Why North Vietnam Won Their “Vietnam War”

Bryan McEntire

History 4321

Spring 2005

What determines the value of human life? What conditions create moral tolerance for extinguishing the sparks of life? The answers to these questions are as numerous as the people who ask them. But the importance of life and death to cultures both East and West can be studied in history’s barometer of human interaction: war. One war in particular, the Vietnam War, is one of the most examples of what happens when these ideals clash.

For the United States, the Vietnam War lasted about 15 years and served the broad purpose of Communist containment. It was the “continuation of political activity by other means” (Clausewitz 87). For North Vietnam, however, this fight with America represented the final chapter in a millennium long struggle for national identity. It was a “revolutionary war” (Mao 179), a struggle by the people and a matter of pride. They were willing to sacrifice anything in order to unite their country and gain freedom. They knew what the struggle would entail and by using Mao’s principles of protracted war, were uniquely prepared to defeat a foe far superior to them militarily. This is the essence of why the North won. They won because for them it was survival and for us it was politics.

In Clausewitz terms, the North Vietnamese trinity was more balanced than America’s and their strengths were matched to our weaknesses. America’s massive total means for waging war were no match for the superiority in the objectives and will by the North Vietnamese to continue the fight. This paper will first discuss how Mao’s principles of protracted war gave North Vietnam the crucial advantages of a more complete understanding of the circumstances and also a proven plan to defeat a larger enemy. Second it will discuss how the North used their superior understanding to create a political/military system to mitigate their own inferior means. And third, how they used their stronger will and tactical advantages as outlined by Mao to eliminate American troops in order to face an enemy they could defeat in a pitched battle.

The intellectual framework provided by Mao gave the North Vietnamese a proven system designed specifically to win a protracted war. An essential element in this advantage was his emphasis on intelligence. Both Mao and Clausewitz break war down into ideal laws or abstractions that the North effectively capitalized upon. They learned from Mao when he said it is important “to familiarize ourselves with all aspects of the enemy situation and our own, to discover the laws governing the actions of both sides and make use of these laws in our own operations” (Mao 187). Clausewitz also notes that, “the maximum use of force is in no way incompatible with the simultaneous use of the intellect” (75). The North Vietnamese were superior to the American forces in their implementation of intelligence. In the theater of war, the use of intelligence was manifest in the different approaches each side took towards the war. The United States, who continued to think in the conventional terms of mechanized warfare, were not adapted to a style of fighting that rejected the doctrine that “weapons decide everything”. Mao states that, “our view is opposed to this; we see not only weapons but also people,” because, “the contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale” (143). He had learned these lessons in his rise to power in China, and the framework he provided was aptly suited to the circumstances in Vietnam, a fact that the American system was unable to translate into unified political and military goals.

The North was able to extract critical advantages from this weakness. Since the war for Americans was only a piece to a global puzzle, U.S. central command placed restrictions on their troops that played a pivotal role in the North’s actions. “The president and his top advisors put precise geographical limits on the war. They kept their military commanders on a tight rein, rejecting proposals to invade enemy sanctuaries in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, mine Haiphong Harbor, and bomb near the Chinese border” (Doughty 646). These restrictions allowed the North free reign in the peripheral spheres of the South necessary to re-supply their troops via the Ho Chi Minh trail, and to recover from battle losses in their sanctuaries. This was a crucial part in their strategy because the North knew the U.S. was politically deadlocked and could do nothing, for if the U.S. chose to violate national boundaries it would mean the overstepping of authority and possibly inciting the anger of the Chinese or Soviets and a larger war of mutually assured destruction.

