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By John Prados
Late in the war, American troops were supposed to be withdrawn
in tandem with improvements in the South Vietnamese armed
forces. It has become an article of faith among some that
Vietnamization produced a supple, effective Republic of
Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF) that could have won the war
but for the termination of American aid. Claims about the
effectiveness of the ARVN produced a mountain of press
releases at the time and included official testimony before
Congress, progress reports, statements at press conferences,
and a plethora of materials flowing from American sources
in Saigon.
Like just about everything else regarding the
Vietnam War, those claims require examination. Most recent
articles on this subject go little further than repeating
the numbers in the press releases. That is misleading because
statistics only scratch the surface of the story. There
is much more to be said.
Resplendent with figures, the official releases
had much progress to report. An example from early in this
period is The ARVN, a 1969 special issue of the Vietnam Bulletin,
the slick magazine published by the South Vietnamese Embassy.
Reporting
on the events of 1968, the magazine claimed that during Tet
the ARVN had inflicted more casualties on the enemy than
the Americans had. It followed up: “The
ARVN went over to the offensive at mid-year and has not lost
the initiative since then.”
This is correct from the
standpoint of battalion-size operations. The point was plain
in the Pentagon’s own statistics:
In May 1968, ARVN operations had increased by a third, to
over 600, and never again fell below that level. South Vietnamese
large-scale operations in 1969 peaked at 1,070 in July and
averaged 950 a month.
Even so, the South Vietnamese did not
meet the claims of Saigon’s embassy about a daily level
of forty to sixty of these efforts, which works out to an
annualized rate of 14,600 to 21,900 battalion-size operations.
The ARVN actually conducted 11,400 such ops in 1969, its
peak year, and that rate afterwards declined to 9,000.
The ARVN offensive coincided with a general mobilization
ordered by President Nguyen Van Thieu. This expanded eligibility
for Saigon’s draft to include males from ages from
18 to 38, a very wide range; 17-year-olds and men from 39
to 43 were called up for the militia. Under the law, all
males between the ages of 16 and 50 were subject to call
for some kind of service.
Saigon intended to increase its
armed forces by 268,000 men before the end of the year, and,
in fact, had obtained 220,000 fresh recruits before the summer
of 1968 ended. Of those, 161,000 volunteered, many of them
attracted by the ability to choose their branch of service,
which was afforded to volunteers. In mid-1968 there were
358,000 ARVN regulars or Marines in ten infantry divisions,
an Airborne division, and one of Marines. By the end of the
year, that figure had risen to 370,000. But some 139,670
South Vietnamese soldiers had deserted during 1968, while
ARVN casualties numbered 27,915 dead, 70,696 wounded, and
2,460 missing. That amounted to almost 241,000 men and virtually
wiped out the force increase anticipated with general mobilization.
About 100,000 young
men reached draft age each year. Dodging the draft became
endemic, creating a whole social strata of “cowboys”—young
men who buzzed around Saigon and other cities on their motorbikes,
many subsisting off the black market. Population flight from
the villages and the propensity of refugees to continue on
to the cities exacerbated the problem.
Volunteerism dissipated in the years
after 1968, making new men that much harder to find. Remaining
South Vietnamese men had to be virtually vacuumed up to fill
the ranks. A U.S. State Department report in May 1971 admitted
that over half the males in Saigon-controlled territory aged
15 to 49 were in uniform. The proportion was higher than
in the United States at the height of World War II. As early
as 1969, American authorities were rightly projecting that
Saigon would be hard-pressed to reach its planned force level
of 1.1 million. Gen. Cao Van Vien and Nguyen
Duy Trinh in their postwar books conceded that even had it
possessed a million more people, South Vietnam would have
had a difficult time keeping up the forces.
In 1969, the army was ordered to hand 23,000 men over to
the National Police, whose function was critical to pacification.
Only a thousand were reassigned.
Conflicting requirements
sharpened as the South Vietnamese forces grew and the demands
of various elements increased, but the pool of available
recruits stayed the same. The ARVN, the Regional Forces (RF),
and the Popular Forces (PF) competed for the same recruits,
and competition between them worsened over time. American
analysts at MACV and elsewhere credited the RF/PF with a
higher contribution to enemy losses than the ARVN, but the
latter took priority in Saigon’s scheme of things.
The
requirements also had an impact on critical specialized functions
such as intelligence. Draft calls threatened to denude American
intelligence of all its South Vietnamese civilian translators,
for example, forcing leaders to engage in subterfuge to preserve
capabilities. Demands for bodies in combat units similarly
pressured the ARVN’s own
intelligence people.
