Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

  The man assigned to this task, Major General Douglas Gracey, commander of the Twentieth, has been described by historians as miscast for his role, in view of his pro-French bias and his paternalistic philosophy that “natives” should not defy Europeans. An unreconstructed colonialist, born in and of the empire, Gracey had spent his whole career with the Indian Army. “The question of the government of Indochina is exclusively French,” he said before leaving for Vietnam. “Civil and military control by the French is only a matter of weeks.” But if Gracey was unusual for his forthrightness, his thinking was fully within the mainstream of British official thinking in the period. Thus Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin could tell the Chinese ambassador in September: “We naturally assumed that Indo-China would return to France.” And thus Anthony Eden could recall that “an Anglo-Indian force under General Gracey occupied the southern half of the country until the French were able to resume control.”45

  Still, it cannot be denied that Gracey by his initial actions in Saigon exacerbated an already-tense situation. His nickname was “Bruiser,” and it fit. When he arrived at Tan Son Nhut airfield aboard an American C-47 on September 13, he walked straight past the Viet Minh delegation waiting patiently by the tarmac and departed in the company of a group of Japanese soldiers. Gracey refused to meet Viet Minh leaders in the days thereafter, and indeed ordered that they be evicted from the former Governor-General’s Palace. “They came to see me and said ‘welcome’ and all that sort of thing,” he later said. “It was an unpleasant situation and I promptly kicked them out. They were obviously communists.”46

  On the twenty-first, following more unrest, Gracey proclaimed martial law. He banned public meetings and demonstrations, imposed a curfew, and closed down the Vietnamese press—even as he allowed French newspapers to continue to publish. Looters and saboteurs, he said, would be summarily shot. In effect the nationalist government was being shut down. The next day, encouraged by Cédile, Gracey released and rearmed more than a thousand excitable French soldiers. The soldiers, their ranks swollen by angry French civilians, promptly set about terrorizing any Vietnamese they encountered. Hundreds were beaten and jailed, and some Committee of the South members were hanged. One French woman who sympathized with the Viet Minh had her hair shaved off like those who collaborated with the Germans in metropolitan France. By midmorning on the twenty-third, the French flag was once more flying from most important buildings.

  It was, in the words of one Briton on the scene, a coup d’état:

  As clocks chimed 0300 a ragtag grim silent army of 300 men, armed to the teeth, padded silently along the deserted streets. The Coup d’Etat was beginning and Saigon was about to become French again. This was the culmination of an incredible week of turbulent rumours and imminent uprisings. Who would strike first? Would it be the Annamese, angry, confident, truculent? Or the French? “Three o’clock Sunday morning,” the word went round; and 300 tough men went out to take the city.47

  Another observer, the Paris-based photojournalist Germaine Krull, who had arrived with the first contingent of Gurkhas on September 12, noted with disgust in her diary the sight of “these men, who were supposed to be the soldiers of France, this undisciplined horde whose laughing and singing I could hear from my window, corrupted by too many years in the tropics, too many women, too much opium and too many months of inactivity in the camp,” and who were now wandering through the streets “as if celebrating 14 July, their guns slung over their shoulders, cigarettes dangling from their lips.” On the rue Catinat she observed “soldiers driving before them a group of Annamites bound, slave-fashion to a long rope. Women spat in their faces. They were on the verge of being lynched.” That night Krull “realized only too well what a serious mistake we had made and how grave the consequences would be.… Instead of regaining our prestige we had lost it forever, and, worse still, we had lost the trust of the few remaining Annamites who believe in us. We had showed them that the new France was even more to be feared than the old one.”48

  FRENCH TROOPS ROUND UP VIETNAMESE NATIONALISTS IN SAIGON, SEPTEMBER 1945. (photo credit 4.3)

