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

by Fredrik Logevall

  II

  SOMEHOW GIAP HAD TO DEVISE A STRATEGY FOR VICTORY. FRENCH firepower would initially be vastly greater than his own, he knew, and he turned for guidance to his Yan’an experience and in particular to the theories of Mao Zedong, who in a succession of essays published in the late 1930s had maintained that successful revolutionary war strategy must pass through three phases: withdrawal, equilibrium, and general offensive. During the first phase, insurgents, facing a foe of superior power, avoid major engagements and rely on small-scale guerrilla tactics to sap the will and strength of government forces. They raid when possible and fall back when necessary. As the guerrillas build up their strength and achieve rough parity, they enter the second phase of the struggle, launching a mix of guerrilla and conventional operations to keep the enemy off balance. In this phase, a sense of futility begins to permeate the thinking of the government’s troops as casualties and costs mount, with no decision in sight. As the stalemate causes the enemy’s morale to plummet, the insurgents launch the general offensive, using conventional attacks with regular army units. Their goal in this third phase is to defeat government forces and exercise political control over territory.

  Beginning already in the spring of 1946, Giap had sought to create two large military base areas from which to wage the first phase of the struggle. To these bases, he could withdraw his principal forces as necessary for rest and refitting, and recruit new troops to be trained. The more important of the two would be the area of northern Tonkin known as the Viet Bac, comprising the provinces of Bac Kan, Cao Bang, Lang Son, Ha Giang, Tuyen Quang, and Thai Nguyen. Giap and his aides knew this region well: It had been a main area of operations for them in 1944 and 1945. Its many limestone caves could be used as offices and workshops; its terrain—for the most part heavily forested and mountainous, and poorly suited to food growing—was relatively easy to defend; and its sparse population was broadly sympathetic to the Viet Minh cause. The second base area was more problematic, Giap acknowledged. This was the region made up of the provinces of Thanh Hoa, Nghe An, and Ha Tinh, to the south of the Red River Delta. It was far less well prepared, far more exposed to enemy attack. The attraction here was the greater proximity to Hanoi and Haiphong, and to the sea.6

  In other respects too, Vo Nguyen Giap used the spring and summer months to strengthen the Viet Minh position. In May the Chinese forces under Lu Han began to withdraw across the Sino-Vietnamese frontier. The French sought to move in quickly but were for the most part stymied. It was the wet season, and Giap’s troops were nimbler at navigating the difficult conditions and establishing control of the evacuated areas. Adept at sabotaging roads and bridges, they continually frustrated the road-bound French, delaying them long enough to take scores of important towns and villages out of play. Inevitably, there were military clashes. At Bac Ninh, a village nineteen miles northwest of Hanoi, for example, a Viet Minh unit’s ambush of a French truck convoy on August 4 led to a fierce nine-hour battle involving machine guns, mortars, and grenades. Casualties were heavy on both sides, with the French suffering 12 men killed and 41 wounded. Tensions rose.7

  Meanwhile, those rival nationalist groups that had depended on Chinese support—notably the VNQDD and Dai Viet—now found themselves squeezed by both the Viet Minh and the French. Giap, seizing the opportunity, used scattered guerrilla outbreaks as an excuse to mercilessly crush these groups, often with French blessing. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of non-Communist rivals were killed. More and more the Viet Minh, who had previously had genuine legitimacy in calling themselves a broad-based nationalist front, was synonymous with the Communist movement. Northern Vietnam, recalled one Dai Viet member of this period, was being transformed into a police state. Many non-Communist Vietnamese suddenly felt squeezed: There seemed to be no real way of resisting Communism except by the unpalatable means of accepting French control or the formation of a government inspired by and beholden to the Paris master.8

