time Magazine interview, General Westmoreland taunted the Viet Cong, saying, quote, "I hope they try something because we are looking for a fight." Unquote.

Little did he know that the communists were preparing for that fight. If Westmoreland felt he had them in the right place, Vo Nguyen Giap felt the same way about the Americans. Although Giap had lost the so-called “border battles,” he had succeeded in pulling the Americans and their allies out of the cities, and into the countryside. Now when the upcoming 1968 offensive took place, it would be possible to inflict more damage in the cities.

When our narrative reached the end of 1965 and 1966, I gave some statistics on the war at that date. Now here are the wartime statistics for the end of 1967. US troop levels reached 463,000, and there have been 16,000 combat deaths among them so far. More than a million American soldiers have rotated through Vietnam; draftees did a one-year term before returning to the United States, and most of the Americans going over served in support units, rather than doing combat duty. An estimated 90,000 soldiers from North Vietnam infiltrated into the South via the Ho Chi Minh trail in 1967. Overall Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troop strength in South Vietnam is now estimated at up to 300,000 men.

*****

Since were are at the end of a year in our narrative, this is a good place to break off the narrative for today. For all of this episode I have been leading up to the Tet Offensive, one of the most important events of the Second Indochina War. Next time we will look at the Tet Offensive, so join me for that. Some people consider it the turning point of the war; do you agree with that statement? And if we get far enough, we will also see how the war affected the United States, by bringing down the Johnson presidency.

If you have paid attention to any news stories lately, you have heard that the whole world is panicking over the Corona virus. As I record this, social events are being canceled or postponed left, right and center, to keep people from being exposed to the virus. To give two examples, schools are switching to online classes, if possible, and the rest of the basketball season – professional, college and even high school basketball – has been canceled. I live in a community that is preoccupied with college sports, especially college basketball, so I know this is going to bring a new meaning to the term “March Madness.”

Personally, I’m beginning to think the virus scare is getting blown out of proportion, when I hear people are emptying store shelves of hand sanitizer and toilet paper, and some have stopped drinking Mexican beer, just because it’s named Corona. I am 61 years old, and during those years I have survived the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation, AIDS, the line-up of the planets in the 1980s, multiple announcements of the coming of the Messiah, mad cow disease, Y2K, anthrax, swine flu, bird flu, SARS, the Mayan calendar business in 2012, Ebola, and Justin Bieber.

Now where can you get learning and entertainment at a time like this? Online, of course! As long as you keep your computer or mobile device clean, the only viruses you have to worry about are computer viruses, and you shouldn’t pick up those from any app or website that carries this podcast. So now is the time, more than ever, to support and promote your favorite podcast! And I just heard today that while the virus scare is going on, some Internet service providers won’t disconnect people who are behind in paying their bills. Therefore you should listen and download as much as you like, and don’t worry about how much bandwidth you’re using!

But seriously, if you are getting something out of this podcast and you can afford to support it, please consider making a donation. Lately the number and amount of the donations has been down, so if you have been waiting for a good time to donate, perhaps that time is now. Donations are secure and done through Paypal. Go to the Blubrry.com page for any episode of this podcast, and click on the gold button at the bottom of the page, the one that says “Donate.” If you have been getting your episodes from iTunes or some other place besides Blubrry, the website is spelled like “blueberry,” but with no “Es.” So here is the spelling of the URL for the podcast’s homepage: Https://, no wwws, B-L-U-B-R-R-Y, dot-com, forward slash, H-O-S-E-A-S-I-A, forward slash. The last letters are a abbreviation of “History of Southeast Asia,” of course. Thanks in advance for your support.

For those who would rather give a little bit every month, sort of like a subscription, recently I also set up a Patreon page. Since the last episode we have gained a new patron, bringing the number up to four, and this week, at the suggestion of a listener, I added a fourth tier to the ranks of patrons, for those who want to give $10 a month. Thanks to all four of you; you’re wonderful people!

In the past I told you to write a review of the podcast on the website or app where you get your podcasts, and to “like” the History of Southeast Asia Podcast page on Facebook, if you haven’t already. By all means continue to do that. I also want you to keep promoting the show by word of mouth. You may have fewer contacts with other people during the virus scare, but opportunities may still come up. If you hear someone complain that there is nothing to do, say “I know a great podcast to listen to,” and add your own words after that. And if you’re on social media more because you’re interacting less in the real world, promote the podcast there when you get the chance. Okay, that’s all for now. Thank you for listening, and come back when the monsoon winds are blowing right!

<Outro>

Episode 85: Question and Answer Session 3

Posted on March 3, 2020 by xenohistorian

Here is the latest podcast episode! It was supposed to go up on March 1, but you’ve heard the saying, better late than never! Today we have a special episode, where I answer the questions which you the listeners sent in last January. As with the previous Q&A show, listen and enjoy!

https://blubrry.com/hoseasia/56884113/episode-85-question-and-answer-session-3/

(Transcript)

This episode is dedicated to Benedict P., for making a donation to the podcast. In the nearly four years this podcast has existed, it only had a sponsor briefly, in 2018; the rest of the time it has depended on listeners like you for its support. Benedict, thank you for doing your part to keep this labor of love running. Here in the northern hemisphere, spring approaches; may you be blessed in this season of new life. Now let’s get started with today’s show.

Episode 85: Question and Answer Session 3

Greetings, dear listeners! This will be a special episode; we are taking a break from our ongoing narrative on the Second Indochina War, or as Americans call it, the Vietnam War. If you listened to Episode 51, our first question and answer episode, you know the format – I copied it from other podcasters who aired questions from their listeners, and then answered them.

Now I am sure that those of you who heard the first question and answer episode are looking at the episode titles and asking, “Where is Question and Answer Session 2?” That was Episode 77, which I recorded four months ago. I gave it the title “What Buddhism is All About,” because the longest answer was to a question about Buddhism, but because it was organized the same way as Episode 51, I now think of it as the second question and answer episode; I just didn’t change the title of Episode 77 to reflect that.

Anyway, a few of you were kind enough to send me questions in January 2020, either by email or by posting them on the podcast’s Facebook page. Let’s open the mailbag and look at the questions.

