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Volume 2 | Issue 2 - Revolutions
Article by Marcus Clark. Edited by Charlotte D’Arcy. Additional Research by Liz Goodwin.
Guerrilla warfare. Its method has not only become synonymous with revolutions but has also become a military strategy that has been infused with nationalistic sentiment in order to prove integral to resistance to foreign invaders. The triumphs of guerrilla warfare have been wide and varied and include Che Guevara and Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba and the American Revolution. The most poignant incident, however, is perhaps the conflict between the Vietcong and U.S. marines during in the Vietnam War.
Traditionally, guerrilla warfare is fought by a small number of armed combatants against a standing army with superior numbers and firepower, and often includes the use of armed civilians. In the case of the Vietnam War, the Americans had an established technological and moral superiority complex. America saw its intervention in Vietnam as a fight for the Free World, a fight for democracy against godless Communism and its allies. The Americans believed that it was their duty to ensure that freedom was upheld. They adopted a ‘Who are you to talk to us?’ attitude.
For General C. William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, the American strategy of attack in Vietnam was simple. Search and Destroy! For General Westmoreland the body count was what mattered, but of course it wasn’t quite so black and white. What General Westmoreland and U.S intelligence had failed to grasp was that Vietnam had a long tradition of successfully fighting off foreign invaders. The Americans failed to learn from the French the nature of the war – that it didn’t matter how many Vietnamese were killed. As retired lieutenant general Bernard Trainor puts it, ‘the North Vietnamese had an almost bottomless pit of people with the determination to outlast the Americans’.
The Americans had also failed to grasp the culture of Vietnam and assumed that the country was taking on a Communist cause rather than a national one. Trainor reveals the general consensus, ‘We viewed communism as a monolithic dragon which controlled all of the Eurasian land mass. We didn’t see any distinction between Chinese and Soviet communism.
We didn’t identify it as a nationalistic or patriotic war.’ China and Soviet Russia had been vying for supreme Communist power in the area and America failed to see that Vietnam was a traditional enemy of China going back centuries. A crucial oversight.
So how exactly did the American technological superiority succumb to the newly independent communist Vietcong? The simple answer is guerrilla warfare and there were many aspects of this which the Vietnamese Armies took advantage of.
Terrain
U.S marines were not used to the jungle climate in which the Vietcong (most of them being former agricultural labourers) had grown up in. Even rice paddy farmers were efficiently able to use their native landscape to their advantage with little training. The most effective use of terrain was the building of hundreds of miles of connecting networks of tunnels; this not only kept the Vietcong safe from standard U.S military practices of blanketing areas with mortar and artillery before sending units in, but it meant that the Vietcong could disappear and reappear at will. The caves and tunnels were very well hidden and sometimes impossible to find. Bernard Trainor tells of a time when he stumbled upon a tunnel through sheer luck: ‘two snuffies (marine infantrymen), out of sight of their masters and bored to death with this senseless exercise, decided to entertain themselves with a frisbee. They tossed it back and forth until it went over one kid’s head and landed in a clump of bushes. When he went to retrieve it, lo and behold he spotted a hole. He enlarged it with his K-Bar and sure enough it opened up into a tunnel.’
Civilian population
Another problem that the marines encountered was that the Vietcong didn’t have any specific uniform. This meant almost anybody could be a member of the army and it therefore became very difficult in identifying members of the civilian population. America’s operation to win the hearts and minds of the people was always undermined by search and destroy missions and annihilation of civilian areas with napalm and bombs as well as Agent Orange, a chemical that was used to strip trees of their leaves to root out the Vietcong more easily. Marines could occupy a town or village during the day and at night would be driven out by the Vietcong that would emerge from the civilian populace.
Foraging foreign Weaponry
Although the Vietnamese were not as well armed as the American Marines, there was nothing that they couldn’t get their hands on from the Americans themselves. This has always been a tactic not just of the Vietnamese but of guerrilla warfare in general. The female Vietnamese war hero Tran Thi Gung indicates after retrieving AR-15s left behind by wounded or killed marines, ‘I learned to use an AR-15 right on the battlefield. In time I could use just about any weapon, including B-40 rockets.’ Similarly in Dien Bien Phu the Vietnamese used captured French artillery and other weapons, which they hauled up to Dien Bien Phu using ropes, bikes and sheer Vietnamese will power – something the French thought impossible – in order to destroy the only air strips that supplied the French. The French artillery commander at Dien Bien Phu was so ashamed that he committed suicide. This manoeuvre ultimately helped lead to the greatest defeat France had ever had by colonial people.
There is cause to believe that the Vietminh (they were renamed Vietcong by the U.S. because Vietminh didn’t sound threatening enough) have been the force which had most effectively used guerrilla warfare. This is perhaps due to its context being better known through popular culture such as films and songs, but also the scope of its victory against a power of such magnitude, set against a period that perhaps America still hasn’t come to terms with. So if you are ever thinking about taking on an oppressive colonial enemy, dictatorial power or foreign invader take a lesson from the Vietminh. Similarly Vietnam may be a very picturesque destination for tourist and gap year students alike with a rich culture, history and a beautifully unspoiled countryside but if you are thinking about getting a substantial amount of your gap year buddies or tourist mates and attempting to install an illegitimate democratic government in the south of the country to fight an invisible communist threat, and pooling all your resources to obtain large amounts of guns, aircraft, naval vessels, munitions, napalm, agent orange and a considerable tonnage of bombs, don’t! It also probably wouldn’t be logistically or practically possible.....
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Guerrilla = Spanish for ‘little war’.
The number of North Vietnamese killed in the Vietnam War was approximately 500,000 to 600,000, with 15 million wounded. 200,000 Vietnamese soldiers are listed as ‘missing in action.’
From 1957 to 1973 the National Liberation Front assassinated 36,725 South Vietnamese and abducted 58,499. Death squads focused on leaders such as schoolteachers and minor officials.
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