[News] Vietnam Will Win: Taking on the Pentagon

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/19/vietnam-will-win-taking-on-the-pentagon/ 



  Vietnam Will Win: Taking on the Pentagon

by Wilfred Burchett - February 19, 2018
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To mark the 50th Anniversary of the 1968 Têt Offensive, CounterPunch is 
serializing Wilfred Burchett’s /Vietnam Will Win /(Guardian Books, New 
York, 1968) over the next few weeks. Readers can judge for themselves 
the validity of the facts, observations, analysis, conclusions, 
predictions and so on made by the author. The books is based on several 
visits to the Liberated Zones controlled by the National Liberation 
Front (‘Viet Cong’) of South Vietnam in 1963-64, 1964-65 and in 1966-67 
and close contacts with the NLF leadership, resistance fighters and 
ordinary folk. Wilfred Burchett’s engagement with Vietnam began in March 
1954, when he met and interviewed President Ho Chi Minh in his jungle 
headquarters in Thai Nguyen, on the eve of the battle of Dien Bien Phu. 
He was also on intimate terms with General Vo Nguyen Giap, Prime 
Minister Pham Van Dong and most of the leadership of the Democratic 
Republic of Vietnam during the country’s struggle against French 
colonialism and American imperial aggression. Wilfred Burchett was not 
writing history as a historian, with the benefit of hindsight, access to 
archives etc. He was reporting history as it was unfolding, often in 
dangerous places. He was an on-the-spot reporter, an eyewitness to 
history. In his reporting, he followed his own convictions, political 
and moral. The book he wrote after his first two visits to the Liberated 
Zones, /Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerilla War /(International 
Publishers, New York, 1965) concludes with this short sentence: “The 
best they [the Americans] can do is to go home.” /Vietnam Will Win/ 
confirms that.

Unfortunately, it took another seven years (1968-75) of death and 
devastation – and the extension of the war into Cambodia and Laos – for 
the U.S. to finally leave Vietnam in ignominy in April 1975. So here, 
chapter by chapter, Wilfred Burchett exposes the futility of fighting a 
people united in their struggle for independence, liberty and unity. It 
also explains, soberly and factually, why they were winning and how they 
won.

/George Burchett, Hanoi./

*Taking on the Pentagon*

When the first 3,500 U.S. Marines started disembarking at Da Nang, on 
March 8, 1965, the NLF knew it was going to be faced with new problems. 
The leadership was not fooled by the Pentagon fairy tale that the 
Marines had landed only to “protect the Da Nang air base,” with 
instructions “to shoot only if fired upon.” The NLF quickly took the 
measure of the redoubtable Marines, tested U.S. tactics and techniques 
and the quality of leadership, and prepared for mighty battles to come. 
During my third visit to the liberated areas in November 1965, the 
question of how the NLF counted on tackling the world’s mightiest 
military machine was one I discussed with NLF President Nguyen Huu Tho, 
a senior staff officer, Nguyen Van Chan, and others during two days and 
nights of talks at their jungle headquarters.

“Every new situation brings its surprises,” said Nguyen Van Chan, “and 
the confrontation with all-American units with their vastly superior 
firepower, the speedy reaction of their planes and artillery and the 
super-mobility of airborne troops, was bound to bring its surprises too. 
Even in 1962 when they first started using heliborne puppet troops in a 
big way, our troops were caught off-balance for a short time. But we 
swiftly developed tactics to deal with helicopters and the Ap Bac[1] 
<#_edn1> victory was the first big demonstration that we could 
successfully defeat heliborne operations.”

I asked if the battle of Chu Lai, which started on August 18, 1965, the 
first big confrontation between NLF and U.S. forces, which the U.S. 
Marines claimed as the “biggest victory of the war” with “600 Vietcong 
killed,” was an example of the NLF forces being caught “off-balance.”

“On the contrary,” replied Chan, “despite what the Marines claimed, we 
regard the Van Thong battle, which the Marines call Chu Lai, as another 
‘Ap Bac’ demonstration that we can beat the Americans. It showed that 
with correct tactics we could stand up to the best, from their 
viewpoint, that they could hurl against us. We hit the Marines so hard 
at Van Tuong that they have practically never budged since. After that 
one battering of their elite troops, the Americans in fact had to change 
the whole strategy of their invasion force.

