Strategic Hamlet Program
The Wehrdorf Program ( Strategic Hamlet Program , vietn. Ấp Chiến lược ), also known as the Taylor-Staley Plan , was a far-reaching military, political and social program started in March 1962. It was carried out by the South Vietnamese government with the support of the USA and had the aim of keeping the population away from the influence of the National Liberation Front . According to the plan, the civilian population was to be concentrated in some areas under government control. After initial success, however, it became clear just a year later that the plan would fail. The rural population often did not want to leave their home areas voluntarily. Corruption, forced relocation , mismanagement and the arbitrariness of the responsible officials led to a rapidly decreasing identification of the rural population with the government. In late 1963 and early 1964, the program was gradually discontinued.
Vietnam 1961
After the beginning of the first major battles between insurgents and government troops in early 1960, a resistance movement that was gaining in strength soon developed from various individual partisan units. The guerrillas' preferred targets were initially capable and influential government officials. For example, the head of the South Vietnamese secret police in the provinces of Quang Ngai , Quang Nam and Bin Dinh , a feared man named Chau, was eliminated with a trick: some guerrillas disguised themselves as ARVN officers and managed to persuade Chau to take them over to follow. After walking a few hundred meters, the agent and his men were ambushed and disarmed. Chau was publicly executed as a deterrent. The execution of Chau was not an isolated incident; in the first half of 1960 alone, 780 government officials were killed and hundreds more kidnapped. The importance of these executions should not be underestimated; with each further attack, the influence of the government in the country declined.
Resistance against the Saigon regime was organized not only on a military, but also on a political level . On December 20, 1960, the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam was officially established. It was an all-party government whose members were former supporters of the Việt Minh , bourgeois oppositionists, members of the three major sects ( Cao Dai , Hoa Hao and Bình Xuyên ), Buddhists , intellectuals and many other people who were the South Vietnamese head of government Ngo Dinh Diem had made enemies through his ruthless policies. The NLF announced a program aimed at reaching broad sections of the Vietnamese population. This included, among other things, a redistribution of the land, the reduction of lease fees, the removal of diems, the promotion of the domestic economy, the reduction of foreign imports, the equality of all religions, races and genders, and finally the peaceful unification of North and South Vietnam.
Major changes occurred in South Vietnam in the course of 1961. After its establishment, the NLF immediately began expanding its influence and took control in many areas of the country. By far the most important goal was to win the population over to the cause of the liberation front. This was usually not difficult for her, as the representatives of the Saigon regime were often corrupt, cruel and domineering officials who were hated by the population. There are countless stories of barbaric torture, murders and arrests by representatives of Diems or soldiers of the South Vietnamese army . Former resistance fighters, or those they believed to be, were all too often publicly beheaded in order to intimidate the population and suppress any thought of resistance. For example, Law 10/59, which was passed in May 1959, gave Diem's agents the right to cut the head off of anyone suspected of sympathizing with the rebels. In addition to the atrocities, looting , forced relocation, strict censorship and the prohibition of any political opposition also contributed to Diem's unpopularity among the population.
At the end of 1961, the situation was extremely critical for Saigon, and its support in Vietnamese society gradually waned. At that time, the government was already receiving massive support from the American government. As the situation worsened and Diem wrote a letter to the US government to ask for help, John F. Kennedy decided to support South Vietnam with increased military and economic aid. The South Vietnamese army was increased by 50,000 men and supported by significantly more US advisers . A battalion of the Green Berets was sent into the Vietnamese jungle to mobilize ethnic minorities in the western highlands and use them to monitor the borders.
The year of the fortified villages
Taylor-Staley plan
Between 1955 and 1961, Washington granted the South Vietnamese government military and economic aid amounting to approximately $ 2 billion without any notable success. A decisive step in improving the situation was the application of a new, complex strategy. In addition to increased military efforts, attempts should also be made to draw the population to the side of the government through social and economic means. The originator of the plan was the American economist Eugene Staley. After a few visits to Vietnam, he realized that the only way to counter the social revolution of the NLF was through social reforms. It was necessary to shift the fight against the rebels from a military to a political level.
Staley's plan was to create a wide, unpopulated strip of land along the Cambodian and Laotian borders. The guerrillas were supposed to be pushed back there in order to be able to destroy them in larger military operations. At the same time, control over the villages should be achieved in several steps:
Stage 1: The South Vietnamese villages should be militarily secured and liberated from the hands of the NLF.
Stage 2: After taking control, a competent, non-corrupt local government should be established.
Step 3: After the sympathy of the population had been acquired, the material situation of the residents should be improved step by step.
