TÁi xáC ĐỊnh giá trị quân lực việt nam cộng hòA
Chunk 4: Perennial Problems
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- Điều hướng trang này:
- Sidebar: Nguyen Van Thieu
- Chunk 5: Lam Son 719
- Chunk 6: A War That Was Won
Chunk 4: Perennial Problems Three important problems confronted the ARVN throughout the war: insufficient qualified leadership, widespread corruption, and desertions. Leadership in adequate amounts of sufficient quality continued to be a problem for ARVN throughout the war. Given the continuing expansion of the forces, finally reaching a peak of 1.1 million men, the situation could not have been otherwise. Combat losses, themselves a testimonial to South Vietnam’s small unit leaders, of course further aggravated the shortages caused by expanding the structure. Strenuous training and recruitment campaigns were undertaken to produce new leaders and move up those proved effective in combat. After Lam Son 719, for example, General Abrams attended a ceremony in Hue. “It really was something,” he later told the staff. “They had a promotion thing, and noncoms got promoted. And noncoms to aspirants. And aspirants that had been noncoms going to first lieutenant. And President Thieu said up there that this was just a token - that there were 5,000 promotions involved, down right in the ranks. And these promotions are real battlefield promotions.” Abrams liked what he had seen. “They’re what happened in Laos,” he noted. “And I just don’t know of any way to get to a military organization any better than going down and promoting some guys that did a good job.”29 (This approach of developing effective leaders from scratch was also undertaken with respect to elected civilian hamlet and village officials, who were put through a course in the training center at Vung Tau designed to help them develop the management and leadership skills they would need to do their jobs.) Some of South Vietnam’s most senior leaders were among the least forgiving critics of the leadership. Wrote General Cao Van Vien after the war: “During the decade I served as chairman of the RVNAF Joint General Staff, I had witnessed all the successes and failures of our leadership. Even though this leadership had done its best, it still proved inadequate for this most difficult episode of our nation’s history.”30 Desertions from ARVN divisions also plagued the South Vietnamese throughout the war. Significantly, however, these were not desertions to join the other side, but largely to escape combat or just to go home. They differed radically from the cases of deserters from the Viet Cong and NVA. Ralliers to the government from the enemy side in many cases became part of the allied armed forces. Deserters on the allied side, in contrast, often rejoined their own side at a local level. As Anthony Joes observed, this phenomenon constituted “a shift of manpower from the army to the militia. Among the militia units defending their native villages or provinces,” he noted, “desertion rates were close to zero, despite casualty rates higher than ARVN’s.”31 Corruption was another problem never really solved, although the impact of it on the outcome of the war was never as significant as critics claimed. General Cao Van Vien, however, concluded: “As to corruption, although it was not directly accountable for the collapse of the nation, its effect certainly debilitated professional competency and[,] by extension, the war effort.”32 CIA’s Tom Polgar commented perceptively on the matter, arguing that the country “could have survived with a corrupt South Vietnamese government, just as the Philippines survived with a corrupt Philippine government - or South Korea does - or Thailand - or anywhere. In any country where you do not pay your civil service adequately, you can expect corruption,” said Polgar. “It’s a way of life.” But, he continued, “that was not the trouble. The trouble was that there was just no margin in the resources of that government to cope with a military invasion.”33 Colonel William LeGro, who was there until the last days with the Defense Attach’ Office, agreed. “Corruption was not the cause of the collapse,” he stated. “The reduction to almost zero of United States support was the cause.” LeGro added one further observation: “We did a terrible thing to the South Vietnamese.”34 Sidebar: Nguyen Van Thieu This sidebar is about the late Nguyen Van Thieu, South Vietnam’s former President and de facto commander-in-chief of its armed forces. President Thieu led his country during years of exceptional difficulty. While fighting against an external invasion and an internal insurgency, both supported and supplied by China and the Soviet Union, he put in place elected governments from the national level down through villages and hamlets, greatly expanded and - with American materiel and advisory support - improved the armed forces as they progressively took over the entire combat burden from withdrawing U.S. forces, personally led a pacification program which rooted out the covert infrastructure that had through coercion and terror dominated the rural population, instituted genuine land reform which gave 400,000 farmers title to 2.5 million acres of land, and organized four million citizens into a People’s Self-Defense Force armed with 600,000 weapons. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, who headed the American embassy in Saigon for six years, saw a great deal of Nguyen Van Thieu and formed some settled judgments of the man and his performance. “He has handled problems with a very considerable astuteness and skill,” Bunker observed. “He is an individual of very considerable intellectual capacity. He made the decision in the beginning to follow the constitutional road, not to rule with a clique of generals, which many of them expected he would do. He has been acting more and more like a politician [Bunker meant this as a compliment], getting out into the country, following up on pacification, talking to people, seeing what they want.” Bunker approved, and on another occasion compared the President to his principal rival for political leadership. “I thought that Thieu was a wiser, more solid person,” Bunker stated.35 Thieu was also realistic, telling Ambassador Bunker that “unfortunately we do not have many real generals who know how to command more than a division,” a category in which he modestly but accurately included himself.36 Given that most of the administrative ability in his country resided in the military establishment, and most of the political power as well, Thieu was agonizingly constrained in replacing the corrupt and the incompetent in high places, and likewise felt himself obliged to retain some who were loyal, if not all that able. Early in his presidency Thieu explained the situation to a senior American officer who reported the conversation this way: “Judging a wholesale purge of South Vietnamese officers as simply impossible, Thieu warned that each major command change would have to be carefully planned and orchestrated. The army could not be removed from politics overnight. The military establishment had been and still was his major political supporter and the only cohesive force holding the country together.”37 Ambassador Bunker and General Abrams understood this, and were both patient and sympathetic, but they also made very pointed recommendations about senior officers who were not measuring up. Often their advice was accepted, even if some time elapsed while the political groundwork was laid. Over time, then, some major changes took place in South Vietnamese leadership, both civil and military, sometimes forced by battlefield crises. But there was never a wholesale housecleaning, nor could there have been. Not only would political chaos have resulted, but the requisite numbers of more viable replacements were simply not available. Producing them in the necessary abundance would have taken more time than there turned out to be. The top Americans recognized President Thieu’s importance in, particularly, the pacification campaign. Abrams observed that “he knows more about pacification than any other Vietnamese” and William Colby called him “the number one pacification officer.” A history of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff identified as Thieu’s most important attribute that “he recognized clearly the cardinal importance of the pacification campaign and of the establishment of effective institutions of local government.”38 On a number of occasions Thieu invited Ambassador Bunker to go along on visits to the countryside, where Bunker heard him emphasize restoring local government, holding village and hamlet elections, training local government officials, and land reform. At Vung Tau 1,400 village chiefs, representing about three-quarters of all the villages in South Vietnam, went through training during the first nine months of 1969. President Thieu visited every one of those classes, giving the village chiefs the incomparable cachet of being able to go home and speak about what “President Thieu said to me -.” By late 1969 the situation had improved so dramatically that John Paul Vann, the legendary figure who played a prominent role in the pacification campaign, would tell an audience at Princeton that the “U.S. has won the military war, and is winning the political war via Thieu.”39 In April 1968 President Thieu, against the advice of virtually all his advisors, activated what was called the People’s Self-Defense Force. Thieu argued that “the government had to rest upon the support of the people, and it had little validity if it did not dare to arm them.” Ultimately some four million people, those too old or too young for regular military service, were enrolled in the self-defense force and armed with 600,000 weapons. Establishing conclusively that the Thieu government did have the support of its own people, the self-defense forces used those weapons not against their own government but to fight against communist domination. In document after document the enemy kept predicting and calling for a “popular uprising” amongst the South Vietnam, but in fact there was never any popular uprising in support of the enemy in South Vietnam. To any objective observer that does not seem too surprising in view of the enemy’s record, year after year, of assassinations, kidnappings, terror bombings, impressments, and indiscriminate shellings of population centers throughout South Vietnam, actions hardly calculated to win the hearts and minds of the victims. In October of 1971, in the midst of a bitter war, President Thieu ran unopposed for reelection. Many criticized him for that, suggesting that his victory was somehow not legitimate given the absence of opposition. But in that election, despite enemy calls for a boycott and warnings that voters would be targetted, an astounding 87.7 percent of eligible voters went to the polls, and 91.5 percent of them cast their ballots for President Thieu. (Some 5.5 percent handed in invalid ballots.)40 That constituted the largest voter turnout in Vietnamese history. If it didn’t matter (since there was no opposition), or if the people did not approve of Thieu’s leadership, why would they turn out in droves, often at real or potential personal risk, to express their support for his reelection? The answer is that, various critics notwithstanding, a