*****

Our first question comes from Jake T, and he wrote, quote: “Hi Charles, I have a question for your mailbag episode. Can you explain the major similarities and differences between the major languages of Southeast Asia? Do the mainland languages (Burmese, Lao, Thai, Vietnamese, Khmer) come from the same family? Why does Malay/Indonesian use the Latin alphabet, and why aren’t those languages tonal like the others? And where does Tagalog fit in?” End quote.

This is going to be a complicated one to answer. Fortunately a lot of it ties in with Episode 2, where I talked about the ancestors of today’s Southeast Asians migrating into the region from South China. The languages of Southeast Asia are classified into five basic language families. Wikipedia calls these families Kra–Dai, Austronesian, Austroasiatic, Hmong–Mien, and Sino-Tibetan. Aside from Wikipedia, the best source I could find was a website called “Creative Obsessions,” and the URL for it is http://donlehmanjr.com/. That’s spelled D-O-N-L-E-H-M-A-N-J-R, dot-com. The names it gave to the language families were different. Kra-Dai was called Tai-Kadai, Austroasiatic was called Mon-Khmer, Hmong-Mien was called Miao-Yao, and Sino-Tibetan was called Tibeto-Burman. I will use the latter names here, because they are closer to what I used in the early episodes of the podcast.

Austronesian, sometimes called Malayo-Polynesian, is the most widespread of these language families. These are the languages spoken in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei, and East Timor. Beyond Southeast Asia, Austronesian languages are in use as far away as Madagascar, Hawaii, and Polynesia. Because these languages have so much in common, it is easy for linguists to trace the relationship between them. As for why they are not tonal, my guess is that is because the most widely used tonal language in the world is Chinese, and the Austronesians got away from China before the other groups did. To make that point, my sources mentioned an Austronesian tonal language called Tsat, spelled T-S-A-T. It has 4,000 speakers, and they live – surprise! – in south China, on the island of Hainan.

You also asked why the Austronesians use the Latin alphabet. That’s easy to answer; it was imposed on them by the Westerners who conquered them – the Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutch and British. I think I mentioned in the podcast that the Malays and Indonesians had an alphabet of their own before the Europeans arrived, derived from Sanskrit, and they introduced it to the Philippines. This inspired the Filipinos to develop an alphabet called Baybayin around the thirteenth century, to use with Tagalog. Today the largest collection of ancient texts written in the Baybayin alphabet is held by the University of Santo Tomas in Manila.

Austroasiatic or Mon-Khmer is the language family of the Khmers, today’s Cambodians, and the Mons, who we saw once had states in Thailand and southern Burma, but today they have been mostly absorbed by their Thai and Burmese neighbors. It also appears that Vietnamese belongs to this language family, but it split off from the others at a very early date, before the migrations into Southeast Asia began. These languages are not tonal except for Vietnamese, and again that can be explained because the Vietnamese have been exposed to Chinese language and culture for such a long time; just about all of their history, in fact.

The Tibeto-Burman languages, those related to Chinese, are spoken mainly in Myanmar, and like Chinese they are tonal. The Miao-Yao languages are tonal as well, and are scattered across south China, northern Vietnam and Laos; speakers of these languages come from hill tribes like the Hmong and the Yao. My older sources classified the Miao-Yao or Hmong-Mien languages as Tibeto-Burman, so I am going to speculate that they were all one group in prehistoric times, but the Miao-Yao speakers got isolated from the rest before leaving China, just as the Vietnamese-speakers separated from the Mon-Khmers.

That leaves the Tai-Kadai or Kra-Dai language family. In the podcast I called their speakers Thais for short, and because they were the last group to migrate, I did not talk about their migration until Episode 10. Besides Thai, the languages in the Tai-Kadai family include Lao, the Shan language of eastern Myanmar, Assamese in India, and Zhuang in China’s Guangxi Province. These languages are tonal, and because they are young compared with the languages in the other families, they have much in common with one another. In fact, I have heard Lao called a Thai dialect. I will venture to say that Lao and Thai would not be considered separate languages if Thailand still ruled Laos, the way it did in the early nineteenth century. There, did I leave anything out on this subject?

Next, we have four questions from a listener in Saigon. I know, Saigon has been called Ho Chi Minh City since 1975, but I am old enough to remember when it was only called by the old name, so I am allowed to use the old name, too. I have also heard that residents of Ho Chi Minh City will call it Saigon when the government is not paying attention. His email had two names in it, Tanzor and Ilyousha; I’m not sure which is the real name. That’s not a surprise either, since I have called myself Berosus, after a Babylonian historian, in more than one website or forum online. Anyway, all the questions in the email have to do with financing, so here goes:

Question 1: Do you think the cost estimates of the Vietnam War to the American taxpayers are accurate and realistic?

I would say yes, as far as I know. The figures I heard were that the United States government spent $3 billion in the First Indochina War, in the form of aid given to France; I think I mentioned that in a previous episode. 1954 dollars were worth 9.59 times as much as today’s dollars, so to match that expenditure, Washington would have to spend $28.77 billion today.

As for the Vietnam War or Second Indochina War, the figure I heard quoted was that the United States spent $168 billion on it. To find out how much that would cost today, I picked the year 1969, because that is when the number of American troops in Vietnam peaked, at more than half a million. An item costing $1 in 1969 would cost around $7 today, so today’s equivalent of the $168 billion spent would be $1.176 trillion.

By the way, when the war ended, I remember somebody wrote a letter to Time Magazine which pointed out that for the amount of money the Americans spent on the war, they could have bought all of South Vietnam for $3,850 an acre. Shall we consider that another missed opportunity?

Question 2: Do you think lobbying by the Military-Industrial Complex groups for financial gains was significant in the Vietnam War’s genesis?

Yes, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that is why Dwight D. Eisenhower made a speech warning about the Military-Industrial Complex at the end of his presidency. It must have been a shock at the time, since everyone knew Ike was a general before becoming president. In the podcast, I commented on how every branch of the US armed forces wanted to see action in Vietnam because as American officers explained at the time, quote: “It’s the only war we’ve got.” Unquote.

