Cable from Comrade Pham Hung to Comrade Le Duc Tho

After receiving Comrade Le Duc Tho’s guidance opinions, Comrade Pham Hung sent the following reply regarding issues involving the realities of the B2 Battlefield:

After the Paris Agreement, the balance of forces on all battlefields has changed substantially in our favor. Our three-pronged attack movement at the grassroots level has gradually been rebuilt and expanded in different forms and at different levels.

Reviewing the attack and uprising movement at the grassroots level, Comrade Pham Hung clearly pointed out one concrete fact:

After the 1968 offensive and uprisings, we launched a movement to eliminate small enemy outposts and liberate hamlets and villages, but the results of this effort were meager because the enemy launched powerful counterattacks.

Our local forces at the grassroots level suffered heavy losses, especially during 1969, and only in 1970 did they finally begin to recover. After the Paris Peace Agreement, our forces strove to counter and push back the enemy’s land-grabbing efforts. The result was that in the Mekong Delta each month our forces managed to eliminate between 50 and 70 enemy outposts, mainly through the use of region and province level units. However, the enemy managed to retake virtually all of the outposts he had lost. During the six months of the 1974 dry season, our three-pronged movement made clear progress. It was able to eliminate many enemy outposts and to open up many new areas for our forces. Conducting combined campaigns at the province or district level, supported by main force units, our forces attacked and overran many key enemy positions and intensified the operations of our three-pronged attack. In that way we managed to liberate more than 1,000 outposts in the Mekong Delta, with village and district level forces participating in more than 30% of these successes.

The 1974 COSVN Conference and the August 1974 review of our counter-pacification campaign affirmed the ability of hamlets to liberate hamlets and villages to liberate villages. Under these new conditions, regional and province level units were used to attack and destroy key enemy positions to create conditions favorable for our three-pronged attack at the grass roots level. These operations were conducted as combined campaigns in individual provinces and districts that were aimed at essentially defeating the enemy’s rural pacification program.

As for the 1974 rainy season, even though COSVN and regional main force units had conducted few operations, through the combined campaigns at the province and district level we expanded our three-pronged attack movement and continued to win major victories. Grassroots-level forces, along with district and provincial forces, made great progress, gained experience, and became more self-confident. Then our main forces launched powerful attacks that inflicted clear, clean defeats on the enemy, defeats that enabled the people to rise up and eliminate entire networks of enemy outposts and guard posts. This proved that conditions were right and that we were in fact capable of conducting grassroots-level uprisings to liberate local areas.

In Region 9, the mass uprising movement was aggressive and ferocious. Local armed forces units supported mass forces in destroying or dispersing individual enemy companies and village-level military headquarters in many locations such as Luong The in Ca Mau and Hiep My in Tra Vinh. They inflicted a continuous stream of casualties on RF battalions that resulted in the retreat and disintegration of these RF units in Cai Nuoc and Thi Keo in Rach Gia province and at Dam Doi, Rach Rang, Vinh Thuan, An Vien, etc.

In Region 9, a dozen districts now had the right conditions to make tremendous progress. Our forces were gradually isolating the province capitals and heavily lowland areas in places such as Ca Mau, Rach Gia, and Tra Vinh.

Pham Hung said that Region 8 and many other regions were carrying out reviews of operations to derive lessons learned and that these reviews clearly demonstrated the capabilities of villages, districts, and provinces to become self-sufficient in order to exploit our combined strength to create conditions that enabled our large, mobile main force units to attack and destroy key enemy military strong-points. Such attacks in turn created favorable conditions that would allow villages to liberate villages, districts to liberate districts, and provinces to liberate provinces. This trend had many practical possibilities for quickly opening up pockets, areas, and entire regions for our forces while at the same time we worked to expand, consolidate, and integrate our liberated zones in the rear.

Comrade Pham Hung emphasized that with regard to the guidance it had issued on the three-pronged attack movement, COSVN had given very specific and detailed guidance to individual area, such as the outskirts of Saigon, the areas along main roads and lines of communications, [Northern] refugee resettlement areas, ethnic Khmer areas, Cao Dai and Hoa Hao areas, etc., on properly deploying our cadre. Because of this concrete and detailed guidance, a number of areas had made great progress. Even [Northern] refugee resettlement areas in Eastern Cochin China that were occupied by the enemy and that had been very difficult for us to infiltrate now had begun to make great progress, and we had been able to recruit many agents and build organizations inside them. Pham Hung said that this demonstrated that the possibilities of conducting uprisings to liberate these areas had become widespread.

[Translator’s Note: This document can also be found in the first edition of Lich Su Bien Nien Xu Uy Nam Bo va Trung Uong Cuc Mien Nam (1954-1975) [Historical Chronicle of the Cochin China Party Committee and the Central Office for South Vietnam, 1954-1975] (Hanoi: Nha xuat ban Chinh tri quoc gia, 2002), 1068-1070.]