North Vietnam’s Master Plan

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The North Vietnamese decisions of 1961 and their much more visible consequences received little notice from the international press at the time and have gone largely unremarked by most postwar scholars. Even the U.S. State Department’s white paper on North Vietnamese aggression, issued in February 1965 and widely criticized at the time as exaggerated and propagandistic, now turns out to have significantly underestimated the extent of North Vietnamese infiltration. The document asserted that from 1959 until the end of 1964 at least 19,000, and possibly as many as 34,000, troops were infiltrated into South Vietnam from the North.

The 1994 PAVN history records that between 1959 and the end of 1963, a year shorter than the period covered by the State Department white paper, more than 40,000 PAVN troops, primarily soldiers from South Vietnam who had regrouped, were sent from the North to the battlefields in South Vietnam. Among these infiltrators were more than 2,000 senior and midlevel officers (field grade and above) and technical personnel. As of 1963, those infiltrators from North Vietnam constituted, according to the PAVN history, 50 percent of the full-time soldiers and 80 percent of the officers and technical cadres in command and leadership organizations of the Communist army in South Vietnam.

Regarding logistic support, the PAVN history brags that from 1961 through 1963, Group 559 [the Ho Chi Minh Trail command] transported to the battlefield 165,600 weapons of all types, including artillery, mortars, and anti-aircraft machine guns. In addition, the North Vietnamese sea infiltration effort finally got started in 1962. By the end of 1963, Sea Infiltration Group 759, using transport vessels camouflaged as fishing junks, successfully delivered 25 shiploads totaling 1,430 tons of weapons and ammunition (including mortars, recoilless rifles and 12.7mm anti-aircraft guns) to covert docks and landing sites in the Mekong Delta and in the coastal provinces east of Saigon. In light of the fact that during 1961 only 317 tons of military supplies had been transported by land down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the contribution made to the Communist war effort by the seaborne supply operation, especially in the areas south of the Central Highlands and far from the Ho Chi Minh Trail’s transshipment points in southern Laos, is especially noteworthy.

In hindsight, the cumulative importance of the North Vietnamese decisions of 1961 is painfully clear. In 1962, Communist forces in the South suffered very serious losses (which were admitted in the PAVN history) as a result of the increased U.S. military aid and new U.S. air support and combat advisers provided to the South Vietnamese armed forces by President Kennedy’s November 1961 action. Without the Politburo decisions of 1961, Communist forces would have lost the military initiative and their continued survival might even have been threatened. But Communist troop strength continued to increase in spite of their losses, growing almost fivefold, according to PAVN figures, from 15,000 full-time soldiers at the end of 1960 to 70,000 full-time troops by the end of 1963. As of 1963, five new main-force Communist regiments had been organized and were operating in South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese supply network then had secure new logistics bases in southern Laos and a functioning sea transport system able to effectively support the main battlefields in South Vietnam, including the vital areas around Saigon and in the Mekong Delta. Communist forces in the South were well-armed and were receiving ample supplies of ammunition. Weapons and trained personnel capable of countering the most dangerous of the new American-provided equipment, helicopters and armored personnel carriers, had arrived in the South and were proving their effectiveness.

The evidence provided by the PAVN history demonstrates clearly that, after 1961, even the most effective internal pacification measures in South Vietnam would have been insufficient without any companion effort to block the flow of troops and supplies from the North. In his book The Key to Failure, former U.S. State Department officer Norman B. Hannah described the American failure to take decisive action on the ground to block North Vietnamese infiltration through Laos as the U.S. government’s single greatest strategic error of the Vietnam War. Whether or not one believes such action was feasible at that time in tactical, strategic and domestic political terms, the revelations provided by the Vietnamese officers who wrote the 1994 PAVN history lend powerful support to Hannah’s argument that the Communist supply line through Laos, the foundation for which was laid by the North Vietnamese decisions of 1961, was indeed the key to the Communist victory in the struggle for South Vietnam.

This article was written by Merle L. Pribbenow and originally published in the August 1999 issue of Vietnam Magazine.

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

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