  All the while Giap sought to maintain the official cease-fire with the French. Notwithstanding periodic clashes that continued to occur in the early autumn, he still wanted to delay the outbreak of major hostilities. The cease-fire still held as Ho Chi Minh reentered Hanoi in late October, but neither he nor any other close observer could mistake the heightening animosity. Both sides girded for war. In the north a DRV government continued to sit in Hanoi, and the Viet Minh held effective control in much of Tonkin and northern Annam, while the French, though they had occupation forces in Hanoi, Haiphong, and other garrisons in the north, still sought a toehold. In many northern municipalities, French-language shop and street signs were replaced by Vietnamese ones. (The few exceptions were, interestingly, in English, such as the large sign for a “Pork Butcher Specialist” that hung in a window on a busy Hanoi street.) In the south, meanwhile, France had solidified her hold on major urban areas, and in Saigon there now operated a French-installed government that showed some semblance of authority, at least intermittently. In the countryside of Cochin China, however, this government had minimal power, and French military control generally extended no farther than the rifle range of the units on patrol.9

  Indeed, the French position in the south looked increasingly tenuous as the autumn began. No longer were British and Japanese forces there to help quell the dissent, and moreover the best French troops had gone north, leaving less experienced units to control the entire area of Cochin China and southern Annam. The leader of the guerrilla forces in the south, Nguyen Binh, a native northerner who had made a name for himself during World War II as an organizer of anti-Japanese and then anti-French activities in the Red River Delta, had been appointed the DRV’s military commander in the south the previous fall. Initially he focused his energies on unifying various bandit groups, sects, and religious forces into an organized armed force in order to fight the returning French. But in April and May 1946, as the new provisional French-sanctioned Cochin Chinese government was established and the main French units ventured north, he stepped up guerrilla activities, ordering political assassinations and the harassing of French forces. On April 10, Nguyen Binh announced the formation of a National United Front, including elements of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects, dedicated to fighting French colonialism, and in the summer months the guerrilla war in the south increased in intensity, its leader taking time in June to join the Indochinese Communist Party.10

  Nguyen Binh’s effectiveness as a guerrilla leader came in part because he was confident enough to act on his own initiative when necessary. But he also received general instructions from party leaders in the north. Tran Huy Lieu, minister of communications and propaganda in Ho’s first government and a longtime acquaintance of Nguyen Binh, signed many of the missives. In one set of instructions, penned in September 1946, Tran captured core elements of what would become the Viet Minh way of war. “The guerrillas,” he wrote, “operate in a familiar atmosphere. Secrecy and surprise are the general conditions for their success in confrontations with a clumsy adversary who is badly informed and operates in an unfavorable climate.”

  The miracle of the guerrilla is that the whole population contributes. The soldier is the inhabitant, and the inhabitant is the soldier.… The tactics consist of avoiding well guarded positions, attacking posts where the garrison is weak, advancing if the enemy retreats and retreating if the enemy advances, organizing ambushes where the enemy will be overcome by numbers in spite of his value.… One of the guerrilla tactics consists in making the enemy “blind.” Our soldiers do not wear uniforms, they don’t concentrate in barracks, and they slip through the crowds that hide them if necessary. In that way, the French soldiers are incapable of detecting their presence.11

  Already now, well before the outbreak of major war, the Viet Minh leadership understood the principles of guerrilla warfare.

  In September and October, French officials in Saigon reported a growing number of clashes with “rebel” forces. To help cope with these altercations, High Commissioner Georges Thierry d’Argenl
ieu strove to create an army of “partisans,” that is, Vietnamese fighting on the side of the French. In mid-September, he asked Paris to provide weapons and supplies for 9,300 partisans in Cochin China and another 1,200 operating in southern Annam. The request was granted, but the materials could not be delivered quickly. Though the telegrams flowing into Paris invariably reported that the “rebels” were suffering the vast bulk of the casualties in the clashes, taken in aggregate the reports show a gradual strengthening of the Viet Minh position in the south. By late October the French controlled no more than a quarter of Cochin China.12

  Politically too, the French position in the south grew steadily weaker. In August 1946, Dr. Nguyen Van Thinh, the avowedly anti-Communist president of the French-backed Cochin Chinese Republic, complained privately that d’Argenlieu’s administration seemed hell-bent on making him look like a puppet. What kind of entity did he lead, he asked bitterly, a colony or a republic with genuine authority? The French claimed the latter but acted otherwise. Thinh’s frustration continued to grow in the weeks that followed. On November 10, his body was found hanging from the latch of his window. D’Argenlieu spun the news of the suicide as best he could, informing Paris that Thinh must have been motivated by a desire to publicize the injustices done to him by backers of Ho Chi Minh’s government. The admiral may have been unaware of a chilling analogue: Eighty years earlier, at the time of France’s colonization of Cochin China, the mandarin Phan Thanh Gian, having chosen to collaborate with the new foreign masters, likewise ended his predicament by taking his own life.13