In the 1960s, another way those companies could make a lot of money was by building rockets and spacecraft for NASA, the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Currently I am listening to a podcast about the history of space flight, and it talked about the competition between companies for NASA contracts; for the Apollo program, for instance, North American/Rockwell built the Apollo capsule, the command and service modules, while Grumman built the lunar module, the LEM. There were only a few of those contracts available, so I can understand why the companies that didn’t get them would go for military contracts, and once the armed forces had new equipment, they would feel compelled to try it out. Of course Vietnam was the place at the time to do that.

Question 3: Do you think the Vietnam War was the main reason the owners of the United States had to default on gold backing of their fiat currency?

No, because the US federal government was spending an awful lot on other things besides the war. Lyndon Johnson vastly increased government spending while he was president; collectively he called his programs for America the “Great Society.” There were the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, for a start. Then came Medicare, Medicaid, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Job Corps, and the Food Stamp program, officially called AFDC, or Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Overseeing them all was an agency called the Office of Economic Opportunity, the OEO. The OEO was disbanded in 1980, but the other programs are still with us today. On top of that, Johnson created two new Cabinet-level agencies that are still around, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Transportation.

In the end, Johnson’s presidency was brought down because he tried to wage two wars at the same time, the real war in Vietnam, and the non-literal “War on Poverty.” The next president after Johnson, Richard Nixon, was a big spender, too; in fact, he would be considered a liberal Republican if he was alive today. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1971, and the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973, and he tried unsuccessfully to stop inflation with wage and price controls.

To get back to your question, I will end by pointing out that the dollar was disconnected from the gold standard in 1974, after the United States had ended its active involvement in all of Indochina.

Question 4: Do you think the Vietnam War was even possible to fund before the era of central banking and unbacked fiat money, which began in 1913 in the US?

Probably not. The Americans did have two wars to fight in Southeast Asia before 1913, both in the Philippines, the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection, also called the Philippine-American War. I covered those wars in Episodes 29, 30 and 31. Though the Americans were successful here, they brought over a lot less equipment than they would bring to Vietnam, inasmuch as tanks and helicopters hadn’t been invented yet, and before World War I, airplanes were only useful for observation purposes, the way balloons were sometimes used in the nineteenth century. The Spanish-American War cost the United States $250 million, and the Philippine Insurrection cost $400 million. I ran the numbers in my calculator, and together the two conflicts would cost $19.37 billion in today’s dollars, less than 2 percent of what the Vietnam War cost. And of course there were fewer lives lost, and the wars put a lot less stress on American society, but I’m not sure how to measure that. Finally, I know from checking old copies of The New York Times in libraries, that the fighting in the Philippines did not make headlines almost every day for years, the way the Vietnam War did.

Of course, it helped a lot that no foreign power gave aid to Emilio Aguinaldo’s army on Luzon, or to the Moros in the south, the way China and the Soviet Union gave aid to North Vietnam. That could have driven the cost of the war up to unacceptable levels for the Americans. Along that line, I mentioned that in the 1860s, the emperor of Vietnam asked US President Lincoln for aid in stopping the French invasion of his country, but the Americans were too busy fighting their own Civil War at home to get involved. An intervention in Vietnam at that date could have led to the Americans fighting the French; how’s that for alternate history?

You might want to take a look at another early overseas venture the Americans tried. In 1871 they sent a squadron to open up Korea for trade; this was during the time when Korea was the “Hermit Kingdom” that refused to trade with anybody but China. Modern Koreans call this the Shinmiyangyo Incident, while I like to call it the First Korean War. The American expeditionary force lost only three men when it captured Ganghwa Island and its fortress, while 243 Koreans were killed. From there the next logical step would have been to march on Seoul, but the Americans decided they didn’t have enough men to take the capital, so they withdrew after spending one month on Korean soil. Because of this, the Americans won the battle, but because the Koreans weren’t persuaded to change their policies, the Koreans technically won the war. Imagine how much that war would have cost, if the Americans had decided to send enough ships and men to go for Seoul! The Koreans did agree to trade with the United States in 1882, so this became the real forgotten war in American history. A big yellow and black flag, belonging to the Korean general killed in the battle, was captured by the Americans, and displayed at the Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis, MD for a hundred and thirty years. The flag was only returned to Seoul recently, in 2007.

Okay, the next question is from Brian F., who has been an enthusiastic fan of my work since 2001, meaning he enjoyed the history papers I wrote before I decided to become a podcaster. Quote:

“Here is my question, and it has an introduction for context so you don’t need to cover everything: In this region, Malaysia has recently had a breath of fresh air with their current prime minister, things look great politically in Timor-Leste, steady in Indonesia, and scary in the Philippines in regard to their president, Duterte-while full democratic institutions don’t seem to have eroded yet. Burma looked promising a few years ago, but the genocide of the Rohingya would say otherwise. Thailand has supposedly restored democracy, with the military stating they can rip-off the window dressing whenever they want. With this stated, Singapore/Thailand/Burma/the Philippines can possibly be added to my question as you see fit, or any other country in the region:

Do you believe Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos will embrace Democracy within the next 80 years?"

Unquote.

I will begin by agreeing with most of your assessment of the countries in the region, but no, President Duterte is not a threat to democracy in the Philippines, though we all know he is a bully boy. I say that mainly because he is 74 years old, and so far has expressed no interested in staying in office after his term ends in 2022. On the contrary, he has said he would like to step down now, due to his age.

By the way, when my wife and I visited the Philippines in December 2018, we flew into Ozamiz City, which has the nearest airport to her home town. It is a small airport that only sees an average of six planes a day, and all of the airport’s facilities are housed in one building. When we went there to begin our journey home, two flights were scheduled to depart that morning, and everyone waiting for both flights sat in one room. In the front of the room was a life-sized cardboard cutout of the president, which I’m sure was there to make sure everyone behaved!

Singapore has probably gone as far as it can go, while keeping its unique economic and political experiment. If you want to see a government that treats everyone like your mother and father treated you, there you have it!

While I was thinking of the answer to this question, I read a news story announcing the resignation of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed, at the age of 94. Since he had gotten elected only two years ago, his second administration as prime minister was much shorter than the first, which lasted from 1981 to 2003. Enjoy your second retirement, Mr. Mohammed. Malaysia will miss you. Until you come back again.

