In this account of the origins of the Vietnam War, as at the Geneva Conference of 1954, it is easy to overlook the presence of the Vietnamese; and, by comparison with France or the US harder to remember that they were involved in civil war and revolution as well as a 30 year struggle to decide the political configuration of their country. Again, by comparison, other countries whose power was projected onto Vietnam may be seen as superior in strength until the issue was eventually decided between one of these powers, France, and Vietnam; and issue was joined between Vietnam and the US. In both cases it was complicated by the divisions in Vietnam itself; in the first instance between those who believed the French would provide genuine independence and those who did not. In the second instance by a partition which could have suggested that Vietnam was two countries rather than one.
The origins of war may therefore be sought, in the first place, in the relationship between France and Vietnam. In general terms it was the relationship that was familiar in all parts of Africa as well as Asia between a strong, confident and ambitious 19th-century European power and a comparatively weak and disorganized state. Conflict of varying intensity was endemic in this relationship but successful national resistance depended upon organization and opportunity. In Vietnam, unlike any other part of Southeast Asia, it was complicated by proximity and relations with China; to the point where the outcome of the French war in Vietnam was decided by what had happened in China in 1949. Well before the communist victory in the Chinese civil war, however, occasional projections of Chinese power – whether in the late 19th century or at the end of the Second World War – had led to the discomfiture of France and provided a third dimension to French relations with Vietnam. It is conceivable that incipient and indigenous resistance to French re-occupation of Vietnam after the war would have happened anyway but the ability of Ho Chi Minh to slip backwards and forwards across the Chinese border, with growing approbation from his US friends, allowed that resistance in Tonkin, small and passive though it was, to be organized on communist lines. When, therefore, the surrender of Japan in August 1945 created an immediate political vacuum it was filled with exultant and so far unchallenged forces of Vietnamese nationalism orchestrated if not organized by the leaders of a communist party.
It was this, communist, factor that distinguished Vietnam from another part of Southeast Asia, Indonesia, where the Japanese surrender, and some Japanese encouragement, had put nationalist forces in power to challenge the resumption of Dutch rule but where the communist component did not surface until 1948: and was then removed by the Indonesians themselves. In Vietnam, nationalism and communism – at least in so far as an effective alternative to the French was concerned – were interlocked and, although the French sponsored and virtually created a non-communist variant of monarchical nationalism, until such time as they were prepared to concede significant independence it was easier to portray their Vietnamese allies as collaborators rather than patriots.
Even without the communist tinge to Vietnamese nationalism, however, it is inconceivable that in 1945 France would voluntarily have given up Vietnam or, indeed, any of her overseas territories. De Gaulle's version of the grandeur of France is well known but even the communist leader, Thorez, like Churchill a propos India, said he had no intention of being remembered as the liquidator of French power in Indo-China. Those, especially Americans, who see the origins of war in 1945 and 1946 when France was ‘allowed’ to return to Vietnam may remember that Free France under de Gaulle was an allied and victorious power. By what right could she have been denied access to Vietnam or to any of her colonies? Perhaps by the right of appeal to the somewhat abstract principles of self-determination in the Atlantic Charter or the Charter of the United Nations. In which case the French could claim that the Vietminh were not properly representative of Vietnamese nationalism and, in any event, Vietnam was recognized as a free state – within the French Union.
The ‘legitimacy’ of French possession of Vietnam had indeed been compromised by the Vichy experience and collaboration with both Germans and Japanese but, while this was sufficient to create the ambivalence of Roosevelt's feelings, the legitimacy of Vietnamese nationalism was itself compromised by its communist leadership. It can be argued that had it not been for intransigence on both sides the French Union might have become the matrix for an independent Vietnam but as it turned out the French Union was neither a bold nor imaginative concept and it was impossible within this structure for the French government to pronounce the one word which Ho Chi Minh said was needed: ‘independence’. With innumerable changes of government France in fact never conceded more than a heavily circumscribed independence, even to her own client, until it was too late: precisely, not until April 1954 when the Vietminh were on the brink of their astounding victory.
The struggle for Vietnamese independence and the terms and conditions on which it would be achieved had instead taken on the form of ordeal by battle and Dien Bien Phu, one of the decisive battles of the 20th century, was one of the greatest defeats ever suffered by a colonial power. In other circumstances it would have meant the end of the Vietnam war but, by then, what had arguably but essentially been a colonial war had been transformed, at least in the understanding of the US, into the most important secondary conflict of the Cold War.
