It was the same people on the north vietnamese side all throughout this entire multi-decade period, from the early 1940s till the mid-70s. They fought a rotating cast of western-backed fig leaf local rulers. I'm not sure what else I can tell you, here.
There was huge ethnic and class component to the Vietnam conflict. In fact, in many ways it was far more important than the nominal communist character of the North, at least from the Vietnamese perspective.
Here's a factoid I recently learned: something like 80+% of Vietnamese refugees were ethnic Chinese (Hoa people), despite constituting a minority of the population from which they fled. Rarely discussed in American history, except perhaps in in-depth treatises, is that ethnic Chinese were the merchant and ruling class in Vietnam for generations, including during colonial periods. That's why the French favored them. It's a classic colonial/imperial techniques to favor a minority group, though AFAIU France basically kept class divisions as they found them. And such minority groups tend to disfavor complete independence as it leaves them more vulnerable. Indeed, continued ethnic conflict after the U.S. departed instigated China to invade Vietnam a few years later.
If the U.S. had fully appreciated the ethnic divisions, it may have made different decisions. State-side the choice to prop up the wealthy, Catholic Diem is well known, but the usual characterizations of that choice completely gloss over the deep and substantial ethnic divisions. (Almost all Vietnamese Catholics were ethnic Chinese, though only are minority of ethnic Chinese were Catholic.) They make the U.S. seem merely tone deaf as opposed to tragically mistaken about the underlying social dynamics. The push for socialism in Vietnam wasn't about political ideology; it was about wrestling control of capital away from a discrete minority ethnic group. Those ethnic enmities ran deep. Without pursuing some of the social reforms sought by Ho Chi Minh a U.S.-backed South Vietnam was always destined to fail.
The irony is that as Vietnam has modernized the same social dynamics have crept back. Ethnic Chinese once again control much (or most?) of the private assets in Vietnam. I have no idea if the ethnic animus has returned to its prior levels, though. Maybe it doesn't matter as much anymore.
I just googled when 'The Ugly American' came out. 1958! Nobody can say "noone could have known".
I'm not an expert on Vietnam, but I'll just say that whatever their problems with a Chinese merchant class, the problems with a Western burning-villages class were probably bigger at the time.
I'm not trying to defend American policies in Vietnam. But Vietnam became independent in 1954, albeit split between North and South. The Vietnam War as typically understood by Americans, and as encompassing most well known atrocities, wouldn't begin for another 10years.
Also, American and, more generally, anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist discourses tend to infantilize people in these countries. I doubt the Vietnamese had a simplistic, love-hate relationship with either the French or the Americans even after the innumerable atrocities. Just like in every other nation even the masses were and are capable of complex strategic, mixed-motive thinking. Look at the sheer devastation America has caused in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet AFAIU neither most Iraqis nor most Afghanis wish for U.S. involvement to completely disappear. Americans would never believe themselves capable of pressing a war out of pure spite, anger, or retaliation; yet we somehow think other groups do? IOW, there's something problematic in thinking that what fundamentally drove the Vietnamese was a response to American atrocities. Far more likely (and consonant with the notion that all communities around the world tend to behave similarly) is that those atrocities exacerbated underlying, primary dynamics. Afterall, the merchant class by definition didn't tend to live on rice farms. They were centered in the cities.
The U.S. tried to implement many of the same policies the British did in Malaysia. During the communist insurgency in Malaysia the British corralled ethnic Chinese (the primary supporters of communism, such as they were--i.e. it wasn't that simple) into cities and towns. (To this day ethnic Chinese can't own rural farms outright in Malaysia.) But Chinese communities were already mostly urban, and were of course a minority (20-30%). It was a plan that arguably worked by accident. But such a strategy was never going to work in Vietnam because the dynamics were totally flipped. That would have been much more obvious if the U.S. saw the ethnic divisions for what they were.
Absolutely, except in this case the U.S. wasn't even capable of that. They missed the importance of the ethnic dynamics, apparently too focused on political and economic dynamics that were at best comorbidities and at worst reflections and mirages.
From the random CIA dispatch reports from Laos and Indonesia I've read, low-level American officials were capable of regional socio-political savvy. I just don't think that appreciation ever translated up the chain. So, for example, people have claimed that the U.S. incited genocide in Indonesia. That seems both true and false. True because low-level CIA officers certainly seemed to understand how political and ethnic divisions overlapped and therefore how their anti-communist campaigning could and did devolve to ethnic cleansing. But I don't think leaders in Washington appreciated that at all. Perhaps mostly out of a racist disinclination to consider such aspects, but oblivious nonetheless.
> the problems with a Western burning-villages class
"Murder, kidnapping, torture and intimidation were a routine part of Viet Cong (VC) and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) operations during the Vietnam War. They were intended to cow the populace, liquidate opponents, erode the morale of South Vietnamese government employees, and boost tax collection and propaganda efforts. Estimates of the total number of South Vietnamese civilians killed by the VC/PAVN between 1954 and 1975 range from 106,000 to 227,000."
Perhaps we can go back in history a little bit further.
The name Vietnam most probably based on Nanyue or Nam Viet a small little known kingdom created by Qin Dynasty deputy General, name Zhao Tuo or Tro Duo, a Han Chinese [1]. The indigenous or the native people of central and south Vietnam are not from China, they are mainly from Austronesian origin probably Taiwan so called Chams or Cham people [2]. They were the main inhabitants of the land for more than a thousand years (around 1500 years) and had a flourishing Champa kingdoms from 2nd to 16th century AD. The Chams mainly Muslim at the time, had been evicted just like the Moro in the Spain during the Spanish Inquisition or forced to convert. The eviction is completed after the Kinh people from the north displaced them during the Nam tien or "March to the South" and by doing that essentially tripled the original northern kingdom area size [3]. It's a kind of ethnic cleansing by today's standard.
The Kinh is originally ethnic Chinese intermarriage with local Tai-Kadai of the northern Vietnam. For about a thousand years they were essentially conquered and ruled by imperial China. As an analogy the Chams is like the Maya people of Vietnam, until they were eventually evicted rather than assimilated in around 16th AD by the Nguyen lords from the north to the other surrounding countries/areas towards the end of Nam tien movements.
The Chams has a proper civilization called Champa just like the Mayan civilization. The Chams' language is the pre-cursor to the modern Malay and Indonesian language. Their oldest writing on a stone tablet namely Dong Yeng Chau contains an old classical writing of Chams languages in the 4th century AD and was discovered recently in modern Quang Nam province, central Vietnam. It is amazingly still comprehensible if you know the modern language [4]. Interestingly the old name for Quang Nam is Simhapura or Lion City, and it is highly probable than the Cham people conquered Singapore (Singapura) and renamed it similar to their capital's name just like York in the UK becomes New York in the US.
The Geneva Accords that dealt with the dismantling of French Indochina proved to have long-lasting repercussions, however. The crumbling of the French Empire in Southeast Asia led to the formation of the states of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), the State of Vietnam (the future Republic of Vietnam, South Vietnam), the Kingdom of Cambodia and the Kingdom of Laos.
