Penalties of Partition

...The manner in which Ho, in 1945, balanced the Chinese, the French and non-Communist nationalists who were wooed with sweet promises when the Republic was established but invested with little or no power, is well described and makes instructive reading— particularly in the light of Ho's present balancing of the Chinese against the Russians...

...How long is this likely to go on...

...Whatever the demerits of the leadership at the top may have been...

...Besides the full texts of the constitutions of North and South Vietnam, the book is replete with fascinating insights, some of them all too brief...

...The initiative, clearly, is still with the Viet Cong...

...It would not be going too far to say that the war in South Vietnam cannot be considered won until there remains not a single disgruntled peasant in all the territory of the Republic...

...Unfortunately, the similarities between the Indochina War and today's fighting are increasing...

...But the futility of U.S...

...He gives a vivid portrayal of what he terms "the Janus-faced quality" of John Foster Dulles' foreign policy at Geneva in 1954, a policy which was the unfortunate result of conflicting pressures from home and from our allies, and which led Dulles to make statements sounding like serious proposals or threats when Eisenhower and others knew they "were not meant as that at all...

...Diem refused even to consider such relatively innocuous contacts as the post-card exchange for separated members of families proposed by the North, and his brother Nhu's susceptibility to initiating a clandestine dialogue with the North through the French and the International Control Commission was merely the gambit of a power-mad family in its death throes...

...General Nguyen Khanh, promises he will build up his grass-roots support...

...While Fall does not advance any prediction of his own concerning the outcome of the war, his book contains more facts and figures basic to the situation—and therefore basic to the outcome, whatever it will be—than any other single volume yet published...

...Nevertheless, the hope of reunification still flickers among the population of the South, and especially among the intellectuals...

...Fall points out the fallacy of comparing the war with the 12-year Emergency in Malaya...

...All the factors in South Vietnam point to a much longer struggle...

...For nine long years there were virtually no contacts across the 17th Parallel...

...As Fall points out, the Viet Cong realized the importance of the link between the governed and the government and proceeded in the crucial years 1957-60 to cut Saigon off from its contacts with the countryside by systematically assassinating competent village chiefs, schoolteachers, social workers and medical personnel...

...Fall demonstrates that the war in South Vietnam cannot be "won" in the sense that we in the West like to think of wars being won: with a formal surrender and full panoply of colors...

...Fall describes the tumultuous events of 1945, including the brutal Viet Minh massacre of 450 French and Eurasians in Saigon that September...

...Now, with the tables turned, de Gaulle sees a return to the status quo originally envisaged at Geneva in 1954 as the only way out of this situation...

...The partition of Vietnam, he insists, must be considered provisional rather than permanent, and the Vietnamese must get together and form a single neutralist government...

...It also implies, of course, the transformation of the territory now under Hanoi's control from a Communist satellite into a genuinely neutralist half of a reunified Vietnam...

...The insurgents possess a secure base on the other side of a common land border, and they are racially identical with the local population, which was not the case in Malaya...

...In the end, American GIs were not dispatched to the aid of the heroic defenders of Dienbienphu...

...Seventh Fleet...

...Twenty...

...North Vietnam soon became a Communist satellite, as Fall's pages of economic statistics and analysis of party organization show, but "Uncle Ho" has managed to cling to the banner of national unity and to keep the Saigon regime from claiming it for itself...

...Reviewed by ARTHUR J. DOMMEN Carnegie Press Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations South Vietnam, unfortunately, has still not found its Magsaysay: a man who will deal with the Viet Cong insurgents on their own terms of cunning and extortion and steal their prophecy of eventual, inevitable victory...

...Ten years...

...By May 1961 when Lyndon Johnson went to Vietnam, Saigon was, to borrow Fall's phrase, légiférant dans le vide (legislating in the void...

...Whether the two Vietnams will again become one is still a matter of conjecture...

...It is a war in which the political aspect is much more significant than the military, and one which certainly will not be won by the nuclear might of the U.S...

...efforts to sustain a government of half the Vietnamese people is becoming increasingly apparent...

...The laurels for ridding the country of the French and bringing independence to Vietnam fell to the Viet Minh and the wily Ho Chi Minh, whose biography fills one of the most valuable chapters of this book...

...The generals who replaced the introverted Diem government in November spent most of their time quarreling among themselves and jockeying for personal power, and now four of them are in prison...

...It remains to be seen, however, whether he can provide the daring sense of decisiveness needed not to win the war, but to win back the peasants...

...There we see a picture of top-level American indecision over "what to do about Indochina" after the conquest of the Pacific...

...Perhaps more important...

...South Vietnam started life with two strikes against it because the French left Indochina without a trained and trustworthy civil service comparable to the civil services left India and Malaya by the British...

...The Viet Cong was assisted in its task by the petty abuses of power practiced by Diem's officials at the local level...

...Here we are presented with a snapshot of Viet Minh guerrillas assisting downed American flyers to safety from the Japanese in the mountains of Tonkin, and cultivating the friendship of American oss agents in Hanoi...

...Bargaining on Ho Chi Minh's nationalist pride, de Gaulle has initiated a series of delicate maneuvers including the recognition of Communist China, the implications of which are formidable indeed...

...The new top man...

...Such a return implies the withdrawal of American military advisers from the territory now under Saigon's control...

...How this desperately sad situation has come about is traced with a damning pen and thousands of telling statistics and quotations in this book by Bernard B. Fall, appropriately dedicated to "the valiant and longsuffering Vietnamese—North and South...

...But the United States has not yet been able to banish the spectre of Americans garrisoning indefinitely the rainswept jungles of Indochina...

...Vietnam is the scene of more and more bloodshed, and once again the peasants, caught between Viet Cong terrorists and massive government firepower, are the principal victims...