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The Strategic Hamlet Program was a plan by the governments of South Vietnam and the United States during the Vietnam War to combat the nationalist insurgency by means of population transfer. Official language Vietnamese Capital Saigon Last President Duong Van Minh Last Prime Minister Vu Van Mau Area - Total - % water 173,809 km² N/A Population - Total - Density 19,370,000 (1973 est. ...
Combatants Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) United States of America South Korea Thailand Australia New Zealand the Philippines Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) Strength ~1,200,000 (1968) ~420,000 (1968) Casualties South Vietnamese dead: 1,250,000+ US dead: 58,226 US wounded...
Population transfer is a term referring to a policy by which a state, or international authority, forces the movement of a large group of people out of a region, most frequently on the basis of their ethnicity or religion. ...
In 1961, U.S. advisors in South Vietnam, along with the Diem regime, began the implementation of a plan attempted to isolate rural peasants from contact with and influence by the NLF. The Strategic Hamlet Program, along with its predecessor, the Rural Community Development Program, played an important role in the shaping of events in South Vietnam during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Both of these programs attempted to separate rural peasants from nationalist insurgents by creating fortified villages and forcing the peasants to take an active role in the civil war. The program backfired drastically and ultimately led to a decrease in support for Diem’s regime and an increase in sympathy for nationalist efforts. (help· info) «ngoh dihn zih-ehm» (January 3, 1901 – November 2, 1963) was the first President of the Republic of Vietnam (1955–63). ...
Nationalism is an ideology that creates and sustains a nation as a concept of a common identity for groups of humans. ...
An insurgency is an armed rebellion against a constituted authority, by any irregular armed force that rises up against an enforced or established authority, government, or administration. ...
In order to understand the significance of the Strategic Hamlets, it is necessary to first look at conditions in South Vietnam during the years 1954 to 1963. After the Diem regime refused to hold national elections as agreed at the Geneva Conference in 1954, Viet Minh sympathizers in the South were subjected to escalating attacks by CIA-trained death squads. After repeated requests for help to the government of North Vietnam produced no result, in 1959 the Vietnam National Liberation Front was formed and began a campaign of guerrilla warfare in an attempt to remove the U.S. client regime and reunite with the North. At the time, it is believed that there were approximately 10,000 Nationalist insurgents throughout South Vietnam. Several international or multinational conferences have been called the Geneva Conference, because they were held in the city of Geneva, Switzerland. ...
The Viet Minh (abbreviated from Việt Nam ộc Lập ồng Minh Hội, League for the Independence of Vietnam) was formed by Ho Ngoc Lam and Nguyen Hai Than in 1941 to seek independence for Vietnam from France. ...
The CIA Seal The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is an American intelligence agency, responsible for obtaining and analyzing information about foreign governments, corporations, and individuals, and reporting such information to the various branches of the U.S. Government. ...
A death squad is an armed group that carries out, usually in secrecy, extrajudicial assassinations and forced disappearances of activists, dissidents and others perceived as interfering with a social or political status quo. ...
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN), or less commonly, Vietnamese Democratic Republic (Vietnamese: Việt Nam Dân Chủ Cộng Hòa), also known as North Vietnam, was proclaimed by Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, September 2nd1945 and was recognized by the Peoples Republic of China and the...
National Liberation Front (NLF) flag The National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (Vietnamese Mặt Tráºn Dân Tá»™c Giải Phóng Miá»n Nam), also known as the Viet Cong (VC), the National Liberation Front (NLF), and as the Front National de Liberté (FNL...
Guerrilla War redirects here. ...
Client state refers to the notion of one state being subservient to another. ...
Along with tactics like sabotage, assassination, and surprise attacks on government troops, guerrillas attempted to gain the support of the rural populace for recruits, shelter, supplies, and most importantly, information. Nationalist forces saw the allegiance of the non-combatant population as paramount to their eventual success and therefore attempted to gain the cooperation of the people through either propaganda or coercion. Non-combatant is a military and legal term describing civilians not engaged in combat. ...
Beginnings Recognizing the danger that the guerrillas posed if they had the support of the peasants, President Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu implemented the Rural Community Development Program (later known as "Agroville") in 1959. Based partly on the success of a similar program in Malaya used by the British to suppress a communist uprising beginning in 1948, the Agroville Plan endeavored to remove the "neutral" population from guerrilla contact. Through direct force and/or incentives, peasants in rural communities were separated and relocated into large communities called "Agrovilles". By 1960, there were twenty-three of these Agrovilles, each consisting of many thousands of people. Ngo Dinh Diem Ngô Ðình Diệm (January 3, 1901–November 2, 1963) was the first President of South Vietnam (1955-63). ...
Ngô Ãình Nhu Ngô Ãình Nhu, born in Vietnam, was the younger brother and chief political advisor of South Vietnams first President, Ngô Ãình Diệm. ...
The Federation of Malaya, or in Malay Persekutuan Tanah Melayu, was formed in 1948 from the British settlements of Penang and Malacca and the nine Malay states and replaced the Malayan Union. ...
