The Huong Lap and Phu Loi Incidents,and the Decision to Resume Armed Struggle in South Vietnam (January-April 1959)

Abstract

The Vietnam War should more correctly be called the Indo-China War. Both Cambodia and Laos were integral to Hanoi's strategy for the reunification of Vietnam. Of the two, Laos was particularly important in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It should also be noted that although the Soviet Union and China, unlike the United States, were never directly involved in the fighting, they were clearly involved in the war. This paper attempts to reconstruct the events surrounding the landmark fifteenth plenary session in January 1959, which sanctioned the resumption of the Vietnamese Communist armed struggle in the South, relating it to developments in Laos. New information from the British archives on the Huong Lap incident, which erupted at the end of December 1958, and the Phu Loi incident, which occurred on 1 December 1958 but which was blown up by the North Vietnamese only after the plenary session ended on 13 January 1959, illustrate Hanoi's calculations. It was then routine for Hanoi to consult Beijing and Moscow. Soon after the fifteenth plenary session, Ho Chi Minh visited both. Although we still do not have access to archival sources to show the positions of Beijing and Moscow with respect to the decision of the fifteenth plenary session, those positions can be inferred from developments in China and the Soviet Union at the time, and from the Chinese and Soviet responses to the Huong Lap and Phu Loi incidents.