Regarding the countries of the former Indochina, I would say Cambodia is the closest to becoming a democracy as we know it. In fact, the current constitution claims it is a democracy now. The only problem is that there is one party holding all the seats in the National Assembly, Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party. Hun Sen is a former member of the Khmer Rouge, he has been prime minister since 1985, and he outlawed the main opposition party before the most recent election, in 2018. Therefore it is safe to say that a complete transition to democracy will have to wait until Hun Sen is no longer prime minister.

With Vietnam, I have a feeling it will become a democracy eventually, mainly because of political trends across the Third World. When I was young, I heard about coups and dictators all the time in Latin America, Africa, etc., but you have to admit they aren’t as common as they used to be. With Latin America, the last of the old-style coups happened more than a quarter century ago; don’t quote me on this, but I think it happened in Haiti, in 1993 or 1994. Worldwide, today’s heads of state are more cautious, and if they try to perpetuate their rule, they make it look like they are still playing by the rules; their favorite trick is to amend or replace the constitution to make their activities legal. Indeed, we see Vladimir Putin doing the same thing in Russia. Also, human rights abuses are less likely these days, thanks to the presence of the Internet almost everywhere; that is what persuaded Myanmar’s military to give up most of its power, a few years ago.

For what it’s worth, recently I read a comment from a conservative blogger who declared that Vietnam is a freer country than China, and China in turn is freer than California. I think he was pointing out that present-day Vietnam is communist in name only; like China, it has embraced a capitalist economy, and the reason why we still call it communist is because everyone in the government is a member of the Communist Party. Someday they may allow members of the opposition to speak their minds and run for office, if they can get leaders who aren’t afraid to hear dissenting views.

As for Laos, since 1975 the Laotians have done whatever the Vietnamese have done, while economically they are tied to both Vietnam and Thailand. Therefore change won’t happen in Laos until one of their larger neighbors encourages it.

*****
Finally, we have two questions from Gabriel S. Here is what he wrote. Quote:

Happy New Year, Charles. Keep up the good work. I have one question and one request. The question is, in your opinion, was the American War winnable for the United States and its South Vietnamese ally? The request is, will you in the future do a podcast on current geopolitical developments in the South China Sea?

Unquote.

Yes, I do plan on talking about the South China Sea dispute in a future episode. It affects the Philippines and Vietnam directly, and Malaysia and Brunei could be drawn into it, too.

I saved Gabriel’s Vietnam question for last because it required some thinking, and I know that whatever answer I give to it will be controversial. For the short run, I would say yes, it was theoretically possible to win. The Americans could have bombed and slaughtered the North Vietnamese until they sued for peace. Contrary to what we thought at the time, the Soviets and the Chinese probably would not have intervened had the tide of the war turned against the communists. I noted in the narrative that Soviet leaders like Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin were less aggressive than Joseph Stalin was. As for China, the Chinese defense minister in the late 1960s, Lin Biao, once said that he didn’t want to get involved in Vietnam. No doubt the Chinese remembered that in Korea they fought the Americans and their allies to a standstill, but at a very heavy cost; among the Chinese dead was a son of Chairman Mao. For a while it looked like Lin Biao was going to be Mao’s heir, so he would have been one of the few people who knew what Mao was really thinking.

However, once defeated, would the North Vietnamese and their clients stay that way? I think not. Remember what I said about Vietnamese persistence. In the past, when the Chinese and the French defeated them, the Vietnamese said to themselves, “There’s always another day.” and started preparing for that day. I am sure the communist leaders in Hanoi would have acted the same way; once the Americans declared victory and pulled out of Vietnam, there would be peace for a while, but then the trouble would start up again. And as long as North Vietnam continued to support the Viet Cong, you can forget about anyone else winning, especially if the South Vietnamese government did not make a transition to true democracy, the way the South Korean government did in the 1980s. In a nutshell, the Americans and their allies could win in the short run, but not in the long run.

*****

I believe that takes care of all the questions. If I forgot yours, drop me a line by email or on the podcast’s Facebook page, and I will answer it in the next episode. I also plan to return to the Second Indochina War narrative. Join me next time as we cover events in Vietnam during the second half of 1967, and maybe start our coverage of 1968. 1968 saw one of the most important campaigns of the war, the Tet Offensive, and the battles of 1967 led up to the Tet Offensive; I’m sure you won’t want to miss any of that. Boy, what an exciting time that will be!

If you are enjoying this podcast and want to become a supporter of it, you can do so with a secure donation, done through Paypal. All you have to do is go to this episode’s Blubrry.com page, scroll to the bottom, and click on the Paypal button, where it says, quote, “Support this podcast!” End quote.

Next to the Paypal button, you will also find links to the podcast’s Hall of Fame page and the new Patreon page. Paypal donors will have their first names mentioned on the Hall of Fame page. For those not familiar with Patreon, it is a website that allows you to donate a small amount at the beginning of each month: $1, $3, $5, or more if you specify it. I hope many of you will sign up on Patreon, and don’t worry; if for any reason you decide you don’t want to give anymore, let Patreon know and they will stop your donation. And as if to prove that point, we lost one patron in February, but gained another, so the number of patrons has stayed the same, at three. At a future date, I may offer gifts to patrons, as I think of them. Some podcasters have placed episodes behind paywalls, so that only those who send money can listen to them, but I still believe in the free flow of information, and do not plan to do that.

Is there anything else you can do to support the podcast, besides send money? Of course there is! You can write a review on any website or app that offers the podcast, except Blubrry.com; sorry! Hopefully some day Blubrry will permit reviews as well. If you are on Facebook, “like” the History of Southeast Asia Podcast page. Currently the page has 588 “likes,” and I know from the number of episode downloads that is only a fraction of the listening audience. Like the page and you will get to see the special content I share with the audience, like the picture of an Indonesian flying frog I shared on February 29. Finally, do you know anyone who listens to podcasts, or is looking for a new history podcast to listen to? You know what to do, spread the good news to them! That’s all folks, so thank you for listening, and come back when the monsoon winds are blowing right!