“The Marine generals had bragged about a famous ‘ink blot’ strategy for 
months previously. Marine troops were supposed to set up bases all along 
the coast and these bases were supposed to expand out like drops of ink 
on blotting paper to link up into one solidly occupied belt all along 
the coast. Army troops would then start from inside this belt and push 
westward until all of Central Vietnam, north from Cap St. Jacques to the 
17th parallel and west to the Laotian and Cambodian borders, would be 
under U.S. control – a splendid idea for the armchair strategists. The 
Marines may consider themselves as drops of ink – that’s their affair. 
But our people and our armed forces don’t consider themselves as scraps 
of blotting paper. The Marines discovered that to their cost at Van 
Tuong. They have not even been able to link up their two bases at Da 
Nang and Chu Lai, or open the road between them, let alone start forming 
‘ink blots’ all along the coast. We inflicted exceptionally severe 
casualties on the Marines at Van Tuong, despite the fantastic weight of 
equipment thrown against us, in a daylight battle which lasted two days, 
our troops slipping out of the area under cover of darkness on the 
second night.”

Chan continued, explaining that the results of that first major battle 
were discussed and analyzed first at staff headquarters and then in 
Liberation Army units all over the country. The lessons learned, both 
positive and negative ones, were applied in the Ban Bang[2] <#_edn2> 
battle at Dan Tieng. (A few days previously I had been at an advanced 
headquarters with Nguyen Huu Tho on the edge of a Michelin rubber 
plantation while a major battle was going on at Dan Tieng, a few miles 
distant.)

I had brought with me some newspaper clippings of the American versions 
of several battles, including that at Ban Bang, and I had never seen 
Nguyen Huu Tho and his aides laugh so uproariously as when the President 
read them, translating the highlights into Vietnamese, noting especially 
the reports on Ban Bang. According to the first official American 
version, a battalion of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division had been engaged 
in a battle that “raged all day” and American losses were “light.” The 
following day another version said that “a reinforced battalion” had 
been engaged and that “146 Vietcong had been killed and abandoned on the 
battlefield” and another “27 had probably been killed by air and 
artillery strikes” which had continued from 7 a.m. until 5:40 p.m. 
American losses in the second version were upgraded to “moderate,” which 
meant, in the communiqué terminology of those days, between 15 and 40% 
casualties.

President Tho quickly drew a map with red and green arrows to illustrate 
what really had happened 10 days earlier on November 12, 1965.

“Two U.S. Infantry battalions, two tank squadrons and a heavy artillery 
company of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division set out from their big base at 
Lai Khe on November 11,” he said, “on the start of what was to be a big 
sweep to wipe out our main force units in the area. This was to form one 
flank of an operation, the code name of which was ‘Construction Ten.’ 
They hoped to open up some highways in the area once they had dealt with 
our main force units. Details of the operation were known to us. Their 
troops moved cautiously down Highway 13 and by nightfall had taken up 
positions in a rubber plantation near Bau Bang village. Our troops were 
ordered to wipe them out that night. They moved swiftly to the area, but 
it took some time to locate all the American positions as these were 
strung out over two kilometers along the highway. But by half an hour 
before dawn, all their units were located and surrounded. The order to 
attack was given and the Americans were taken completely by surprise. 
Within the first minutes, their command post and communications center 
were wiped out and this added to their confusion and panic. At the same 
time another of our units attacked the U.S. artillery positions at Lai 
Khe, silencing the guns there. An American reinforcing unit set out from 
Lai Khe when the shooting at Bau Bang was heard, but the greater part 
turned back, presumably because they heard our mortars firing at Lai Khe 
and noticed there was no returning fire from their own artillery.