In this way it was hoped that the guerrillas would be able to dig the water. If all three stages were successful, the area would become what is known as a “welfare zone” - an area where the population would be completely under government control and beyond the influence of NLF propaganda. Staley divided South Vietnam into three areas:
1. Yellow Zones: Areas that were already under Saigon's control. This is where the generous US aid would come first.
2. Blue zones: areas that were not entirely under the influence of the government, d. H. “No man's land”, in which both Saigon's troops and those of the NLF moved, but where the residents could still be won over to the cause of the government.
3. Red Zones: The areas that were controlled by the guerrillas. It was here that yellow zones had to be created first, from which the government's influence would gradually spread. Military actions took precedence over civilian actions.
Fortified settlements should be built in all three zones, strategic villages with moats, barbed wire entrenchments, observation towers and bamboo palisades. The residents should receive military training and, together with regional self-defense forces, protect the rural population. There should be schools, markets and medical facilities in the settlements. In addition, many farmers were promised land, a certain amount of money and regular food rations.
Fight for the hearts of the people
After initial resistance to the plans by the Diems family, the implementation of the plan was decided on January 4, 1962. After the Americans promised to deliver the materials for building the villages, Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu became the driving force behind the program. A total of 116 prosperity zones with 15,000 strategic villages with 500 to 900 residents per village were to be established within 18 months. Since the Mekong Delta and the coastal regions were already more densely populated, existing villages could be expanded and fortified. In the sparsely populated provinces, however, the population first had to be concentrated. But the farmers, even the pro-government ones, were often unwilling to leave their homeland and face the hardships of resettlement.
In the early 1960s, more than 80% of the population lived on land that their ancestors had cultivated for generations. The village community and family were the most important societal-building factors where there were usually only very loose relationships with the state authorities. In addition to the material loss that many suffered, leaving the ancestral graves behind was often even more serious. Ancestors played a very important role in the Confucian Buddhist belief of the population. To separate the peasants from them means to uproot them and to deliver them defenselessly to the dangers of the cosmos.
When residents refused to be relocated, which often happened, they were forcibly evicted from the villages. Most of the time, the farmers could not take more with them to the strategic villages than what they were wearing and a little bit of personal belongings. Again and again there was violence against the villagers. Some of the settlements that had put up a united defense against resettlement were even bombed and destroyed by the Vietnamese air force. Village elders who opposed the resettlement were often cruelly executed by the ARVN: They wanted to make examples. While the first villages were still being built by soldiers, later it was quite common to force the residents to build the new village without any form of payment. The abandoned villages were often burned down in front of the farmers, and chemicals were sprayed over the plantations, fields and forests for the first time since the end of 1961 to destroy all plant life: a measure that has tremendously damaged the reputation of the USA in all of Asia.
The first strategic villages were established in Binh Duong Province, north of Saigon. Hundreds of additional villages were established in south and central Vietnam over the next several months, including in the provinces of Quang Ngai, Binh Dinh and Phu Yen, during numerous different operations. Another step in the plan was the deployment of so-called “civil action groups”. These consisted of 20 to 30 men, whose job it was to train self-defense units, create agricultural cooperatives and build schools and clinics. In addition to the normal villages, some “model villages” were built, showpieces that were shown to foreign representatives. The head of the British contingent of advisers, Sir Robert Thompson, recommended that the government proceed slowly and initially secure the areas militarily over a large area. But Diem wanted as many strategic villages as possible, as quickly as possible. Countless settlements were built in areas where the government could not guarantee permanent security at all. Areas that the government troops could not get under their control were declared by Diem as so-called "open zones". The villages located there have been the target of sporadic bombardment by planes and artillery to drive the residents into the government-controlled areas. The result were thousands of refugees who were celebrated by Diem as supporters of his policies. In fact, however, these measures only drove another wedge between the peasant population and the government.
Life in the strategic villages
After the population was relocated to the villages, voluntarily or involuntarily, their daily habits were completely changed. Life in the new settlements proceeded according to a strict program: all residents were given personal papers and ID cards, both those with which they could move around the village and those with which they could move outside. Entrances and exits were strictly guarded, and the residents were often subjected to body searches. The gates were open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., and nobody was allowed to enter or leave the village at night. Visits from village to village to celebrate parties, funerals or weddings - the most popular form of social intercourse between the villagers - were prohibited. Once the people were relocated, they were subjected to a rigorous government taxation system. In 1962, a Vietnamese farmer earned an average of 1,000 piastres , about $ 8-10, a month. From this meager wage he had to pay an average of 200 to 400 piasters in protection taxes, 4 piasters for the South Vietnamese flag , which every resident in the strategic villages had to have, 50 piasters for the uniform, 30 piasters for the village administration, taxes on births, weddings, and deaths and so on. The residents had to undergo military training and join semi-regular associations. Every male resident over the age of twelve had to carry a gun with him, whether he wanted to or not. The people were uniformed, grown men were to wear blue jackets and white trousers, boys white jackets and white trousers, women white jackets and black trousers, old women black jackets and white trousers - all measures that appeared to the resettled as harassment.