<Outro>

Episode 84: The Second Indochina War, Part 12

Posted on February 17, 2020 by xenohistorian

This episode is a day late, sorry to keep you waiting! Episode 84 continues our ongoing narrative of the Second Indochina War, better known as the Vietnam War in the United States, and the American War in Vietnam. Here the battles of early 1967 are covered, and then we look at the growing protest movement against the war, from late 1965 to 1967.

https://blubrry.com/hoseasia/56178697/episode-84-the-second-indochina-war-part-12/

(Transcript)

This episode is dedicated to Christian M., who made a donation to the podcast. Christian, sorry I didn’t report your donation last time; it arrived in the time frame between when I finished recording the episode, and when I uploaded it. Therefore, here are my belated thanks. What’s more, because you made a donation last year, you have received the coveted water buffalo icon next to your name, on the podcast Hall of Fame page! Thank you for your support, may this year be a good year for you, and may many others follow your example! And now let’s get started for today.

Episode 84: The Second Indochina War, Part 12

or, The Crossover Point Approaches, but for Which Side?

Greetings, dear listeners! And if you have listened to the podcast before, welcome back! For most of the northern hemisphere, February is a short and chilly month, so here is a podcast about a part of the world that is always hot, to get your mind off the cold.

This is the twelfth episode in our ongoing series on the second war in Indochina in the twentieth century, which lasted from the late 1950s until 1975. Most history texts call it the Second Indochina War, but Americans know it as the Vietnam War, while the Vietnamese in turn call it the American War. And a few times I have half-seriously called this the Unofficial Vietnam War Podcast, partly because there are other podcasts about the Vietnam War, which may have a better claim to being the official Vietnam War Podcast than this one, and partly because I plan to talk about recent history in the rest of Southeast Asia when we get done with the war in Vietnam.

In the previous episode we made it to the end of 1966, concerning the part of the war in Vietnam. In the past I gave a recap for those who missed the previous episodes, but I won’t do it this time. We have too much material behind us now, so if you missed what we covered on the Second Indochina War so far, here are the episodes you should listen to.

For the war in Vietnam, Episodes 71, 72, 73, 80, 81, 82 and 83.

And for the war next door in Laos, Episodes 74, 75, 78, and 79.

Now let’s get started with today’s content.

*****

When 1967 began, there were nearly 400,000 American troops in South Vietnam — along with some 850,000 from South Vietnam, South Korea and other allies — and America’s civilian and military leaders were starting to think big. After two years of troop buildups, the commander of the American troops, General William Westmoreland, announced that the “crossover point” he had been predicting, the point when there would be enough American troops to break the Viet Cong guerrillas and the North Vietnamese troops, would come sometime in 1967. But while the Americans usually won their battles – the enemy continually suffered more casualties than they did – they could not follow up on their victories, and the communists soon re-occupied the land on which the battles took place. Let us take a timeout from the narrative and look at what made the war unwinnable for the Americans.

1. The kind of warfare in Vietnam was quite outside the American experience. The closest thing to it the Americans had been in was fought in the Philippines seventy years earlier – we covered that war in Episodes 30 and 31 – and most Americans completely forgot about it afterwards, including whatever lessons they might have learned from it. To repeat what I have said before, the war was not a conventional conflict, with shifting front lines and armies on the move. Progress here was not measured in territory gained but in the number of casualties inflicted. In a conventional war, it is possible to escape it by moving to a spot where fighting is not taking place, but in a war without frontiers, the Americans lived under constant danger, no matter where they were – even in Saigon they could be a target. That is why I haven’t shared any maps lately on the course of this war –a map won’t accurately show the situation until the 1970s, when the war becomes a conventional one.

2. The enemy was not an obvious villain. The Viet Cong did not always wear their black pajama uniforms; their ranks included women and even children. My favorite story of child soldiers in the conflict comes from the testimony of the evangelist Mike Warnke, who was a hospital corpsman stationed with the Marines in Vietnam for three and a half years. Here is how he tells it:

In a nutshell, any civilian could be an enemy, and before long many Americans wondered if they were fighting on the right side. Americans also found it hard to hate the enemy completely because Ho Chi Minh was not a Stalin or a Hitler; to them he looked more like an Oriental Santa Claus. Here in Kentucky, he reminded folks of Colonel Sanders; I have seen pictures on the Internet that put photos of Ho Chi Minh and Colonel Sanders together, asking if they were separated at birth.

3. Heat, disease, leeches, and fiendish Viet Cong traps; in the jungle these put almost as many men out of action as the actual firefights did. And I have heard one report of an American soldier getting eaten by a tiger. Yes, a tiger! You don’t learn anything in school about what to do in THAT kind of situation! An enemy soldier might spare you if he is in the mood, but nature takes no prisoners.

4. The ineffectiveness of bombing. We saw that for most of the time between 1965 and 1968, American B-52s flew daily bombing missions over North Vietnam. They would do it again in 1972. Ultimately, like Laos, North Vietnam would get pounded with more bomb tonnage than was dropped everywhere during World War II. Bombers were only allowed to go after targets in six categories: power facilities, war support facilities, transportation lines, military complexes, fuel storage, and air defense installations. Because of those limitations, casualties were limited; civilians were protected by putting them in underground tunnels or by moving them out to the countryside. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was also bombed, as we saw in the episodes on the Laotian war, but the Viet Cong carried so little gear that their entire force could keep fighting even if only 15 tons of supplies got to them daily. Whatever could not be manufactured locally was generously given by both Russia and China. Targets that could have done real harm if hit, like the heavily populated residential neighborhoods of Hanoi, were carefully avoided; US President Lyndon Johnson thought if he hit North Vietnam too hard, it would trigger Chinese or Russian intervention, and that would be the beginning of World War III. The US never attempted an offensive strategy–like an invasion of North Vietnam to topple Ho Chi Minh’s government–for the same reason. From the American point of view, the war in Vietnam was always a defensive war.

5. Speaking of aircraft, the North Vietnamese had a surprisingly effective air force. I say "surprisingly" because the first North Vietnamese squadron was only assembled in 1964, the same year as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, and a year later they won their first battle, one that pitted eight North Vietnamese planes against seventy-nine American ones. In that encounter, the North Vietnamese pilots were flying hand-me-down Soviet MIGs that were out of date, but still they managed to shoot down two American planes. Over the course of the war, the North Vietnamese lost 131 planes, while the Americans lost more than 2,000; seventeen North Vietnamese pilots had enough kills to become aces, compared with only three American aces. This isn’t just beginner’s luck; away from Vietnam, only the American, Soviet and Israeli air forces have done better! In fact, the Americans were so embarrassed at the North Vietnamese performance that they did not talk about it until long after the war.

