FRENCH TROOPS ENTER HANOI AS MASSES OF COLONS TURN OUT TO CHEER, MARCH 1946. (photo credit 5.3)
To no one’s surprise, therefore, the old problems immediately resurfaced as the discussions began. The Vietnamese wanted independence and a weak form of association with France. France sought guided self-government (the English word was used in internal documents) within the French Union, with France controlling the sovereignty of Vietnam—in other words, the French would hold the crucial ministries. On Cochin China, the Vietnamese held steadfast to the line that it was part of their country, but the French refused to budge. According to Pham Van Dong, André said to him: “We only need an ordinary police operation for eight days to clean all of you out.” France, in other words, had no need to compromise.35
Days and weeks passed, and the gap between the Vietnamese and the French never seemed to narrow. The French had given Ho a giant red carpet at his hotel when he first arrived, as was the custom with visiting heads of state. David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli leader, who was in Paris at the time, remarked that “Ho’s descending fortunes could be measured by the progressive shrinking of the protocolary carpet. On Ho’s arrival it had extended from the sidewalk to his room. As the summer wore on, it was limited to the lobby, then to the staircase, and finally simply to the corridor in front of Ho’s suite.”36
Ho seriously exaggerated the weight of left-wing opinion in France. The hoped-for support from the Socialists and Communists never materialized, notwithstanding the gushing praise that the respective party newspapers heaped on the Vietnamese. Marius Moutet, the beleaguered minister of Overseas France, whose socialist party had lost ground in the recent election, proved unwilling to champion independence for Vietnam, and Communist leader Thorez was likewise equivocal. Over lunch in July, the veteran socialist leader Léon Blum assured Ho, “I will be there at difficult moments. Count on me.” That too would turn out to be false.37
In Saigon, meanwhile, Thierry d’Argenlieu continued his efforts at sabotage. Leclerc had by now left Indochina—in July he was reassigned to North Africa and was succeeded in Indochina by General Jean Étienne Valluy—which made the subversion easier. He declared that the future relationship between France and Indochina could not be decided solely by delegates representing the Hanoi government and that, accordingly, another conference would be convened, this one at Dalat, on August 1. Its purpose would be to discuss an “Indochinese Federation” comprising Cochin China, Laos, and Cambodia, as well as southern Annam and the Central Highlands. Hanoi would not be represented at all. When word of this Dalat plan reached Fontainebleau, Pham Van Dong reacted with fury and broke off negotiations, much to d’Argenlieu’s delight. The two sides eventually returned to the table, but the deep divisions remained. Provisional agreements were drawn up on a range of economic issues, but the stubborn refusal of the French to discuss political issues—notably the status of Cochin China—rendered these agreements worthless to the Vietnamese delegation. Eight weeks of talks, Pham Van Dong concluded on September 10, as the conference drew to a close, had shown only that no basis for serious negotiations existed.38
Ho Chi Minh, not yet willing to abandon all hope, sent his delegation back to Vietnam while he stayed behind in Paris to make one last push for a deal. To reporters he emphasized the DRV’s need for allies and her willingness to go it alone if necessary. The United States, as always, loomed large in his mind. “Your country,” he told American journalist David Schoenbrun on September 11, “can play a vital role for peace in Southeast Asia. The memory of Roosevelt is still strong. You never had an empire, never exploited the Asian peoples. The example you set in the Philippines was an inspiration to all of us. Your ties with France are strong and durable and you have great influence in this country. I urge you to report to your people the need there is to swing the balance toward peace and independence before it is too late for all of us. Do not be blinded by this issue of Communism.”
To Schoenbrun’s reply that Americans did not think Communism was compatible with freedom, Ho nodded in understanding but said the Vietnamese people would not rest until true independence had been won. “If men you call Communists are the only men who lead the fight for independence, then Vietnam will be Communist. Independence is the motivating force, not Communism.… On the issue of independence and the unity of North and South we are all in agreement, Communists, Catholics, Republicans, peasants, workers. If we must, we will fight together for those aims.”
Schoenbrun marveled at the self-assured language. “But, President Ho, this is extraordinary. How can you hope to wage war against the French? You have no army, you have no modern weapons. Why, such a war would seem hopeless to you!”
