Page:Pentagon-Papers-Part IV. A. 5.djvu/235

Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3 NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011  3. Preparations: Winter, 1958 -- Spring, 1959. In the autumn of 1957, and throughout 1958, violence in rural South Vietnam mounted, and increasingly manifested strategic direction. There is, however, only sparse evidence that North Vietnam was directing, or was capable of directing that violence. Yet even had the DRV determined in late 1957 to support insurgency in South Vietnam, there probably would have been little sign of that decision in 1958, so soon after it had been reached. The Lao Dong leaders were possibly the most experienced and dedicated group of professional revolutionaries in the world -- and probably the most cautious. Perhaps more than any other such group, the North Vietnamese communists had subjected their past to intense and objective scrutiny, striving to detect errors in strategy and tactics, and to derive lessons applicable to the future. The writings of Ho, Giap, Truong Chinh, and others have revealed that they were by no means satisfied that they had always made correct choices in the past on questions of war or peace. The salient lesson they have drawn is that premature revolution is significantly worse than no revolution at all, and they have repeatedly cited the abortive uprisings of 1930 and 1940 as cases in point. In both instances, amorphous, mainly spontaneous insurrection lead to failure, and then to reprisals and heavy losses among exposed middle and lower echelon Party leaders, which set back Party progress several years.

The 1940 rebellion has seemed particularly poignant to DRV commentators. When the Japanese invaded Tonkin in September, 1940, the Indochinese Communist Party, together with other Vietnamese nationalists, elected violent resistance. Demonstrations took place throughout the country. Ho Chi Minh was at the time in Kuming, with the ICP "External Bureau." Ho and his colleagues there counseled their in-country counterparts against proceeding beyond demonstrations, but the ardor of local leaders could not be dampened. In November, 1940, peasants in the Plain of Reeds took up arms, and there was shortly a series of peasant jacquerie, which spread throughout the Mekong Delta. As Ho, ., had predicted, the uprising failed and the French administration in Saigon launched a savage repression which virtually destroyed the ICP organization in rural Cochinchina. 177/

In May, 1941, at the Eighth Plenum of the ICP Central Committee, there was an exhaustive review of the 1940 debacle, and a re-direction of party effort toward forming an alliance of all social classes and political parties, nationalist movements, religious sects, and anti-Japanese resistance groups. Social reform and communist slogans were de-emphasized. All the resources of the Party were to be thrown behind a new front group which would carry out the Party strategy; that group was the League for Independence of Vietnam, or the Viet Minh. 178/ Again and again thereafter, communist leaders in their speeches and published works have returned to the lessons of the abortive revolt and the Eighth Plenum : never squander Party grassroots Rh