Response to “Vietnam Falls” by Susan Huck:
Huck resorts to lies, inaccuracies, exaggerations. and omission of important information.
She claims this was “a no-win war. Planned that way.” Of course this is absurd. Presidents are always obsessed with their historical legacies. Can you really imagine Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon planning to lose a war, which would ruin their historical reputations? Common sense dictates against this.
She claims that Ho Chi Minh was sprung free from a Chinese prison by Americans in about 1944. There is no evidence whatsoever to support that. According to biographical sources, Ho made a deal with his warlord captors. Americans had nothing to do with it.
Huck then claims “In March 1946 a Leftist French Government was ready to let HO have the North, but he wanted everything and made his bid with a surprise attack on Hanoi on the night of December 19, 1946.” In fact, it was the French who struck first the previous month with a naval bombardment of Haiphong that killed 6,000 people. Funny that Huck didn’t mention that.
She later writes that after the French lost the first Indochina War in 1954, that they “were at least able to over the southern flight (from north to south) of some three million refugees from ‘liberation.’” This is a huge exaggeration. The initial 250,000 refugees (typically collaborators with the French) made an unprompted decision to leave, but the number then increased to 850-900, 000 due to CIA black propaganda psy war strikes to the Catholics (according to the Pentagon Papers and other sources) that influenced vastly more to leave.
Huck also didn’t mention that there was the Geneva Agreement created in 1954 that temporarily split Vietnam in two, to be later reunited after national elections. The United States put Ngo Dinh Diem in power who refused the elections. The reason is that Ho as a national hero would have won. Diem then started a violent campaign in 1955 against all opposition including the communists. Ho’s Viet Minh in the South did not start fighting back until two years later and the North began sending Southerners home (to help out) in 1959.
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Once the war started under Johnson, Huck said that Haiphong was never hit during the early years. That is not true. In June 1966, 80 % of Haiphong’s doc facilities were destroyed, but the North Vietnamese got the supplies in anyway. And plenty of other targets were hit, but government officials who studied the potential for bombing Vietnam concluded “The idea that destroying or threatening to destroy N. Vietnam’s industry would pressure Hanoi into calling it quits, seems in retrospect, a colossal misjudgment... NVN…was an agricultural country with a rudimentary transportation system and little industry of any kind.” (Source: Pentagon Papers)
Meanwhile, Washington dumped more than 7 million tons of bombs mostly on South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and some on North Vietnam as well—though there were restrictions there, due to fear of a Soviet or Chinese reaction.
(To Be Continued)
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