“Within half an hour, the greater part of the units at Bau Bang were 
destroyed. They had 36 tanks there, and another three arrived with that 
part of the reinforcing unit which continued from Lai Khe. The survivors 
from our first assault scrambled aboard these tanks and tried to flee, 
but our men rushed the tanks and in close-in fighting with machine guns, 
bazookas, grenades and satchel charges, they wiped out 37 of the tanks 
on the spot. Two that escaped this encounter were destroyed by one of 
our ambush units set up for the heavy reinforcements we had expected 
from Lai Khe. All ten artillery pieces were destroyed before they could 
fire a shot, and before the sun was up, virtually the whole American 
task force was out of action. We estimate their total casualties were 
around 2,000.

“Because we destroyed the communications center within the first few 
minutes, the divisional headquarters seemed to have no idea what had 
happened. Planes were late on the scene and the artillery which was 
supposed to support this unit – apart from that at Lai Khe which was 
destroyed – started firing only when the action was over. By the time 
the attack planes arrived, our troops had already withdrawn, laden with 
whatever they could carry of the captured heavy and automatic weapons. 
Around 8 a.m., and not 7 a.m. as their accounts say, fighter-bombers 
came over and started circling. After a while they seem to have 
concluded that their own dead and wounded lying around the battlefield 
were our troops, hiding in the grass and undergrowth. They had no 
ground-air radio contact because they had nothing operational left on 
the ground. Our troops were marching off with all their communications 
equipment. They started bombing the battlefield, bombing their own dead 
and wounded. Then their artillery joined in. The battle that ‘raged all 
day’ according to their communiqué never took place except that between 
their own planes and artillery and their own dead and wounded It was not 
until late in the afternoon that two puppet battalions entered the area 
to collect what was left of the two American battalions. Nguyen Van Chan 
can fill in any other details you might want,” concluded President Tho, 
“because he was on the spot and helped direct the battle.”

Chan began by saying that until the Bau Bang battle, NLF units in that 
area had not had much contact with the U.S. combat units. “We had only 
studied the analyzes and experiences passed on by units on other fronts. 
But our troops had confidence in the tactical and technical instructions 
passed on by the high command, based mainly on the Van Tuong battle, 
even for such complicated and dangerous tactics as close in fights with 
tanks and hand-to-hand fighting to rob the enemy of his air and 
artillery superiority. We had practiced these tactics for months past in 
our training bases and in encounters with puppet troops with whatever 
tanks and artillery they had but in the Bau Bang battle, our lads went 
over to real, practical application of their theoretical studies. They 
are most enthusiastic about the results. The U.S. troops don’t seem to 
have been physically or psychologically prepared for hand-to-hand 
fighting. Probably they never thought it would be necessary; the bombs 
and shells would do the work at long range for them.

“At Bau Bang we saw how the American troops thought only of saving 
themselves –abandoning terrain, their armored vehicles and even their 
weapons, something our men would never do, the moment we launched 
attacks at close quarters. On many occasions, they refused hand-to-hand 
combat. They turned their backs, bellowing like oxen, and became easy 
targets for our men using their bayonets or light automatics. Because it 
had taken more time than we had allowed to locate all their 
dispositions, the battle started later than intended and spilled over 
into the early daylight hours. But even when the first reconnaissance 
planes came, they could do nothing because we were completely integrated 
with what American troops were still left.”

I asked Chan how he evaluated the leadership of the U.S. troops. He said 
it would be incorrect to generalize on the basis of one battle, 
especially as it was a surprise night attack. But he also pointed out 
that the U.S. 1st Infantry Division was considered one of the best, an 
elite unit, especially powerful in motorized units and 40-mm mortar 
teams and with a high proportion of ultra rapid automatic arms. “But 
what we noted from the moment of our attack,” said Chan, “and I was sent 
there by our high command just to note such things, was that the command 
post was in complete disorder and coordination between infantry and the 
motorized units was nonexistent. Tanks, when they got under way at all, 
moved aimlessly about and quickly lost their mobility among the trees, 
to be destroyed one after another by our special tank-destruction teams. 
One of our 10-man squads put 11 tanks out of action, while another 
combat trio put a tank crew out of action, then jumped aboard and turned 
the tank’s heavy machine guns against what was left of that tank unit, 
forcing them to break formation and present easy targets for our own 
antitank teams and their bazookas. In our summing-up discussion later, 
our troops had much praise for the quality of the study classes where we 
had analyzed the enemy’s weak points in technique, their machines as 
well as their men. They found our evaluations were really very close to 
the mark. The conclusions we had drawn were home out to the letter on 
the battlefield.

