Quick questions on Diem regime in South Vietnam 1954-1963: HSC Modern History Indochina

Ngo Dinh Diem (1901 to 1963), a Catholic Vietnamese mandarin who had refused to serve under either the French or the Viet Minh, was appointed Prime Minister of the State of Vietnam by Emperor Bao Dai on 26 June 1954. The Eisenhower administration backed him as a non-communist alternative to Ho.

The Geneva Accords required nationwide elections by 20 July 1956 to reunify Vietnam. Diem, supported by the US, refused to hold them on the grounds that the State of Vietnam had not signed the Final Declaration and that free elections were impossible in the north. Eisenhower later wrote in his 1963 memoir that around 80 per cent of voters would have chosen Ho Chi Minh.

Diem governed through his Catholic family. Brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, head of the Can Lao party and the secret police, was the regime's enforcer. Sister-in-law Madame Nhu (Tran Le Xuan) led the Women's Solidarity Movement and was an aggressive public spokesperson. Brother Ngo Dinh Can ran central Vietnam from Hue; brother Ngo Dinh Thuc was Archbishop of Hue.

Diem's land reform (Ordinance 57, October 1956) capped landholdings at 100 hectares, well above most pre-1954 Viet Minh redistributions in the south. Around 13 per cent of the rural population benefited. In Viet Minh-controlled areas, peasants found that their wartime land grants were reversed and rents reinstated. The rural base of southern resistance was set.

The remaining southern Viet Minh cadres, joined by other opposition groups, formed the National Liberation Front (NLF) on 20 December 1960 at a forest meeting near the Cambodian border. The People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF, known in the south as Viet Cong) was the military arm. Hanoi created the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN) to coordinate. Infiltration of cadres and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail accelerated.

The Strategic Hamlet Program, designed by Sir Robert Thompson on the Malayan model and implemented from March 1962 by Ngo Dinh Nhu, forcibly relocated peasants into fortified villages defended by Civilian Irregular Defence Groups. By mid-1963 the regime claimed around 8,000 hamlets housing two-thirds of the rural population.

The crisis was triggered on 7 May 1963 when the Hue authorities banned the display of Buddhist flags on Vesak, while Catholic flags had been authorised for Archbishop Thuc's anniversary the week before. A protest at Hue radio station on 8 May was broken up by ARVN troops; nine Buddhists were killed, eight by a grenade.

The Kennedy administration, alarmed at the regime's collapse of legitimacy, signalled its readiness to accept a change of government. State Department Cable 243 of 24 August 1963, drafted by Roger Hilsman and Averell Harriman, told Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge that the US would not stand in the way of the generals.

Stanley Karnow (Vietnam: A History, 1983) is the standard narrative.

The plot was Vietnamese; the US tolerated rather than directed it.

It runs from 8 May to 1 November 1963.

This is the policy that lost the countryside.