With the Bình Xuyên vanquished, Diệm turned his attention to conquering the Hòa Hảo. As a result, a battle between government troops led by General Dương Văn Minh and Ba Cụt's men commenced in Cần Thơ on 5 June. Five Hòa Hảo battalions surrendered immediately; Ba Cụt and three remaining leaders had fled to the Cambodian border by the end of the month. Having surrendered his forces, Ngo excoriated Soai and Ba Cụt, claiming that their activities were not consistent with Hòa Hảo religious practices and accused them of fighting with communists. The soldiers of the three other leaders eventually surrendered, but Ba Cụt's men continued to the end, claiming loyalty to the Emperor Bảo Đại. Diệm responded by replacing the officers of Bảo Đại's personal regiments with his own men and used the royal units to attack Ba Cụt's rebels near Hà Tiên and Rạch Giá, outnumbering the Hòa Hảo by at least a factor of five. Knowing that they could not defeat the government in open conventional warfare, Ba Cụt's forces destroyed their own bases so that the VNA could not use their abandoned resources, and retreated into the jungle. Ba Cụt's 3,000 men spent the rest of 1955 evading 20,000 VNA troops who had been deployed to quell them, notwithstanding a A bounty of one million piasters was put on the head of Ba Cụt, who scattered trails of money in the jungle, hoping to distract his pursuers, but to no avail. The communists claimed in a history written decades later that Ba Cụt had tried to forge an alliance with them, but that talks broke down a few months later.