THE 1968 'HUE MASSACRE'
(Thảm sát Mậu Thân Huế 1968)
Part One
by D. Gareth Porter
“Indochina
Chronicle,” #33, June 24, 1974
Six
years after the stunning communist Tet Offensive of 1968, one of the
enduring myths of the Second Indochina War remains essentially
unchallenged: the communist “massacre” at Hue. The official version of
what happened in Hue has been that the National Liberation Front (NLF) and
the North Vietnamese deliberately and systematically murdered not only
responsible officials but religious figures, the educated elite and
ordinary people, and that burial sites later found yielded some 3,000
bodies, the largest portion of the total of more than 4,700 victims of
communist execution.
Although there is still much that is not known about what happened in Hue,
there is sufficient evidence to conclude that the story conveyed to the
American public by the South Vietnamese and American propaganda agencies
bore little resemblance to the truth, but was, on the contrary, the result
of a political warfare campaign by the Saigon government, embellished by
the U.S. government and accepted uncritically by the U.S. press. A careful
study of the official story of the Hue “massacre” on the one hand, and of
the evidence from independent or anti-communist sources on the other,
provides a revealing glimpse into efforts by the U.S. press to keep alive
fears of a massive “bloodbath.”1 It is a myth which has served the U.S.
administration interests well in the past, and continues to influence
public attitudes deeply today.
THE
TENTH POLITICAL WARFARE BATTALION'S ROLE
To
unravel the official story of Hue, one must go back to the source of the
original information which was conveyed to the American public about the
episode.
The
agency of the Saigon government given overall responsibility for compiling
data on the alleged “massacre” and publicizing the information was neither
the Ministry of Social Welfare and Refugees nor the Ministry of Health, as
one might have expected, but the Tenth Political Warfare Battalion of the
Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). It is on the word of this body,
whose specific mission is to discredit the National Liberation Front
without regard to the truth, that the story of the “massacre” reported by
the U.S. press in 1968 and 1969 was based. Neither the number of bodies
found nor the causes of death were ever confirmed by independent sources.
On the contrary, as we shall see, evidence from independent sources
challenges the Tenth Political Warfare Battalion's version of the facts.
The
official Saigon account of the alleged massacre surfaced on April 23, 1968
when the Political Warfare Battalion released a report that over one
thousand people were executed by the communists in and around Hue. The
battalion's report was repeated in detail by the United States Information
Service but the U.S. media ignored it.2 One week later the U.S. Mission
released a report of its own which was essentially a restatement of the
ARVN report. The U.S. Mission report was said to have been the result of
an investigation “by the United States and South Vietnamese authorities.”3
But the role of the U.S. advisors in the report appears to have been
secondary; according to the Saigon government news agency, Vietnam Press,
the report was based on data supplied by the National Police in Hue, U.S.
advisers, interviews with South Vietnamese Information and Refugee
officials and “records of the Tenth Political Warfare Battalion,” which
supplied the basic statistics on the alleged executions.4 Vietnam Press
further reported that “an officer of the Tenth Political Warfare Battalion
involved in investigating the executions estimated that almost half of the
victims were found buried alive.”
During the months of March and April, when the alleged victims of
communist execution were being uncovered, the Saigon government did not
allow any journalists to view the grave sites or bodies, despite the fact
that many foreign journalists were in Hue at the time. Province Chief Col.
Pham Van Khoa announced at the end of February that 300 civilians
government workers had been executed by the communists and had been found
in common graves southeast of the city.5 But no journalist was ever taken
to see the alleged graves. In fact, French photographer Marc Riboud, who
demanded several times to see the graves, was repeatedly refused
permission. When he was finally taken in a helicopter to travel to the
alleged site the pilot refused to land, claiming that the area was
“insecure.”6 Riboud never saw the site , and when the official chronology
of discoveries and map coordinates of the grave sites were finally
released, there was no site resembling the one described by Co. Khoa.7
Stewart Harris of the _London Times_ was in Hue to do a story on the
alleged mass executions in late March, just at the time when, according to
the official chronology, some 400 bodies were being uncovered in the area
of the imperial tombs south of Hue. But instead of taking him to that
site, the American political warfare officer took Harris to a village
where there no mass graves, while the Vietnamese political warfare officer
took him to a grave site in Gia Hoi district, where the bodies had long
since been reburied.8 So he had to depend on the word of the Vietnamese
and American officials concerning what was to be found at the grave sites.