“One of the greatest weaknesses of the Americans, judged by the Bau Bang 
battle, is the lack of creative leadership of the officers, their 
inability to adapt themselves quickly to surprise situations, and the 
lack of /esprit de corps/ among the men. This was something especially 
noted by our troops. In tough situations where success or defeat depends 
on men acting as a unit, they have an ‘every man for himself’ attitude 
which is perhaps a reflection of their individualistic social system, 
but in military situations is disastrous.

“The greatest difference between their troops and ours, however, is 
ideological,” Chan concluded. “Before the Bau Bang action, the U.S. 
divisional commander issued an ‘Order of the Day’ which we captured. It 
praised the victories the division had won in two world wars and boasted 
of the splendid ultramodern weapons with which it was equipped. But this 
didn’t help. Traditions are no substitute for ideology. Recalling the 
past in purely military terms could not inject the quality of morale 
which our politically conscious soldiers have to a high degree, and this 
was manifest in all stages of the action. In addition, the greater part 
of enemy troops killed were young men in their early 20s. We learned 
this from their personal documents. Despite the division’s traditions, 
individually the men had had no previous combat experience, and 
collectively they had no cause for which to sacrifice themselves. Our 
men were burning to get to grips with the enemy, while the latter 
dreaded the face-to-face encounter. Thus, despite their equipment, much 
of it our equipment now, they could not withstand the withering attacks 
of our troops.”

Nguyen Huu Tho said that reports coming in from the most distant comers 
of the country were of the same order and that some preliminary, general 
conclusions had been drawn by the Liberation Army high command to the 
effect that U.S. troops lacked combat spirit, solidarity and physical 
endurance. “They march badly. With their helicopters they get to the 
scene quickly but once there they move like snails. What seems to be an 
advantage, the ability of the helicopters to bring them everything from 
bullets to canned turkey and drinking water, turns into a disadvantage 
when the helicopters cannot land because of our heavy ground fire or 
because fog has blotted out the tree tops and landing patches. At the 
rate their troops use up supplies, even a few hours’ delay with the 
helicopters has turned into a disaster for them.”

Concerning the quality of the U.S. high command, Nguyen Van Chau said 
the most striking characteristics were “passivity and very limited 
strategic initiative; hesitation between tendencies to concentrate 
troops for offensive operations and to disperse them in holding or 
‘Pacification’ duties; inability to defend effectively their own bases 
and positions, and lack of vigor in attack. “Of all the surprises the 
Americans have brought with them,” Chau stated, “the biggest and most 
agreeable for us is the great disparity between the high quality of the 
equipment and the poor quality of strategic and tactical command of the 
officers and men. With us it is just the opposite, and we believe that 
the decisive factor is men and morale and correct leadership.”

“Battles are sometimes compared to a game of chess,” said Nguyen Huu 
Tho. “But war in South Vietnam is certainly not a game of chess. When 
the Pentagon decided to commit U.S. troops, it did so because they had 
already lost the ‘special war.’ In a game of chess if you lose one game, 
you sweep the chess board clean, each side gathers up his men and you 
start again. Not so in war. When the Americans moved in their own troops 
in the ‘limited war,’ they moved into a situation in which our men were 
already in position on the chessboard – a winning position They moved 
into a situation dominated by us, one in which, in military terms, we 
held the strategic initiative. They had only a very limited freedom of 
choice as to where they could place their pawns and generals. They could 
not draw a line and say to us ‘south of this is yours, north of it is 
ours; let’s fight and see who wins.’ They could only move into those 
positions that the crumbling puppet army had still been able to hold, 
and a few more for which the Americans were willing to pay a high price 
to secure and a higher price still to hold. Whatever positions they 
secured were immediately encircled by our forces.