6. The role of the US press. In previous wars the activities of reporters in war zones were heavily restricted, and the main source of war news for Americans at home were newsreels carrying carefully edited, or should I say censored, stories. For Vietnam many of those restrictions were dropped, and for the first time, stories about the war were brought into Americans’ homes on TV, in living color. At first the media, like the average American, supported the war effort, but soon many editors were having second thoughts. In 1967 LIFE Magazine brought the reality of the war home to readers by printing the names and high school photos of the 250 young Americans killed in a single week. The television news programs also showed a point of view that was not pro-American, by interviewing North Vietnamese/Viet Cong leaders and by showing pictures of wounded Americans and atrocities committed against civilians, like the notorious My Lai massacre. None of that had happened before; in World War II, for instance, American news networks did not interview Prime Minister Tojo to let him defend the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The actual effect of all this on American morale has been debated ever since, and you will be hearing more about it in future episodes of this podcast.

7. General Westmoreland and his superiors in Washington underestimated the breaking point of the communists, and overestimated it on their side. The Vietnamese had fought wars against China and Champa that had lasted for centuries, and the Communist Party provided the discipline and coercion needed to withstand the more recent wars with France and the United States. On the other hand, this was the first time the Americans fought a war that lasted longer than a decade, and they did not have the willpower to fight an unpopular war for generations. They began to realize this when recruiters for the armed forces no longer got enough volunteers to meet the demands for more troops, and started calling up reservists to fill the ranks. By October 1966, draft calls were bringing in 49,300 soldiers a month, the highest number of draftees since the Korean War. The typical soldier who was drafted to serve in Vietnam could expect to be there for a year, and his main goal was to stay alive until his assignment was over; many counted out the number of days they had left. In a boxing match, when you have one fighter who is determined to win, while the other simply wants to keep standing until the match is over, who do you think will win the prize?

Besides conscription, the recruiters also lowered their standards. This was the idea of the Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, who thought it would be better than abolishing student deferments or calling up reservists. He optimistically called this “Project 100,000" because he felt this would generate a ton of fresh soldiers without causing a backlash like the one coming from drafting able-bodied young men. He also figured that superior American technology would allow poor-quality troops to perform about as well as the recruits who met the old standards.

Now the recruiters gave more attention to the men who had been unfit, mentally or medically, to serve previously. Recruiting efforts targeted small Southern communities, where support for the war was still strong, and urban ghettoes, offering college educations to those who enlisted. Because of this emphasis, 41 percent of the soldiers recruited were black, at a time when African-Americans made up 12 percent of the US population. In the past, the military did not take applicants who scored less than 80 on an IQ test, but under Project 100,000, they brought in at least one recruit with an IQ of 62. Critics of Project 100,000 unkindly called the recruits that came from it The Moron Corps, McNamara’s Folly, and McNamara’s Misfits.

We don’t have exact figures on how many casualties the substandard troops suffered, except to say that they died at higher rates than other Americans serving in Vietnam. Those who survived the war didn’t have a better standard of living either; after doing their term of service, they had lower incomes and higher rates of divorce than their non-veteran counterparts. Project 100,000 lasted from October 1966 to December 1971; by the time it ended, it had recruited not 100,000, but 354,000 troops for the war effort. Therefore it was one of the reasons why the draft was abolished in the early 1970s. The Vietnam War was the last time in US history when recruiters would accept anyone who could walk and breathe, and members of the US armed forces have all been volunteers since then.

8. Anti-war protests at home. We will cover this more later in the episode. It has been said that the Americans won every battle in Vietnam, but they lost the war in America.

End of timeout.

*****

1967 began with Operation Bolo on January 2. This was a major air battle, where 28 US Air Force F-4 Phantom jets, pretending to be going on a typical air raid, lured 16 North Vietnamese MiG-21 interceptors into a dogfight over Hanoi that lasted for just twelve minutes, and shot down seven of the MiGs. The American pilots were led by Colonel Robin Olds, a World War II ace, and they did not lose a single plane. Four days later, the Air Force launched another ruse, this time mimicking an F-4 reconnaissance flight, and they shot down two more MiG-21s. As a result, the North Vietnamese only had seven MiG-21s left for service, and this severely limited North Vietnamese air activity for several months. However, the American pilots were prohibited by Washington from attacking MiG air bases in North Vietnam, presumably because they might kill or injure citizens of the Soviet Union. You can count this as another victory the Americans did not follow up on.

Do you remember what I said about the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong sneaking back into areas they had been driven away from? One of those places was between Saigon, Tay Ninh, and the Michelin rubber plantation, an area called the Iron Triangle by Americans. Because the Saigon River runs through here, and because the Iron Triangle was so close to the capital, it was essential to keep enemy troops out of here. This was the site of Operation Attleboro in late 1966, and the return of the Viet Cong after the battle required another search and destroy mission, Operation Cedar Falls, in early 1967. Lasting from January 8 to 26, this was the largest ground operation in the war so far; it combined 16,000 American and 14,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, to clear the Viet Cong out of the Iron Triangle. However, the Viet Cong avoided a one-on-one fight either by fleeing across the border into Cambodia, or by hiding in an extensive network of tunnels. Thus, there was no large scale combat, just small unit actions. Americans discovered the tunnels and large stockpiles of Viet Cong supplies – enough rice to feed a Viet Cong division for one year – and introduced specially trained volunteers called “tunnel rats” to explore the tunnels. The tunnel rats found the Viet Cong district headquarters at Cu Chi, where they discovered half a million military documents: documents on strategy, maps of US bases, records of guerrilla movements from Cambodia into Vietnam, and lists of South Vietnamese sympathizers.