Moreover, ARVN'S Political Warfare Department issued contradictory reports
on how many bodies were actually uncovered. At the Gia Hoi High School
sites, for example, the official American report, based on information
furnished by the Tenth Political Warfare Battalion, gave a total of 22
mass graves and 200 bodies, for an average of nine bodies per grave.9 But
when Stewart Harris was taken to the site, he was told by his Vietnamese
escort officer that each of the 22 graves held from three to seven bodies,
which would have put the total somewhere between 66 and 150.10 At about
the same time, the Tenth Political Warfare Battalion published a pamphlet
for Vietnamese consumption which said there were 14 graves at the high
school instead of 22, which would have reduced the total still further.11
A
DOCTOR'S CONTRADICTORY FINDINGS
The
elusiveness of Saigon's figures is significant in the view of the
testimony of Alje Vennema, a doctor working for a Canadian medical team at
Quang Ngai hospital, who happened to be in the Hue province hospital
during the Tet Offensive and who made his own investigation of the grave
sites.12 Vennema agreed that there were 14 graves at Gia Hoi High School
but said there was a total of only 20 bodies in those graves. Vennema also
stated that the other two sites in Gia Hoi district of Hue held only 19
bodies rather than the 77 claimed by the government, and that those in the
area of the imperial tombs southwest of Hue contained only 29 bodies
rather than 201 as claimed in the official report.
According to Vennema, therefore, the total number of bodies at the four
major sites discovered immediately after Tet was 68, instead of the
officially claimed total of 477. Then, too, while he did not claim that
none of these bodies was the victim of NLF execution, he said that the
evidence indicated most of them were victims of fighting in the area,
rather than of political killings. In the case of the sites in the
imperial tombs area, he stated that most of the bodies were clothed in the
threads of uniforms. He reported having talked with nearby villagers who
said that from February 21 to 26 there had been heavy bombing, shelling
and strafing in the immediate area. And, in contrast to the government
claims that many victims had been buried alive there, Vennema said all the
bodies showed wounds.
The
circumstances of the official version -- its political warfare origins,
the refusal to allow confirmation by the press from first-hand
observation, the questionable statistics -- and the conflicting testimony
of a medical doctor who was present at the time all point to
misrepresentation of the truth by the Saigon government in its April 1968
report. In fact, the evidence suggests that the Political Warfare
Battalion may have inflated the number of actual executions by the NLF by
a factor of ten or more.
THE 1969 EXHUMATIONS
During 1969, as more bodies were uncovered in the villages surrounding
Hue, another phase of the Saigon government campaign was launched by
ARVN's political warfare officers. The first bodies were found southeast
of Hue, where digging was carried out under the supervision of a
“Committee for Search and Burial of Communist Victims” headed by the
district chief, Major Trung. Again newsmen were not invited to watch the
work while it was going on, but were later summoned by Major Trung and
told that the Committee had found 135 bodies in Vinh Luu hamlet of Phu Da
village and 230 bodies in seven graves in Phu Xuan village.13
What
the district chief did not tell the reporters was that the entire area in
which the grave sites were found southeast of Hue had been a battleground
for many weeks early in 1968. The NLF continued to hold many of the
hamlets even after being driven out of the city, and some hamlets remained
in their hands for months, as American fighter-bombers carried out heavy
strikes against them.
One
of the four sites discovered in late March 1969, which allegedly contained
22 bodies, was between Phu My and Tuy Van villages.14 Phy My village, only
three miles east of Hue, was one of the villages occupied by communist
troops during the offensive, when many young men of military age were
drafted into the Liberation Army. According to a later interview with one
of its inhabitants, American planes bombed the village repeatedly,
destroying hundreds of homes and killing civilians.
