The New York Times: Who Were the Real Nationalists in Vietnam?

Stephen B. Young

The Tet offensive was a turning point in the Vietnam War for Vietnamese nationalism. With North Vietnam having been turned over to the Communists by the French in 1954, Vietnam’s southern provinces had become a haven for non-Communist nationalists, just as the western states of Germany were a haven for German non-Communists and the southern half of Korea was a secure state for Korean nationalists.

In the new state of South Vietnam, with American assistance, President Ngo Dinh Diem successfully built a functioning non-Communist state. Responding to this resilience of the nationalists, in 1959, the Communist regime in Hanoi decided to destroy what their rivals had achieved. Their intrusion into the internal affairs of South Vietnam made considerable headway, and set off what we now call the American war in Vietnam. But it took the Tet offensive to bring the various strains of southern nationalism together.

In early March 1968, the American ambassador in Saigon, Ellsworth Bunker, reported to President Lyndon B. Johnson on a remarkable change among the South Vietnamese.

Instead of falling apart, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam was growing — in February, after the Tet attacks, 10,084 South Vietnamese volunteered for military service, versus 3,924 the previous February. Some 10,600 draftees reported for duty that month, versus 4,006 the previous February.

It wasn’t just that new recruits were signing up; veteran soldiers were staying, and stepping up. Of the 155 South Vietnamese regular maneuver battalions, 118 were rated combat effective. In the field, companies of the South Vietnamese Regional Forces, a militia that manned outposts and guarded critical infrastructure, were at fighting strength, with 99 out of a 123-man complement present for duty. The platoons of another militia, the Popular Forces, which guarded villages, were averaging 29 men out of a full complement of 35, another unprecedented turnout. The new civil defense militia was joined by 19,000 volunteers in 20 provinces.South Vietnam’s president, Nguyen van Thieu, stepped up to provide more vigorous leadership. He replaced corrupt and incompetent officials and personally headed the recovery committee charged with rebuilding destroyed or damaged infrastructure and buildings and resettling over 500,000 people who had fled Communist control. And elsewhere in national politics, new, surprising political coalitions formed to vociferously oppose Hanoi’s aggression.

These determined nationalist efforts continued to gain momentum during the ensuing months and years. A new pacification and development program, placed under village leadership, largely defeated Hanoi’s southern followers in the National Liberation Front (also known as the Viet Cong). By 1973, the N.L.F. had just 25,000 fighters left. South Vietnam, by contrast, had 748,000 combat troops, along with an additional million citizens in lightly armed self-defense units. The nationalists controlled 90 percent of South Vietnam’s population, 85 percent of which lived in secure communities.

South Vietnam’s economy grew continuously. Elections were held in all villages and provinces, and several times for the national Senate and House of Representatives, bringing into power a wide range of political outlooks, without anyone seriously proposing surrender to Hanoi’s one-party dictatorship.

The strength of South Vietnam’s newly energized military held up for years; during the 1972 summer offensive, in which Hanoi threw its entire army into the south to take advantage of the withdrawal of American ground troops, the South Vietnamese successfully defended their positions, relying on the United States for air support only.

What made this resistance to Communist aggression so effective? It was not as if the South Vietnamese had suddenly discovered nationalist pride in March 1968. Rather, it reached back to millenniums-old traditions of ethnic pride.

Put in simple terms, the fundamental cultural norm for many Vietnamese is dependence on the will of heaven, which gives individualism to each Vietnamese, provides the people good or bad fortune, and mandates a sovereign state for them. It’s also a bad fit for communism, which is Western in its premises about class warfare and government ownership of the means of production.

Of course, historians have largely accepted the notion that the North Vietnamese leadership was at least as nationalist as it was communist. But in fact, that conflation was intentional, and artificial: As early as 1945, party leaders realized that they could never rally Vietnamese to the banner of Communism, so they used the tactic of working through a supposedly non-Communist front, an approach that the Soviets had promoted for the 1920s struggle against feudalism in China, and then against fascism globally.

The ties between Communists and nationalists were always tenuous, precisely because the Communists recognized their incompatibility. In 1945, the Communists outlawed two nationalist parties, and murdered the founder of one of them. Two years later, they murdered Huynh Phu So, the charismatic young man who had founded the nationalist Hoa Hao religion in the Mekong Delta in 1939.

As late as 1960, the 10-point plan proposed by North Vietnam for the formation of the National Liberation Front made no a single mention of communism as the future for South Vietnam. Instead, it leaned heavily on anti-Americanism and the overthrow of the Saigon regime that it said, playing on traditional Vietnamese nationalism, lacked merit-virtue.

So, in 1968, when ordinary South Vietnamese considered the military failure of the Communists in the Tet offensive, the failure of their fellow citizens to come out in support of Hanoi, and the success of South Vietnamese forces in fighting back, many concluded that heaven had turned the tides of fate their way.

Obviously, even this revitalized nationalist spirit alone wasn’t enough to defeat North Vietnam’s aggression. In 1975, Hanoi conquered Saigon, after the Americans withdrew their forces and then, just a few years later, much of their financial and military support.

But it’s also important to understand that the impetus for the American withdrawal was, in large part, a misunderstanding about Vietnamese nationalism by the antiwar movement, which came to dominate much American thinking about the war. While there were American radicals who indeed embraced Ho Chi Minh’s communist vision, the movement in general preferred to see him as a nationalist first, fighting for his country against colony and empire.

It’s true that Ho fought for independence from France, and then against the Americans for a unified, independent Vietnam. In that limited sense he was true to deep Vietnamese aspirations for cultural autonomy. But that narrow demand for independence did not make him a nationalist, especially in the Vietnamese tradition. Ho wanted independence for a country to be ruled in its culture, society, economy and politics by his party alone.

Except for a relatively small contingent that found French rule acceptable — some Catholics, some French-speaking intellectuals and some well-off families — most every Vietnamese wanted independence without communism. Had the Americans understood this, they might have better understood what motivated South Vietnam, and not moved so quickly to abandon them just as they were coalescing into a unified, motivated political and military force.

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