  Gracey, angered by the brutality of these “tough men,” ordered the former detainees back to barracks as punishment, but the damage was done: Viet Minh leaders on the twenty-fourth mobilized a massive general strike that paralyzed Saigon. French civilians barricaded their houses or sought refuge in the old Continental Hotel. Bursts of gunfire and the thuds of mortar rounds could be heard throughout the city, as Viet Minh squads attacked the airport and stormed the local jail to liberate hundreds of Vietnamese prisoners. At dawn on the twenty-fifth, Vietnamese bands of various political stripes slipped past Japanese guards in the Cité Herault section of town and massacred scores of French and Eurasian civilians, among them many women and children.49

  Thus began, it could be argued, the Vietnamese war of liberation against France. It would take several more months before the struggle would extend to the entire south, and more than a year before it also engulfed Hanoi and the north, which is why historians typically date the start of the war as late 1946. But this date, September 23, 1945, may be as plausible a start date as any.50

  “But why,” Gracey’s chief political spokesman was asked, “why would you not talk with the Viet Minh before the shooting started?”

  “Because you cannot negotiate when a pistol is held at your head,” the Briton replied.

  “You mean you can negotiate only when you hold a pistol at the other party’s head?”

  He shrugged.51

  To Lieutenant Colonel Peter A. Dewey, Patti’s OSS counterpart in the south, the situation was desperate. The son of a Republican congressman and a graduate of Yale, Dewey was a remarkably accomplished young man. He had been a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News and had enlisted in the Polish Army before the United States became involved in the war. In 1943, he had joined the OSS and led a paratroop unit that parachuted into southern France and helped organize the French underground. Along the way, he developed a reputation for uncommon physical daring. In 1944, he was a member of one of the legendary Jedburgh teams that parachuted into occupied France to conduct sabotage and guerrilla warfare, at great personal peril. Fluent in French, disdainful of autocracy, he had also found time to author two books, including one on the French defeat in 1940. Now, at the ripe old age of twenty-eight, he found himself heading the small OSS contingent in Cochin China to find POWs and gather intelligence.

  Dewey fully shared Patti’s anticolonial predilections and had helped facilitate the earlier failed negotiations between Cédile and the Viet Minh. He had sought an early audience with Gracey, but the Englishman rebuffed him. To Gracey, indeed, the troubles in Saigon could be blamed partly on Dewey and his OSS detachment, whom he declared persona non grata and labeled “blatantly subversive” for supposedly conniving with the Viet Minh.52 He demanded that Dewey leave Indochina as soon as possible. Dewey duly packed his bags and, on the morning of September 26, headed for the airport in a jeep. The plane sent from Bangkok to fetch him had not arrived, so Dewey got back in the jeep and made for the mission headquarters to have lunch. He took a shortcut past the Saigon golf course and found the road blocked by logs and branches. Slowing to swerve around the obstacle, he saw some Vietnamese in the ditch and cursed at them in French. Perhaps mistaking him for a Frenchman, they opened fire, hitting him in the back of the head and killing him instantly. Dewey’s fellow passenger, Captain Herbert Bluechel, a former movie chain operator from San Francisco, escaped unharmed, a bullet knocking off his cap as he ran, the Vietnamese in hot pursuit.53

  Peter Dewey was the first of nearly sixty thousand Americans to be killed in Vietnam. His body was never found, and the French and Viet Minh accused each other of being responsible for the murder. Washington reacted to the killing by scaling back the OSS presence and activities in Saigon. Before he left for the airport on that final day, Dewey had summarized his thinking in a report: “Cochinchina is burning, the French and British are finished
here, and we [the United States] ought to clear out of Southeast Asia.”54