To make the Iron Triangle useless to the enemy, if and when they came back, once the fighting was over, the entire civilian population in this area was relocated to so-called New Life Villages, their old homes were destroyed, and defoliants like Agent Orange were used to wipe out eleven square miles of jungle. For the casualty count, 72 Americans and 11 South Vietnamese were killed, while for the enemy, 720 were reported dead, and 218 were captured. Thus, at a casual glance, Operation Cedar Falls was another American-South Vietnamese victory. But when you look at the “big picture,” the operation wasn’t as big a success as the senior officers claimed. First, the Americans did not get the big battle with the enemy they wanted. Second, as you have learned to expect by now, the Viet Cong would return, and rebuild their sanctuary. In 1968 they would use the Iron Triangle as a staging ground for attacks on Saigon, during the Tet Offensive. Third, the Americans came under criticism for destroying the Thanh Dien Forest Preserve, and for their harsh treatment of the local civilians. Instead of winning over the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, the Americans had driven a bunch of them into the ranks of the Viet Cong.

Podcast footnote: On January 10, while Operation Cedar Falls was taking place, the United Nations Secretary General, U Thant, said he doubted that Vietnam was essential to the security of the West. Apparently President Johnson was not listening, for he gave his annual State of the Union address to Congress on the same day, and there he again declared, quote, "We will stand firm in Vietnam." Unquote. End footnote.

The next attempt to clear out the Iron Triangle came less than four weeks after Operation Cedar Falls. This was Operation Junction City, and though it used the same number of American and South Vietnamese troops, 30,000, there was much more air support, so this is considered the largest airborne operation of the Vietnam War, and one of the largest US operations in the war.

The declared goal of Operation Junction City was to locate and capture the headquarters of North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam, which the communists called the Central Office of South Vietnam, or COSVN. Americans expected the headquarters to be in a fixed location, and some imagined it as a "mini-Pentagon," complete with typists, filing cabinets, and staff workers organized in layers of bureaucracy. Sounds like one of our “cubicle farms” in today’s offices, doesn’t it? They never found the headquarters, though; its personnel escaped to Cambodia at the beginning of the operation. After the war, Viet Cong records revealed the headquarters was a small group of people, constantly on the move, often sheltering in makeshift facilities; at one point, American pilots who didn’t know they were there dropped bombs that missed them by a hundred meters or so.

Operation Junction City also lasted much longer than Operation Cedar Falls, from February 22 to May 14, 1967. It began with the dropping of 845 paratroops, to secure the pieces of land selected as landing zones for the troops brought in by helicopter; this was the only large paratroop assault during the entire war. Most of the time after that, though, the Allied forces moved without encountering much resistance. The Viet Cong attacked Americans at the village of Prek Klok twice, on February 28 and March 10; air strikes and artillery drove them away each time. Then on the night of March 19, the Viet Cong 9th Division attacked Fire Support Base 20, the base of the 5th Cavalry Regiment, a mechanized force. There had been a battle on this spot in November 1965, the first battle involving American armored vehicles, and it was called the battle of Ap Bau Bang, so this clash became known as the second battle of Ap Bau Bang. This time the Viet Cong infantry swarmed over the American armored vehicles, and were dispersed by the vehicles shooting on one another, which meant that some of the vehicles were put out of action. With the help of artillery and air strikes, as well as flares and aerial searchlights to spot their enemies, the Viet Cong were repelled again. The Americans claimed 227 enemies killed and three captured, while losing 3 and suffering 63 wounded. Two more attacks on the Americans were staged on March 21 and April 1, and again the Viet Cong 9th Division suffered heavy losses. After that, the rest of the operation consisted of long and exhaustive searches in the bush and villages, which captured large amounts of enemy materiel and rice, but there were no more large encounters with communists. For the whole operation, 282 Americans were killed, and 2,728 Viet Cong were counted dead. In the long run, Junction City was no more effective than the other operations in Tay Ninh province, because the enemy’s Central Office had gotten away.

Before we move on, I would like to mention one of the American officers involved in Operation Junction City, because you have probably heard of him – Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Haig. In the last clash, the battle of Ap Gu, Haig’s unit, the 1st Battalion of the 26th Infantry Regiment, was pinned down by a Viet Cong unit three times its size. Haig boarded a helicopter and flew to investigate; his helicopter was shot down, and he led the battalion in two days of bloody hand-to-hand combat, before US artillery and air power saved the day. For this, General Westmoreland awarded Haig the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second highest medal for valor. Here is an excerpt from Haig’s official Army citation, explaining what he did to earn the medal. Quote:

“When two of his companies were engaged by a large hostile force, Colonel Haig landed amid a hail of fire, personally took charge of the units, called for artillery and air fire support and succeeded in soundly defeating the insurgent force … the next day a barrage of 400 rounds was fired by the Viet Cong, but it was ineffective because of the warning and preparations by Colonel Haig. As the barrage subsided, a force three times larger than his began a series of human wave assaults on the camp. Heedless of the danger himself, Colonel Haig repeatedly braved intense hostile fire to survey the battlefield. His personal courage and determination, and his skillful employment of every defense and support tactic possible, inspired his men to fight with previously unimagined power. Although his force was outnumbered three to one, Colonel Haig succeeded in inflicting 592 casualties on the Viet Cong …

HQ US Army, Vietnam, General Orders No. 2318 (May 22, 1967)”

End Quote.

Afterwards, Haig rose through the ranks to become an advisor to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, vice chief of staff of the Army, the second-highest-ranking position in the Army, White House Chief of Staff under Presidents Nixon and Ford, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe, and President Ronald Reagan’s first Secretary of State.

Growing Opposition at Home

Back in the United States, the Vietnam War was starting to interfere with President Johnson’s other plans for America, what he called the “Great Society.” Although as we noted, the “kill ratio” in the battles was way in the Americans’ favor, it was unacceptable for those who thought no American lives should be sacrificed for Vietnam. And as long as North Vietnam was sending troops into South Vietnam at a higher rate than the US escalation, no number of American troops would be enough. If the Americans could not win, the best alternative was a negotiated agreement to end the war, and Johnson offered peace talks, but as we have already seen, the North Vietnamese at this stage were not interested. Because the Americans temporarily stopped bombing North Vietnam whenever Johnson was making peace overtures, the North Vietnamese felt they were being bombed to the conference table. Leaders like Premier Pham Van Dong made it clear that they would only talk peace if the bombing was stopped permanently, and that whatever agreement is reached must give the Viet Cong a role in the government of South Vietnam.