The
three other burial sites, uncovered in late March and early April,
containing 357 bodies according to the Pentagon's chronology of
discoveries, were located in Phu Xuan village and a short distance down
the road in Phu Da village.15 Again, Phu Xuan, 13 miles east of Hue, had
been the scene of fierce fighting, including the heavy use of American air
power, in the weeks after the offensive. In one all-day battle in which
American air strikes were called in, some 250 communist soldiers were
killed, according to an interview with the Phu Xuan village chief
published in the Political Warfare Department's own newspaper, _Tien
Tuyen_.16
The
Saigon assertion that the bodies found were victims of communist execution
were not convincing even to officials of the Saigon government. The
Minister of Health, Tran Luu Y, after visiting the burial sites in April
1969, frankly informed the Thua Thien deputy province chief of his opinion
that the bodies could be those of NLF soldiers killed in battle.17 The
Political Warfare Department's newspaper promptly denounced the minister
for this skepticism.18
What
little information was made available about the bodies discovered
certainly supported the suspicion that very few were actually victims of
communist execution. For one thing, Major Trung's own report on the bodies
found in his district claimed only nine civil servants and 14 soldiers of
the Saigon army out of a total of 365.19 It was well known that a
considerable number of the bodies were those of women and children. An
American officer in Hue admitted to a _Washington Post_ reporter at a mass
funeral for the dead, “Some may have just gotten caught up [in the
fighting].”20 It would not be surprising indeed if the NLF had not buried
many women and children killed by airstrikes or artillery fire in the
hamlets which they controlled near Hue.
Another major discovery of bodies at Da Mai Creek, a heavily wooded area
ten miles south of Hue, in September 1969 remains shrouded in vagueness
and contradictions. Even the number of bodies found remains something of a
mystery. The official Pentagon account of the discovery shows that the
number was approximately 250.21 But when Douglas Pike, the U.S.
Information Agency's Vietnam specialist, reported the find a few months
later, the figure had grown to 428.22
Moreover, the one “defector” produced by Saigon to testify on this alleged
communist massacre told two very different and contradictory stories about
the episode. In an interview arranged by the Saigon government for the
_Baltimore Sun_ late in 1969, the “defector” testified that a communist
district chief who had been his friend had told him that nearly 600 people
from Phu Cam and Tu Dam were turned over to pro-communist hill tribesmen
to be murdered. The reason, he explained to the _Sun_, was that they had
been “traitors to the revolution.”23 But this same man, in an interview
with the correspondent of _Tien Tuyen_ a few days later said he had been
told by the same district chief that 500 “tyrants” were being taken to the
mountains, not to be killed but to be reformed.”24
Again, there is a major and direct conflict between Pike and the official
Pentagon version on who the victims were and where they came from. Pike's
version is that they were a group captured in a church in the Catholic
district of Phu Cam in Hue on February 5, 1968 and marched five miles
south, where 20 of them were executed by a people's court and then turned
over to a local communist unit, which took them three and a half more
miles away from Hue before being murdered.25 But the Defense Department
account shows that the group of civilians taken from the church in Phu Cam
numbered only 80 to 100 people, not 400 as Pike suggests.26 Moreover, an
account originally published in the semi-official _Viet-Nam Magazine_ and
reprinted by the Saigon Embassy in Washington, asserts that all except the
20 people executed by the people's court were allowed to return to Hue
with the warning that the NLF would some day return to Hue, and that the
people should behave accordingly.27
These contradictions are important, given Pike's effort to argue that the
skeletons at Da Mai had to be the victims of communist murder because they
were a group which had been taken from Hue as prisoners. In fact, there is
evidence that most of the people who left Phu Cam with the communists were
not prisoners at all, but were pressed into service as stretcher- bearers,
ammunition carriers, or even as soldiers for the NLF.28 As Agence France
Presse reported from Hue during the battle for the city, a number of young
men, especially from the Phu Cam area, received guns or were used as
stretcher-bearers to transport wounded soldiers toward the mountain
camps.29
Again, circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that the 250 skeletons
found at Da Mai Creek (not 400 as claimed by Pike) were also killed in
battle or by American B-52 strikes. The _Viet-Nam Magazine_ article notes
in passing that the site was “in the vicinity where the communists fought
their last big battle with the allies (April 30 to May 2, 1968)”30 -- a
fact of which readers of the American press were never informed. The
People's Liberation Armed Forces have always made a point of carrying as
many of their war dead as possible from the battlefield to be buried, in
order to deny their enemy tactical intelligence on casualties.
