How They Won

Abstract

O ne of the most remarkable features of the current conflict in Viet Nam i:s the ability of the forces opposed to the Saigon government, now consisting of some 240,000 men under arms, to fight to an apparent stand-still a combined Vietnamese and foreign military force some seven times their own size. They have done this without advanced weapons, without aircraft, without modern communications, without a massive economic assistance program, and without a single grain of miracle rice. Similarly by early 1965 the revolutionary movement was apparently within a few months of the final general counteroffensive which would have swept into the cities destroying the few surviving vestiges of the Saigon government. This was accomplished with manpower largely of southern origin, and in the face of massive foreign assistance to the Saigon government which in the preceding decade had provided hundreds of millions of dollars of economic and military aid, had. completely retrained and re-equipped Saigon's military and police forces, and had supplemented this extensive material aid with an advisory effort exceeding 10,000 military and civilian personnel. How was this possible? The following pages recount the findings of a study intended to answer this question. This study examined side-by-side the efforts of both the revolutionary movement and the Saigon government over a fifteen-year period in Long An province of the Mekong Delta, in order to discover what differences in approach permitted the revolutionary movement to accomplish, with such sparse human and material resources, what the Saigon government failed to accomplish with such a comparative wealth of resources. These findings are based on the factors which led to the collapse of the Saigon government's presence in Long An province by early 1965, but they may be carried over into the present period to explain the remarkable per-