“No, it would not be hopeless. It would be hard, desperate, but we could win.” History offered many examples of ragged bands defeating modern armies—think of the Yugoslav partisans against the Germans or, further back, simple American farmers taking on the mighty British Empire! “The spirit of man is more powerful than his own machines.” The Viet Minh, Ho stressed, would make full use of the swamps, the thick jungles, the mountains and caves, the terrain they knew so well. “It will be a war between an elephant and a tiger. If the tiger ever stands still the elephant will crush him with his mighty tusks. But the tiger does not stand still. He lurks in the jungle by day and emerges only at night. He will leap upon the back of the elephant, tearing huge chunks from his hide, and then he will leap back into the dark jungle. And slowly the elephant will bleed to death. That will be the war of Indochina.”39
The confident words masked deep private doubts. “Don’t leave me this way,” Ho despaired to Sainteny and Moutet on the same day as the Schoenbrun interview. “Arm me against those who would seek to displace me. You will not regret it.” Ho feared that radical elements among the Viet Minh would resort to force prematurely; perhaps he also feared for his own position of authority, should he return with nothing to show for two months of haggling. He assured the two Frenchmen that his government would respect a meaningful agreement but also warned them: “If we have to fight, we will fight. You will kill ten of us, and we will kill one of you, and in the end it is you who will be exhausted.”40
At midnight on the fourteenth, Ho slipped out of the Hotel Royal Monceau and made his way along the Avenue Hoche to Moutet’s apartment. The Frenchman was already in bed. Ho sat down beside him. One imagines the scene: the gaunt and goateed revolutionary and the portly and gray Moutet discussing the fate of Vietnam in a Paris bedroom in the dead of night. Before long, the two men have attached their initials to a partial agreement, which they call a Modus Vivendi. It seemingly safeguards most of the rights in Indochina that the French have sought, both at Dalat in April and at Fontainebleau, while offering little to the Vietnamese. As for the difficult political questions, it postpones these for future negotiations, which are to start no later than January 1947. Also included is a cease-fire between French and Vietnamese forces in the south, to take effect on October 30. No mention is made of ultimate independence for Vietnam.
Sainteny would later refer to the Modus Vivendi as a “pathetic” agreement that gave Ho “far less than he had hoped for when he came to France.” Just why the veteran revolutionary chose to sign is somewhat of a mystery. Perhaps he simply sought to buy time, both to prepare for war and to see if the November elections in France might produce a government dependent on Communist and Socialist support and more likely to make concessions. He told young supporters on September 15, thinking back to Blum’s promise in July: “Have confidence in Léon Blum, whatever may happen.”41
Later that day Ho left Paris, for the last time. Never again would he set foot in the city he knew so well—better, perhaps, than any other. Despite the numerous frustrations of the previous weeks, he had enjoyed his stay in key respects. He had taken time to visit many of his old Paris haunts, had mingled frequently with French intellectuals and politicians, and had devoured any and all newspapers, and overall the city and its culture undoubtedly stirred something
deep in his soul. An intangible but real connection to the colonial overlord remained, despite his decades-long campaign to win independence for his country, and despite his sense that all-out war was drawing ever closer. Nor was he alone in this feeling. It’s a fascinating thing about many Vietnamese nationalists of the period, the degree to which they possessed complex and conflicting feelings about France. Said Ho to author Jean Lacouture earlier in the year: “A race such as yours which has given the world the literature of freedom will always find us friends.… If you only knew, monsieur, how passionately I reread Victor Hugo and Michelet year after year.”42
The same sense comes through in Ho’s notebook of the trip, a fascinating account not initially meant for public release. There are entries on international developments that matter to him, including the declaration of independence in the Philippines early in July and the U.S. atomic tests at Bikini Atoll (but curiously not France’s evacuation of Syria and Lebanon, marking the effective end of her colonialist claims in the Middle East), and on the stakes in the negotiations. But it is his admiration for France and the French that leaves the strongest impression. He records that on June 30 he wanted to take a walk in Monceau Park at six o’clock in the morning, only to find the gate locked. When the guard learned that he was a foreigner who had recently arrived in France, he let him in without knowing Ho Chi Minh’s identity: “It is just a small anecdote but it is enough to show that the French, in France, are courteous and respectful of foreigners.” Another section, titled “The Beautiful Qualities of the French,” comments on their attachment to lofty principles such as liberty and fraternity and their passion for intellectual argument and debate. Of the generally welcoming reception given him, he writes that “it was not because I was the president of a nation that they behaved that way; they just naturally showed friendship toward us.”43
The question looms: Did Ho’s Paris sojourn in mid-1946 represent the great lost chance for a genuine and far-reaching accord, one that could have defused the growing crisis before it devolved into large-scale war, one that could have prevented thirty years of indescribably bloody and destructive war on the Indochinese peninsula? What if the French had really put Ho’s conciliatory words to the test? He was not staking out a maximalist position, after all—he was not demanding full and complete independence. He sought compromise and indicated a willingness—maybe even a desire—to maintain an association with France. The French could have retained every important commercial, cultural, and political tie, losing only the outer trappings of colonial rule. In the event, his hosts couldn’t bring themselves to explore the proposition, certainly not at the highest levels. The opportunity was missed, but it was never close to being seized. Instead, the failure of the Fontainebleau talks allowed hard-liners on both sides to dig in, rendering a compromise settlement more remote than ever.
As Ho Chi Minh departed this country he loved, he had no illusions: The war clouds were gathering fast.
CHAPTER 6
THE SPARK
IT WOULD BE LATE OCTOBER 1946 BEFORE HO CHI MINH ARRIVED back in Hanoi. For reasons that remain murky, he chose to travel home not by airplane but by a French ship whose leisurely passage from Toulon to Haiphong took several weeks.1 He was away more than four months, during which time Vo Nguyen Giap led the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and worked feverishly to prepare for war.