In
short, the inconsistencies and other weaknesses of the various official
documents, the lack of confirming evidence, and the evidence contradicting
the official explanation all suggests that the overwhelming majority of
the bodies discovered in 1969 were in fact the victims of American air
power and of the ground fighting that raged in the hamlets, rather than
NLF execution.
DOUGLAS PIKE: MEDIA MANIPULATOR PAR EXCELLENCE
It
was in large part due to the work of one man that the Hue “massacre”
received significant press coverage and wide comment in 1969 and 1970.
That man was U.S. Information Agency's Douglas Pike. It was Pike who
visited South Vietnam in November 1969, apparently at the suggestion of
Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, to prepare a report on Hue.31
During the last two weeks of November, Pike inspired, either directly or
indirectly, several different newspaper articles on both Hue and the
“bloodbath” theme in general. Pike himself briefed several reporters on
his version of the communist occupation of Hue and at the same time
circulated a translation of a captured communist document which he had
found in the files and which he argued was an open admission of the mass
murder of innocent civilians during the occupation of Hue.
The
document was the subject of several stories in the American press. The
_Washington Post_, for example, carried the Associated Press article on
the document with the headline, “Reds Killed 2900 in Hue during Tet,
according to Seized Enemy Document.”32 The _Christian Science Monitor_
correspondent's article, under the headline, “Communists Admit Murder,”
began, “The Communist massacre in Hue in early 1968 represented the
culmination of careful planning.”33 Both articles quoted as proof of the
“admission” the following sentence from the translation: “We eliminated
1,892 administrative personnel, 39 policemen, 790 tyrants, 6 captains, 2
first lieutenants, 20 second lieutenants, and many non-commissioned
officers.”
No
reported questioned the authenticity of the document or the accuracy of
the translation they were given. Yet the original Vietnamese document, a
copy of which I obtained from the U.S. Command in Vietnam in September,
1972, shows that the anonymous author did not say what the press and
public were led to believe he said.34 In the original Vietnamese, the
sentence quoted above does not support the official U.S. line that the
communists admitted murdering more than 2,600 civilians in Hue. To begin
with, the context in which this sentence was written was not a discussion
of punishing those who were considered criminals or “enemies,” but an
overall account of the offensive in destroying the army and administration
in Thua Thien. Two paragraphs earlier, the document refers to the
establishment of a “political force whose mission was to propagandize and
appeal for enemy soldiers to surrender with their weapons.” It recalls
that self- defense forces were so frightened when the Front's forces
attacked that they tried to cross the river, with the result that 21 of
them drowned. The section dealing with Phu Vang district notes the
strength of the opposing forces and the locus of the attack, claiming the
seizure of 12 trucks to transport food and 60 rolls of cloth for flags.
It
is the next sentence which reads, “We eliminate 1,892 administrative
personnel” in the official translation. But the word _diet_, translated as
“eliminate” here, must be understood to mean “destroy” or “neutralize” in
a military sense, rather than to “kill” or “liquidate,” as Pike and the
press reports claimed. As used in communist military communiques, the term
had previously been used to include killed, wounded or captured among
enemy forces. For example, the Third Special Communique of the People's
Liberation Armed Forces, issued at the end of the Tet Offensive, said, “We
have destroyed [_diet_] a large part of the enemy's force; according to
initial statistics, we have killed, wounded and captured more than 90,000
enemy....”35 It should be noted that _diet_ does not mean to “kill” in any
ordinary Vietnamese usage, and that the official translation is highly
irregular.