  III

  D’ARGENLIEU AND HIS COLLEAGUES NEEDED SOMETHING NEW AND dramatic, a game changer. Their hope of securing firm control of Cochin China as a means of forcing Ho Chi Minh’s regime to come to terms had plainly come to naught—an honest appraisal would have to conclude that the French position in Cochin China was slipping away, while in Tonkin, Ho’s administration retained a powerful grip on much of the populace. Moreover, the cease-fire in the south agreed to in the Ho-Moutet Modus Vivendi would only make things worse over time, by giving the Viet Minh a free hand to quietly expand their control in the countryside. Only one possibility remained: to strike at the heart of Viet Minh power in the north. “Instead of contenting ourselves with controlling rebel attacks in the south,” General Jean Étienne Valluy, the commander for French forces, recommended in mid-October, “we should put serious pressure on the rebels by taking large-scale initiatives in Hanoi and Annam. This seems to me to be the inevitable recourse to the ultima ratio.” D’Argenlieu concurred and asked Paris for reinforcements in the form of a light armored division of ten thousand troops. The request was approved on October 23.14

  Haiphong was the scene of the first major clash. The port city was key to French hopes in the north, as its harbor serviced the needs of the Red River Delta—and, d’Argenlieu suspected, brought crucial contraband (weapons, motor oil, gasoline) from China to Giap’s forces, in exchange for rice. In Paul Mus’s apt phrase, Haiphong was “the lungs of Tonkin.”15 That French and Viet Minh troops controlled different sections of the city added to the tension, and the two sides also squabbled over the right to collect customs duties. By the end of October, rumors were rife in the city of a coming French attack on Viet Minh–held sectors, and the local French commander issued secret orders for the use of tanks and artillery should hostilities erupt. By holding Haiphong and other ports, Valluy optimistically declared in his war plans submitted to d’Argenlieu on November 9, France would “put the Tonkinese authorities and populace at our mercy through the asphyxiation of the country’s economy.”16

  But what if Haiphong could not be held? Valluy shuddered at the thought. All other goals must be subordinated to the task of securing the city. To facilitate the objective, Valluy, long convinced that his forces were too dispersed, advocated the evacuation of French garrisons in several important towns—Nam Dinh, Lang Son, Bac Ninh, and Phu Lang Thuong. He even floated the idea of abandoning Hanoi but quickly backed off, acknowledging that it would send a powerful psychological message, signaling a French retreat. Yet a purely military solution would not be possible, the general continued, and thus it would be essential to carry out, in the first phase of the operation, a series of coups d’état in cities throughout Tonkin, the better to neutralize Ho Chi Minh’s government.17

  D’Argenlieu, whose sense of urgency was strengthened by Thinh’s suicide as well as by the outcome of parliamentary elections in France, in which the Communists made major gains (thereby threatening the medium- and long-term prospects for an unyielding French posture on Indochina, and perhaps the admiral’s own job), did not reject wholesale Valluy’s plan but overall considered it too cautious. Evacuations of the type the general wanted were neither wise nor necessary, he determined, and there could certainly be no question of withdrawing from Hanoi. Above all, France must gird for battle: “If, in spite of the efforts of the French government to arrive at a satisfactory agreement with the Hanoi Government,” the admiral instructed Valluy on November 12, just before departing for Paris, “hostilities should resume on the various operational theaters in Indochina, it matters that our troops are capable of not just enduring a sudden attack from the adversary, but in addition responding by decisive forceful action.… We must hence foresee the hypothesis under which the French Government, after having exhausted all of its conciliatory resources, views itself obliged, in order to retaliate against a resumption of hostilities, to resort to a forceful action against the Hanoi Government.”18