Armed with a greater awareness of the “state of affairs on the enemy” (Mao 190), and also with Mao’s three stages of protracted war, the North possessed the tools they needed to win against a great superpower. Fundamental to this system of war was the assumption that the enemy was larger and more powerful then they. Mao wrote that “there is no magic short-cut” to shortening the duration of the war (143). The goal of protraction in a military conflict, according to Mao, is to defeat the enemy by “disintegrating its morale by stimulating the growth of homesickness, war-weariness and even anti-war sentiment” (139). Clausewitz marks this as an important measure, stating that “wearing down the enemy in a conflict means using the duration of the war to bring about a gradual exhaustion of his physical and moral resistance” (93). This is exactly what the NVA did to Southern Vietnam. They were able to “[protract] the war, gradually chang[e] the general balance of forces and prepar[e] conditions for [their] counter offensive” (Mao 175) They knew that to fight U.S. troops in conventional mechanized battles would be suicide, but by using their knowledge of American weakness, both on the field of battle and off because of the “lack of strategic coordination” (Mao 179), they were able to break down American moral resistance and shift the tide so it was a weak and corrupt South Vietnamese regime they faced instead of a wealthy hydra.

This situation was made more complex for the Americans because not only did they have to worry about conflicts between their war aims and operational realities, but were also required to concurrently train and support the South Vietnamese army. The battle of Ap Bac is a good example not only of how the NLF exploited these weaknesses, but also of the importance of efficient communication between the three arms of the trinity. Ap Bac is significant because the NLF emerged victorious from the battle “despite their inferiority in numbers, firepower, and mobility” (Krepinevich 79). This was made possible because “the South Vietnamese commander delayed for a day giving the NLF time to learn of the operation and prepare deadly defenses” (Doughty 644). The NLF left behind three bodies before escaping to their sanctuaries while the “vastly superior ARVN forces suffered sixty-one dead and one hundred wounded” (ibid). While such tactical ineptitude was embarrassing or dishonorable for the ARVN, even more unfortunate for them was the presence of the U.S. media whose stories about the debacle, fueled by information from disgruntled military advisors, contradicted General Harkins insistence that Ap Bac had been a victory for the South because the enemy had abandoned their positions. Failures of this sort belie the tenuous relationship between the information shared with the world about the war, and the reality it was intended to reflect. Such misunderstandings about what kind of war was being fought were exactly what the NLF counted on in their strategy of protraction.

In order to unify Vietnam, it was necessary to remove the Americans from their country, and to do that they needed a way to counterbalance their inferiority in the total means to wage war. Their ability to do this again originated from their differing views of the nature of the conflict. Clausewitz sums up this advantage: “The more powerful and inspiring the motives for war… the closer will war approach its abstract concept; the more important will be the destruction of the enemy; the more closely will the military aims and the political objects of war coincide, and the more military and less political will war appear to be” (187-88). This ideal state of war was a crucial advantage for the North — not only did it reduce friction between their strategic and tactical commands, but it gave them the support of a unified populace at home and a sympathetic one in the South. This was crucial because for America and the South, the inverse was true, because, “the less intense the motives. . . the political object will be more and more at variance with the aim of ideal war, and the conflict will seem increasingly political in character” (ibid). Morale and willpower were improved for the North by the indoctrination and education programs that assured both civilian and military personnel that they were assured the certainty of victory and monopoly of virtue. Those who led and fought were “ban lo” and were to rise up from generations of exploitation to unite their land. This Marxist ideology was extremely effective in preparing the people of North Vietnam for a long struggle and to weather horrific losses like were sustained during Dien Bien Phu.

The advantages that more inspiring motives gave the North were heightened by the complex social structures set up according to the Dau tranh or “struggle”. This was a two-pronged system of both “armed struggle”, or vu trang, and “political struggle”, or chinh tri. This system enlisted the support of people within occupied territory by giving status to farmers, women and youth, as well as playing to local grievances. What resulted were NLF cadres that “established a tightly knit political military movement operating with often deadly efficiency from the village level to the central committee” (Doughty 639). Since these cadres were “disperse[d] through all enemy-occupied areas, arous[ing] the masses to arm themselves, and wag[ing] guerrilla warfare in co-ordination with the masses” (Mao 173), America “did not have sufficient forces to wage war against enemy regulars and control the countryside” (Doughty 652). Establishing this structure within South Vietnam in conjunction with the development of regular forces supported by the China and the Soviet Union was the essential first phase of mobilization in Mao’s phases of protracted war.

