Going Local: Lansdale on Policemen vs Battalions

The campaign of terror by the Communist guerrillas ... was the old nightmare of savagery with murders and kidnappings. It was prompted this time by the burgeoning success that Diem and his government were having in establishing an effective rule throughout South Vietnam. The Communist leaders in Hanoi couldn't afford to let this continue. Communist stay-behind cadre in the villages dug up cached weapons and undertook secretive raids. Cadre who had gone north in 1954-55 started returning in small groups to their home areas in the South, fortified with refresher training in political methods and small unit tactics. By the end of 1956, there were hundreds of Communist guerrillas in scattered bands throughout South Vietnam trying to impose a hold on the villages.

The government relied mainly on the Civil Guard, its national police constabulary, to maintail law and order in the provinces. The Civil Guard was badly outmatched in trying to cope with the guerrillas. I had remembered the lessons taught by the Huk campaigns in the Philippines and had urged Diem to designate the Civil Guard as a military reserve organization, with training and equipment for at least company-sized military operations as well as their normal police worl. However, the U.S. Mission in Vietnam decided on a firm policy of keeping police and military forces separate and persuaded Diem that the only way he could get American help for his police was to keep them as a strictly civilian organization, with American civilian police "experts" as advisers and trainers.

The result was a police force sketchily trained and armed along the lines of keeping order in an American city and pathetically unready for the realities of the Vietnamese countryside. A squad of Civil Guard policemen, armed with whistles, nightsticks, and .38-cal. revolvers, could hardly be expected to arrest a squad of guerrillas armed with submachine guns, rifles, grenades, and mortars, the Civil Guard squad would be dead or dispersed by the guerrillas long before they got close enough to be effective. Even so, the Civil Guard tried to do what their American advisers insisted upon. Fortunately, before the Civil Guard experienced too many casualties, General [Samuel Tankersley AKA "Hanging Sam"] Williams quietly convinced the Minister of Defense to make a back-door delivery of military weapons and ammunition to the Civil Guard, giving it a fighting chance for survival. By that time Diem was begging the U.S. Mission to change its policy of assisting the Vietnamese police, but to no avail. American bureaucrats are a stubborn breed.