Desertion continued to be a problem,
although it was a poorly understood phenomenon. Peak rates
coincided with the seasons for planting and harvesting rice,
indicating that soldiers went home to help with farming.
This suggested that a more liberal leave policy might have
lowered the desertion rate substantially.
Instead, the Joint General Staff adopted an anti-desertion
program in 1969. That year there were over 123,000 deserters.
There was also a trend of soldiers deserting units located
far from home and enlisting in ones nearer their families.
About
150,500 soldiers deserted in 1970, but some 24,000 returned
in one way or another. Such service was lost when deserters
were apprehended and imprisoned. The ARVN experienced its
lowest desertion rate during 1966. The rates during the Vietnamization
years fluctuated, but were all far higher than 1966, especially
in 1971, the year of Lam Son 719.
Various
measures were adapted for training the recruits who did join.
The army had relied on a single basic training camp at Quang
Trung, northwest of Saigon. After general mobilization, more
camps were added for each corps area, along with a similar
group of training camps for Regional Forces and for Popular
Forces. After basic, there was advanced training for the
combat arms or specialties. Ones that required use of American
technical manuals or extensive interaction with the Americans
necessitated language skills, so extensive English language
courses began in Saigon.
The ARVN’s combat branches,
divisions, and corps had their own tactical training areas
to put battalions and other units through refresher courses
from time to time. The best ARVN units, like the 1st Division,
constantly rotated their maneuver units through this training.
During the Korean War, the United States had used a buddy
system to help train South Koreans. Nothing like that was
attempted in Vietnam.
Something
the Americans did was buddy up units to share know-how. In
the spring of 1969, for example, MACV sent the 199th Light
Infantry Brigade into the area of operations of the ARVN
18th Infantry Division, led by Brigadier Gen. Lam Quang Tho.
The 18th, long considered among the worst South Vietnamese
units, in 1975 was among the few that fought hard.
The ARVN
force structure of January 1969 was very close to what existed
three years later. Not until 1971 did South Vietnam add a
division-size unit, and it was done by taking the nucleus
from another ARVN formation. The Americans of the Military
Assistance Command Vietnam, whose main task was to help the
Saigon forces’ expansion, noted at
a 1969 staff conference that the ARVN had reached its unit
formation goals, except for several planned engineer battalions.
Between 1968 and 1969, the regulars added seven infantry
battalions, enabling the ARVN to insert two additional regiments
into its best formation, the 1st Infantry Division. These
became the basis for creation of the 3rd Division two years
later.
The Airborne and Marines were elites, in part because
they could fight anywhere in South Vietnam. With the exception
of some ARVN Ranger units, the other forces were all territorial.
Families lived with, or close to, the soldiers and their
bases. The infantry divisions were not formations that could
move to where the enemy threatened unless it was their own
regions.
Saigon lacked freely deployable forces. In 1971,
when President Thieu rejected pulling the ARVN’s 2nd
Infantry Division out of its sector to reinforce the Laotian
invasion, he was recognizing this fact. The next year, during
the Easter Offensive, the ARVN managed to send the 21st Division
from the Mekong Delta to help the defenders of An Loc in
a different military region, and the difficulty of that maneuver
confirmed the basic problem. After the war, Gen. Vien theorized
that creating large-scale units (regiments) from the Regional
Forces would have freed ARVN divisions from territorial defense
responsibilities, but that would not have made them mobile
without solving these social issues.
By far the biggest increase in ARVN infantry
forces during the period of Vietnamization came when the
number of Ranger battalions more than doubled, starting in
1970, to 25 units. But this was not really a South Vietnamese
force increase. Rather, the RVNAF took over the Civilian
Irregular Defense Groups, which the Americans had created,
and transformed them into Rangers.
The units were composed of Montagnards,
treated shabbily by the Saigon government for decades. In
fact, Montagnard political groups opposed to the South Vietnamese
government fled to Cambodia and took up arms at exactly the
point the
ARVN started up these Ranger battalions. The Montagnards
played a key role in defending the Central Highlands during
the Easter Offensive. They were fighting for their homes.
Anywhere else they would have been useless, a perfect illustration
of the territoriality problem with Saigon’s armed forces.
The
biggest increases in the ARVN were in the specialized branches.