very large majority of his countrymen valued Thieu’s service and wished to see him continue in office. “The basic fact of life,” said John Paul Vann in January 1972, “and it is an inescapable one, is that the overwhelming majority of the population - somewhere around 95 percent - prefer the government of Vietnam to a communist government or the government that’s being offered by the other side.” 41 Sadly, many South Vietnamese today are critical in their outlook on President Thieu. I have spoken about this with many Vietnamese friends now living in America. Recently one man in particular, an intelligent and educated person, shocked me by saying that the Vietnamese think President Thieu lied to them. I asked him in what way. “He knew the Americans were going to abandon us, and he didn’t tell us that,” responded my friend. I find that a harsh judgment, and a debatable one. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker recalled personally giving President Thieu three letters from President Nixon in which “he made a commitment” to come to the assistance of South Vietnam “in case of any major violation of the treaties by the other side.” But, observed Bunker, “the Congress…made it impossible to carry out those commitments.” The result? “I think really it was a betrayal of the South Vietnamese,” Bunker stated unequivocally.42 It is difficult for me to understand how President Thieu could be expected to have foreseen such an ignominious course of American action. Mr. Thieu resigned the presidency a few days before the fall of Saigon, hoping to facilitate a negotiated settlement of the war. In his valedictory, he was understandably bitter about the outcome of the long years of struggle. That performance alone should serve to demonstrate that he was as stunned as any that the sometime American ally would, in a time of such crisis, turn its back on South Vietnam (and on all the sacrifices Americans had made there). My view is that Nguyen Van Thieu performed heroically over long years of an extremely difficult war, in the process earning - whether he is accorded them or not - the respect and gratitude of all those who wished South Vietnam well. Chunk 5: Lam Son 719 Virtually all accounts of Lam Son 719, ARVN’s 1971 incursion into Laos, depict it as a devastating defeat for the South Vietnamese. The reality, however, is quite different. We now know, thanks to the Abrams tapes and other sources, that the North Vietnamese were badly hurt by the operation, further delaying their readiness to mount a major offensive against the South and providing additional time for Vietnamization to succeed. At the WIEU on 30 January the first indications that the enemy sensed an impending cross-border operation were reported. That was eight days before the operation was scheduled to begin. “COMINT [communications intelligence] reveals the enemy’s concern over anticipated friendly operations in northern MR-1 [Military Region 1] and the contiguous areas of Laos,” reported a briefer. Messages intercepted since 24 January reflected enemy concern that South Vietnamese forces “might strike across the border in an effort to interdict the enemy’s logistic corridor system.” There were other indications that the enemy was concerned about an amphibious invasion of North Vietnam, about an invasion of Laos from carriers standing off the coast, and so on.43 On 8 February ARVN elements crossed the border into Laos, using the east-west axis of Route 9. The attacking force comprised armor, airborne, ranger, marine and infantry units. By the end of the first week some 10,600 ARVN troops were in Laos. At the same time, two other ARVN cross-border operations involving 19,000 troops continued in Cambodia.44 When Admiral McCain, the CINCPAC, came out for a briefing on 19 February, the briefer told him that “in Laos, the ground contacts have remained at a relatively light level, with company-size and smaller contacts reported throughout the AO. Also, attacks by fire have remained at a relatively low level.” As of that date MACV was carrying six enemy regiments committed against ARVN forces in Laos. No American forces were permitted on the ground in Laos, but U.S. elements flying air support had thus far lost 21 helicopters while flying nearly 7,000 sorties. (By the end of the operation, six weeks later, losses would have risen to 108 for a loss rate of 21 per 100,000 45 sorties.)45 Major General William E. Potts, the MACV J-2, summed up for Admiral McCain: “The real significance of that Lam Son operation is the enemy has everything committed, or en route, that he has, with the exception of the 325th Division and the 9th Regiment out of the 304th. So if they’re hurt, he’s really going to be beat for a long time.” Added General Abrams: “And of course we’re trying to welcome them all, best we can.”46 Still, by 20 February, nearly two weeks into the operation, only six enemy regiments were committed in the Lam Son AO. In fact, stated the briefer at a Commanders WIEU on that date, “the first significant enemy counterattack occurred on the night of 18 February.” Meanwhile ARVN had about an equivalent force, eighteen battalion-size task forces, continuing search and clear operations.47 General Abrams emphasized to the staff and subordinate commanders the importance of giving the South Vietnamese every thing they needed to succeed in this crucial battle. “It’s an opportunity to deal the enemy a blow which probably hasn’t existed before as clearly cut in the war,” he stressed. In a comment that would later prove significant, when certain recriminations were advanced in Washington, Abrams also noted: “The risks in getting it done were all known and