“One of the decisive factors,” continued President Nguyen Huu Tho, “is 
obviously going to be on whose terms the war is to be waged. If the 
Americans could impose their terms, our armed forces would quickly be 
finished. We have no planes, no naval vessels, no tanks, no heavy 
artillery. But since we are masters of the situation, we will impose our 
terms. It is we who will decide where, when and how the decisive battles 
will take place. The Americans must fight on our terms, not we on 
theirs. Even where they take a tactical initiative, within each of their 
offensive operations, it is our forces that decide when, where and how 
to give battle. The Americans have to pay the penalty of being 
aggressors in a land where everything is hostile to them, man above all, 
but nature and climate also. Many foreign correspondents are overwhelmed 
when they see the staggering amount of equipment the Americans are 
massing on our soil. Even those who have some sympathy toward us 
conclude that we will quickly be crushed under the enormous weight of 
military technique. But how does this help when, as Chau here has 
experienced, their men do not dare to stand up to ours in hand-to-hand 
encounters where superior morale is decisive? And we will force them to 
fight that way. We will give them no choice whether to concentrate or 
disperse. If they want to disperse, we will force them to concentrate. 
If it suits them better to concentrate we will force them to disperse. 
Even if at times they seem to have a tactical initiative it is we who 
will retain the strategic initiative, and within their tactical 
initiatives it is our forces which will retain the initiative of action.”

These analyzes of the fundamental factors relating to the military 
struggle by President Nguyen Huu Tho and staff officer Chau still remain 
valid. Apart from the obvious ideological factors, there were basic 
differences between the military training, tactics and psychology of 
U.S. and NLF troops which favored the latter. American troops were 
trained for a war in which one rarely saw the adversary at close range, 
at most over the sights of a machine gun or rifle or as death had caught 
him. And death came from afar, from the blast of bombs or shells, from 
an air run over map coordinates, the split-second view of an adversary 
in a machine gun sight or even as blobs on radar screens.

Artillery and planes were supposed to do the main work, troops sweeping 
ahead aboard tanks and armored troop carriers, leaping earthward when 
necessary to mop up survivors from air and artillery strikes, then back 
into armor and transport and on again. Everything from the comics to the 
TV screens and their own military training had prepared them for such a 
war, in which technology dominated tactics. This was especially true of 
the first combat divisions to arrive in South Vietnam. Instead they 
found themselves called upon to fight in man-to-man combat, which 
nullified their technological superiority.

Precisely because of their dependence upon a monopoly of air power and 
artillery, American troops were deprived of this advantage by the NLF’s 
“grab the enemy by the belt” tactics. NLF combat training was oriented 
around the necessity of countering the adversary’s monopoly of air 
power, tanks and artillery. U.S. combat training was oriented around the 
facts of air, tank and artillery support. Furthermore, motivation of 
troops must be taken into account. If the deepest desire of most U.S. 
soldiers was never to see a live “Vietcong” at close quarters, the 
deepest desire of most NLF soldiers was to confront live Americans at 
close quarters. Virtually every one of them had what they call some 
personal “blood debts to settle.” They wanted to settle accounts for 
villages bombed and relatives killed by the faceless, unreachable enemy 
that streaked down from the skies and disappeared back into the blue; 
for family members arrested, tortured, executed according to lists and 
orders drawn up over the years by American advisers sitting in air 
conditioned Saigon offices. Most NLF fighters had an accumulation of 
personal hatred that they wanted to get out of their systems in a very 
personal way. They had felt frustrated for years at never getting to 
grips with the real enemy, and welcomed the chance when tactics dictated 
hand-to-hand fighting as the best way of preventing the enemy from using 
his planes and artillery.

Tactics of U.S. troops, once battle was joined, were to put as great a 
distance as possible between themselves and the enemy so that the bombs 
and shells could do the fighting; to “disengage,” as the U.S. briefing 
officers in Saigon expressed it, “to run for their lives,” as the NLF 
troops would say. But the only way to deal with hand-to-hand fighting is 
to face up to it, man to man, bayonet to bayonet, knife to knife if 
necessary. The first to break and turn his back is doomed. And it was 
neither in the NLF interests nor in their character to be the first to 
break. The very first major confrontation between U.S. and NLF troops 
revealed serious weaknesses among the American troops, even in such 
matters as classic infantry training, not to mention the question of 
morale, according to the sober evaluations of NLF staff officers.

