Page:Pentagon-Papers-Part IV. A. 5.djvu/87

Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3 NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011   {| south could engage in "mobile warfare, without having to worry about reprisals against their relatives," has not been substantiated in recent interviews with Viet Cong. Fall, The Two Viet-Nams, op. cit ., 358. |} Rh
 * -valign="top"
 * ICC, Fourth Interim Report, op. cit ., 30.
 * -valign="top"
 * CIA, "Probable Developments in North and South Vietnam Through Mid-1957," (NIE 63–56, 17 July 1956), 10. A thesis advanced by Bernard Fall that the Viet Minh deliberately sent the families of the stay-behinds north, so that the hard-core regulars who remained in the
 * -valign="top"
 * B.S.N. Murti, Vietnam Divided, op. cit ., 224; U.S. Dept. of State, "Southern Regroupees and Northerners in the Communist Military Force in South Vietnam," (Research Memorandum RFE-49, November 9, 1966), SECRET, iii. Fall once accepted a figure of 120,000, but later tended to a ceiling of 100,000. Cf ., Fall in Lindholm, ed ., Viet-Nam , op. cit ., 57; and Fall, Vietnam Witness , op. cit ., 216. The 130,000 total approximates the figures published by the Research Staff of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1956; 150,000 Viet Minh troops and their families. Wilfred G. Burchett, the Australian communist, has referred to "the withdrawal of the 140,000 Viet Minh and the cadres to the north." The statistic usually used in U.S. official publications—for example in the 1965 White Paper—is 90,000 Viet Minh troops moved north, and this is commonly regarded as an invaluable reservoir for the DRV's subsequent infiltration of South Vietnam. But the dimension of this resource extended beyond 90,000 "warriors." There were Montagnards who proved particularly useful in building and protecting the infiltration routes down through the Laotian and Vietnamese Highlands. There were also children, an obvious long-range asset. The DRV set up a special school for southern Montagnards, and some 14 elementary and higher schools were reserved for other southern children. Moreover there is evidence that the Viet Minh systematically broadened its family ties in the South through hundreds of hasty, directed marriages for departing "warriors" and by recruiting very young men and boys just before departure.