The years of Vietnamization witnessed a large expansion of
ARVN artillery and armored forces. The artillery improvements
were the most extensive. Except for the Airborne and Marines,
the South Vietnamese standard had been two artillery battalions
per division. The elite troops, because they tended to be
dispersed in operating areas, had just one artillery battalion
each. By mid-1969 both elite divisions had been brought to
the two-battalion standard, while half the ARVN infantry
divisions fielded three. By 1972 all the infantry formations
had three light, plus a medium, battalion, while the elite
divisions met the three-battalion organization. At that point
the South Vietnamese Army had 1,202 guns.
Independent artillery
units, used by the military regions and high command, also
were greatly increased by 150 percent in 105mm and 100 percent
in 155mm battalions in mid-1969. That added up to a lot of
new units: ten 105mm and six 155mm formations were added
to the army in just one year.
That same
year there were many revisions made in the overall plans
for RVNAF modernization. For artillery, this amounted to
adding another pair of 105mm battalions, plus one equipped
with 155mm howitzers. Two battalions of 175mm guns were approved
but not actually formed until 1971. The heavy gun force later
was doubled.
The United States delivered 790 new 105mm howitzers
to South Vietnam during 1969, meeting all requirements of
the revised plans, but faltered badly on 155mm weapons, managing
to supply just 294 of the 701 field pieces required. But
having a large number of guns did not necessarily equate
to having an effective artillery force. For example, at the
time of the Cambodian invasion, only half the battery positions
of the ARVN III Corps had been surveyed, while 12 percent
of its guns never had been calibrated.
Even after the creation of all the new
units, the need to support pacification and the local forces
drained away capabilities. A dedicated effort in the Central
Highlands in 1969 to train CIDG personnel to man gun sections
at Special Forces camps and have them coordinate with larger
artillery units showed the way. Eventually there came a decision
to form 176 artillery platoons of two guns each to be placed
within the districts and dedicated to local defense. The
first hundred were created during 1970, though only half
had been deployed by the end of the year.
Training
the ARVN artillerymen and servicing the guns brought huge
headaches. Expansion diluted the pool of skilled technicians
and officers. The South Vietnamese artillery school, at Duc
My near Nha Trang, had planned to train 1,715 new personnel
in 1970, but actually enrolled 2,327. The press of service
demands also diluted the training. American training programs
imported from Fort Sill were pared back to essential elements.
Much technical education would have to be done by American
mobile teams roaming the ARVN bases, and by temporarily assigning
Vietnamese artillerymen to American units to garner specialized
knowledge.
The South Vietnamese Armor Command and school were
located at Thu Duc, north of Saigon. The corps began with
armored cavalry units formed in the 1950s, equipped with
a mix of light tanks and armored personnel carriers. A squadron
was attached to each ARVN corps and one stayed in the Saigon
region. In 1962, the ARVN had added pure tank squadrons for
the first time, and by 1966 had six armored cavalry squadrons.
Elements of these units later were incorporated into the
ARVN’s infantry divisions and five additional squadrons
activated in 1968-69.
Vietnamization added an additional five
squadrons. In 1969 reorganization created two actual armored
brigades, grouping tanks squadrons with some of the armored
cavalry. One brigade was assigned to the critical I Corps
area, the other to the Mekong Delta. In Laos in 1971 ARVN
armor encountered Soviet-supplied T-54 tanks in North Vietnamese
hands for the first time. Those vehicles outclassed the American
M-41s, which, at the time, were the best the ARVN had.
After Lam Son 719, the ARVN
added its 20th Tank Regiment, equipped with the M-48. That
unit had just taken the field when the Easter Offensive began.
Its intervention near Quang Tri in April blocked the North
Vietnamese from crossing a key river, a crucial development
in preventing them from capturing Hue.
In general the Easter Offensive pointed up
important weaknesses in the ARVN force structure. That, plus
the cease fire, led to a fresh round of force-building. The
artillery added two 175mm gun battalions; the armored corps,
two M-48 tank regiments. The Marines added another brigade
of three battalions. The Vietnamese Air Force and Navy were
greatly strengthened, and the Air Force transitioned to an
almost all-jet force with a considerably augmented complement
of helicopters and gunships. The South Vietnamese reached
their force of about 1.1 million at this time.
THE PROBLEM OF LEADERSHIP
All these troops required leaders. The problems in that arena
were intractable. In 1969 half of all ARVN battalions were
commanded by men up to two grades below the stipulated rank.
This was after a sustained Saigon effort to promote qualified
personnel, under which 2,653 officers reached field grade
in the ten months ending in October 1969. South Vietnam’s
administrative system, under which military officers controlled
almost all the provinces, villages, and districts, was a
big culprit. At this time almost 40 percent of ARVN officers
were not even assigned to the military.
