Word: north
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) to make contact with Ho in 1945 in the jungles along the China-Viet Nam border. Under the code name "Lucius," Ho provided the OSS with intelligence about Japanese forces and, a generation before U.S. air attacks on North Viet Nam, his guerrillas rescued 17 downed American flyers. An OSS medic probably saved Ho's life by treating his tropical fevers with sulfa drugs...
...spoils seemed paltry at best. The French had concentrated their agricultural production in the South; crops in the North were insufficient to feed its population. Industry, indeed, had been established in the North?but the plant was minuscule: a cement factory, a brewery, a few railway-repair shops and an assortment of small machine and textile producers. Ho's major asset was coal, and its continuing abundance has provided North Viet Nam with badly needed foreign exchange. Clearly, intensive efforts were needed in the agricultural sector. Ho's first major program, accordingly, was agrarian reform, and his first mass target...
...embarked upon collectivization, this time calling the units "cooperatives." Today 93% of North Vietnamese peasants are enrolled in them. Productivity has not been helped. Last year North Viet Nam was forced to import 750,000 tons of wheat from Russia to make up for rice shortages...
...Hanoi last spring, representatives criticized pointed or padded brassieres because it took too much time and, more important, too much fabric, to make them. The nation is barely self-sufficient in simple tools and basic agricultural machinery, and it is completely dependent on its allies for major industrial needs. North Viet Nam today is not a going economic concern...
Compounding the economic problem is the fact that morale has fallen off sharply since the halt in American bombing. As long as U.S. warplanes filled the skies over the North, workers and peasants were inspired to grim extra effort. Now, according to non-Communist foreign visitors recently in Hanoi, many seem to have relaxed their drive. Last June the newspaper Hanoi Moi reported that of 538 specific construction-industry quotas only 328 had been achieved or surpassed. Other papers maintain a steady barrage of complaint against pilferage, slackness and absenteeism, and at the beginning of 1969 the government found itself...