understood in the beginning, and it was felt that it was time to take the risks.” Ambassador Bunker then reviewed all the elements taken into account in the course of such an evaluation during his recent visit to Washington.48 By 24 February MACV was still carrying six enemy regiments (a figure increased to seven three days later) in the Lam Son AO and the briefer at an update for General Abrams stated that four enemy battalions, of the eighteen subordinate to the committed regiments, were believed to have been rendered combat ineffective. As of that date enemy KIA were estimated at 2,191, while ARVN had sustained 276 KIA. 49 At this point, just over two weeks into the operation, a serious crisis of helicopter availability suddenly arose. Route 9, the east-west highway leading into the area of operations, had turned out to have many deep cuts, some reaching a depth of twenty feet, rendering the road much less useful for resupply than anticipated. In particular the 5,000-gallon fuel tankers proved unable to negotiate the route. Aerial resupply had had to take up the slack, which was in turn putting an extremely heavy burden on the helicopter fleet. Apparently intensive management and maintenance got the situation corrected, for when Lieutenant General Julian Ewell, not noted for an uncritical attitude, later visited, he reported “their OR [operational readiness] rate when I was up there Sunday was 79 percent, which I considered astronomical.”50 Simultaneously a major enemy attack, including tanks, overran Objective 31 and a brigade headquarters of the 1st ARVN Division located there. Subsequently enemy losses in that attack were reported as 250 KIA and 15 tanks destroyed against 13 friendly KIA, 39 WIA, and three armored personnel carriers damaged.51 Another enemy regiment was assessed as committed by 1 March, bringing the total to eight (and of the 24 battalions they constituted the equivalent of six were considered combat ineffective). Observed General Abrams: “It’s still a hell of a struggle.” At an update on 4 March the briefer recalled that the first indications of the enemy’s shifting to an offensive posture had come on 11 February, but that it was not until 18 February that the first major enemy counterattack occurred. Now the enemy was considered to have lost the equivalent of seven maneuver battalions in personnel losses, while his remaining tanks were down to 65 - 70 from an original 100.52 At this point the enemy was assessed as having approximately 13,000 combat forces in the area of operations, plus 8,000-10,000 rear service personnel. Opposing them ARVN had sixteen maneuver battalions.53 When a prisoner from the 24B Regiment described heavy casualties suffered in fighting along Route 92 north of Ban Dong, MACV J-2 reduced the enemy’s effective strength by two more battalions, for “a total of 10 battalions effectively lost out of the 30 battalions of the 10 regiments committed against ARVN forces in the entire AO.” Said General Abrams, “I’m just more and more convinced that what you’ve got here is maybe the only decisive battle of the war.” Added General Potts: “He’s lost half of his tanks, half of his AAA [anti-aircraft artillery], and 10 of his 30 battalions.”54 At a Commanders WIEU on 20 March Ambassador Bunker described Lam Son 719, then winding down, as “extremely helpful, this whole operation.” General Abrams responded: “It was a hard fight, but its effects for the rest of this year, I think, are going to be substantial. He [the enemy] committed a lot to that Lam Son operation, and it’s getting pretty badly hurt.”55 Just how badly was summarized on 23 March, by which time the enemy had committed an eleventh regiment. The briefer reported that nine of the eleven regiments had received heavy casualties and estimated that the enemy retained the equivalent of only 17 maneuver battalions (of the 33 committed), and that he had also lost some 3,500 rear service elements.56 When this was subsequently briefed at a WIEU, Potts added: “That’s not just ineffective battalions, sir. That’s a complete loss of those battalions.”57 The South Vietnamese also experienced severe losses, including a reported 1,446 KIA and 724 MIA.58 Much equipment was also destroyed or left behind in Laos during a somewhat precipitous final withdrawal. And in his after action assessment Lieutenant General Sutherland noted that “a long-standing shortfall has been the RVNAF staff capability to conduct timely preplanning and coordination of air assets and both air and ground fire support means, but they have learned a great deal on this operation.”59 The South Vietnamese public’s support for the operation turned out to be extraordinary. When Sir Robert Thompson visited in late March, he was briefed on results of a survey just taken in 36 provinces. The results were 92 percent in favor of operations such as Lam Son 719, 3 percent opposed, and the rest no opinion. That represented the highest percentage ever recorded on any question on any of these periodic surveys.60 Altogether ARVN operated for 42 days in Laos. MACV’s modest summary, rendered for the visiting Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor in late April, was that the operation “tested RVNAF against a determined enemy in cross-border operations, and undoubtedly interrupted his [the enemy’s] supply schedule.” 