Negotiating While Fighting: Peace Initiatives, British Policy and the Vietnam War
FCO
Americans could not possibly win. Why? It had taken them from 1890 to 1954 to work this out. How long would it take the Americans? The answer was that it took them until about 1973, which was pretty good going because it could have gone on and on. I was always in the right places at the right time, but knew nothing about what was going on, mainly in the South East Asia Department from 1962 to 1966 and then in Warsaw with Tom Brimelow as political Head of Chancery but below the level at which great things were happening in the stratosphere. During my time in Hanoi the Foreign Minister, Nguyen Co Thach, tried to explain to me why the union flag was listed among those western countries which had supported the puppet regime. When I said, ‗I thought it should be taken out.‘ He said, ‗Ah! You will surely be aware that there were special British forces fighting with the Americans ‗on a volunteer basis‘, and you had doghandling teams in Saigon and that is why the flag is there.‘ A week later he had removed it. I am eternally grateful to the Vietnamese for this. That is my contribution.
Sir John Margetson Perhaps I may answer the question about the ICC. When I was in Saigon no one took any notice of the ICC at all. I just had a tremendous argument once with a Canadian, but that is neither here nor there. What is important is that their plane came down regularly once a month. It was a dreadful plane; it was a Lockheed. You said it was a DC3.
James Hershberg They called it that earlier in the 1960s.
Sir John Margetson It was a very old plane, and I was rather frightened that it would fall to pieces.
James Hershberg So were they!
Sir John Margetson We had a Consul General in Hanoi. He relied on me to fill the ICC plane with butter, sausages, which I particularly remember, and every sort of goody you could imagine to keep the Consul General alive. That was the main purpose of the ICC from the British Embassy‘s point of view. It had no money. They would come to me and say, ‗We want to put some more petrol in this plane. Would you please supply some?‘ We had a vote on which I used to draw to fill this ICC plane with petrol. It kept it in the air, but that was all I saw of the ICC in the two years I was there.
Sir Robert Wade-Gery I wanted to come back to an earlier point about the difference in morale between the North and South Vietnamese. When I was there it was very obvious to everybody, even the most bullish Americans that the South Vietnamese, as then constituted, were hopeless and ran like hares whenever there was a fight, unless they had been stiffened by American troops. Indeed, what sucked the Americans further in was the need to stiffen them all the time. By contrast, one could
9 May 2012
40