Massacre at Huế: Difference between revisions

The Huế Massacre (Vietnamese: Thảm sát tại Huế Tết Mậu Thân or Thảm sát Tết Mậu Thân ở Huế) is the name given to the summary executions and mass killings perpetrated by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army during their capture, occupation and later withdrawal from the city of Huế during the Tet Offensive, considered one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War.

During the months and years that followed the Battle of Huế, which began on January 31, 1968, and lasted a total of 28 days, dozens of mass graves were discovered in and around Huế. Victims included women, men, children, and infants.^[1] The estimated death toll was between 2,800 to 6,000 civilians and prisoners of war.^[2] Victims were found bound, tortured, and sometimes apparently buried alive.^[3][4][5]

A number of U.S. and South Vietnamese authorities as well a number of journalists who investigated the events took the discoveries, along with other evidence, as proof that a large-scale atrocity had been carried out in and around Huế during its four-week occupation. The killings were perceived as part of a large-scale purge of a whole social stratum, including anyone friendly to American forces in the region. The Massacre at Huế came under increasing press scrutiny later, when press reports exposed that South Vietnamese "revenge squads" had also been at work in the aftermath of the battle, searching out and executing citizens that had supported the communist occupation.^[6][7]

Executions

The Viet Cong set up provisional authorities shortly after capturing Huế in the early hours of January 31, 1968, and was charged with removing the existing government administration from power within the city and replacing it with a "revolutionary administration." Working from lists of "cruel tyrants and reactionary elements" previously developed by VC intelligence officers, many people were to be rounded up following the initial hours of the attack. These included Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) soldiers, civil servants, political party members, local religious leaders, American civilians and other international people.

These individuals, according to Viet Cong documents captured during and after the siege, were to be taken out of the city and held and punished for their “crimes against the Vietnamese people”. The disposition of those who were previously in control of the city was carefully laid out, and the lists were detailed and extensive. Those in the Saigon-based-state police apparatus at all levels were to be rounded up and held outside the city. High civilian and military officials were also removed from the city, both to await study of their individual cases.^{[citation needed]}

Ordinary civil servants who worked for "the Saigon enemy" out of necessity, but did not oppose the communists, were destined for reeducation and later employment. Low-level civil servants who had at some point been involved in paramilitary activities were to be held for reeducation, but not employed. There are documented cases of individuals who were executed by the VC when they tried to hide or otherwise resisted during the early stages of Huế's occupation.^{[citation needed]}

Within days of the capture, US Marine Corps (USMC) and US Army as well as ARVN infantry units were dispatched to counterattack and recaptured the city after weeks of fierce fighting, during which the city and its outlying areas were exposed to repeated shelling from US Navy ships off the coast and numerous bombing runs by U.S. aircraft. It was implied that during the USMC and ARVN attack, North Vietnam's forces had rounded up those individuals whose names it had previously collected and had them executed or sent North for reeducation.

It was determined by piecing together bits of information from several sources that a large number of people had taken sanctuary from the battle in a local church. Several hundred of these people were ordered out to undergo indoctrination in the "liberated area" and told afterwards they would be allowed to return home. After marching the group south 9 kilometers, 20 of the people were separated, tried in a kangaroo court, found guilty, executed and buried. The others were taken across the river and turned over to a local Communist unit in an exchange that even included written receipts.^{[citation needed]}

Douglas Pike notes that, while “It is probable that the Commissar intended that their prisoners should be reeducated and returned, but with the turnover, matters passed from his control.” Sometime within the following several weeks, the communists decided to kill the individuals under their control. After being informed of this by VC defectors, local authorities released a list of 428 names of people they claimed were identified from the bones found over a 100 yard area of the Da Mai creek bed.^{[citation needed]}

Philip W. Manhard, a U.S. senior advisor in Huế province, was taken to a POW camp by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and held until 1973. Manhard recounted that during the NVA withdrawal from Huế, the NVA summarily executed anyone in their custody who resisted being taken out of the city or who was too old, too young, or too frail to make the journey to the camp.^{[citation needed]}

Captured in the home of Vietnamese friends, American Stephen Miller of the U.S. Information Service was shot in a field behind a Catholic seminary.^[8] Courtney Niles, an American civilian working for NBC International, was killed during an attack by communist forces while in the presence of U.S soldiers.^[9]

Three professors, members of the West German Cultural Mission who taught at the Huế Faculty of Medicine, and the wife of one of the professors, were arrested and executed by the North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front during their recapture of Huế during the Tet Offensive (Feb. 1968). Their bodies, along with those of scores of Vietnamese civilians, who also were executed, were found April 5 in mass graves near Huế. The slain Germans were Professor and Mrs. Horst Krainick, Dr. Alois Altekoester, and Dr. Raimund Discher.^[8]

Don Oberdorfer spent five days in late 1969 with Paul Vogle, an American English professor at Huế University, going through Huế interviewing witnesses of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong occupation. Oberdorfer classified all the killings into two categories: the planned execution of government officials and their families, political and civil servants, and collaborators with Americans; and those civilians not connected to the government who ran from questioning, who spoke harshly about the occupation, or who the occupiers believed “displayed a bad attitude” towards the occupiers.

