The War in Vietnam

WHEN the monsoon rains began last April, the Viet Cong and PAVN (People’s Army of North Vietnam) had deployed fifty-six main-force battalions in the central highlands of South Vietnam and reinforcements were arriving along the Ho Chi Minh Trail at a rate of about 7000 a month. Immediately south of the 17th parallel, where the First ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) Division, its fighting qualities sapped by the Buddhist crisis, held the line, the 324th PAVN Division had begun to cut the infiltration corners by moving across the demilitarized zone to join another thirty-six regular Viet Cong and PAVN forces already established in the First Corps area. The expectation in Saigon was that these forces would attempt to move into the mobile and more conventional phase of the war as set out in the instruction manuals of Mao Tse-tung and Vo Nguyen Giap, North Vietnam’s brilliant revolutionary warfare tactician.

The task proved even more difficult than the American and ARVN forces had expected, and more difficult, also, than Hanoi and the National Liberation Front had feared. Through June and July and well into August, every PAVN and Viet Cong attempt to take the initiative, whether in the Kontum region of the central highlands or in Quang Tri Province immediately south of the demilitarized zone, was heavily repelled. In a single month’s bitter fighting with the U.S. Marines, the 324th PAVN Division had about a thousand men killed in action and 3000 to 4000 wounded. In more populous areas, Communist casualties and the kill ratio are often imprecise indicators; here, the damage inflicted on the 324th was beyond dispute, and it fell back into the demilitarized zone licking its wounds and hammered in retreat by Guam-based B-52 bombers.

These actions, more than any other, confirmed the assumptions drawn from earlier engagements — that lacking air support and helicopters and with only limited artillery support, neither the PAVN nor the main-force Viet Cong units are a match for the Americans. Man for man, the U.S. troops may lack some of their enemies’ jungle skill, but the rapid availability of firepower and heliborne mobility have tipped the scales decisively in their favor. The Americans win far more engagements than they lose, and it is difficult to see how the PAVN or the Viet Cong, though they may have occasional and significant successes, can reverse this trend. Viet Cong and PAVN troops cannot get in close enough or quickly enough to escape the rain of napalm bombs and artillery fire that an attack immediately triggers.

The Communists defect

Increasing numbers of defectors and prisoners pour out a consistent tale of PAVN and Viet Cong woes. Two or three years ago tactical intelligence was meager and uncollated. Today a much bigger flow of defectors from the Communist ranks — 11,000 so far in 1966 — and a much more scientific approach to interrogation are producing an immense body of important intelligence. The nature of the Viet Cong’s leadership and direction, their methods of communication, operation, and supply are no longer a mystery. Their problems, and increasingly, their tactical plans and vulnerabilities, are being documented and translated into counteraction.

Surprise and security used to be two of the mainsprings of Viet Cong morale, but they no longer have a monopoly of either. Their tunnels and bunkers are not always proof against bombing. Many villagers who once responded well to their cajolery have become antagonistic now that the mounting pressures of the Communist war effort demand coercion. Even in rest areas the troops are required to keep constantly on the move. Disease, especially in the central highlands, takes a heavy toll. Medical facilities are inadequate: the high survival rate of the wounded, which has been made possible by helicopter evacuation on the U.S.-ARVN side, is matched by an appalling death rate among Viet Cong-PAVN wounded.

During the dry season between 1500 and 3000 trucks and tens of thousands of coolies turned the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos into a fairly effective supply route, proof against interdiction by commando-type raids and not critically hampered by aerial bombardment. When the rains came, the enemy forces in the monsoon-wrapped mountains were ready to strike. Yet in the early months of what they clearly intended to be a major offensive, the Viet Cong-PAVN failed alike in the central highlands and in the First Corps area to achieve even modest successes. They were faced with the choice of continuing to accept losses out of proportion to realistic military expectations, or of reverting to much smaller and less ambitious actions.

