Interview with NVA General Tran Van Tra

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As military commander of the B-2 Front from 1964 to 1976, General Tran Van Tra of the People’s Army of Vietnam led the war in the field against the Americans. On November 23, 1990, at the Vietnam Mission to the United Nations in New York City, John M. Carland of the U.S. Army Center for Military History conducted the following interview with General Tra. Tran Minh Dzung, the third secretary at the mission, served as interpreter.

Tra, at 72, looked remarkably fit and was cooperative and at ease throughout the interview. Although forthright about what he had done during the war, and especially proud of what the B-2 Front had accomplished in its struggle against American units, he came across as a pragmatic military man and not an ideologue. For example, he could easily have referred to the government of Vietnam (i.e., South Vietnam) as the ‘puppet government’ instead of using, as he did, the more neutral term ‘Saigon regime.’ He seemed to be what might be called a practical Communist.

A number of notes have been inserted in the text below to address discrepancies between the general’s statements and what has heretofore been accepted in American historical records of the Vietnam War.

Vietnam:What was your position in the Central Office, South Vietnam, or COSVN, as we called it? Our information says that you were deputy commander for military affairs. Is this so? [At this point there was some confusion over the term COSVN. Tra and the interpreter seemed more familiar with the term B-2 Front, so that term was used thereafter.]

Tran Van Tra:General Nguyen Chi Thanh was the political chief of the B-2 Front. I was military commander of the Front. When General Thanh went to Hanoi in 1966, he did not come back.

VN: 1966? Do you mean 1967?

Tra: No, 1966. [We know that Thanh went to Hanoi in April 1966 to defend his Main Force war against the Americans. Heretofore we have assumed that he returned to serve as commander for another year, until his death in July 1967, after which Tran Van Tra became acting political commander of the B-2 Front from July until October, when Pham Hung took over. This intriguing suggestion that Thanh did not return to the South may reflect a translation misunderstanding; all the evidence we have supports the notion that he did come back.]

VN: What was the B-2 Front’s objective in the 1964 dry season campaign?

Tra: Our objectives were limited. We wanted to defeat the most well-trained Saigon regime battalions and defend the liberated zones. We had no expectation of collapse [of the government of South Vietnam].

VN: Were you aware that, after you had mauled several of the best South Vietnamese battalions, senior Americans in Saigon, such as General William Westmoreland and Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, thought that you were planning to go in for the kill?

Tra: I knew that after we had destroyed several South Vietnamese battalions Taylor and Westmoreland realized that the morale of the regime was so low that it [the Saigon government] might collapse from within.

VN: How did you and General Thanh see the American intervention, especially when it got into full swing in late 1965? Did it make you change your 1965-66 dry season strategy and campaign?

Tra: Yes. It did make us change our strategy. We were forced at the beginning of this phase of the war to think and discuss at length the U.S. intervention. At the time we were strong enough to counter the Saigon army, but when U.S. forces came, we were very concerned about whether we were able to counter the U.S. Army. That was a modern army with sophisticated weapons. This was to be the first time we had fought with the U.S. Army, so we had to study its organization and tactics. So we had long discussions on the tactics of the U.S. Army and what our tactics should be in response.

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, Vietnam War

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