A New Communist ‘Offensive’ in South Vietnam? Thieu Reaches for More Handouts From US Treasury

Intercontinental Press – September 23, 1974
By Peter Green (John Percy)

In the last few months South Vietnam has undergone the heaviest fighting since the “cease-fire” agreement went into effect in January 1973.

In the Iron Triangle area north of Saigon, clashes have occurred since May 17, when three militia outposts near Bencat were captured by the liberation forces. Two have still not been retaken. Skirmishes have taken place only sixteen miles from the center of Saigon, and Bienhoa airfield, the largest military airfield in South Vietnam, was said to have been threatened at one point.

On July 1 the forces of the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) captured Datrach base, twenty-five miles southwest of Danang in the north, and the nearby district capital of Thuongduc fell on August 7.

In Quangngai province, seventy-five miles south of Danang, ten Saigon positions were reported overrun on August 4, and on August 17 a district capital, Minhlong, was captured.

The increased fighting has prompted speculation that another “offensive” by the liberation forces is on the way. What are the facts?

Retaliation for Saigon Land-Grabbing

One of the most significant items is the rise in cease-fire violations by Saigon. The PRG has responded with defensive actions.

A Reuters dispatch in the August 2 Christian Science Monitor reported that officers in the PRG delegation to the two-party joint Military Commission in Saigon “scoff at the idea that their commanders plan any general offensive.

“They say their forces aim to take back territory said to have been seized from them by the government in the months following the January, 1973, cease-fire agreement. But they also say there are attacks on government bases to cut off activity against their zones.”

Philip A. McCombs reported in the August 6 Washington Post that the PRG had claimed in April that the Saigon government had shelled areas controlled by the PRG, and had, some months after the cease-fire, set up a series of hilltop outposts in PRG territory.

“Well informed, non-Communist sources,” stated McCombs, “have confirmed that the government did, in fact, set up hilltop outposts after the cease-fire went into effect, and that this was a military measure intended to disrupt Communist efforts to gather the important rice crop in the Queson Valley area 20 miles south of here.”

McCombs conceded that this “would seem to violate the agreement.”

The August 8 New York Times cited “some foreign military observers” who believe the recent PRG actions “have been logical military responses” to sweeps by Saigon through PRG areas.

Daniel Southerland reported in the September 4 Christian Science Monitor that the PRG forces “have regained a good part of the territory they held in the northernmost region at the time of the cease-fire.”

A similar explanation for the increased fighting was given in the July 30 New York Times. James M. Markham reported that since January, Saigon’s commanders “had scored several remarkable victories.” They had “cleared the Tri Phap base area in the northern delta -- something that American troops had been unable to do while they were in South Vietnam.”

Markham also mentioned Saigon successes in the Ho Bo Woods in Haunghia province, and inside Cambodia, with heavy casualties being inflicted on the PRG forces.

“In some ways I don’t blame them, the Communists,” he quoted one Western diplomat as saying. “At some point they say, ‘Enough’s enough.’“

‘Offensive’ Launched for U.S. Aid

The propaganda about the war heating up is also explainable as one of the ploys used by Saigon to give the hawks in Washington an excuse to step up military and economic aid.

Thieu, of course, has been predicting an imminent Communist offensive for more than a year now. When debate began in the U. S. Congress on appropriating funds for the South Vietnamese regime, Thieu’s propaganda machine went into high gear.

The U. S. ambassador to Saigon, Graham A. Martin, made a special trip to Washington to plead Thieu’s financial needs before Congress. However, Congress decided to give $700 million this year in place of $1,500 million originally requested by the Nixon administration. The cut was a concession to the unpopularity of aid to the Thieu regime (1974 is an election year).

A staff report issued by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee August 5 criticized the U. S. Embassy in Saigon for “selective reporting,” for being too closely associated with the Saigon government, and for tending “to play down or to ignore obvious cease-fire violations by the South Vietnamese armed forces.”

The report cited the case of the fall of Tong Le Chan, a small outpost on the Cambodian border that had been under siege for more than a year. On April 12, Saigon announced that a “massive” North Vietnamese attack had overrun the garrison.

Within a few days, however, it became common knowledge in Saigon -- and was reported in the U. S. media -- that the Saigon forces had withdrawn voluntarily without losing a man. Nonetheless, the U. S. Embassy continued to report as late as April 24 on the “bombardment and fall” of Tong Le Chan.

The Senate study said that many diplomats in Saigon believed that the Tong Le Chan incident and others were “part of a deliberate effort by the Saigon Government, assisted by the United States Embassy, to impress the United States Congress of the necessity to authorize additional military assistance for South Vietnam.”