  VI

  IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING THE CITÉ HERAULT MASSACRE, GENERAL Gracey managed to calm Saigon, but not before additional skirmishes caused the deaths of some two hundred Vietnamese and several dozen French civilians. The general persuaded French and Vietnamese representatives to resume talks and made preparations for the arrival of the rest of this division, as well as the first troops from France. He also supervised the establishment of a base for his troops, which in due course would feature a bagpipe band, theaters, and a brothel with separate facilities for Indians and Europeans. In facilitating Franco-Vietnamese talks, Gracey acted on the instructions of Lord Mountbatten, SEAC commander, who had rebuked him for his failure to deal with Vietnamese authorities and who said a political settlement should be secured immediately. But the negotiations got nowhere; neither the French nor the Vietnamese were willing to make the concessions on sovereignty that the other side demanded. A fragile truce nevertheless took hold, and it was still in place when the French battleship Richelieu and the light cruiser Triomphant arrived on October 3 and began to debark Leclerc’s Fifth Colonial Regiment. The commander himself arrived two days later and, with Gracey, began to penetrate pockets of resistance. The killings began again, by both sides, inside and outside Saigon. The shops along the rue Catinat were shuttered, cafés were empty, and there were no cyclos in the streets.55

  Major Jacques Philippe de Hautecloque, an aristocratic cavalryman and graduate of Saint-Cyr, had taken the pseudonym “Leclerc” to protect his family in France when he declared for de Gaulle in 1940. Dashing, charismatic, and deeply religious—every day of his adult life, when circumstances permitted, he received the Eucharist—Leclerc achieved his first distinction when he led 2,500 mostly African troops across 1,500 miles of the Sahara Desert in 1942 to join the British Eighth Army in its campaign against Rommel. In 1944, he led the Second French Armored Division in the liberation of Paris, formally entering the city in triumph alongside de Gaulle on August 26 (see photo on this page). Later he took Strasbourg, personally hoisting the tricolor over the cathedral. His selection, a year later, as commander of the Indochina effort was greeted with jubilation by colons throughout Cochin China, and they gave him a hero’s welcome as he entered Saigon. French flags flew everywhere, and portraits of de Gaulle hung in shop windows.

  De Gaulle’s instructions to Leclerc had been plain: Be firm, and don’t compromise. Beginning on October 12, Leclerc and Gracey used their forces—augmented by sizable numbers of Japanese troops, who were ordered to take part—to push outward from Saigon, taking the suburbs of Go Vap and Gia Dinh, then moving northwestward to Bien Hoa on the twenty-third and to Thu Dau Mot on the twenty-fifth. Also on the twenty-fifth, the French captured control of My Tho in the south, the gateway to the Mekong Delta, using both a naval force attacking from the river estuary and land troops moving by road from Saigon. Vinh Long and Can Tho, both important trading and communications centers in the delta, fell on October 29 and November 1, respectively. Many of these engagements were hard fought, however, as the nationalists proved resilient, showing themselves adept at withdrawing and regrouping, then, under the cover of night, striking back. Casualties were significant on both sides: The British Indian Division, for example, suffered nineteen killed and sixty-eight wounded by early November, while the Japanese lost fifty-four dead and seventy-nine wounded. This latter figure did not include a sizable number of Japanese—somewhere between one thousand and three thousand—who deserted their units and fought on the side of the Vietnamese (meaning that in some engagements Japanese fought Japanese).56

  In his initial public statements, Leclerc expressed confidence that absolute French control could be established quickly, within a few weeks. With the arrival of his first full division of French regulars, the Second Armored Division, in late October, his optimism increased as his troop count reached 4,500 men. Then the Ninth Colonial Division arrived aboard eight American ships (the first significant act, it may be said, of U.S. aid). Many of the troops wore uniforms of American issue and carried American equipment. Leclerc now thought he had enough men to undertake operations even in distant parts of Cochin China. It marked an important shift in the balance of armed forces. By the middle of December, most of the towns in Vietnam south of the sixteenth parallel had come under French control. It all seemed to be going according to plan.