The Viet Cong-PAVN frustrations at this period were very similar to those experienced by the allies during the dry season. Repeated largescale heliborne forays into enemy territory on search-and-destroy missions kept the Viet Cong-PAVN forces off balance and resulted in the destruction and capture of large quantities of supplies, especially rice. In three critical aspects the dryseason campaign failed dismally, however. It did not succeed in restoring communications between the major American base areas along the coast; it failed to engage major mainforce Viet Cong and PAVN in setpiece actions in which American firepower could be used with devastating effect; and it did not even begin to isolate the insurgents from the people.

No shortcuts to victory

By the end of the dry season there were 316,000 ARVN’s, 255,000 Americans, 26,500 Koreans, Australians, and New Zealanders, and half a million Vietnamese paramilitary forces in the field. By eliminating time-wasting forced marches, the helicopter fleet in effect multiplied the striking capacity of these forces. Yet it was patent in every corps area that even an armed force of a million men was not sufficient to break through the military stalemate. Extra forces were clearly needed.

Since the ARVN was already stretched close to the limits of its potential resources by the deployment during the year of an extra thirty battalions and has to compete for manpower with the substantial staff needs of the rural reconstruction program, it was apparent that the troops would not be available from South Vietnam. The Koreans were preparing to send a second division, and the Australians were breaking in two new infantry battalions. Useful as these were in terms of allied solidarity, however, they did not begin to cope with the needs, which only the United States had the means and the inclination to provide. By August the U.S. forces in Vietnam totaled 284,000, and the numbers are growing all the time.

The Viet Cong-PAVN forces, despite their losses, are also increasing in size. Viet Cong manpower problems are as formidable as those of the ARVN, but with only about 50,000 northerners yet deployed in the south, the PAVN has extensive, and as yet scarcely touched, reservoirs on which to draw. If Hanoi is willing to pay the price, and the fears of a wider war continue prudently to limit American options, there will be no shortcuts to victory.

For obvious reasons, figures on the size of the Viet Cong and Viet Cong-PAVN forces have been imprecise, but are not so inaccurate as to invalidate the general pattern that emerges from plotting the graph of the annual estimates of their growth.

Vietnamese and American intelligence in 1961 estimated the Viet Cong strength at about 15,000, of whom about 7500 were believed to be armed with more or less effective weapons. These were the hard core, the nucleus of what eventually became known as the main-force units. By 1962 the hard-core figure had crept up to 25,000. The following year it was 35,000, then 40,000 plus (although the Ky government in Saigon was still putting out for public consumption the unclassified figure of 20,000 to 21,000 as late as March, 1964). In 1965 the figure moved to 45,000. Today, swollen by the influx from North Vietnam, it is around the 100,000 mark. Directed by regimental, and now even divisional, headquarters, the Viet CongPAVN are divided into about 160 main-force battalions, which draw on and are complemented by an armed guerrilla support of more than 170,000.

Among the main-force battalions, about sixty are PAVN. A significant, but much smaller, number of northerners hold ranking positions in predominantly southern battalions. Many of the armed propaganda cadres are also northerners. Vo Chi Cong and Tran Nam Trung, the two principal figures in the People’s Revolutionary Party, the southern offshoot of the Laodong (Communist) Party of North Vietnam, which provides the National Liberation Front with its party leadership and the war with its impetus and direction, are both Hanoi men, though Cong was born in the South Vietnam province of Quang Nam. General Nguyen Don, who commands Viet Cong and PAVN forces, is a northerner.

Theories but no facts

While tactical intelligence available to the ARVN and U.S. forces is improving, strategic intelligence remains weak. Thus, there are theories about Viet Cong-PAVN future intentions but no facts. The military tend to believe that the shock of the summer reverses will cause the PAVN and Viet Cong main-force battalions to disengage and attempt to revert to small-scale actions. Other intelligence agencies interpret the situation differently. Their expectation is that PAVN units, working to the Giap thesis that a big military success is needed in order to win a great political victory, will continue.