As long as they had wanted to stay in the war, or until such time as a government was prepared to get out, the French had done their best to convince everyone that in Vietnam they were fighting in the front line of the free world. Indispensable as an ally in Europe the US seemed to take France at its word and after China's entry into the Korean War, no matter what prompted it, it was comparatively easy for the French and for the US to describe Vietnam and Korea as one war. What was more difficult was to enhance the importance of Vietnam to the point where it was vital to the security of the US but in the first instance, in 1950, it was seen as a vital sector in a policy of total containment. In the first instance, too, the French were seen to be containing China rather than Vietnam and in looking at Vietnam from 1950 onwards the US never lost sight of the Chinese connection.1
However, provided China might be deterred from open intervention by the nuclear power of the US, it was not yet obvious that France was going to lose its Vietnam war and as long as they were willing to fight the US was willing to pay. Right up until the Vietminh opened their attack on Dien Bien Phu in March 1954 it was by no means certain how the war was going to end. French – and American – premises may have been shaky and French plans defective but if, as was not absolutely inconceivable, their casualties or logistics had made the Vietminh call off their attack, it is also conceivable that peace would have emerged from mutual exhaustion. In the event, French defeat put them in the weakest of positions when the Geneva Conference began but in spite of that, and Mendès France's self-imposed deadline, the war had not ended in outright victory or defeat: at least not in the settlement that was made at Geneva.
The Geneva agreements of 1954 are among the most curious, controversial and unsatisfactory compromises of modern international relations. Perhaps the essential flaw was to have internationalized the peace without in any way guaranteeing it but they were ambiguously if not carelessly worded so that the French could make peace without anyone else being involved in the war. What happened next would be open to interpretation but there were enough pointers to suggest that the supreme irony was that if the US had signed the agreement both China and the USSR, as well as France and Britain, might have guaranteed a settlement in which Vietnam was partitioned for an indefinite period. By refusing to join in any guarantee with communist states one has to ask whether Dulles rejected a finite end to the first Vietnam War and, in so doing, doomed the US to participation in the second. As it happened, however, the opportunity presented itself to create a state in South Vietnam which would survive as long as it had US support but would collapse when that support was removed. In 1954, although the Vietminh felt they had been robbed of victory, Russia and China may have been more disposed to partition; the North Vietnamese might have been forced to settle down to a resentful co-existence; and the two Vietnams, like the two Koreas, could have gone their separate, authoritarian, ways.
In the absence of any guaranteed agreement, however, the open question and starting point for the second Vietnam War was whether Vietnam was one state or two. If it was one, then, if enough people had enough determination, reunification on national, if not ideological, grounds demanded an end to the artificial government in the South. If it was two, then the US and everyone else who respected the sovereign integrity of a small country was entitled to defend it against communist aggression. On balance this account has suggested that it was one and, with the exception of the US and the nominally independent state of Vietnam represented by Bao Dai, that is what the Geneva powers had assumed. Alternatively, if the temporary state of South Vietnam or non-communist parties in the South had been able to mobilize such support in the scheduled elections of 1956 as to call this assumption into question then a more or less legitimate partition might have continued.
In the event Ngo Dinh Diem was not encouraged to put these considerations to the test. An interesting but ultimately unfortunate choice of client, the nature of the US commitment linked his personal fortunes with those of the US; while US optimism and capabilities convinced them that with enough US support South Vietnam, with or without Diem, was a viable state which deserved to survive. Generalizations such as this about ‘the United States’ beg the question of dissent over US purposes in Vietnam, whether or not government represented the people, and, at least, whether the wrong policies may not have been followed for the right reasons. Not only in hindsight can one see that in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam there might have been more agreeable alternatives to the triumph of communist parties. But in spite of the arguments of those who claim that the evidence was concealed, the warnings ignored and the failure of US policy stemmed from some sort of continuing governmental aberration, in its origins, long drawn out as they were, there was in every US government since the war a general disposition to intervene. In part this originated with the idea of containment but there was so much confidence in US ability to handle a small war, such as and for so long as Vietnam seemed to be, that at first sight it would have been particularly obstinate or dogmatic to believe that the US would not win its contest with North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front. When America shoved the other fellow damn well moved. Equally dogmatic, this assumption underlay the incremental additions to US power and commitment in Vietnam on a continuum in which the rational use of limited war was a familiar if not entirely normal instrument of national policy.
Perhaps there should have been a clear distinction between peace and war or, at least, Congress should have been asked for a formal declaration of war: although that may be to misunderstand the nature of revolutionary war. It would, however, have confronted the US with the necessity of defining vital interest and national security on the basis of popular decisions. In its absence successive governments were able to assume that they were entitled to define what was of vital importance even if they did not appreciate how many would die in order to sustain their definition. However many it might have been expected to be the object of maintaining two Vietnams can hardly have been, for Americans, of the same importance as it was for Vietnamese. The US defence of South Vietnam, while of considerable interest and benefit to many South Vietnamese, ultimately became, in itself, a US purpose; and at that point one may say the US was fighting principally in its own interest.
