Vietnamese allies had even less regard for the lives
of those of their fellow countrymen who were
assisting the Vietcong and Vietminh. It was a bru-
talising war even by the standards of the twenti-
eth century.
The losses the Americans suffered were small
in comparison with those of the Vietnamese
people. The scale of death, crippling injury and
destruction in Vietnam was so great it is difficult
for Westerners to grasp how any people could
have tenaciously gone on fighting. That was the
prime error made by the American generals, who
with superior weapons thought they were fight-
ing a war of attrition. Since America’s goal was
not to win a total victory but ‘only’ to force the
North Vietnamese communists to abandon their
efforts to occupy the central and southern regions
of Vietnam, it seemed to any Westerner that a
point would be reached when the leaders of the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam would accept
that the price of extending their rule over the
centre and south was too high in human lives and
material destruction.
The cruelties of the Vietnam conflict plumbed
the depths of human conduct – prisoners were
tortured by both sides, and in practice the Geneva
Convention on warfare counted for nothing. The
communist atrocities were largely hidden from
Western eyes. The freedom of the press in the
West, however, ensured that some idea of the bar-
barities committed by the South Vietnamese
army, and of the effects of American warfare,
reached every sitting room. Two images especially
etched themselves on the public eye: the execu-
tion of a Vietcong suspect, shot in the head by
the chief of police in a street in Hue; and the
spectacle of a naked Vietnamese girl, burnt by
napalm dropped from the air and running scream-
ing towards the camera.
The land war in the southern and central
regions of Vietnam that formed the Republic of
Vietnam was fought in rice-fields and jungle. The
Americans ‘punished’ North Vietnam by starting
in March 1965 a bombing offensive, codenamed
Rolling Thunder, intended to batter its popula-
tion into the Stone Age. More bombs were
dropped on North Vietnam than the Americans
had dropped during the whole of the Second
World War. The continuation of a war against
such odds, it was believed in Washington, made
no rational sense. Vietnam was pitted with bomb
craters; large areas of jungle were defoliated by a
chemical, ‘agent orange’, in an attempt to reveal
communist hide-outs. The land was poisoned and
so were its people.
Rational? Ho Chi-minh and his North
Vietnamese Politburo were not ‘rational’ when
measured by Western moral standards. Ho Chi-
minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap were ready
to press into the fight as many hundreds of thou-
sands of Vietnamese as might be needed to over-
whelm the Americans and the South Vietnamese
army. ‘Body counts’ of Vietnamese did not matter
to them. Vietnamese fertility was high. The only
‘body counts’ that mattered were those of the
Americans, who sooner or later would have to
abandon a war being fought in a far-away
country, a war whose outcome was no possible
threat to US security. Whether the war lasted ten
years or forty, Ho Chi-minh knew that the
Americans would not fight for ever. The com-
munists did not have to defeat US forces in the
field. This they could not do. But, provided they
continued to inflict casualties and just prevented
the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies
from winning, the US would in the end leave
Vietnam. It was a war of attrition. The American
people’s threshold of acceptable losses, in an
Asian war fought on ideological grounds, was
much lower than their enemy’s. For the Vietminh
it was a fight to the end to free the south from
American imperialism. The death of Ho Chi-
minh in September 1969 altered nothing – his
policies continued to be ruthlessly pursued by his
comrades in arms.
The price in blood the Vietnamese paid for their
victory was terrible. Vietnam has issued figures
starkly revealing the carnage: 1.1 million combat-
ants were killed, 600,000 wounded; the ARVN
(the army of the southern Republic) suffered
nearly 250,000 killed and 600,000 wounded; 2
million civilians were killed and 2 million injured;
thus total casualties reached a staggering 6.5 mil-
lion, about one in every seven Vietnamese. If the
same proportions were applied to the population
of the US in 1976, 6 million combatants would