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The Huế Massacre (Vietnamese: Thảm sát tại Huế Tết Mậu Thân) is the name given to the summary executions and mass killings perpetrated by the Viet Cong and North Vietnam 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 containing 2,800 to 6,000 civilians and prisoners of war.[1] Victims were found bound, tortured, and sometimes apparently buried alive.
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.
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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 foreigners.
These individuals, according to Vietcong 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.
Ordinary civil servants who worked for "the Saigon enemy" out of necessity, but did not oppose the revolution, 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.
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, 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.
Douglas Pike notes that, while “It is probable that the Commissar intended that their prisoners should be re-educated 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.
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.
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.[2] 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.[3]
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 abducted and murdered by the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong during their attack on Huế during the Tet Offensive (Feb. 1968). Their bodies, along with those of scores of Vietnamese civilians, who also were slain by the Communist attackers, 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.[2]
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.
While unable to confirm this with first-hand accounts, Oberdorfer reported that in the Catholic area of Huế, Phucam, 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."
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."[4] This was because, "large numbers of people had been executed" including "captured American soldiers and several other foreigners who were not combatants." According to Tạng, "discipline in Hue was seriously inadequate" and "fanatic young soldiers had indiscriminately shot people."[4] The massacre was, "one of those terrible spontaneous tragedies that inevitably accompany war."[4]
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”.
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”.
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.
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.
Later studies contending with these earlier accounts, most prominently Gareth Porter's examination, were highly critical of the initial reports.[5] Porter alleged that Pike manipulated the official figures for civilian death counts in the destruction of Huế during Tet, primarily by U.S. artillery and naval shelling and aerial bombing,[6] to arrive at his figure of nearly 4,000 civilians murdered by the Viet Cong, and that Pike’s hypothesis about the Communist policy during the occupation of Huế was contradicted by captured Communist documents and other evidence. On the other hand, Porter admitted that there were executions in Huế during the occupation. Porter argued that the executions were the actions of individuals rather than the policy of the Vietcong. Shortly thereafter, one of Porter's leading witnesses, Alje Vennema, published a book about the massacre supporting Pike's version. There has been denial of the scale of the massacre by some "anti-war" critics, such as Noam Chomsky, Marilyn B. Young in The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 contends,
"In the early days of the occupation, there were indeed summary executions...and as the occupation ended in the firestorm of artillery and aerial bombardment, retreating Vietcong troops executed many of those they held in custody (rather than either releasing them or keeping them prisoner), not in the numbers Saigon and Washington charged, but certainly enough to have posed troubling questions for the people of Huế who survived..."
Douglas Pike's account referencing the government of South Vietnam's estimated civilian casualties states:
"The story remains uncompleted. If the estimates by Huế officials are even approximately correct, nearly 2,000 people are still missing (as of late 1970)."