The Vietnamese War—
Revolution and Social Change
in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1945
By David Elliott
Professor of International Relations and Politics, Pomona College
M.E. Sharpe, 2002
2 volumes, 1,584 pages • $140.00

At 67, Nguyen Thi Thap was coming home. It was 1975, the Revolution’s year of victory. After 30 years as a National Liberation Front fighter and a long-time Party member, now one of the top leaders in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, she was finally able to pay a visit to her native village in My Tho, the populous rice-growing province on the north bank of the Mekong River. Earlier that year the anti-Communist Republic of Vietnam had crumbled; its American military supporters were long gone, like the French colonialists before them. Gone, too, were the familiar landmarks—the thatched-roof peasant houses, the old-fashioned market baskets. Of course her old wartime comrades were almost all gone—killed during the years of struggle. There were no more landlords, but new strata of small independent “middle peasant” farmers in place of the oppressed tenants of Thap’s youth. The roads were different, too. After leaving the broad modern highway, built by American engineers, Thap had to walk along the banks of ditches built to impede American armored vehicles.

“As Thap ended her nostalgic trip,” David Elliott writes, “memories flooded her consciousness. Images of the anticolonial demonstrations of the 1930s were followed by remembrances of the brief but bloody 1940 uprising against the French. The August 1945 revolution, when the revolutionaries first seized power, came back to her. A generation of fallen revolutionaries had been replaced by a new generation. ... Little was left of the rural society that had existed before.”

I have borrowed these lines from the personal Postlude essay that begins Elliott’s magisterial two-volume work in order to illustrate how different this is from the multitude of books written by Americans about wartime Vietnam. He labels its coverage in his title: The Vietnamese War—Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1945. This is therefore not another story of Americans at war in Vietnam. Rather, as the author explains in his introduction, “it is an attempt to elicit Vietnamese voices to explain what happened during the Vietnam War and why.”

Starting with the first stirrings of anticolonial resistance, Elliott, a longtime professor of politics and by general opinion the dean of Asianists at Pomona College, has carefully traced the evolution of this militant modern nation-state—politics, economy and society thrown in. While military battles and political struggles against first the French, then Americans take up a good bit of the narrative, the story is told largely from the Vietnamese point of view. Indeed, it is focused on the single province of My Tho. The people of this province are its principal actors, as they lived, grew and died over a half century. In its grasp of the subject and the authoritative combination of narrative and analysis, I know of no other book on Vietnam’s war that can approach it.

This narrowing of focus, if at first a bit puzzling to the non-initiate reader, brings a striking immediacy to the action. The vast amount of research the author relies on both during the wars and thereafter provides the wealth of detail. Although Elliott does not neglect the march of events as played out on the national level, his constant interplay of how they affected one province’s people dramatizes the complexity of their motives and lends poignancy to their activities in a way that broader-brush studies cannot equal. By concentrating on this one area, Elliott brings three generations of Vietnamese to life. As he explains in his introduction, the book shows “the human face of a movement that is pictured by Americans largely in abstract and stereotyped terms ... and illustrates its diversity.”

The first stirrings of independence in the Delta were scattered and mostly local—oppressed tenant farmers and anti-colonial intellectuals protesting harsh French rule. It was not until 1945, after Japan’s World War II defeat, that a real revolutionary movement took shape. It was sparked by Ho Chi Minh’s Communists in the North, who moved to assume leadership of the resistance. Bitter fighting continued for almost a decade. The French military reaction, strongest in the South, for a time almost totally suppressed

the nationalists in My Tho, but they were able to rebound. By 1954, when the Geneva Accords enforced a temporary peace, nationalists and Viet Minh sympathizers were well represented in the farming villages of the Delta.

After the North-South partition of the country was formalized, Ngo Dinh Diem’s government of the Republic of Vietnam declared open season on Communists and their allies (real or fancied). A civil war began in earnest, increasingly scarred by atrocities on both sides. In 1960, with the approval of the Communist government in the North, different groups of resistance fighters joined forces in a massive effort aimed at overthrowing Saigon’s rule throughout the province. Life in the villages grew more precarious. It was almost impossible for people in the Delta to remain neutral, as terror tactics and underground assaults became the rule of the day. Under the name of the National Liberation Front (NLF), the insurrection—political as well as military—cast a wide shadow, but its leadership was largely Communist.

“Now that the die was cast,” Elliott comments, “it would be the Communist Party organization and leadership that would provide the guidance and structure for the movement. The “fellow travelers” that the early revolutionaries had written about were welcome, but not in leadership positions. ... The revolutionary movement was much larger than the Party which led it, [however] and the mass organization composed of non-Party members were crucial to the revolution’s success.”