EQUILIBRIUM

Before discussing how the second stage, equilibrium, led to American pullout and victory for the North, it is important to clarify the relationship between Maoist doctrine and the military actions of the North. They recognized the importance of protraction in war, but also realized that “the outcome of the war depends mainly on regular warfare, especially in its mobile form, and that guerilla warfare cannot shoulder the main responsibility in deciding the outcome” (Mao 172). While guerilla forces played a crucial role in wearing down their enemies through “casualties, the drain on arms and ammunition, deterioration of troop morale, popular discontent at home. . . condemnation by world opinion, etc” (Clausewitz 141), it was the main forces that would actually invade Saigon and attack the resisting military. But for this to happen popular support for the war in America had to be so divisive that once the “expenditure of effort exceed[ed] the value of the political object, the object must be renounced and peace must follow” (92).

In reaching this point, Mao’s approach played into the erosion of American willpower. Throughout the war, American dictums of mechanized war asserted that nearly each battle was a Southern victory when viewed by the numbers of casualties afflicted. What this approach failed to recognize, however, was Mao’s belief that “some defeats or failures in tactical operations or campaigns do not lead to deterioration in the war situation as a whole, because they are not of decisive significance” (184). In spite of heavier losses, the North couldn’t attrit forces in the South physically as fast as they could attrit the U.S. politically at home. In this sense, any battle where an American soldier died was a strategic victory for the North even if it was a tactical failure. In no other battle is this reality more apparent than in the Tet Offensive

STRATEGIC OFFENSIVE

The Tet Offensive was intended by the North as a way to end the costly stalemate and represented one of their premature transitions to the third stage as outlined by Mao — strategic offensive. The North was not prepared for the staunch resistance they met. Mao even issued an indirect warning about this when he wrote, “the third stage will not present a uniform and even picture throughout the country in its initial phase, but will be regional character” (143). As a result, “the body count at the end of February was estimated at 37,000, with another 6,000 captured” (Krepinevich 239). The Communist political structure in South Vietnam was destroyed and it would never fully recover to the same extent. Since the American forces had not suffered any major defeats up until this point, October 1967, the war had been characterized as moving in a positive direction and nearing a swift and tidy conclusion. But this belief stemmed from their mechanized view of the war, which ignored the political reality within Southern Vietnam.

Although Tet was a disaster for the North in almost every way, it dealt a critical blow to the weakest arm in the Americas trinity; the value of their political objectives. The political backlash in America over the ability of North Vietnam to even wage a coordinated offensive as extensive as Tet shifted the American war aim from the preservation of South Vietnam to withdrawal from Southeast Asia as soon as possible. This political objective ignored the changing conditions in Vietnam that were in favor of the South. Tet had unified the people of the South and they were learning to combat insurgency while the Vietnamization of the countryside blossomed with the vast reduction in Communist political influence there. America no longer had the stomach for a long fight, and while the road to victory for the North after Tet was not swift, their opponent had reached political culmination. By the time they recovered from Tet and another failed Easter offensive in 1972, American military superiority was no longer a problem because the only forces left to fight were native to Southern Vietnam, and “never able to stand without massive American support, South Vietnam fell on April 30, 1975, ending a war that in its various phases had lasted for nearly thirty years.

CONCLUSION?

Even though North Vietnam had received support from China and the Soviet Union, it was their employment of Maoist doctrine that enabled them to use superior willpower and objectives to defeat the military might of the most technologically advanced nation on the planet. Carl Von Clausewitz writes about the precise path the North used to unite Vietnam; “wars have in fact been fought between states of very unequal strength, for actual war is often far removed from the pure concept postulated by theory. Inability to carry on the struggle can, in practice be replaced by two other grounds for making peace: the first is the improbability of victory; the second is its unacceptable cost” (91).