Historian Christopher Goscha had an essay published in the New York Times yesterday (7 February 2017) entitled “The 30-Years War in Vietnam.” This essay is about the wars that took place in Vietnam between 1945 and 1975. Goscha has recently published a survey of Vietnamese history, and the essay in the New York Times is based on his more detailed coverage of that same period in that book.

Goscha’s survey is called Vietnam: A New History, and it is indeed a “new” history. It is a history that is based on Goscha’s own research, but also on his extensive reading of the new scholarship that has emerged in the past 30 years in “the West.”

What makes this recent scholarship on Vietnamese history “new”? First, it has largely been researched and written by a generation that did not directly experience the war years, and this “distance” from the object of study has enabled these scholars to maintain a level of objectivity that was at times difficult for scholars in the past.

Second, the scholars who have produced this body of scholarship 1) can read Vietnamese, and 2) base their research on archival work in Vietnam, two elements that were too often absent in a good deal of earlier scholarship, particularly scholarship on the war years.

I realize that a lot of people are unaware of this new scholarship, and that as a result, when they read something like Goscha’s New York Times essay, they might not be able to see what is actually new in what he wrote. So to make that clear, I’ve gone through his essay and added some comments. Some of the points I’m saying are new might be ones that people have “heard” of before, but Goscha’s writing is based on what has been “documented” (and the citations in his book are spectacular!).

That is a very important distinction. It is one thing to sit in a café or a bar and talk about the past, but it is something entirely different to go to an archive, carefully read through documents, and to then record what one finds there in a (peer-reviewed) published text. Goscha’s writing, both in this essay and in his book, is based on that type of painstaking research (his own and that of many others), not on café or bar talk.

So let’s see what Goscha wrote about “The 30-Years War in Vietnam.” What follows is Goscha’s article. I have placed my comments in bold and in brackets.






Colonial War

Without World War II, the struggle in Vietnam might have played out very differently [He’s countering the idea, found in many older works (both Vietnamese and French/American) that the Communists’ rise to power was inevitable. David Marr’s Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power thoroughly demonstrated that this was definitely not the case.].

The Japanese had occupied French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) in 1940, and they left the fascist Vichy French government, allied with Tokyo’s German partner after the fall of France in 1940, in charge of day-to-day affairs. This collaboration ended in early 1945, as the Allies terminated the German hold on Europe and prepared to defeat the Japanese in Asia [shows how local events in Indochina can only be understood in a wider, even global, context. This is one of Goscha’s many strengths]. In March, worried that Vichy troops would turn on them, the Japanese overthrew the French, ending 80 years of colonialism. A few months later, the Japanese capitulated, creating a power vacuum in Vietnam.

Ho Chi Minh and his Communist-led Viet Minh nationalist front seized the opportunity. On Sept. 2, 1945, Ho proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Taking power, however, was one thing; holding onto it was another [pointing out how weak the Viet Minh’s control of the country was – a point that you will certainly not find in Vietnamese accounts of this period]. Within days, Allied troops landed to disarm Japanese forces. The British debarked in southern Indochina below the 16th parallel, while Chinese nationalist troops occupied the north. In the wings, the leader of a newly liberated France, Charles de Gaulle, ordered his men to re-establish colonial rule. Unable to maintain order, three weeks later the British allowed the French to dislodge the Viet Minh from Saigon, triggering war below the 16th parallel.

Accompanying the Chinese troops in the north were Vietnamese nationalists long opposed to Ho and his Communist Party [mentions non-Communists, a reference to the fact that there were many political players at this time]. Local Chinese commanders preferred, however, to keep Ho’s Vietnam in place in order to avoid the chaos occurring in the south [counters myths about the period that say that the Chinese wanted to take over Vietnam]. They imposed a coalition government on Ho, but did little more. This uneasy truce between Vietnamese Communist and anti-Communist nationalists broke down when the Chinese withdrew in mid-1946, leaving their allies at the mercy of the Communists, who swiftly defeated them before focusing on the French [great point! Argues that the big “problem” with the Chinese was that they demanded that HCM’s government be “plural,” and that as soon as the Chinese were gone, the Communists put an end to that limited political plurality]. Despite Ho’s sincere efforts to negotiate decolonization peacefully, the French wanted Indochina back. Full-scale war broke out in December 1946.

The French refusal to decolonize enabled the Communists to monopolize the nationalist mantle as they bogged the French down in a guerrilla war. Nationalists working with the French begged them to decolonize before it was too late [counters the myth that the Viet Minh were “the only true nationalists” and shows why other nationalists were unable to gain prominence]. But even when the French finally created the State of Vietnam in 1949, led by the ex-emperor Bao Dai, they refused to grant it full independence.