In its own way, so, it may be argued, was North Vietnam. There was, at first sight, no inherent and irrefutable reason why Vietnam had to be one state rather than two. Like two Germanies or two Koreas temporary partition could have hardened into indefinite division but the premise for this construction is that most people in at least one half of the country were in favour. In South Vietnam it was difficult to tell, if only because it had not been put to the test in 1956, and if the insurgency when it began in the South was not entirely the work of North Vietnam, which it did not seem to be, then there must have been a significant number of people in South Vietnam who were prepared to challenge this assumption at the risk of their lives.
In the end, and if one has to find a basic cause, perhaps it makes more sense in understanding the origins of the Vietnam war to see it in terms of ambition, more like the 19th-century wars for the unification of Italy and Germany, than in the more anaemic, 20th-century, concept of self-determination. North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front were going to war, as Vietnamese, to unite Vietnam under the leadership of the communist party. The United States were going to war, as Americans, to prevent that happening.
NOTE
As late as 8 November 1967, in a meeting of the National Security Council, Senator Fulbright was trying to get Vice-President Humphrey to answer the question ‘Who is the enemy – Peking or Ho Chi Minh?’ Humphrey's reply was ‘sanitised’ – and remains so. (Johnson Library).
SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
Particular sources are given at the end of each chapter. Two invaluable bibliographies are Richard Dean Burns and Milton Leitenberg The Wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, 1945–1982 (Oxford 1984) and Christopher L. Sugnet and John T. Hickey Vietnam War Bibliography (Lexington, Mass. 1983). There is a bibliographical essay ‘Suggested Readings’ in William S. Turley The Second Indo-China War (London 1986). George McT. Kahin has a hundred pages of notes and bibliographical references in Intervention (New York 1987).
GENERAL
(i) US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States.
US Department of Defense, United States-Vietnam Relations 1945–1967 (12 volumes) 1971.
The Pentagon Papers (the Senator Gravel Edition) 5 volumes, Boston 1971.
The New York Times, The Pentagon Papers (New York 1971).
Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, The US Government and the Vietnam War Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships Part 1 1945–1961, Part 2 1961–1964 (Washington 1984).
Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Background Information Relating to South-East Asia and Vietnam, Washington 1966; and Causes, Origins, and Lessons of the Vietnam War (Washington 1973).
(ii) Allan W. Cameron (ed.), Vietnam Crisis: a Documentary History, 1940–1956 (Ithaca N.Y. 1971).
A.B. Cole et al. (eds.), Conflict in Indo-China and International Repercussions: a Documentary History 1945–1955 (Ithaca N.Y. 1956).
Gareth Porter, Vietnam: The Definitive Documentation of Human Decisions, (2 volumes) (London 1979).
(iii) Marvin E. Gettleman (ed.), Vietnam: History, Documents and Opinions on a Major World Crisis (London 1966).
Marcus G. Raskin and Bernard B. Fall (eds.), The Vietnam Reader: Articles and Documents on American Foreign Policy and the Vietnam Crisis (New York 1965).
(iv) Michael Charlton and Anthony Moncrieff, Many Reasons Why (London 1978).
Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake (Boston 1972).
Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (London 1983).
THE FRENCH WAR
Peter Dennis, Troubled Days of Peace: Mountbatten and South-East Asia Command, 1945–46 (Manchester 1987).
Philippe Devillers, Histoire du Viêt-Nam (Paris 1952).
Philippe Devillers and Jean Lacouture, End of a War: Indo-China, 1954 (London 1969).
Dennis J. Duncanson, Government and Revolution in Vietnam (London 1968).
Peter M. Dunn, The First Vietnam War (London 1985).
Bernard B. Fall, Street Without Joy (London 1963).
Bernard B. Fall, The Two Vietnams (London 1963).
Bernard B. Fall, Vietnam Witness (London 1966).
Bernard B. Fall, Hell in a Very Small Place (London 1967).
Ellen J. Hammer, The Struggle for Indo-China (Stanford 1954).
R. E. M. Irving, The First Indochina War (London 1975).
George Armstrong Kelly, Lost Soldiers: The French Army and Empire in Crisis, 1947–1962 (Cambridge, Mass. 1965).
Donald Lancaster, The Emancipation of French Indo-China (London 1961).
Henri Navarre, Agonie de l'Indochine, 1953–1955 (Paris 1956).