  The admiral received full-throated backing for his view from Léon Pignon, federal commissioner for political affairs within the Saigon administration. Pignon, widely respected in Paris for his knowledge of Indochinese history and society, warned the metropolitan government’s Indochina Committee (Comité interministériel de l’Indochine, or COMININDO) that decisive action against the Viet Minh in Tonkin was imperative to bolster the morale of colons throughout Indochina and particularly in Saigon. Only by dealing forcefully with Ho Chi Minh’s regime could France stem the rapid decline that had occurred since the Japanese coup of March 1945. A failure to act swiftly, Pignon added, would allow the United States to gradually increase her economic penetration in the colony.19

  D’Argenlieu expected to be back in Vietnam before things came to a head, but events would not wait for him. On the thirteenth, the very day he left for France, the Vietnamese command in Haiphong reported an “extremely provocative” French attitude and cautioned its troops to prepare for potential hostilities. The following day the DRV Interior Ministry instructed “all cities and Haiphong” to compel French soldiers to return to the French sector if they ventured out of their designated zones without a Vietnamese permit.20

  Then, on November 20, the combustible mix ignited. A French patrol ship seized a Chinese junk carrying a load of gasoline. Viet Minh troops intercepted the French craft and arrested its crew members. In the ensuing attempts to rescue the French personnel, shots were fired, and the fighting soon spread to other parts of the city. At the Opera House, a troupe of Vietnamese actors beat back the French with antique muskets. By nightfall, 240 Vietnamese and seven Frenchmen lay dead.21

  The following day the two sides agreed to a cease-fire. There the matter might have ended had French officers not sought to exploit the incident to secure a strategic advantage. On the twenty-second, General Valluy ordered the volatile local commander, Colonel Pierre-Louis Dèbes, a forty-six-year-old World War II veteran who harbored a deep dislike of the Vietnamese, to “take maximum advantage of this incident in order to improve our position in Haiphong. It seems clear that we are facing premeditated aggression, carefully planned by the regular Vietnamese army which seems no longer to be following its Government’s orders.… The moment has arrived to teach a hard lesson to those who have so treacherously attacked us. By every possible means you must take complete control of Haiphong and force the Vietnamese government and army into submission.”22

  Valluy issued this d
irective despite a warning from his cautious senior subordinate, General Louis Morlière, commander of French forces in Northern Indochina, that any effort to take the city while minimizing French casualties would involve massive destruction and Vietnamese loss of life and would be a wholesale violation of both the March 6 Accords and the Modus Vivendi. At six A.M. on the twenty-third, Dèbes demanded a full Vietnamese withdrawal from the Chinese quarter of Haiphong and the nearby village of Lac Vien, and further that all Vietnamese civilians in these areas be disarmed. Claiming the authority of the high commissioner for these demands, he gave the Vietnamese until nine A.M. to accept these conditions. The Vietnamese refused to comply, whereupon Dèbes ordered a general attack, supported by artillery.

  At 10:05 A.M. it began, a prolonged naval and aerial bombardment that, over two days, reduced much of the Vietnamese and Chinese quarters of Haiphong to rubble. How many Vietnamese died has never been firmly established, but certainly the number is in the thousands. According to credible reports, civilians attempting to flee the town were strafed by Spitfires. A French officer, Henri Martin, said years later: “When we visited Haiphong afterwards, all the Vietnamese neighborhoods were completely wiped out. There were dead buried under debris.… It is difficult to know the exact figure. But the larger part of the city, it seemed to us from what we saw, [that is] almost the entire Vietnamese part of the city, had been destroyed.”23

  Strikingly, Valluy did not get prior approval from Paris for the bombardment. Not for the first time and not for the last, Saigon made a major policy decision without so much as consulting metropolitan officials. Even d’Argenlieu, then in Paris for meetings with Georges Bidault, leader of the Provisional Government of France, and others, learned of Valluy’s order only after it had been issued. Then again, there’s no doubt Valluy acted in full confidence that the high commissioner would approve his action. So he did. On November 24, d’Argenlieu cabled his congratulations from Paris and added: “We will never retreat or surrender.” He even quoted an instruction from Bidault (likely meant only for Cochin China) “to use all means to ensure law and order are respected.” By the twenty-eighth, the French were in control of Haiphong, and also of Lang Son, the frontier garrison town where fighting had broken out the previous week.24