271. Memorandum of a Conversation, Saigon, November 7, 19551
PARTICIPANTS
- President Diem
- Ambassador Reinhardt
- General O’Daniel
- General Williams
During President Diem’s discussion of his urgent need for village auto-defense units,2 I asked him to clarify his long-term intentions with respect to the police organization of Viet-Nam. In reply to my several questions, he said it was his definite purpose to develop in Vietnam a police system along the lines which had been recommended consisting of Metropolitan Police, Garde Civile for the countryside and the National Sûreté. He made it very clear that it was not his intention that the Garde Civile should be an adjunct to the army, but he went on to say that it was inevitable that for some time it would have, in effect, to function in large measure as an auxiliary force to the military. Until the widespread illegal possession of arms had been reduced to manageable proportions and the Viet Minh capability for armed intervention in the countryside had been removed, it made little sense to expose the yet inadequately trained and inadequately armed Garde Civile to the sub-machine gun fire of Viet Minh guerrillas. The process of pacification had still a long way to go before it would be possible for members of the Garde Civile to patrol the countryside in groups of two or three as do the rural police of less disturbed countries. He added that one of the causes of confusion with respect to the development of the Garde Civile was the old-fashioned view of some of the bureaucrats in the Ministry of the Interior who still seemed to think of the Garde Civile as a sort of [Page 572] honor guard for a Chef de Province. They did not recognize the critical nature of the present emergency and resisted his orders that units of the Garde be assigned to the military in circumstances where this was required. He commented in passing that, in the Philippines, President Magsaysay had apparently not yet reached the point where he felt he could return his Garde Civile to the Ministry of the Interior where it, of course, belonged.
- Source: Center of Military History, O’Daniel Papers. Secret.↩
- For a memorandum of this portion of the conversation, see Document 276.↩
- Printed from a carbon copy which bears this typed signature.↩