Jules Roy, The Battle of Dien Bien Phu (London 1965).
Jean Sainteny, Histoire d'une paix manquée (Paris 1953).
Stein Tønnesson, 7946: Déclenchement de la guerre d'Indochine (Paris 1987).
James Cable, The Geneva Conference of 1954 on Indochina (London 1986).
Anthony Eden, Full Circle (London 1960).
Richard A. Falk, The Vietnam War and International Law (Princeton, 1968–1976) (4 vols.).
Francois Joyaux, La Chine et le Réglement du Premier Conflit d'Indochine (Geneve 1954) (Paris 1979).
Robert F. Randall, Geneva, 1954 (Princeton 1969).
VIETNAM
Sources on Vietnam, as a subject in its own right as well as the object or reflection of French and American attentions, may be found in other sections as well as this. Vietnamese communist sources available in English for this period, in so far as they may have been intended for propaganda purposes, tended towards the didactic and polemical; and one may take, for example, the simple assertion of Le Duan, ‘Under the leadership of the Party, the entire Vietnamese people took to arms and resolutely waged an all-out and protracted war.’ Forward Under the Glorious Banner of Revolution (Hanoi 1967). General Vo Nguyen Giap's Unforgettable Days (Hanoi 1975) provides an extended prologue to the start of the war with France; and periodicals such as Vietnamese Studies have numbers devoted to particular issues eg. Dien Bien Phu.
A useful source, that has been translated, is the chronology The Anti-US Resistance War For National Salvation 1954–1975, Joint Publications Research Service (Washington 1982). Vietnam Documents and Research Notes, translations of captured documents, was published by the US Embassy in Saigon between 1967 and 1972 but a lot of the material deals with earlier periods.
Joseph Buttinger, The Smaller Dragon: A Political History of Vietnam (New York 1958).
Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, (2 vols.) (New York 1967).
William J. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam (Boulder, Colorado 1981).
James Pinckney Harrison, The Endless War: Vietnam's Struggle for Independence (New York 1982).
John T. McAlister, Vietnam: Origins of Revolution (New York 1969).
John T. McAlister and Paul Mus, The Vietnamese and Their Revolution, (New York 1970).
David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anti-Colonialism, 1885–1925 (Berkeley 1971).
Douglas Pike, Viet Cong (Cambridge, Mass. 1966).
Douglas Pike, History of Vietnamese Communism, 1925–1976 (Stanford 1978).
Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An (Berkeley 1972).
Robert Scigliano, South Vietnam: Nation Under Stress (Boston 1964).
Ralph Smith, Viet-Nam and the West (London 1968).
Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Stanford 1975).
Denis Warner, The Last Confucian (New York 1963).
For an interesting retrospective, one of the Indochina monographs based on the ‘debriefing’ of senior South Vietnamese Officers, see Nguyen Duy Hinh and Tran Dinh Tho, The South Vietnamese Society, US Army Center of Military History (Washington 1980).
UNITED STATES
George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern (New York 1982).
Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanisation of the War in Vietnam (New York 1982).
Robert M. BlumLarry Berman, Drawing the Line: The Origin of the American Containment Policy in East Asia (New York 1982).
Warren I. Cohen, Dean Rusk, (Totowa, New Jersey 1980).
Chester L. Cooper, The Last Crusade (London 1971).
Daniel Ellsberg, Papers on the War (New York 1972).
John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (New York 1982).
Robert L. Gallucci, Neither Peace Nor Honour: The Politics of American Military Policy in Vietnam (Baltimore 1975).
Leslie H. Gelb with Richard K. Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington 1979).
David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York 1969).
George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (New York 1979).
Roger Hilsman, To Move A Nation (New York 1964).
Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point (New York 1971).
George M. Kahin and John W. Lewis, The United States in Vietnam (New York 1966).
Geoge M. Kahin, Intervention (New York 1987).
Marvin Kalb and Elie Abel, Roots of Involvement: The US in Asia 1784–1971, (London 1971).
Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War (New York 1985).
Herbert Y. Schandler, The Unmaking of a President: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam (Princeton 1977).
Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days (New York 1965).
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York 1978).
Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Imperial Presidency (New York 1973).
Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Bitter Heritage (London 1967).
R.B. Smith, An International History of the Vietnam War Volume I, Revolution Versus Containment, 1955–61, (London 1983), Volume II, The Struggle for Southeast Asia 1961–65, (London 1985).
Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York 1965).
Ronald H. Spector, United States Army in Vietnam. Advice and Support: The Early Years 1941–1960 (Washington 1983).
Wallace J. Thies, When Governments Collide (Berkeley 1980).
William S. Turley, The Second Indo-China War (London 1986).