Their argument is persuasive. In comparison with the losses Giap’s forces suffered by trial and error during the Indochina War, neither the Viet Cong nor the PAVN has been badly hurt. The Dien Bien Phu curtain-raiser, an unsuccessful attack on the heavily defended entrenched camp of Nasam in December, 1953, cost the Viet Minh some 4000 lives, but undaunted, Giap pressed on when the French threw down the gauntlet and invited him into the major set-piece battle a year later. Though early losses at Dien Bien Phu (which the Viet Minh have never disclosed) shocked many of Giap’s colleagues and raised immediate and critical tactical arguments, Giap’s view that the end justified the means prevailed.

During the first six months of this year, the Viet Cong-PAVN death toll is reported to have totaled 27,000. After making allowances for civilians incorrectly classified as Viet Cong or PAVN, and for the compensatory unknown losses among those who died of wounds or sickness, this may be an unduly low estimate. Still, it is probably not so harmful as to persuade Giap that the major strategic plan should be quickly abandoned.

Communiqués issued by both the National Liberation Front and the People’s Republic of Vietnam continue to claim great victories. During the dry season, according to the communiqué issued after the meeting of the Presidium of the NLF in July, 43,000 U.S. forces were put out of action. Seventy thousand “puppet” troops were “wiped out,” or “disintegrated,” 1400 aircraft shot down or destroyed, and 1310 military vehicles demolished. Since both Hanoi and the NLF attach great store to the Vietnam debate in the United States and their interpretation that this is evidence of American political weakness and lack of resolve, it is at least conceivable that their grossly exaggerated claims of ARVN and American losses are a factor of some consequence when it comes to strategic planning.

A more significant consideration is that though the Viet Cong has the capability of reverting to smaller guerrilla-type actions and mingling inconspicuously with the rural population, this is not really practicable in the case of the PAVN. As alien “fish” in the peasant “ocean” they would be easily detected and extremely vulnerable. Short of withdrawing to North Vietnam, with all the consequences this would have in the south, or perhaps creating a diversion in Laos by an attack in the Mekong valley, which would be a further strain on Hanoi’s resources, the momentum achieved by the PAVN in attempting to move into a more mobile and conventional phase cannot be easily reversed.

The need to increase guerrilla activities in the more heavily populated rural areas and the compulsion to attempt a main-force offensive in the highlands have produced a duality in the Viet Cong-PAVN effort. Their troops are, in effect, fighting two different phases of revolutionary war at the same time: semi-conventional war in the central highlands and in the First Corps area, where PAVN’s account for more than half of the Communist main forces, and guerrilla war along the coast, around Saigon, and in the Mekong Delta.

Persuasion and terror

Beating the PAVN will demand harder fighting, but overcoming the Viet Cong is likely to take even longer. In retrospect, over the seven years of war that began on September 26, 1959, when two ARVN

companies were overrun in the Plain of Reeds, west of Saigon, one successful Viet Cong tactic stands out above others: the destruction of the fragile rural administration by discriminating terror (between 1959 and 1961 they killed or abducted 12,000 rural officials) and the substitution of a new infrastructure by methods which depended more heavily on persuasion than on terror.

Since 1962 there have been repeated efforts by Saigon authorities to restore the rural administration. Though all showed some measure of initiative and enterprise and, in restricted areas, were for a time successful, they collapsed one by one. The biggest and most spectacularly unsuccessful was the late Ngo Dinh Nhu’s “strategic hamlet” program.

Having learned by hard experience, Vietnamese and American officials in Saigon are hopeful that the hundreds of fifty-nine-man rural reconstruction teams which have been going into the field since May will succeed this time in breaking the Viet Cong infrastructure and reestablishing their own. No one seriously expected spectacular results, and no one has been greatly disappointed, therefore, that this new rural campaign has been slow-moving. To be successful the program will require years of patient effort and an assurance of security that only an effective and complementary military effort can provide. Although the war is no longer in danger of being lost, it is sobering in these sometimes excessively optimistic days to reflect on how long it may take to win.