Moreover, the word _te_, translated as “administrative personnel” in the
version circulated to newsmen, actually has the broader meaning, according
to a standard North Vietnamese dictionary, of “puppet personnel,”
including both civilian _and_ military.36 When the document does refer
specifically to the Saigon government's administration, in fact, it uses a
different term, _nguy quyen_. Both the context and the normal usage of the
words in question, therefore, belie the meaning which Pike successfully
urged on the press.
PIKE'S 'ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE' DOCUMENT
If
the misrepresentation of the document may be explained by a combination of
bad translation and Pike's own zeal to find evidence to support the
official argument, Pike himself must take sole responsibility for a second
such case which occurred about the same time. Pike gave to selected
reporters a list of 15 categories of what he called -- and were called in
the press -- “enemies of the people,” which were said to be targeted by
the communists for liquidation. The list included two categories which
suggests that the communists were out to kill Catholic leaders and
landlords or capitalists in particular: “leading and key members of
religious organizations still superstitious” and “members of the
exploiting class.” The document was given prominence in articles in the
_Los Angeles Times_ and _Washington Daily News_ on alleged communist plans
for a “bloodbath,” and was again mentioned in stories dealing with Pike's
own pamphlet.37
But
again, although the document may have been authentic, the construction put
on it was clearly deceptive. First of all, the document itself said
nothing about “enemies of the people”38 -- a phrase introduced by Pike
himself and repeated by the press as thought it were in the original. And
second, it did not say or imply that these 15 categories of people were to
be punished, much less liquidated, as Pike suggested to reporters and
later wrote in his own booklet on Hue.39
In
fact, the document, which bore the title “Fifteen Criteria for
Investigation,” was simply one local cadre's notion of the kinds of people
who should be watched.40 The categories of people who were marked for
repression by the NLF were quite different from the ones on the list
circulated by Pike, and included neither the “leading and key members of
religious organizations” nor “members of the exploiting class.” And Pike
should have been well aware of this, since a separate document containing
the categories of people to be punished was published by the U.S. Mission
in October 1967.41
Yet
another element of the press offensive inspired by Pike's presence in
Saigon was the testimony of a “rallier,” or defector, from the NLF on the
bloodbath issue. The technique of displaying such defectors before press
conferences had been used on many occasions by Saigon's Political Warfare
Department in order to make a political point which could not otherwise be
convincingly documented. Although the most experienced reporters in Saigon
were always skeptical of statements made by defectors put on display by
Saigon, there were always journalists who were fascinated by the idea of
interviewing genuine ex-communists. Thus, it was arranged for Le Xuan
Chuyen, who claimed to have been a lieutenant colonel in the Vietnam
People's Army before defecting in August 1966, to be interviewed by
_Washington Daily News_ and _Los Angeles Times_ correspondents in order to
publicize his views on communist plans for a postwar bloodbath. Chuyen
estimated that a communist “blood debt” list included some five million
South Vietnamese, of whom some 500,000 would be killed.42
A
brief note on Chuyen's background helps to put this testimony in proper
perspective. Even in his initial interrogation, this self-proclaimed
“lieutenant colonel” (a rank his interrogators were inclined to question)
exhibited a notable sense of political opportunism.43 He lost no time in
praising Thieu and Ky as leaders who were”daring, patriotic and have a
strong sense of nationalism,” and he volunteered his desire to work for
the Americans or the Saigon government even before he was asked.44 Within
a few months, Chuyen was nominated to be director of the government's
Chieu Hoi Center for Saigon -- a position which was never mentioned in
news accounts of his statement on alleged communist policies.45
A
second alleged high-ranking communist defector, Col. Tran Van Dac, was
actually Planning Adviser to the General Directorate of Political Warfare
of ARVN at the time and this hardly a disinterested witness.46 His 1969
statement that there were three million Vietnamese on the “blood debt”
list continues to be relied on by U.S. administrative apologists,
including Sir Robert Thompson and Pike himself.47
End
of Part One.
Gareth Porter, “The 1968 Hue Massacre”, Part One / HTML'd by Grover Furr
30 Jan 95 / http://www.shss.montclair.edu/english/furr/porterhue1.html /
furrg@alpha.montclair.edu
Posted on 22 Mar 2009