Oberdorfer reported that in the Catholic district of Huế, Phủ Cam, virtually every able-bodied man over the age of 15 who took refuge in the cathedral was taken away and killed. In an interview with Ho Ty, a VC commander who took part in the advanced planning of a general uprising, Oberdorfer reported Ty's statement that the Communist party "was particularly anxious to get those people at Phucam... The Catholics were considered particular enemies of ours."^{[citation needed]}

When Trương Như Tạng was appointed Vietcong justice minister soon after Huế, he understood this to be a critical position because the massacre had, "left us with a special need to address fears among the Southern people that a revolutionary victory would bring with it a bloodbath or reign of terror."^[10] This was because, "large numbers of people had been executed" including "captured American soldiers and several other international people who were not combatants." According to Tạng, "discipline in Hue was seriously inadequate" and "fanatic young soldiers had indiscriminately shot people, and angry local citizens who supported the revolution had on various occasions taken justice into their own hands…."^[10] The massacre was, "one of those terrible spontaneous tragedies that inevitably accompany war."^[10]

Discovery

A first summary was published for the U.S. Mission in Vietnam by Douglas Pike, then working as a Foreign Service Officer for the U.S. Information Agency in 1970. Pike identified three distinct phases for the executions in Huế. Phase one was a series of kangaroo court trials of local ARVN officials. The highly publicized trials lasted anywhere from five to ten minutes and the accused were always found guilty of “crimes against the people”.^{[citation needed]}

Phase two was implemented when the communists thought that they could hold the city long-term, and consisted of a campaign of “social reconstruction” along Maoist dogmatic lines. Those who the communists believed to be counterrevolutionaries were singled out in this phase. Catholics, intellectuals, prominent businessmen, and other “imperialist lackeys” were targeted in order to “build a new social order”.^{[citation needed]}

The last phase began when it became evident that the communists could not hold the city and was designed to “leave no witnesses”. Anyone who could identify individual VC members who participated in the occupation was to be killed and their bodies hidden.^{[citation needed]}

Many later authors relied on Pike's account, e.g., Stanley Karnow in Vietnam, A History and Michael Maclear in The Ten Thousand Day War. Other early sources include front line reporters serving under a strict code of reporting conduct imposed by U.S. forces and agencies.^{[citation needed]}

North Vietnam officially denounced "the hooligan lackeys who had owed blood debts to the Tri-Thien Hue compatriots and who were annihilated" in the Tet Offensive.^[11] Captured Viet Cong documents boasted that they had "eliminated" thousands of people and "annihilated members of various reactionary political parties, henchmen, and wicked tyrants" in Hue.^[12] One regiment reported that its units alone killed 1,000 victims. Another report mentioned 2,867 killed. Yet another document boasted of over 3,000 killed. A further document listed 2,748 executions.^[13]

Dispute

Marilyn B. Young disputes the "official" figures of executions at Hue. While acknowledging that there were executions, she cites freelance journalist Len Ackland, who was at Hue, who estimated the number to be somewhere between 300 and 400. Attempting "to understand" what happened at Hue, Young explained that the task of the NLF was to destroy the government administration of the city, establishing in its place a "revolutionary administration."^[14]

A doctor named Alje Vennema, who live at Hue city during the battle, also diputed the number of victims, arguing that the total number of bodies at the four major sites discovered immediately after Tet was 68, instead of the officially claimed total of 477. Vennema said that the evidence indicated most of them were victims of fighting in the area, rather than of political killings.^[15][16][17]

