Kontum: The Battle to Save South Vietnam

6. The North Vietnamese Invasion

6 The North Vietnamese Invasion One thing Hanoi cannot do in the remaining months of this dry season: it cannot launch a nationwide military offensive on anything approaching the scale of Tet 1968. —CIA intelligence estimate, January 1972 When the Communists would be able to launch their invasion depended in part on the weather. Enemy activity in the Highlands usually peaked from February to April because that was a period of good, dry weather not seriously affected by either monsoon cycle. The monsoon rains started in May, and they would make moving supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and maneuvering in the jungle much more difficult. At the Communist Party’s Nineteenth Plenum in Hanoi late in 1970, there was discussion about whether to give priority to invading the South or to rebuilding the North. A year later the arguments for invasion were the strongest. The Vietnamization program in the South appeared to be succeeding, and more of the population was progressively being brought under government control. The ARVN was growing stronger and was acquiring more modern arms from the Americans. Both of those developments were reasons to attack sooner rather than later. Despite the ARVN’s increased size and modern weapons, however, when it launched Operation Lam Son 719 into Laos in early 1971—without its US advisers or US air support— its performance against the NV A was poor. That result encouraged a sense of military superiority on the part of the North Vietnamese and some sense of military inferiority on the part of the South 58 • KONTUM Vietnamese. The US Armed Forces were being withdrawn, and US public opinion was unlikely to allow Nixon to send any American ground units back to Vietnam. Moreover, the American presidential campaign would start with the New Hampshire primaries in the spring of 1972, and the Communists hoped a victory for them in the spring would mean a defeat for Nixon in the fall.1 The principal proponents of invasion in 1972 were General Vo Nguyen Giap and First Secretary Le Duan of the Communist Party. Giap hoped the Easter Offensive would lead to final victory over the South and perhaps even trap the tens of thousands of Americans still there.2 The Communists decided they should attack in early 1972. When the enemy had launched attacks all over South Vietnam during Tet in 1968, they had assumed that the people would rise up to support them and that the Communists could seize and control enough of the cities and population to force the South Vietnamese government to accept a coalition government including Communists, who could then take over the Saigon government. However, the vast majority of the populace had not supported the Communists, the VC had been driven back with heavy losses, and— after having revealed themselves—most of the VC leaders had been killed and their infrastructure destroyed. There was no prospect of launching a similar uprising anytime in the near future. So the Communists’ only alternative for total victory within the next few years was to use their army to launch a conventional invasion into South Vietnam. Another negative factor for them was that Nixon was improving relations with both China and Russia, which may have caused the North Vietnamese to worry that Nixon might convince their two biggest arms suppliers to stop supporting them. Time magazine summed up why the North Vietnamese might attack in the spring of 1972 rather than wait for all the Americans to leave: A more important question is why the Communists would want to attack in 1972, instead of waiting a year for U.S. withdrawal to run its course. An offensive timed to the President ’s Peking visit would clearly be a signal from Hanoi that it will not tolerate any possible deal on Viet Nam cooked up by the U.S. and China. Beyond that, some Pentagon officials are convinced that the Communists want the psychological benefit of a “visible victory.” According to this theory, Hanoi and the Viet Cong have decided not to settle for a uni- THE NORTH VIETNAMESE INVASION • 59 lateral American withdrawal, which the world might interpret as simply a political decision made by the White House. Instead, the Communists want a tangible triumph, à la Dien Bien Phu, which they can hold up as their own.3 If the North Vietnamese succeeded in taking over South Vietnam in 1972, it...