The Malayan Emergency was an insurrection and guerrilla war of the Malay Races Liberation Army against the British and Malayan administration from 1948-1960 in what is now Malaysia. ...
This mass resettlement created a strong backlash from peasants and forced the central government to rethink its strategy. A report put out by the Caravelle group, consisting of among others, Bishop Thuc (a brother of Diem) described the situation as follows:
- "Tens of thousands of people are being mobilized… to take up a life in collectivity, to construct beautiful but useless agrovilles which tire the people, lose their affection, increase their resentment and most of all give an additional terrain for propaganda to the enemy."
Strategic Hamlet Program In 1961, the government of South Vietnam (GVN) along with several U.S. advisors and the head of BRIAM (British Advisory Mission to South Vietnam), R. K. G. Thompson, (who was closely involved with the successful Malayan resettlement), began reforming the Agroville Plan into what was to become the Strategic Hamlet Program. The new plan called for smaller communities (less than a thousand residents) erected on both existing and newly developed settlements. The GVN wanted to create a new infrastructure with the intention that the Vietnamese peasants would come to identify Diem and his regime as the legitimate government. In a speech given in April 1962, Diem declared his ultimate goal for the Program: Official language Vietnamese Capital Saigon Last President Duong Van Minh Last Prime Minister Vu Van Mau Area - Total - % water 173,809 km² N/A Population - Total - Density 19,370,000 (1973 est. ...
The CIA Seal The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is an American intelligence agency, responsible for obtaining and analyzing information about foreign governments, corporations, and individuals, and reporting such information to the various branches of the U.S. Government. ...
Sir Robert Thompson KBE, CMG, DSO, MC, was a British soldier and counter-insurgency expert. ...
- "... strategic hamlets represented the basic elements in the war undertaken by our people against our three enemies: communism, discord, and underdevelopment. In this concept they also represent foundation of the Vietnamese society where values are reassessed according the personalist revolution where social, cultural, and economic reform will improve the living conditions of the large working class down to the remotest village."
The fundamental idea was to give the peasants enough motivation to want to support the government and at the same time, fight off the NLF.
Problems faced by the program In theory, the hamlets were to be heavily fortified and guarded by both residents of the communities and national patrols. Each hamlet was to have its own radio transmitter for communication with the central government in Saigon as well as an arrangement that included supply lines and medical and educational programs. Unfortunately, these programs never materialized for most of the hamlets. Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnamese: Thà nh Chà Minh) is the largest city in Vietnam, located near the delta of the Mekong River. ...
The speed of the implementation of the program is important to note, as it is considered to be one of the main causes for its eventual failure. The Pentagon Papers reported that in September of 1962, 4.3 million people were housed in 3,225 completed hamlets with more than two thousand still under construction. By July 1963, over 8.5 million people had been settled in 7,205 hamlets according to figures given by the Vietnam Press. In less than a year, both the number of completed hamlets and its population had doubled. Given this rapid rate of construction, the GVN was unable to fully support or protect the hamlets or its residents, despite the immense funding by the United States government. NLF insurgents easily sabotaged and overran the poorly defended communities, gaining much sought access to the South Vietnamese peasants. It is estimated that only twenty percent of the hamlets in the Mekong Delta area were controlled by the GVN by the end of 1963. In an in interview, a resident of a hamlet in Vinh-Long describes the situation: The Pentagon Papers is the colloquial term for United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, a 47 volume, 7,000-page, top-secret United States Department of Defense history of the United States political and military involvement in the Vietnam War from 1945...
Mekong River Delta from space, February 1996 Mekong Delta, February 2005. ...
- "It is dangerous in my village because the civil guard from the district headquarters cross the river to the village only in the daytime… leaving the village unprotected at night. The village people have no protection from the Viet Cong [NLF] so they will not inform on them to the authorities."
There are several other important problems that the GVN faced in addition to those created by the failure to provide basic social needs for the peasants and over-extension of its resources. One of these was wide public opposition to the program caused partly by aggressive NLF information campaigns, but also brought about by the inability of the program committee to choose safe and agriculturally sound locations for the development of the hamlets. Some peasants were also angry at having to walk further to their rice paddies, others were upset for religious reasons at having to leave the site of their ancestors' burial, and, as another group of observers reported: A Viet Cong soldier, heavily guarded, awaits interrogation following capture in the attacks on Saigon during the festive Tet holiday period of 1968. ...
A paddy field in Japan A paddy field is a flooded parcel of arable land used for growing rice and other semiaquatic crops. ...
- "Peasants resented working without pay to dig moats, implant bamboo stakes, and erect fences against an enemy that did not threaten them but directed its sights against government officials."
However, according to the Pentagon Papers, the most important source of failure was the with inflexible nature of the Ngo family. This, coupled with an unrealistic optimism held by the Diem government and U.S. advisors, made success of the program virtually impossible. Facing all of these challenges, the Strategic Hamlet Program finally collapsed with the assassination of President Diem in late 1963 and the disbanding of the Committee for Strategic Hamlets in early 1964.
References Roger Hilsman in an author and political scientist. ...
The National Security Archive is an independent organization located within the George Washington University. ...
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