Since February 1962 it was also forbidden to beat the gongs or drums, as these could be signals for the partisans. The inhabitants of the central highlands were allowed to work areas within a radius of only one kilometer, which practically brought agriculture to a standstill. In the Mekong Delta, the farmers' fields were usually several kilometers from the village. People went to the fields in the morning and came back in the late afternoon, which meant they were out of sight of the soldiers for the entire day. Farm animals could not be kept within the village due to lack of space. Because of the limited area around the village, the hunt was over. A political cleansing program has started. Family members in the areas already under guerrilla control were asked to come to the strategic villages. If the farmers refused, the people in the villages faced punishment. The settlements were searched for rebels, and anyone suspected of sympathizing or having had contact with the NLF was arrested, sentenced and often publicly executed. With a huge amount of effort, the Saigon regime succeeded in bringing large areas, at least nominally, under the control of the government.
Another reason for the discontent of the farmers was the rampant corruption among government officials. Even before the resettlement, only a few landowners adhered to the government-imposed reduction in leases from 50% to an average of 25% of the harvest. Little changed in the strategic villages. The promised new huts were often nothing more than dirty, quickly assembled barracks. Of the food rations that the Americans supplied, the warehouse manager often kept half for himself and his team. Huge sums of money, which were actually intended to help the farmers, ended up in the pockets of government officials or the Diems family.
Resistance and failure
Intervention of the liberation front
The motto of the Americans involved in the military village program was: "We can only do for Vietnam what the government in Saigon wants to do". In that thought, however, was one of the fundamental problems that would cause the plan to fail. Shortly after the resettlement began, it became clear that the brothers Diem and Nhu did not intend to improve living conditions, but only to physically control the population. The intervention of further American experts and massive criticism had brought little. Diem accepted the aid supplies and weapons from the USA, he saw in them a historical obligation that rich America had to fulfill of course to poor Vietnam, which was threatened by alleged communism, but he forbade advice on how to do it better. After a short time, riots broke out in many villages. In many cases, the residents burned the palisades or their own village and destroyed the weapons. They then told the Vietnamese soldiers that the resistance fighters had attacked the village and ran away with all weapons. These protests were not always instigated by the NLF. But the result was always the same: tougher sentences and more executions. Kuno Knöbl summed up the general mood of the population in the words: "The farmers soon had the feeling that the government did not want to protect themselves from them, but on the contrary."
The leaders of the Liberation Front were aware of the far-reaching program of Dr. Staleys very concerned at first. But they soon realized that the Wehrdorf program did not pose a threat to them, but on the contrary offered new opportunities to turn the population against the Saigon regime. Hence the strategic villages became the preferred targets of the guerrillas. They vigorously demonstrated to the farmers that the government is unable to protect or care for them. By November 1962, within just seven months, 105 of a total of 117 strategic villages had been attacked in Ben Tre Province alone. In the Mekong Delta, the partisans destroyed 547 villages. In all of South Vietnam, a total of 2,000 villages are said to have been attacked more than once in 1962. The village of Dai Dem was attacked or destroyed 36 times in one year. But despite all the raids and fighting, the front always remained true to one tactic: the life of the farmers should be spared if possible. The only victims of the attacks were soldiers and government officials. One order from the NLF fighters said: “The farmers should not be killed. The fortifications, but above all the barbed wire barriers, must be destroyed. ”By the end of 1962 alone, more than 1,250 kilometers of barbed wire and palisades were destroyed in this way. Since the workshops of the NLF had a constant shortage of raw materials, they often benefited from the barbed wire they captured. Many residents welcomed the guerrilla attacks. Only a few farmers were real supporters of the government, so only a few were willing to repair the fortifications after the attacks in order to continue the life forced on them. If the NLF managed to take a village undamaged, it often became a fortified place under their command. In contrast to the Saigon government, which believed that the farmers were dependent on them, the guerrillas knew that they would only survive if they had the active support of the people.