The arrival of the Cold War in Asia following the Chinese Communist victory in 1949, and the start of the Korean War a year later, strengthened the French hand. By casting themselves as the Asian front line of the free world’s struggle against global communism, the French persuaded the Americans to abandon their anticolonialism in favor of supporting France in Indochina.

This strategy came with a price, though. The French may have used the Americans, but the Americans used the French — their army, their administration, their State of Vietnam and its troops — to indirectly fight the Communists in Indochina. The United States created a Military Assistance Advisory Group in 1950, funded counterinsurgency programs and stepped up C.I.A. operations. By 1954, the Americans were paying for more than 70 percent of the French war — because it was their war, too. Chinese Communists pushed back, directly in Korea by sending in troops, and indirectly in Vietnam by sending their own advisers and arming a new regular army for Ho, the People’s Army of Vietnam, or P.A.V.N. All of this transformed Vietnam into the deadliest war of decolonization of the 20th century.

By 1954, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap commanded a divisional army and was ready to engage the French in a series of set-piece battles. This army carefully organized an epic siege of the fortified French camp at Dien Bien Phu, carrying artillery across mountainous terrain to destroy the air base supplying colonial troops. When the guns fell silent on May 7, 1954, the French Army had suffered its greatest colonial defeat since losing Quebec in 1759, and the Vietnamese Communists had proved they could fight conventional battles — and win [Notice that he says that the Viet Minh won “a battle.” He does not say that they won “a war” or that they “defeated the French.” Why he wrote this way will become clear below.]. No other 20th-century war of decolonization produced a Dien Bien Phu.

But fighting big battles came at a cost, for this type of war required the enormous mobilization of people. In 1953, Ho’s party initiated a land reform program to encourage peasants to support the war. It also harshly overturned the landed and commercial classes as part of the communization of the state. The problem was that this dual military and social revolution exhausted the population. When the Chinese joined the French to reach a cease-fire, Ho agreed that he could push his people no further. The Communists had won a battle at Dien Bien Phu, but not the war. And behind the French, Ho knew, stood the Americans. On July 21, 1954, the Communists accepted a cease-fire at Geneva that separated the country in half at the 17th parallel, with elections to follow in two years. [In a lot of scholarship, the Viet Minh have been depicted as “victims” of Cold War politics. That argument goes that since the Viet Minh “defeated the French,” they should have gained control of the entire country. However, the more powerful parties at the negotiating table (the US, the USSR, the PRC, etc.), had other issues and interest, and the Viet Minh case was “sacrificed.” Goscha is basing this passage on more recent scholarship, including his own, which shows that although the Viet Minh had won a major battle, they still did not control the cities, the population was exhausted, and they were terrified that now that the Korean War was over the Americans would get directly involved. Therefore, the division at the 17th parallel was not “imposed” on HCM and the Viet Minh, but instead, they realized that this was the best they could hope for at that time.]


Civil and Cold Wars Resume

Something else happened as the French looked to exit Indochina at Geneva. One of the few non-Communist nationalists to have refused to collaborate with both the colonialists and the Communists stepped off the fence: Ngo Dinh Diem. Bao Dai had named him prime minister in June 1954, in a last-minute bid to prevent the French from handing over Vietnam to the adversary. The Americans feared the same thing and began rapidly pivoting their support to him. [No mention here of NDD being a “puppet” of the US, or of the US “putting him in power.” Behind this paragraph is the recent work of scholars like Edward Miller and Jessica Chapman who have documented in detail the autonomy and agency that NDD possessed.]

When France and China agreed at Geneva to hold elections to unite the two Vietnams, Diem and his newly enthusiastic supporter, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, took note but signed nothing. Geneva may have ended the French war, but it did not end America’s indirect one. Instead the Americans replaced their reliance on the French colonial state to contain Communism in favor of working through an independent, non-Communist Vietnamese state led by their “miracle man.” As long as Washington did not tread on this new nation’s sovereignty and Diem did not endanger the decade-old American strategic investment in Vietnam, indirect containment could continue.

