LIFE Magazine December 14, 1953 – PROSPECTS FOR RICE AND TRUCE IMPROVE

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Written by Sonya Porter

 

The recent withdrawal of the US troops from Afghanistan has been compared to their defeat in Vietnam of almost fifty years ago.   In both cases, the US were trying to install democracy in the countries, but in the case of Afghanistan, the country was invaded while in Vietnam their troops were invited in.   Ten years ago I wrote the following article for a small print magazine, The Lantern, which is now closed, but I feel that in view of what has recently happened in Afghanistan, it might be worth reading again.

Sonya Porter

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Over the past forty years I’ve often heard it said, first by students and later by adults who really should have known better, that the Americans invaded Vietnam in 1964 and so started the war in that country.

No, they didn’t.

In 1963/64 I was working in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) the capital of South Vietnam, and I’d like to give my version of events.   It might not be 100% correct of course, but by researching the history of those times and putting it together with what I remember, I feel that mine gives as good a picture as many others.

To explain how the war happened and why America was involved, we have to go back in time a fair way  —  back, in fact, to the 1850s when France began its conquest of Indochina, and then to 1884 when the Treaty of Hue formed the basis for French colonial rule there for the next seven decades.

So, the French were the colonial power in what was later called Vietnam, during the Second World War.  But after France was defeated by the Germans in 1940, the colonial authorities in Indochina became Vichy French, allies of the Axis powers, and this in turn meant that the French had to collaborate with the Japanese forces after their invasion and conquest of Indochina during that year.  The French continued to run the affairs in the colony, but ultimate power resided in the hands of the Japanese until the German forces were driven out of France.  

At that time, fearing that they could no longer trust them, the Japanese army executed or interned most of the French still living there, although some French troops did manage to escape to The Republic of China.  But when the Japanese surrendered following an Allied offensive in August 1945, which involved these French forces together with British Commandos and Gurkhas, a power vacuum was created and into this vacuum stepped the Viet Minh.  This was a national independence movement, headed by Ho Chi Minh who, 20 years later was to defeat the Americans.   However, at that time the Viet Minh had been fighting against both the Japanese and the Vichy French and because of this, they had received backing not only from the Republic of China which had itself been invaded by the Japanese in 1937, but also from the main Allied power in the area, the Americans, who appear for the first time.

But now came a problem both for the French and the Americans, because Ho Chi Minh and his force were Communists.   Until 1945 the Communist USSR had been an ally of the United States and the Allies, but after this, as Churchill said, down came the Iron Curtain and the Cold War started, so that military assistance for the Viet Minh came to an end.

Following the Party line from Moscow, Ho Chi Minh initially attempted to negotiate with the French who were trying to re-establish their control across the country.   When these negotiations failed, what was now the Communist People’s Republic of China, sent military aid to retrain the Viet Minh guerrilla force into a regular army.   The USA were now caught between backing a French colonial force, which they were reluctant to do, or contemplating a USSR and Chinese-backed Communist Vietnam.   They therefore decided to accept the lesser of the two evils and agreed with the French in 1950 to set up a Military Assistance and Advisory Group to train Vietnamese soldiers.   By 1954 The US was shouldering 80% of the cost of the war although it remained sceptical of French chances of success.  And, indeed, the French were decisively defeated in May that year at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. 

Two months later the Geneva Accords were signed which separated the country into two zones with the country divided at the 17th parallel.  There was to be a northern Communist zone and a southern zone which was to be the democratic State of Vietnam, headed by former Emperor, Bao Dai, who then named Ngo Dinh Diem as his Prime Minister.  Bao Dai was the 13th and last Emperor of the Nguyen dynasty, who first named his country ‘Vietnam’ and who abdicated in 1945 at the time of the surrender of the Japanese.   Ngo Dinh Diem was an aristocrat with close ties to the Emperor and whose family was strongly Roman Catholic.

The separation of Vietnam was supposed to be temporary, with elections to take place throughout the country two years later.   However, in October 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem declared a new Republic of Vietnam, deposed the French-leaning and very unpopular Bao Dai, and created himself Head of State.   He also cancelled the proposed elections, knowing full well that Ho Chi Minh, who though Communist, had been fighting for his country’s independence from the French, would have easily won the Presidency.

To put it bluntly, Ngo Dinh Diem was not a nice man.   He was undoubtedly corrupt and too apt to put his family and Catholic friends in positions of power. But the word on the street when I got to Saigon in 1963 was that his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu and sister-in-law, known as the Tiger Lady of Vietnam, forced his hand on many occasions and were far more unpopular. 

On arrival, I was struck by the sheer energy and openness in Saigon with its bustling shops and markets and the large number of different newspapers and political parties and to me, the country seemed well on the way to being democratic.   But I was wrong.   While Ho Chi Minh had executed an estimated 8,000 ‘class enemies’ in the North, I gradually learned that in the South thousands of Viet Minh cadres (there called the Viet Cong) had also been executed or sent to concentration camps by Ngo Dinh Diem and his family.   In addition to which Catholic Diem was violently at odds with Buddhism, the main religion of the country and this ended with many Buddhist monks burning themselves to death in protest.

John F Kennedy was elected President of the United States in 1960 and his policy towards South Vietnam rested on the assumption that Diem and his forces must ultimately defeat the Communists from the North on their own.   He was against the deployment of American combat troops and observed that ‘To introduce US forces in large numbers there today, while it might have an initially favorable military impact, would almost certainly lead to adverse political and, in the long run, adverse military consequences’.  Unfortunately, he was right.

The trouble was, as Vice President Lyndon B Johnson said in 1961 while on a visit to South Vietnam: ‘Diem’s the only boy we got out there’.  Either the Americans went along with Diem’s request first for advisors and later for fighting troops, or the whole of Vietnam became Communist.  First Russia and is satellites, then China, then North Korea – it seemed as though The Domino Theory was in fact, correct.   This theory, first proposed as policy by the Eisenhower administration, argued that if one country fell to Communist forces, then all the surrounding countries would follow.   Certainly, when Vietnam fell in 1975, so did Laos and Cambodia.

However, it seemed that Diem wasn’t after all the only boy the Americans had out there.   In November 1963, the South Vietnamese Army staged a coup, Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu were killed and General Duong Van Minh became President of South Vietnam.   It is assumed by many people that the Americans aided the coup, but once again, word on the street at the time was that the US had had no need to assist since by that time the Ngo family were hated by most of the people in South Vietnam.

Sadly, the fall of Ngo Dinh Diem left the way open to a string of incompetent military rulers and eventually to the defeat of the American forces and to the fall of Vietnam to Communist rule, which has lasted until this day.

So – the Americans became involved in what was later known as Vietnam by aiding their World War Two allies, the French, plus the anti-French but also anti-Japanese Viet Minh.  They then felt obliged to back the French against the Communist Viet Minh, and, following the division of the country, to back a supposedly Democratic South against an avowedly Communist North.

At the request of first the French and then of the South Vietnamese Prime Minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, the US provided military aid, then Advisors to train Vietnamese troops and then later their own troops to fight against the Viet Minh who were crossing the 17th parallel in an effort to take over South Vietnam and to create one Communist country.

They might have been bossy and naïve and their troops didn’t wear halos, but it has to be said that the Americans did not actually invade South Vietnam – in 1964 or at any other time.

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Photo by manhhai

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