  But close observers saw ominous signs of trouble. George Wickes, an American with the OSS who spent much of the fall in Saigon, thought the French would be hard-pressed to win a lasting victory. “The French are not quite so confident as they were at the start that this would be cleared up a in few weeks,” Wickes wrote his parents in late November after a visit to the countryside north of Saigon. “And I believe that, unless they always keep large garrisons and patrols everywhere, they will not be able to keep the country submissive as it was before. The Annamite’s great advantage lies in the fact that he is everywhere, that he does not need to fight pitched battles or organize troops to be a threat and that no amount of reprisal can completely defeat him. I cannot say how it will end, but at least it will be a long time before Frenchmen can roam about the country with peace of mind.”57

  Leclerc himself began to suffer nagging doubts or at least an awareness that the task ahead was complex. He reflected on something Mountbatten had told him in Ceylon, where Leclerc had stopped en route to Indochina: that postwar Asia was very different from the prewar variety, and there was no going back. Leclerc soon came to agree. “One does not kill ideas with bullets,” he told aides, and he warned superiors that France must avoid a large-scale war. Military action was necessary—troops had to be used to hold cities and lines of communication—but there could be no long-term military solution. Any hope of imposing such a solution would require a vastly larger French fighting force, which Paris was in no position to provide, now or in the foreseeable future. The task of French forces, therefore, would be to reassert French control and thereby give negotiators a base from which to proceed to a generalized political settlement involving mutual concessions.58

  It was a prescient assessment but it fell on deaf ears. As 1945—the year historian David Marr has called the most important in modern Vietnamese history—drew to a close, most French officials concerned with Indochina, far from seeing major obstacles ahead for the objective of reclaiming control of the colony, saw reasons for optimism.59 Didn’t Leclerc’s own actions, after all, show that things were moving in the right direction? His troops had gained control of much of Cochin China and were poised to move north. In Cambodia, meanwhile, French efforts to reestablish authority were proceeding well. Diplomatically too, the signs seemed to point in the right direction and not merely with respect to the welcome support from the British. Negotiations had begun with the Chinese that, French officials hoped, would in short order result in an agreement allowing for the withdrawal of Lu Han’s forces from Tonkin. The Americans, though not to be trusted—in both Paris and Saigon, French observers suspected Washington of seeking to undermine French interests in Indochina—were for the moment sticking to a neutral policy that tilted to France.

  More than anything, though, it was the presence of one man, a brand-new arrival in Vietnam, that ensured the failure of any French move to an early political settlement. That was Leclerc’s civilian counterpart, Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu, the high commissioner, who like the general had been instructed by de Gaulle to brook no defiance from any Vietnamese and who was determined to live up to that instruction. He was a man of the cloth, a former monk, whose appointment had been criticized by some colons on the grounds that as a cleric he might be too liberal, that he might give away the store. They need not have worried. For the high commissioner who set foot in Saigon on October 31, 1945, quickly showed himself to be a warrior monk. His policy decisions in the year that followed would set the conditions and the course for the outbreak of a full-scale war.

  CHAPTER 5

/>   THE WARRIOR MONK

  HE WAS BORN IN BREST, IN BRITTANY, ON AUGUST 7, 1889, THE third of six children of Olivier Thierry d’Argenlieu, an aristocratic naval officer. Following in his father’s career path, the young Georges Thierry entered the École Navale in Brest in 1906 and, upon graduation, followed the typical career of a naval officer. After World War I, however, he resigned his commission at the rank of lieutenant in order to join the Carmelite Order, a Catholic religious body noted for dogmatic severity and strict moral views. D’Argenlieu, known as Father Louis of the Trinity among his brethren, rose rapidly in his calling and by the late 1930s had become the Carmelites’ provincial in France.1

  With the outbreak of World War II, he returned to his previous career. Captured by the Germans after the fall of France, he escaped and joined de Gaulle in London in 1940 as a capitaine de corvette, later rising to become an admiral and, successively, high commissioner for France in the Pacific, commander in chief of Free French naval forces based in Britain, and assistant chief of the Free French General Staff. D’Argenlieu’s devotion to de Gaulle and Free France puzzled many who saw him as a natural Pétainist, in view of his royalist birth, his Carmelite training, and his adherence to the extreme right political views so favored by French naval men. Whatever its source, his Gaullism was genuine and unshakable, and he took up his new charge with determination, fully sharing the general’s uncompromising ideas about maintaining the empire for the glory of France.2