The National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia was started by the wives of the American military personnel believed to be held by the North Vietnamese Army. It was intended to place pressure on the Communists in order that they live up to their obligations under the Geneva Convention. Here is an article by a respected American journalist who was dispatched to South Vietnam in order that he might see for himself what the problems were as to why the Republic of Vietnam seemed so incapable of maintaining military dominance in the field. Everywhere he went he got the same answer:
"A highly respected professor at Saigon University [remarked]: 'If you have to make a choice between supporting the Ngo family and withdrawing from South Vietnam, you might as well pull out.
You cannot win with the family.'" During the earliest days of 1951 many journalists and intelligence analysts in the West thought Ho Chi Minh's prolonged absence from public view meant a coup d'état had taken place within the Viet Minh hierarchy. These same minds held that the most likely candidate to launch such a power play was Ho's number two: Dang Xuan Khu (1907 - 1988). This article goes into some detail explaining who he was and what he'd been up to for the past forty years. Three years before the total French withdrawal from Vietnam, this one Frenchman summed up his comrade's frustrations concerning their battles against the Viet Minh:
"We can't win a guerrilla war unless we have the support of the people. Frankly, we have not got it. Hitler or the Russians could conquer this country in two months with mass executions, wholesale reprisals and concentration camps. To fight this war and remain humanitarian is difficult." A 1947 article reporting on the French desire to maintain their colonies in Indo-China, and their conflict with a Moscow-trained revolutionary Marxist (and Paris-trained pastry chef) named Ho Chi-Minh (1890 – 1969).
Click here to read about American communists and their Soviet overlords.
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