Losses in battle only
compounded the problem. So did the relief of officers for
corruption. And there was no available pool of reserves.
Upon general mobilization, slightly more than a thousand
officers were recalled to duty and that exhausted the supply.
The military academy at Dalat had 280 spaces in its entering
class in 1966. That simply could not do. A new Military Academy
was built that introduced a four-year program virtually identical
to West Point’s, alongside
a two-year course run for South Vietnamese with college educations.
The reserve school at Thu Duc also operated flat out, and
repeated efforts were made to encourage battlefield promotions.
By
means of extraordinary measures, the ARVN met its officer
goals in 1971. Yet in May 1971 a third of all army battalions
still were commanded by captains, and almost two thirds of
infantry unit commanders had led their battalions for less
than a year. During 1972 the ARVN actually reduced its infantry
force by fifteen battalions in order to economize on officers
and regroup the other units as stronger battalions.
At every command level, corruption affected RVNAF performance,
from ghost soldiers who did not exist except on unit rosters
but drew pay that disappeared into someone’s pocket,
to the gasoline pilfered from pipelines, to the antics of
provincial and district officials and their effects on pacification.
Some men handed over part or all their pay to commanders
so they could be somewhere else, and showed up only for inspections.
The
high command had special problems. There were officers in
the ARVN who had never served outside the Joint General Staff.
In July 1970, President Thieu issued a decree, reorganizing
the Joint General Staff, but he preserved the cumbersome
system under which the JGS functioned simultaneously as the
ARVN’s own command authority.
The problems with the
network persisted. The JGS chief of staff simply had too
much on his plate as he managed the armed forces while commanding
the ARVN war in the field. This became especially evident
in periods of intense combat such as the Cambodian and Laotian
invasions or the Easter Offensive. In his treatise on South
Vietnamese military leadership, JGS Chief of Staff Cao Van
Vien noted that in the latter crisis, the commander of a
key front in I Corps issued orders and failed to tell Saigon
about them. Yet this was not an isolated episode. The very
last review by the American defense attaché in Saigon,
for the period January-April 1975, reported that events “amplified
the lack of control by the JGS. There was a complete lack
of knowledge at the working staff level of the JGS as to
what the situation was at any given time.” The high
command problem was never resolved.
Some division commanders had never undergone advanced training.
Many officers of a certain age received some training at
French or American schools, but it was not until 1969 that
the ARVN itself had a Command and Staff College or a Political
Warfare School, and a National Defense College in Saigon,
the most advanced course of all. Five classes of officers
took the Defense College’s year-long course between
1968 and 1973. Of these 111 colonels and generals, fewer
than a dozen showed up in ARVN senior commands including
divisions, corps staffs, combat arms branches, and the like.
The problem of officer utilization, like that of leadership
itself, persisted.
THE PROBLEM OF PERFORMANCE
For all the statistics, the proof of Vietnamization was in
the fighting. American advisers, including Gen. Creighton
Abrams himself, always put the best face on this. But the
truth is that South Vietnamese performance remained uneven
throughout. Every year brought fresh evidence.
Abrams told
Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird in early 1970 that the
ARVN’s big battles of the previous year had
been in the Central Highlands. He cited four, all fights
for Special Forces camps: Ben Het, Dak To, Bu Prang, and
Duc Lap. Joint Chiefs of Staff historians writing after American
forces had left the war agreed that Ben Het, not Hamburger
Hill or any of the American battles, had been the key engagement
of 1969. The ARVN largely failed in the Highlands campaign.
Ben Het stood under siege for weeks without the South Vietnamese
sector commander at Dak To, breaking up the concentration,
and allowed the enemy to reach past Ben Het to strike at
Dak To itself.
The NVA troops failed to capture either place,
despite using tanks against Ben Het. But the defenders there
were mostly CIDG strikers, Special Forces, Nungs, and American
artillerymen, with a lesser contingent of South Vietnamese.
It took the ARVN four months to disengage the camp. Secret
American reports on ARVN performance show the desertion rate
for the main unit in this sector, the 42nd Infantry, ran
20 percent higher than for the ARVN as a whole. Ben Het was
won by air power, not ground troops. The Americans had furnished
all the Arc Lights and nine-tenths of the tactical air support.
Bu Prang
came under siege during the last months of 1969, and the
battle spilled over to Duc Lap. The campaign featured the
loss of several nearby firebases. MACV said it deliberately
withheld help other than air power in order to test Vietnamization.