Truong Ky, the regimental political officer quoted previously, put his 
finger on another weakness of the U.S. Command. This was “subjectivism,” 
he said. “It crops up all the time in U.S. planning and battlefield 
operations. They always overestimate their own strength and 
underestimate ours. That is an error we never make. If we were unable to 
make a fairly precise estimate of the enemy’s real strength and 
capacities for each operation, we would soon be in real trouble.” This 
latter conversation took place in August 1966, during my fourth visit to 
the NLF controlled areas, when there were already rumors that U.S. 
forces would be built up to around 500,000 in 1967. I asked if this 
would not overtax NLF strength.

“No,” replied Truong Ky, “because the Americans will in fact be less 
effective with 500,000 troops than with the 250,000 they had for their 
1965-66 dry season operations.”

Would not, I inquired, the American mobile forces, that is, units 
available for offensive operations, increase proportionately to the 
total force committed?

“Not under our conditions,” he replied, “because we will continue to 
encircle and hug their bases wherever they establish them. Our forces 
are also constantly increasing in quantity and quality. As we get 
stronger, they will need proportionately more to defend those bases, 
including new bases needed to supply any big increase in their troops. 
They are operating 10,000 kilometers from their own rear. Problems of 
transport and unloading stores and shifting them around the country once 
they are unloaded are already giving them headaches with 300,000 men. 
Keeping the garrison bases supplied is already a problem for them, but 
distributing supplies to the battlefield when we control the rear and 
the areas immediately surrounding the battlefield is even worse. 
Doubling the number of troops under such conditions means more than 
doubling their problems. We will force them to disperse their troops and 
hog them down in static defense positions so that their mobile forces 
will get progressively smaller, not bigger.

When I asked President Nguyen Huu Tho how he viewed the possibility of 
the Pentagon increasing its forces to 500,000 or more, he replied as 
follows: “We believe the strength of an army in time of war is composed 
of a great number of factors of which the determinant ones are political 
and moral. We have absolute supremacy over the Americans on the 
political and moral front. Our entire people wage this war and do not 
shrink from any difficulty or sacrifice. We are also stronger than the 
Americans in other fundamental aspects of the struggle, such as our 
strategic position, our rear areas, our actual conduct of the war. Our 
ground forces are superior to theirs; these are factors

that decide the outcome on the battlefield. Although the Americans are 
strong in material and equipment, they also have fundamental weaknesses, 
politically and materially, strategically and tactically.

“Because of their overseas commitments and their policy of world 
domination, total American power is not unlimited. The fact that they 
are engaged in a war of aggression thousands of miles from their own 
country, their inability to transform any part of our territory into a 
stable base for themselves, represents serious weakness…

“We can successfully stand up to new American reinforcements and 
militarily defeat the American aggressors in any situation whatsoever. 
In fact, just as it is obviously true that the Americans cannot bring 
off a military victory in South Vietnam, it is also obvious to us that 
the South Vietnamese people and its armed forces can bring off the final 
victory, despite U.S. military and economic strength”

Truong Ky added that when they spoke of “final victory,” this meant an 
“independent and sovereign South Vietnam, democratic and neutral without 
any foreign troops on our soil. We are not seeking to impose a military 
defeat on the U.S. as such,” he said. “If they want to withdraw and call 
it their victory, they can do so. We won’t even argue about who won. Our 
independence is prize enough. For this we win fight to the end-and win.”

*Notes.*

[1] <#_ednref1> The battle of Ap Bac, in My Tho Province of the Mekong 
Delta, was fought on Jan. 1, 1963, and was considered by the U.S.-Saigon 
Command as the biggest defeat sustained by the government troops till 
that time.

[2] <#_ednref2> Ban Bang is in Binh Duong Province, about 32 miles due 
north of Saigon.

*NEXT: Chapter 7 – Military Realities *

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