Another target of the rebels were the members of the "civil action groups". Some American historians saw these actions as attempts to turn civilians against the government by further worsening their social and economic situation. Guenter Lewy even described them as: "Murders of ... school teachers, medical staff and social workers who tried to improve the lives of farmers." These statements may be true in some cases, but they are not entirely true. In reality, the farmers only rarely benefited from the aid promised by the government, even without the assistance of the NLF. The “civil action groups”, on the other hand, did not have the exclusively social character that they were supposed to awaken. Her most important tasks were the setting up of local self-defense units, the construction of defensive structures, the distribution of weapons and the deployment of government representatives. Thus they were more of military-political and less of social importance. After a short time the medical aid program of the strategic villages, a key element of civil work and the South Vietnamese intelligence service, practically came to a standstill.
The failure of the military village program
The result of hardly any other operation during the Vietnam War was as far from expectations as that of the Wehrdorf program. The presidential palace in Saigon published figures that by the summer of 1962 more than a third of the entire South Vietnamese population, four million people, were living in strategic villages and thus under the control of the government. It was only after the collapse of the Diem regime in November 1963 that it became clear that the government was systematically falsifying military statistics to reassure Americans. Countless of the allegedly 3,225 fortified settlements existed only on paper. After the coup, the new head of government, General Dương Văn Minh , tried to calm the domestic political situation. Therefore, he began to reduce the Wehrdorf program step by step. He allowed anyone who had to live in a strategic village to return to their home area. Within a few weeks, thousands of people left the villages, which ultimately meant the end of the military village program. This at least ended the forced resettlements that had caused so much resentment among the rural population. However, the concept of fortified settlements never completely disappeared during the war.
The result of the program was the alienation of the population from their government on a gigantic scale. The farmers reacted to the reprisals and oppression with increasing bitterness. Instead of centers of resistance, the strategic villages became easy targets for subversion by the Liberation Front. In addition, the peasants were confronted anew, and this time very memorable, with all the excesses of the corrupt regime, in which they had never had much confidence, but for which they could have been won. A French plantation owner once said: "Anyone who was unlucky enough to end up in a poorly managed strategic village, and whoever was not yet a supporter of the Viet Cong, was determined there."
literature
- Kuno Knöbl: Victor Charlie: Viet Cong - The Uncanny Enemy . Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 4th edition, Munich 1968
- Marc Frey : History of the Vietnam War. The tragedy in Asia and the end of the American dream . Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-45978-1
- Guenter Lewy: America in Vietnam . Oxford University Press, New York 1978
- Wilfred Burchett: Partisans versus Generals . 1st edition, Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1965
- Terrence Maitland: The Vietnam Experience: Raising the Stakes. Boston Publishing Company, Boston 1982
Individual evidence
- ^ Burchett: Partisans versus Generals. P. 75
- ↑ Frey: History of the Vietnam War. P. 65
- ↑ Frey: History of the Vietnam War. P. 66
- ^ Knöbl: Victor Charlie: Viet Cong. P. 47
- ^ Burchett: Partisans versus Generals. P. 18
- ↑ Frey: History of the Vietnam War. P. 72
- ↑ Frey: History of the Vietnam War. P. 55
- ^ Knöbl: Victor Charlie: Viet Cong. P. 206
- ↑ Frey: History of the Vietnam War. P. 88
- ^ Knöbl: Victor Charlie: Viet Cong. P. 207
- ^ Burchett: Partisans versus Generals. P. 123
- ↑ Frey: History of the Vietnam War. P. 62
- ^ Knöbl: Victor Charlie: Viet Cong. P. 209
- ^ Maitland: Raising the Stakes. P. 18
- ^ Burchett: Partisans versus Generals. P. 249
- ^ Maitland: Raising the Stakes. P. 54
- ^ Lewy: America in Vietnam. P. 25
- ^ Burchett: Partisans versus Generals. P. 155
- ^ Knöbl: Victor Charlie: Viet Cong. P. 211
- ^ Knöbl: Victor Charlie: Viet Cong. P. 155
- ^ Knöbl: Victor Charlie: Viet Cong. P. 212
- ^ Knöbl: Victor Charlie: Viet Cong. P. 213
- ^ Burchett: Partisans versus Generals. P. 303
- ↑ Frey: History of the Vietnam War. P. 89
- ^ Maitland: Raising the Stakes. P. 47
- ^ Lewy: America in Vietnam. P. 16
- ^ Maitland: Raising the Stakes. P. 54
- ^ Maitland: Raising the Stakes. P.56
- ^ Lewy: America in Vietnam. P. 25
- ↑ Frey: History of the Vietnam War. P. 100
- ^ Knöbl: Victor Charlie: Viet Cong. P. 214