61 In the United States the operation was widely proclaimed a disaster for the South Vietnamese. Hanoi’s propagandists were only too glad to agree. Abrams, however, perceived the results of the operation as decisive in favor of the South Vietnamese. “It’s gone over [beyond] the point,” he observed, “where I think the North Vietnamese can be successful against them. The war won’t stop, but North Vietnam has now got a much tougher problem than they ever had before.”62 Chunk 6: A War That Was Won Contrary to what most people seem to believe, the new approach during the Abrams era succeeded remarkably. And, since during these later years American forces were progressively being withdrawn, more and more it was the South Vietnamese who were achieving that success. As control of more and more territory was seized from the enemy, large numbers of enemy “rallied” to the allied side. This reached a peak of 47,000 in 1969, with another 32,000 crossing over in 1970.63 Given the authorized 8,689 strength of a North Vietnamese Army division,64 this amounted to enemy losses by defection equivalent to about nine divisions in those two years alone. There came a point at which the war was won. The fighting wasn’t over, but the war was won. The reason it was won was that the South Vietnamese had achieved the capacity to, with promised American support (similar to the support still being rendered to American allies in West Germany and South Korea), maintain their independence and freedom of action. As early as late 1969 John Paul Vann, a senior official in the pacification program, wrote to former Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge to say that “for the first time in my involvement in Vietnam, I am not interested in visiting either Washington or Paris because all of my previous visits have been with the intention of attempting to influence or change the policies for Vietnam. Now I am satisfied with the policies. In spite of ourselves,” Vann wrote with impressive prescience, “I believe we are accomplishing our objectives, that we will practically eliminate the tragedy of additional US deaths in Vietnam beyond 1972 and that the costs of the war (a war which I think will continue indefinitely) will be drastically reduced and will eventually be manageable by the Vietnamese with our logistical and financial assistance.”65 Besides taking over combat responsibilities from the departing Americans, the South Vietnamese had to deal with multiple changes in policy. General Abrams was clear on how the South Vietnamese were being asked to vault higher and higher hurdles. “We started out in 1968,” he recalled. “We were going to get these people by 1974 where they could whip hell out of the VC—the VC. Then they changed the goal to lick the VC and the NVA—in South Vietnam. Then they compressed it. They’ve compressed it about three times, or four times— acceleration. So what we started out with to be over this kind of time” - indicating with his hands a long time - “is now going to be over this kind of time”—much shorter. “And if it’s VC, NVA, interdiction, helping Cambodians and so on - that’s what we’re working with. And,” Abrams cautioned, “you have to be careful on a thing like this, or you’ll get the impression you’re being screwed. You mustn’t do that, ‘cause it’ll get you mad.”66 Among the most crucial of the policy changes was dropping longstanding plans for a U.S. residual force to remain in South Vietnam indefinitely in a solution comparable to that adopted in western Europe and South Korea. After a three-year absence from Vietnam, Thomas J. Barnes returned to work in the pacification program in the autumn of 1971. “I have been struck by three principal improvements,” he told General Fred Weyand, “rural prosperity, the way the Regional and Popular Forces have taken hold, and growing political and economic autonomy in the villages. One of our greatest contributions to pacification has been the re-establishment of the village in its historic Vietnamese role of relative independence and self-sufficiency.”67 Even earlier, in mid-March 1971, it was apparent that it was the South Vietnamese who were carrying the combat load. “The emphasis General Abrams is putting on it now is almost a hundred percent towards pacification and into this saturation campaign,” a briefer told Lieutenant General Ewell. “We’re just about out of business in large U.S. force operations.” Testimony from the enemy side was confirmatory of what the South Vietnamese had achieved. “In Nam Bo,” wrote Luu Van Loi and Nguyen Anh Vu in a book published by Hanoi’s World Publishing House, “by the end of 1968 the strategic hamlets and contested areas had been reoccupied by the Saigon army.” And: “By the end of 1968, we had suffered great losses.” And: “The enemy concentrated its forces to pacify the rural areas, causing great difficulties to us in 1969-1970.” “Since the introduction of U.S. troops into South Vietnam, we had never met with so many difficulties as in these two years. Our bases in the countryside were weakened, our positions shrank. Our main [force] troops were decimated and no longer had footholds in South Vietnam and had to camp in friendly Cambodia.” And finally: “We fell into a critical situation in the years 1969, 1970, 1971. From the second half of 1968 on, the enemy concentrated their attacks against the liberated zone to annihilate and drive away our main forces.”68 In January 1972 Vann told friends that “we are now at the lowest level of fighting the war has ever seen. Today there is an air of prosperity throughout the rural areas of Vietnam, and it cannot be denied. Today the roads are open and the bridges are up, and you run much greater risk traveling any road in Vietnam today from the scurrying, bustling, hustling Hondas and Lambrettas than you do from the VC.” And, added Vann, “this program of Vietnamization has gone kind of literally beyond my wildest dreams of success.”69 Those were South Vietnamese accomplishments. 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