Against the growing concentration of the revolutionary guerrilla warriors, Diem’s autocratic anti-Communist government was counting on its own land reform, a system of strategic villages and—above all—the heavy support of American military advisers, amply equipped with artillery, armor, helicopters and air power. For by the early ’60s Washington had decided to do some intensive “nation-building” in Saigon, using a heavily reinforced Vietnamese army as its surrogate. In an unexpected encounter at Ap Bac, however, NLF troops from My Tho decisively smashed units of Diem’s corruption-ridden army and shot down their American support helicopters. Their victory, Elliott writes, “showed that the revolution could cope with the new weapons and more sophisticated equipment and tactics and bolstered the confidence of troops, cadres and civilian supporters of the revolution. ...” As such it was a small but significant harbinger of America’s ultimately disastrous commitment of U.S. troops to save a shaky regime and a steadily losing local political and strategic situation.

Were it not for the massive U.S. intervention, Elliott tells us, the revolutionary forces would have won the war against Diem’s feckless successors in 1965. But the Americans, for all their tactical successes, were never able to counter the Communists’ organization of the villages—maintained over the years through a combination of nationalism, anti-colonial idealism, economic self-interest and fear. True that many fled their farms to seek work and shelter in the cities. And American “hearts and minds” pacification programs enjoyed some brief successes. But even in the weary closing years of war the NLF continued to control the countryside by coercion where they had earlier won by patriotism and revolutionary spirit.

In the end the Party’s discipline and persistence somehow kept the loyalty of My Tho’s people, supported as they were by continuing political guidance and troop reinforcements from Hanoi. Yet the leadership of the Revolution was far from the monolith envisioned by many Americans. On the contrary, he writes, “The rich mix of voices [illustrate] the complexity and individuality of the Vietnamese participants.” Strains between cadres and villagers intensified as the war went on, while violent disagreements took place among generals and Party bosses in the top echelons. Discussing the background of the 1968 Tet offensive, which almost proved disastrous to the NLF, Elliott quotes the demands of the Northerner General Tran Do for a “once-and-for-all” attack against the caution of the regional Party secretary, Sau Duong, who answered: “No way, brother! We have been here a long time and we see that, as a matter of history, an uprising is not easy. If we fight this battle, we also have to consider that the situation will not develop favorably, that the enemy will counter-attack. Then what do we do? If they come back, how will [our] people live…”

Elliott’s book abounds in exchanges of this sort, thanks to the completeness of his research, originally based on intensive interviews with NLF defectors in My Tho, as part of a Rand Corporation survey. Fluent in the language—which he learned at a U.S. Army school, he spent seven years there during the war, supplementing his interrogation work with documents, books and interviews after the war had ended. (He still travels to Vietnam regularly.) Despite his emphasis on the Vietnamese side of things, he cites American interviews and documents to round out the picture.

Could the Americans have won? He doubts that improved U.S. Army tactics could have led to victory—not to mention the worsening political climate at home as fighting continued. He writes: “…though the revolutionaries were often knocked down, they were never knocked out. They seemed to find ways of recovering from every setback by devising new approaches when old tactics faltered, from the French period right through to the end. ... Whatever one’s view of the outcome, however, [the war] in the end was fundamentally decided by the Vietnamese themselves.”

What happened post-war was a different story. As Elliott analyzes it: “The evidence suggests that the revolution was a victim of its own success. Its land reforms set in motion a fundamental transformation of South Vietnam’s rural society, but at the same time led to a prolonged and disruptive war which itself became the main engine of social change and took it in a different direction than the Communist Party had originally planned. Subsidized American consumer goods and equipment flooded the countryside. Peasant communities were dislocated, and the depopulation of the countryside led to even more sweeping change in rural class structure than anything the Party could have engineered. The unintended result was the emergence of a rural middle class that included nearly 70 percent of the rural population in the Mekong Delta and, after the war, proved stubbornly resistant to collectivization. Eventually, this brought socialist transformation in South Vietnam to a halt. ... It ultimately forced the entire country to abandon collective agriculture and many other features of state socialism and adopt a sweeping program of market reforms. In some ways it could be said that in winning the war the Communist Party lost its revolution…”

No wonder that Nguyen Thi Thap felt sad and wistful on her first trip home.

—Frank Gibney is president of the Pacific Basin Institute and
Professor of Politics at Pomona College.