After Geneva, Communists and anti-Communists focused on taking over their respective states, consolidating their political power and promoting economic development with their allies. The Communists completed land reform in 1956 as part of plans to collectivize the economy along Soviet lines. Dissent was crushed as Ho’s party extended its Communist state to all the north. Diem ordered the French Army out and pushed Bao Dai aside as he created a republic in 1955 under his family’s authoritarian control. He neutralized religious and political groups before going after remaining Communists and anyone else who opposed him. Diem welcomed American aid and advisers, but he rejected direct military intervention. [Right, it’s not just Diem who ignored the election, HCM’s government was focusing on transforming the society in the north through land reform and anti-capitalism campaigns.]

This is where Le Duan, the veteran Communist who had run the party’s war in the south against the French, enters the picture [Until recently, Le Duan was barely mentioned in English-language writings on this period. Now thanks to the archival work of many scholars (Lien-Hang Nguyen, Pierre Asselin, Martin Grossheim, just to name a few), Le Duan has emerged as basically the most important North Vietnamese figure of the war years.]. Since Geneva, he had painted a dire picture of what was happening below the 17th parallel: Not only had Diem and the Americans rejected the idea of holding elections, but Diem’s repression was also destroying what little remained of the party’s southern network. Although Hanoi’s leaders balked at resuming war outright, unsure of Sino-Soviet support and worried that the Americans would send in troops, in 1959 Le Duan persuaded the party to intervene indirectly in the south or risk losing it forever. [This is the beginning of HCM’s loss of power, a fact that historians were not aware of in the past.]

This new strategy reactivated the Ho Chi Minh Trail to bring southward thousands of administrators (most of whom were native southerners sent north after Geneva). They formed a competing southern proto-state in the form of the National Liberation Front, created in 1960, and protected by the People’s Liberation Armed Forces — what came to be known, to its enemies, as the Viet Cong. That same year, Le Duan assumed the party’s leadership. He reactivated the Central Office of South Vietnam to run this indirect civil war to bring down Diem’s state and unify the country on Hanoi’s terms before the Americans could intervene. [This is a critical passage. So much writing in English has portrayed the Vietnam War as essentially something that the Americans instigated. While recent scholarship does not try to exonerate American actions, it nonetheless clearly documents that Le Duan (and the government that supported his policies) is equally responsible for instigating a war.]


Parallel, Direct Wars

Diem did fall, but not his state. In 1963, the Kennedy administration watched in shock as the N.L.F. greatly expanded its hold over the countryside. Diem’s half-baked counterinsurgency projects forcing millions of peasants into strategic hamlets, as well as his relentless attacks on non-Communist opponents, created the red-hot discontent on which the insurgency thrived. In June 1963, a Buddhist monk immolated himself in downtown Saigon in a sign of protest. Worried that Diem’s policies were playing into Communist hands, South Vietnamese generals sought American support for a plan to overthrow their president. The Kennedy White House approved, and on Nov. 2 and 3, 1963, a military coup ousted Diem, killing him in the process.

The question now was whether Washington or Hanoi would intervene directly. Starting in 1963, Le Duan pushed for gradual, direct military intervention, meaning the dispatch of P.A.V.N. troops southward. The hope was that, together with the N.L.F./P.L.A.F., Hanoi could take the south before the Americans could escalate. [Note that North Vietnam made the first move. Again, I mentioned that not to try to exonerate the US. Instead, what this new research does is that it counters a lot of earlier scholarship that essentially puts all of the agency for what happened in Vietnam in the hands of Americans. That was clearly not the case.]

Not everyone in the party agreed, however. Some, including Vo Nguyen Giap, advised caution, pointing out the dangers of provoking the Americans into the conflict head on especially when the Soviets were advocating superpower détente [It is only recently that historians have documented the divisions that existed among the leadership in the North at that time.]. Le Duan, however, knew that he could count on China’s Mao Zedong, who was highly critical of the Soviets and their lack of revolutionary backbone. In early 1964, the party approved direct intervention in the south.

Lyndon B. Johnson also had to choose. Would the new president continue America’s indirect war? Would he cut his country’s losses and get out? Or would he send in American troops to save the South? Like Le Duan, Johnson chose war. [Again, here you have the point that recent scholarship has made: Le Duan and the North were also belligerents in this war.]

Following an attack on an American helicopter base at Pleiku in early 1965, Johnson opened a sustained air war against Vietnamese targets above and below the 17th parallel, and authorized troops to land in the south in March. A few months later, American and P.A.V.N. troops clashed in the highland valley of Ia Drang, the first of many big battles to come. It was in the same area where P.A.V.N. regiments had decimated French mobile groups a decade earlier.

By 1967, almost 500,000 American troops were in Vietnam, as Hanoi sent its own boys southward. The second half of the 30-Years War for Vietnam was now underway, with a vengeance.