It was an awesome responsibility for the young Giap, but he proved equal to the task. Of medium height and with prominent cheekbones and deep-set eyes, he had about him a reserved and unassuming air that masked a steely determination. Not yet thirty-five when Ho departed for France, he would become a profoundly important factor in the revolution’s success—a largely self-taught military commander who oversaw the forces that took on first the mighty French and then the even mightier Americans. Only Ho himself was more responsible for the ultimate success of the revolution. Over the years, Giap would make his share of mistakes on the battlefield, but his record as a logistician, strategist, and organizer is nevertheless extraordinary and ranks him with the finest military leaders of modern history—with Wellington, Grant, Lee, and Rommel. He proved spectacularly adept, in particular, at using the often-limited means at his disposal as well as the terrain, which he knew better than his adversaries because it was his own.
He was born into modest circumstances, on August 21, 1911, in Quang Binh province in the narrow waist of central Vietnam, near the seventeenth parallel. The name Giap meant “armor.” His father, who instilled in the young boy a respect for education, died in a French prison after being arrested for subversion; an older sister died the same way. These tragedies fostered in Giap a hatred of the French, and he was further inspired to fight colonial rule after reading, at age fourteen, Ho Chi Minh’s French Colonialism on Trial. In short order, Giap became active in nationalist politics, and the French Sûreté opened a file on him. Imprisoned briefly at age eighteen for organizing a student demonstration, Giap was given permission to enroll at the French-run Lycée Albert Sarraut in Hanoi. He proved an exceptionally able and diligent student and continued on for a law degree at the University of Hanoi, another French institution, refusing a scholarship to study for a doctorate in Paris.
During this time he married and, in order to support his wife and their young daughter, took a position teaching history at a private school in Hanoi. His lectures could be intoxicating. On the first day of class, one student recalled, Giap announced that he would depart from the usual curriculum, which covered France from 1789 to the mid-nineteenth century. “Look, there are a lot of books about this stuff,” he declared as he paced at the front of the room. “If you want to know about it, you can look it up. I’m going to tell you about two things—the French Revolution and Napoleon.” The students sat transfixed as Giap expounded on Marie Antoinette’s indulgences, on Robespierre’s life and Danton’s death, and—most of all—on Napoleon’s military campaigns. Right down to individual minor battles he would go, his admiration for Napoleon palpable, the students hanging on every word.2
All the while he continued to immerse himself in nationalist literature, including that of Ho Chi Minh. In 1937, he joined the Indochinese Communist Party, and in 1938, he wrote a book, The Question of National Liberation in Indochina. ICP leaders took notice of this smart and educated comrade, who seemed to possess boundless energy. In 1940, they sent Giap and another young party member, Pham Van Dong, to China to make contact with Ho. (Giap’s wife wept as he bade her farewell; arrested soon thereafter by the French, she died in Hanoi’s Hoa Lo prison, though Giap would not learn the news for three years.) The encounter occurred in Kunming. At fifty, Ho was frail and hunched over, but Giap immediately noticed the piercing eyes. The three men launched into a lively discussion as they walked along the waterfront, and a bond was struck.3 On Ho’s orders, Giap went to Yan’an, in northern China, to take part in military training with Mao Zedong’s Communist forces, then returned south in time to be present at the historic founding of the Viet Minh in the cave near Pac Bo in Cao Bang in May 1941.4
“Political action should precede military action,” Ho frequently proclaimed in these years. But armed struggle would surely come in the end, and preparations must be made. Giap was made head of the Military Committee for the Viet Minh’s General Directorate, in charge of building up and training the movement’s armed forces. On December 12, 1944, he presided over the creation of the National Liberation Army of Vietnam—thirty-one men and three women at the start, who between them reportedly had one light machine gun, seventeen modern rifles, two revolvers, and fourteen additional firearms of various kinds. Gradually the army’s ranks swelled, and it began to clear whole districts in the mountainous areas of Tonkin. By the time of the Japanese coup of 1945, the Viet Minh had a genuine base area.
Giap by now was one of Ho’s principal lieutenants, seldom leaving his side for long. He was there at Tan Trao in August 1945, when the party created the National Committee for the Liberation of Vietnam. Giap ran its mili
tary subgroup and signed the order to begin the general uprising. This committee effectively became the provisional government of the DRV on September 2, 1945. Giap served as minister of the interior in Ho’s first government and over time made himself more and more the indispensable man—capable and efficient and ruthless in equal measure. It surprised no one when he assumed leadership of the DRV during Ho’s sojourn to France.
Historian Stein Tønnesson notes an important difference between the deputy and the chief. Giap was the more cold and calculating of the two, a man who stirred awe and admiration in his underlings but not the kind of devotion Ho generated. When Giap speaks in his memoirs of the fabulously persuasive force of his master, Tønnesson remarks, he does not see the importance of Ho’s sincerity. “Uncle Ho had an extraordinary flair for detecting the thoughts and feelings of the enemy,” Giap writes. “With great shrewdness, he worked out a concrete treatment for each type and each individual.… Even his enemies, men who were notoriously anticommunist, showed respect for him. They seemed to lose some of their aggressiveness when they were in his presence.” Concludes Tønnesson: “In Giap’s rational brain, Ho’s charm is reduced to a tool.”5
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam Page 18