From :FRONTPAGEMAG.COM

Monday, February 12, 2007

What did the North Vietnamese leadership think of the American antiwar
movement? What was the purpose of the Tet Offensive? How could the U.S.
have been more successful in fighting the Vietnam War?

Bui Tin, a former colonel in the North Vietnamese army, answers

these questions in the following excerpts from an interview conducted by

Stephen Young, a Minnesota attorney and human-rights activist

[in The Wall Street Journal, 3 August 1995].


Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of North Vietnam's army, received
the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975. He later
became editor of the People's Daily, the official newspaper of Vietnam. He
now lives in Paris, where he immigrated after becoming disillusioned with
the fruits of Vietnamese communism.


Question: How did Hanoi intend to defeat the Americans?
Answer: By fighting a long war which would break their will to help
South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh said,
"We don't need to win military victories, we only need to hit them until
they give up and get out."

Q: Was the American antiwar movement important to Hanoi's victory?

A: It was essential to our strategy. Support of the war from our
rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day
our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to
follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by
people like Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers
gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses.
We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a
press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and
that she would struggle along with us.



Q: Did the Politburo pay attention to these visits?
A: Keenly.

Q: Why?
A: Those people represented the conscience of America. The conscience
of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning
that power in our favor. America lost because of its democracy; through
dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win.


Q: How could the Americans have won the war?

A: Cut the Ho Chi Minh trail inside Laos. If Johnson had granted [Gen.
William] Westmoreland's requests to enter Laos and block the Ho Chi
Minh trail, Hanoi could not have won the war.

Q: Anything else?
A: Train South Vietnam's generals. The junior South Vietnamese
officers were good, competent and courageous, but the commanding general officers
were inept.

Q: Did Hanoi expect that the National Liberation Front would win power in
South Vietnam?

A: No. Gen. [Vo Nguyen] Giap [commander of the North Vietnamese army] believed

that guerrilla warfare was important but not sufficient for victory. Regular military

divisions with artillery and armor would be needed. The Chinese believed in fighting only with guerrillas, but wehad a different approach. The Chinese were reluctant to help us.

Soviet aid made the war possible. Le Duan [secretary general of the Vietnamese
Communist Party] once told Mao Tse-tung that if you help us, we are sure to win;
if you don't, we will still win, but we will have to sacrifice one or two
million more soldiers to do so.

Q: Was the National Liberation Front an independent political movement
of South Vietnamese?

A: No. It was set up by our Communist Party to implement a decision of
the Third Party Congress of September 1960. We always said there was only
one party, only one army in the war to liberate the South and unify the nation.
At all times there was only one party commissar in command of the South.

Q: Why was the Ho Chi Minh trail so important?

A: It was the only way to bring sufficient military power to bear on
the fighting in the South. Building and maintaining the trail was a huge
effort, involving tens of thousands of soldiers, drivers, repair teams,
medical stations, communication units.

Q: What of American bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail?

A: Not very effective. Our operations were never compromised by
attacks on the trail. At times, accurate B-52 strikes would cause real damage,
but we put so much in at the top of the trail that enough men and weapons to
prolong the war always came out the bottom. Bombing by smaller planes
rarely hit significant targets.

Q: What of American bombing of North Vietnam?
A: If all the bombing had been concentrated at one time, it would have
hurt our efforts. But the bombing was expanded in slow stages under Johnson
and it didn't worry us. We had plenty of times to prepare alternative
routes and facilities. We always had stockpiles of rice ready to feed the people
for months if a harvest were damaged. The Soviets bought rice from
Thailand for us.

Q: What was the purpose of the 1968 Tet Offensive?
A: To relieve the pressure Gen. Westmoreland was putting on us in late
1966 and 1967 and to weaken American resolve during a presidential election
year.
Q: What about Gen. Westmoreland's strategy and tactics caused you
concern?

A: Our senior commander in the South, Gen. Nguyen Chi Thanh, knew that
we were losing base areas, control of the rural population and that his
main forces were being pushed out to the borders of South Vietnam. He also

worried that Westmoreland might receive permission to enter Laos and
cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In January 1967, after discussions with Le Duan, Thanh

proposed the Tet Offensive. Thanh was the senior member of the Politburo in South
Vietnam. He supervised the entire war effort. Thanh's struggle philosophy was that
"America is wealthy but not resolute," and "squeeze tight to the
American chest and attack." He was invited up to Hanoi for further discussions.
He went on commercial flights with a false passport from Cambodia to Hong
Kong and then to Hanoi. Only in July was his plan adopted by the
leadership. Then Johnson had rejected Westmoreland's request for 200,000 more troops.
We realized that America had made its maximum military commitment to the
war. Vietnam was not sufficiently important for the United States to call
up its reserves. We had stretched American power to a breaking point. When
more frustration set in, all the Americans could do would be to withdraw;
they had no more troops to send over.
Tet was designed to influence American public opinion. We would attack
poorly defended parts of South Vietnam cities during a holiday and a
truce when few South Vietnamese troops would be on duty. Before the main
attack, we would entice American units to advance close to the borders, away
from the cities. By attacking all South Vietnam's major cities, we would
spread out our forces and neutralize the impact of American firepower.
Attacking on a broad front, we would lose some battles but win others. We used
local forces nearby each target to frustrate discovery of our plans. Small
teams, like the one which attacked the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, would be
sufficient. It was a guerrilla strategy of hit-and-run raids. (Looks like a
re-writing of history with the benefit of hindsight]

Q: What about the results?


A: Our losses were staggering and a complete surprise;. Giap later
told me that Tet had been a military defeat, though we had gained the planned
political advantages when Johnson agreed to negotiate and did not run
for re-election. The second and third waves in May and September were, in
retrospect, mistakes. Our forces in the South were nearly wiped out by
all the fighting in 1968. It took us until 1971 to re-establish our
presence, but we had to use North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. If the
American forces had not begun to withdraw under Nixon in 1969, they
could have punished us severely. We suffered badly in 1969 and 1970 as it
was.

Q: What of Nixon?

A: Well, when Nixon stepped down because of Watergate we knew we would
win. Pham Van Dong [prime minister of North Vietnam] said of Gerald Ford,
the new president, "he's the weakest president in U.S. history; the people
didn't elect him; even if you gave him candy, he doesn't dare to intervene in
Vietnam again." We tested Ford's resolve by attacking Phuoc Long in
January 1975. When Ford kept American B-52's in their hangers, our leadership
decided on a big offensive against South Vietnam.

Q: What else?
A: We had the impression that American commanders had their hands tied
by political factors. Your generals could never deploy a maximum force
for greatest military effect.