We saw in previous episodes that a solid majority of Americans supported the war when the first American ground troops went to Vietnam in 1965. That support eroded steadily, however, when news stories captured the horrors of the war, and reported on various atrocities like the destruction of villages and the use of defoliants. And the news stories did not show the Americans winning the war, though they won individual battles. For the American public, the “crossover point” came sometime in 1967; a survey published in October 1967 reported that 46 percent of the people it interviewed regarded the Vietnam War as a mistake, while 44 percent continued to back it. Also in October, Life Magazine renounced its earlier support of President Johnson’s war policies. Still, those who saw the war as an exercise in futility felt that a humiliating defeat, like what the French had suffered at Dienbienphu, must be avoided at all costs; the only options were to win or quit. As one housewife at the time told a pollster, quote, “I want to get out, but I don’t want to give up.” Unquote.

We also saw previously that there was some domestic opposition to the war from the start. As early as August 31, 1965, President Johnson signed a law that made draft card burning a crime, with penalties of a five year prison sentence and a $1,000 fine. Nevertheless, people burned their draft cards at anti-war rallies. Some young people also fled to Canada, to avoid getting drafted.

Podcast footnote: Early on in the antiwar movement, the most popular slogan was, "Girls say yes to boys who say no." I was too young to be looking for a date at that time, so I don’t know if I would have gotten a date by saying “No.” Oh well . . . This slogan was dropped after the feminist movement appeared, because some women were offended at the idea of mixing sex and politics this way. Among the slogans that took its place, the most famous was “Hell no, we won’t go!” End footnote.

Here I will give a quick list of the main events in the antiwar movement, from 1965 to 1967. This should give you an idea of how American opinion of the war changed as the 1960s went on:

October 16, 1965 – Anti-war rallies occurred in 40 American cities and in international cities, including London and Rome.

October 30, 1965 – 25,000 marched in Washington. This was one of the few cases where the demonstrators were for the war, not against it. They were led by five Medal of Honor recipients.

November 27, 1965 – In Washington, 35,000 anti-war protesters circled the White House, and then marched on to the Washington Monument for a rally.

March 26, 1966 – Anti-war protests were held in New York, Washington, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco.

June 4, 1966 – A three-page anti-war advertisement appeared in The New York Times, signed by 6,400 teachers and professors.

November 7, 1966 – Defense Secretary McNamara is confronted by student protesters during a visit to Harvard University.

January 23, 1967 – Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright published The Arrogance of Power, a book that was critical of American war policy in Vietnam, and called for direct peace talks between the South Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong. Both Fulbright and Johnson were Democrats from the southern United States, but after Fulbright learned everything he could about Vietnam, he and Johnson were no longer on speaking terms. Instead, the President denounced Fulbright, Robert Kennedy, and a growing number of critics in Congress as "nervous Nellies" and "sunshine patriots."

February 8-10,1967 – American religious groups stage a nationwide "Fast for Peace."

April 14, 1967 – Former Vice President Richard M. Nixon visited Saigon and stated that anti-war protests back in the U.S. are quote, "prolonging the war." Unquote.

April 15, 1967 – Nearly 200,000 people took part in anti-war demonstrations, in New York City and San Francisco. Here the Rev. Martin Luther King declared that the war was undermining President Johnson’s Great Society social reform programs. Quote: "…the pursuit of this widened war has narrowed the promised dimensions of the domestic welfare programs, making the poor white and Negro bear the heaviest burdens both at the front and at home." Unquote.

Podcast Footnote: When it came to race relations, Dr. King got nearly everything he wanted with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Therefore he spent the last years of his life pursuing new goals, and that included opposing the Vietnam War, at a time when most Americans were for it. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and even King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, thought that speaking out against the war was a bad idea. King also campaigned for economic equality, meaning better jobs, better housing and better pay for African-Americans, only to find that white Americans were not as receptive to this as they were to social and political equality, especially in the Northern states. End footnote.

April 24, 1967 – General Westmoreland condemned anti-war demonstrators, saying they give the North Vietnamese soldier, quote, "hope that he can win politically that which he cannot accomplish militarily." Unquote. Privately, he warned President Johnson that "the war could go on indefinitely."

May 2, 1967 – The United States is condemned during a mock war crimes tribunal held in Stockholm, Sweden, organized by British philosopher Bertrand Russell.

August 18, 1967 – California Governor Ronald Reagan said the U.S. should get out of Vietnam, because it is difficult to win a war when "too many qualified targets have been put off limits to bombing."

November 29, 1967 – An emotional Robert McNamara announced his resignation as Defense Secretary during a press briefing, stating, quote, "Mr. President…I cannot find words to express what lies in my heart today…" Unquote. Behind closed doors, he had begun regularly expressing doubts over Johnson’s war strategy, angering the President. McNamara became the latest of Johnson’s top aides who resigned over the war; among the others were Bill Moyers, McGeorge Bundy and George Ball.

December 4-7, 1967 – Four days of anti-war protests take place in New York City. 585 protesters are arrested, of which the most famous is Dr. Benjamin Spock, author of a best-selling book on baby care.

*****

Oh my goodness, we are out of time already! I was planning to finish by chronicling the events in 1967 that led up to 1968’s main battle, the Tet Offensive, but now that will have to wait for another episode. And it probably won’t be the next episode; I am thinking of running a question-and-answer episode first, to answer the questions you kindly sent me last month. Whatever the next topic will be, join me again for that, on or near March 1, 2020 if you are listening to the episodes as soon as I upload them. As for the Tet Offensive, it now looks like I will need two episodes to cover that, but don’t worry, we will continue to make progress.

If you are enjoying the podcast and haven’t supported it yet, now is the time to do so. This podcast depends on the support of the listeners; that is the main reason why I have been able to keep doing the research and recording that goes into it, for more than three and a half years. The most visible way to support the podcast is to make a donation, either a one-time donation via Paypal, or a small monthly donation through Patreon. To make a Paypal donation, go to the Blubrry.com page for any episode of this podcast, and click on the gold button on the page, the one that says “Donate.” Those who donate this way will get their first names mentioned at the beginning of an episode, as was the case for Christian M. this time, and their first names will be added to the new Podcast Hall of Fame Page. If you have already donated before 2020, make another donation, and you will get the water buffalo icon added next to your name, meaning you are a very special person.

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<Outro>

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