An article in the May 13 Far Eastern Economic Review was more explicit: “The current upsurge in fighting is widely thought in South Vietnam to have been ‘ordered’ by US Ambassador Graham Martin to justify the Administration’s demands for increased military assistance.... It is even claimed that Martin advised President Thieu to yield up one of Saigon’s isolated bases within territory held by the Provisional Revolutionary Government each week to convince the US Congress and the public that North Vietnam had launched offensives.”

Creating a ‘Suitable Atmosphere for the Aid Struggle’

Another side of the operation to extract more aid has been an attempt to spruce up the image of the Saigon regime.

The Thieu regime has labeled as a “monstrous lie that exceeds even the wildest imagination” the many reports that Saigon holds 200,000 political prisoners.

Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing July 25, Martin chimed in, denying that Saigon had any political prisoners. He claimed that a year ago there were just over 34,000 persons in South Vietnamese prisons and that the figure had now been reduced to 31,000.

As part of the same cover-up operation, Thieu released a prisoner for publicity purposes for seventy minutes and then whisked him off to jail again.

Tran Ngoe Chau, a former legislator and Thieu opponent, had been arrested in February 1970 and sentenced to ten years’ hard labor. Philip A. McCombs reported in the June 17 Washington Post that on June 5, Chau’s wife and children were allowed to see him for seventy minutes in their home in Saigon before police took him away again.

Vietnamese police, however, contacted the newspapers, urging them to write articles about Chau’s “release.” Many did, and the story was picked up by foreign publications. The June 17 Far Eastern Economic Review, for example, carried the story, billing it as a “spectacular move” by Thieu.

“Chau’s ‘release,’“ wrote McCombs, “appears to be one of a number of orchestrated moves made recently by the Thieu government to ‘create a suitable atmosphere for the aid struggle on Capitol Hill,’ in the words of one government official.”

In Washington, at the other end of the operation, some previously critical elements have jumped into line. The Washington Post announced in an editorial August 11 that it had had “second thoughts.”

“... after having inclined the other way during the past 20 months,” said the Washington Post editors, they now thought the American commitment to Saigon should be “open-ended.”

“Aid to Vietnam should be offered on the basis of what dollar levels and what forms of aid (economic or military) and what particular programs will enable Saigon to tend effectively to its citizens’ security and welfare.”

This formulation, they admitted, left “many loose ends,” and Thieu’s was “far from a model regime.” Of overriding importance to the Washington Post, however, was the belief “that Americans would not like to live in a world where a small nation that had strong reason to rely on American steadfastness had been let down.”

Columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak in the August 31 Washington Post could afford to be a little more blunt than the editors. They saw the threatened aid cutbacks as “perilous” in the light of Hanoi’s “cruelly perfected new tactics” and the increasing aid from the Soviet Union and China, which “seem still bent on fueling Hanoi’s lustful conquest of the South....”

As proof of Hanoi’s subversive goal, Evans and Novak referred to “statistics” in Quangnam province showing that “the invaders forcibly uprooted more than 10,000 civilians settled there two years ago and moved them west to ‘liberated’ areas as virtual slave labor.”

Three days later the Washington Post carried an article describing how the Saigon regime forcibly prevents people from returning to PRG-held areas.

The village chief of Hoaphung, three miles southwest of Danang, purportedly told a Washington Post reporter, “There are a thousand people in my village and 90 per cent of them are pro-Vietcong.” He himself lives in Danang because it is too dangerous for him to spend nights in Hoaphung.

Last month eighty families in the village dismantled their houses and carted them off to rebuild in a nearby PRG area. To the village chief, this was “part of a Vietcong campaign to destroy all the refugee camps and get the people to return to their native hamlets,” something to be prevented at all costs. Usually the Saigon regime would tear down the houses rebuilt in the new area, but the solution in this case was to move a platoon of airborne troops into the new village.

The highest-ranking U. S. military officer in Vietnam, Major General John E. Murray, also joined the chorus of protest against the cutbacks. “They’re sacrificing blood for the lack of ammunition,” he said in an interview in Saigon.

For those swayed by crude self-interest, there were other arguments. John T. Calkins, executive director of the Republican Congressional Committee, wrote a column in the August 30 New York Times extolling the advantages of investing in South Vietnam.

“She [South Vietnam] has a large labor pool of talented, industrious people whose cost of labor is far less than Hong Kong, Singapore or even Korea or Taiwan.” He urged continued aid. In his words, “there is much profit to be made there.”

To compensate for the cut in direct military funding, the White House will no doubt find additional ways of helping the Saigon puppet to live it up. Last April, the Pentagon miraculously discovered $266 million “left over” from last year’s appropriations.

Another angle was revealed in Congress August 12 by Representative Michael Harrington. This year, he reported, 43 percent (or nearly $500 million) of the money budgeted for the “Food for Peace” program went to just two countries -- South Vietnam and Cambodia.

Source: https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1974/IP1233.pdf#page=18&view=FitV,35