The truthfulness of the translation of these documents have been disputed by Gareth Porter and Edward S Herman.^[18] In 1974, Porter wrote a detailed criticism of U.S. Information Agency official Douglas Pike's account of the "Massacre at Huế during the Tet Offensive."^[19] Porter claimed that Pike manipulated official figures to make it appear that over 2,800 civilians were murdered by the Viet Cong, and the numbers and causes of death were actually much different.^[19] He asserted that Douglas Pike was a "media manipulator par excellence," working in collusion with the ARVN 10th Political Warfare Battalion to manufacture the story of the massacre at the direction of Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker. Additionally, he claimed that Pike overestimated the number of those killed by the VC cadres and that "thousands" of civilians killed in Hue "were in fact victims of American air power and of the ground fighting that raged in the hamlets, rather than NLF execution." His conclusion: "The official story of an indiscriminate slaughter of those who were considered to be unsympathetic to the NLF is a complete fabrication.".^[14]

Writer Hoang Phu Ngoc Tuong, the NLF officer, describes the events of the battle of Hue. He said:

"There were certainly people who had been killed by our troops because when we came to their house and asked them to surrender, they shot at our soldiers and wounded them. So these people had to be shot on the spot. But there were not many people in this category... The majority of these people who got killed and buried in this city, first of all, had been killed by the American bombing and strafing during the counterattacks. For example, the Americans dropped a bomb smack into a hospital in the Dong Ba neighborhood, killing and wounding over 200 persons... When the enemy came into the city, they killed the members of NLF supporter's families and had them taken to the communal graves. Bodies of Liberation soldiers whom we did not have time to retrieve were also taken to the mass graves. In addition the young people and the prisoners of war who walked with us into the jungle were killed by the American planes along with our cadres. During the period from 1975—1977 when we dug canals and irrigation ditches, we discovered that in the mass graves of the so-called massacre victims there were full of people who were wearing the lotus-shaped hats and wearing Liberation forces’ uniforms. This was indeed the devious trick of the neo-colonialists. They killed two birds with one stone. First, they managed to hide their crimes. And second, they heaped all their crimes on the heads of the revolutionary troops. And an American historian who visited Hue after that said publicly that he thought that it was a big propaganda campaign — which cost the Americans a lot of money and which was approved by Kissinger himself to smear the NLF on the Hue situation of Tet 1968."^[20]

See also

• List of massacres in Vietnam
• War Remnants Museum
• Battle of Huế
• Bửu Đồng
• Tet Offensive
• Red Terror

References

Further reading

• Arnold, James R., Tet Offensive 1968: Turning Point in Vietnam, London: Osprey 1990
• Bullington, James R. "And Here, See Huế," Foreign Service Journal, November 1968.
• Christmas, G. R. "A Company Commander Reflects on Operation Huế City," Marine Corps Gazette, April 1971.
• Davidson, Phillip B. Vietnam at War: The History, 1946-1975. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1988.
• Hammel, Eric. Fire in the Streets: The Battle for Huế, Tet 1968. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1991.
• Harkanson, John, and Charles McMahon. "USMC & Tet ’68: There’s a Little Trouble in Huế …," Vietnam Combat, Winter 1985.
• Krohn, Charles A., The Lost Battalion: Controversy and Casualties in the Battle of Huế, Praeger Publishers, 1993.
• Larson, Mike, Heroes: A Year in Vietnam With The First Air Cavalry Division, Barnes & Noble, 2008.
• Nolan, Keith William. Battle for Huế: Tet 1968. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1983.
• Oberdorfer, Don. Tet!: The Turning Point in the Vietnam War. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1971.
• Palmer, Dave Richard. Summons of the Trumpet: U.S.-Vietnam in Perspective. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1978.
• Phan Van Son. The Viet Cong Tet Offensive (1968). Saigon: Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces, 1969.
• Pike, Douglas. PAVN: People’s Army of Vietnam. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1986.
• Secrets of the Vietnam War. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1990.
• Smith, Captain George W., USA. "The Battle of Huế," Infantry, July–August 1968.
• Stanton, Shelby L. Anatomy of a Division: 1st Cav in Vietnam. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1987.
• Tolson, Major General John J., 3rd. Airmobility: 1961-1971. Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1973.
• Truong Sinh. "The Fight to Liberate the City of Huế During Mau Than Tet (1969)," Hoc Tap, December 1974.
• Tucker, Spencer, Vietnam. London: UCL Press, 1999
• Vietnam Order of Battle. New York: U.S. News & World Report, Inc., 1981.
• Young, Marilyn B., The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991)
• Vennama, Alje, The Viet Cong Massacre at Huế. New York, Vantage Press, 1976.

External links

• Complete text of Douglas Pike's "Vietcong Strategy of Terror" (PDF)
• Viet Quoc article
• Misreporting that Doomed Millions, Setting the Record Straight
• The Battle for Hue, 1968 by James H. Willbanks