North Vietnam’s Master Plan

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From the beginning of construction on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1959 through the end of 1960, merely 3,500 soldiers and officers had been sent south down the trail. Only a small proportion of those soldiers went all the way to the Saigon area and the Mekong Delta, the majority being assigned to the closer and more accessible regions of Interzone 5 and the Central Highlands. On May 5, 1961, only two days after the conclusion of the PAVN operation in the Laotian panhandle, a group of 500 senior and midlevel PAVN officers slated for assignment to the planned new main-force regiments and military region commands in the South began their journey to South Vietnam. On July 28, the group, led by Maj. Gen. Tran Van Quang, deputy chief of staff of the PAVN general staff, reached its destination in Binh Long province north of Saigon. On June 1 another group of 400 infiltrators departed the North, arriving in Binh Long in September 1961. During the entire year of 1961, a total of 7,664 PAVN officers and enlisted men, more than twice the total sent in 1959 and 1960 combined, traveled down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to South Vietnam. According to the PAVN history, 317 tons of military supplies, primarily weapons and ammunition, went to the South along Group 559’s Ho Chi Minh Trail supply network in 1961–four times greater than the tonnage shipped in 1960.

In September 1961 the North Vietnamese Politburo made its final major military decision that year. The Politburo approved a PAVN general staff plan to support an expansion of Communist armed forces in South Vietnam from 1961 to 1963. The plan not only called for greatly increased local recruitment in South Vietnam but also directed that between 30,000 and 40,000 fully trained PAVN Regulars–the bulk of whom were to be drawn from individuals with previous experience working or fighting in South Vietnam–were to infiltrate the South. The PAVN history’s explanation of the fact that only southerners, or those who had lived in the South and could pass as southerners, were sent is revealing. Rather than claiming that the infiltrators were volunteers returning to their home villages to fight, as has been speculated–or that they were sent because they knew the area and would be more effective than northerners, as many U.S. government officials and supporters of the war believed–the PAVN history states that only southerners were sent because at that time the international situation was still undergoing a number of complicated developments. In the United States, for example, newly elected President John F. Kennedy had begun to concentrate on counterinsurgency affairs in Vietnam and elsewhere. The primary reason the North Vietnamese sent only southerners during those early years was the same reason they sent only captured, Western-produced weapons during those same years: They wanted to maintain sufficient deniability regarding North Vietnam’s support for and control over the war in the South, to avoid giving the United States any excuse to send military forces to directly intervene in Indochina.

While the full scope of the North Vietnamese decisions (especially the plan to dispatch 30,000 to 40,000 troops to the South) was not known to the Americans or the South Vietnamese, the intense PAVN buildup in southern Laos was quickly detected by the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments. During the summer and early fall of 1961, the Kennedy administration considered, but ultimately rejected, several proposals to dispatch U.S. combat units to Laos to block the increased PAVN infiltration into South Vietnam. Thereafter, because the North Vietnamese had achieved total control of the Laotian panhandle, it became very difficult to monitor the size of the North Vietnamese supply and infiltration operation. As a consequence, the precise numbers of infiltrators and the quantity of supplies moving down the trail became a subject of constant debate both inside and outside the U.S. government.

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Foreign Affairs, Historical Conflicts, Politics, Vietnam War

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