But the airplanes saved the day here, too. When a rescue
force of the 23rd ARVN Division finally arrived at Duc Lap,
its regimental commander denounced the leader of the defending
ARVN regiment as a coward and expelled him and his troops
from the camp.
The Cambodian invasion in 1970 was widely portrayed
as the event that proved Vietnamization worked. Without question,
the ARVN did well in the operation. The South Vietnamese
captured many weapons, inflicted losses, and sustained them.
But
several points need making.
First, Nguyen Van Thieu insisted
on timing his offensive according to the importunes of his
astrologer, which raises questions in and of itself. The
ARVN in this operation benefitted from unprecedented amounts
of American artillery and air support. Meanwhile, American
forces took the lead in every big assault except the one
into the Parrot’s Beak.
In places where the two allies worked together, notably the
Fishhook, the bulk of results were tabulated by American
troops.
In the second phase exploitation of that operation,
the losses the ARVN claimed to have inflicted came to less
than 1/11th—and
weapons captured, 1/10th—of the American level. The
most striking ARVN results came from attacks carried out
in IV Corps, where Hanoi and the veterans had relatively
much less strength.
In addition, there were the forgotten
battles of 1970, also in the Central Highlands. Here the
Special Forces camps of Dak Seang and Dak Pek were besieged
or assaulted. In the first campaign the ARVN displayed the
same weaknesses in taking risks to relieve a besieged force
as they had the previous year. At Dak Pek the enemy overran
more than half the camp, and the American-led Mike Force
troops restored the situation before any South Vietnamese
showed up. These battles again manifested weaknesses in ARVN
leadership.
The
Laotian invasion, Lam Son 719, was the test of 1971. The
South Vietnamese corps commander proved ineffective in leading
a large conventional operation. His troops were unable to
coordinate air and artillery support without their American
advisers, who were prohibited from participating because
of restrictions in American law. South Vietnamese battalions
were destroyed and others rendered combat ineffective.
These
were not just any units, but the best ARVN troops: the 1st
Division, the Airborne, the Marines. An ARVN armored brigade,
upon which depended the entire scheme of the operation, attained
its intermediate objective and then sat down. President Thieu
refused to uproot his 2nd Division from its territory and
send it to reinforce his vulnerable troops at the front.
Washington’s
press releases, and President Richard Nixon after the war,
emphasized the numbers of weapons captured and enemy killed,
minimizing ARVN losses, in particular claiming that only
four ARVN battalions had been shown to be “combat
ineffective.” The reality is that those four battalions
had performed very well but had been nearly destroyed. At
least half a dozen other rifle units, plus the armored brigade,
had to be rebuilt after the Laotian fiasco. Worst of all,
Saigon did not fire its corps commander after this patent
failure.
The latter had specific consequences in the greatest
test of Vietnamization, the Easter Offensive of 1972. The
incumbent I Corps commander, not informing Saigon of bad
news, made it impossible for the ARVN to respond. He also
went outside the chain of command to issue orders to tactical
units while not appraising subordinates who had operational
control of those formations. These errors played a key role
in the North Vietnamese capture of Quang Tri, which required
four months of tough fighting to overturn.
South Vietnamese command weaknesses
are here evident. In II Corps in the Central Highlands, the
ARVN regulars performed unevenly, while the Montagnard Rangers
fought well. The best news of 1972 was that the poorly rated
ARVN 5th Division and elements of the 18th fought like lions
at the siege of An Loc. Still, the enduring debate about
1972 is over whether the South Vietnamese fought their way
out of this crisis or were saved by American air power.
The Easter Offensive
ended with the Paris cease fire and the final departure of
American troops from South Vietnam. The war was now left
to the South Vietnamese. Not long after the cease fire, a
senior CIA officer visited Saigon and called together the
agency people who knew the most about South Vietnam and the
South Vietnamese: top analysts fluent in the language, key
operators, some of those who had gone out of their way to
immerse themselves in the culture. There were about fifteen
experts in the room. They were asked their views on whether
Saigon could survive on its own. Some thought the South Vietnamese
could hold on if they continued to have American air power.
Absent such heavy support, no one believed Saigon could make
it.
And that’s the way it turned out.
All those press releases on Vietnamization had expressed
wishes and hopes, not realities past the raw numbers they
reported, cloaking the real weaknesses of the South Vietnamese
military. Saigon had built a huge military machine under
the Vietnamization program, but that never amounted to a
war-winning success because the fissures and cracks in that
edifice left it without a solid foundation.
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