In Cochin China, meanwhile, guerrilla activity increased in the weeks following December 19 and was effective enough to reduce the amount of territory the French controlled. In the urban areas, however, the French retained the upper hand; in these weeks, the region as a whole saw a lot less large-scale fighting than occurred in the north. Hopeful French commanders described a pesky but tolerable level of insecurity in the south and hoped to maintain it as they devoted primary attention and resources to the north.
Jean Étienne Valluy was the first in a long line of French generals who would take the battle to Giap; like all the rest, he possessed formidable credentials. Forty-six years old, a highly decorated officer who had joined the military as a private in 1917 at the age of seventeen, his courage and skill in the Great War had won him both a Croix de Guerre for valor and an appointment to Saint-Cyr, the French military academy. Following the war, he rose through the ranks, assuming a number of staff and command jobs, and at the outbreak of war in 1940 he was a major and operations officer with the French XXI Corps. Taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940, Valluy was repatriated in 1941 and by 1944 had become a brigadier general and chief of staff of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s First French Army in Europe. In 1945 he assumed command of the Ninth Colonial Infantry Division and earned praise for his hard-driving command against stubborn German resistance.2
Like Leclerc before him, Valluy understood that he did not have the military capability to fight a long and costly guerrilla war against the Viet Minh. His problem was manpower. He knew he would not get any conscripts from France—no Paris government was deemed likely to survive a decision to send draftees (in part because of the tradition of using specialized corps of professional volunteers in colonial conflicts). So he had to rely on volunteers as well as colonial troops from Africa—Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, and Senegalese—and from Indochina herself (Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, as well as assorted ethnic minority groups). Also available were a variety of paramilitary forces and an assortment of local militias and self-defense groups.
African troops were as yet few in number. In May 1945 Charles de Gaulle had prohibited their use in Indochina on the grounds that they might be unduly influenced by Vietnamese nationalist discourse and might seek to implement these ideas upon their return home. He also worried that their presence could sharpen American anticolonialist critiques of French imperalism. Now, however, the acute need for fighting men compelled a change in the policy, and during the course of 1947 more and more African conscripts were deployed.
In addition, Valluy had units of the French Foreign Legion, about which so much has been written, and which included within it a sizable number of ex-Nazis.3 Most legionnaires in Indochina in 1947 were indeed Germans in their midtwenties who had gone into the Wehrmacht young and knew no occupation but war, who had helped conquer France in 1940, and who bore scars from wounds suffered in Russia, Poland, or Romania. The majority took a five-year enlistment as means to escape the French prison system; partly as a result of their experience with that system, they had no special love for the French. In most cases, the legionnaires assembled at Marseille for the long journey ahead, having already passed through security screenings in recruiting centers in Paris or Lyon or Lille. Fiercely jealous of its record as a stronghold against Marxism-Leninism, the Legion’s security officers took special care to weed out not just murderers, sexual offenders, and other felons but Communists as well.4
Occasionally a legionnaire with a more surprising nationality would turn up. One evening U.S. journalist Seymour Topping, during a tour of French installations in northern Tonkin, dined in the Foreign Legion officers’ club in Lang Son near the Chinese frontier; he bumped into a tall and slim lieutenant whose accent sounded familiar. He was Robert Fleet, a captain in the U.S. Army during World War II and a lover of arms and uniforms and battle. Drawn to the Legion for the chance to experience again the thrill of the fight, Fleet prevailed upon Topping not to reveal his name because of the U.S. law banning service by Americans in foreign armies.5
The French nationals in the Expeditionary Corps, meanwhile, numbered in the tens of thousands, but they essentially composed the officer corps for the colonial and Legion troops as well as the staffs of headquarters and administrative units. They trickled in at regular intervals in the early months of the year but never in the numbers that Valluy wanted to see.
This manpower shortage left the general with limited options, and his predicament worsened in March 1947, when an additional division of French colonial troops had to be diverted en route to Indochina to quell an insurgency in Madagascar. Yet there could be no question of turning back, not in his mind or that of other senior French officials. “It is impossible to negotiate with those people,” Overseas Minister Marius Moutet declared of the Viet Minh during a visit to Saigon in January. “They have fallen to the lowest levels of barbarity.” A few days later, after his entourage had been fired upon during a stop in Hanoi, Moutet added: “Before there is any negotiation it will be necessary to get a military decision.”6
Valluy expressed confidence that his troops could build on their early successes and complete the task. He hoped that a series of pincer movements combining air, land, and river-borne forces could finish off the enemy swiftly, before Giap had time to build up his forces. By cementing French control of the Red River Delta and Route Coloniale 4 (RC4), which ran close to the Chinese border in the far north, Valluy planned to contain the Viet Minh maquis, cut them off from all contact with the outside, and then exterminate them.7
II
IT DIDN’T WORK OUT THAT WAY. GIAP GRASPED RIGHT AWAY THAT he must deny the French the quick victory they sought. But he also understood that he had to avoid open and large-scale engagements if at all possible; his forces were simply too weak. He in effect ceded the major towns and lines of communication in Tonkin and Annam as he withdrew the bulk of his army to the Viet Bac. Patience would be his main weapon as he plotted for a protracted war based roughly on Mao’s three-phase model of withdrawal (from major towns and cities), equilibrium, and general offensive. Already on December 22, 1946, a mere three days into the fighting, the DRV issued a proclamation stating that the war would be fought along these lines.8
The declaration was drafted by theoretician Truong Chinh, who elaborated on the essentials of this Maoist strategy in a publication titled The Resistance Will Win, which appeared in February 1947. Secretary-general of the Indochinese Communist Party until its ostensible dissolution in November 1945, Truong Chinh became head of the “Marxist Study Group” that formally took the party’s place, and he later led the Vietnamese Workers Party (VWP, or Lao Dong), as the Communist Party was called after its revival in 1951. In Resistance, he cautioned that the timing of the transition from one of Mao’s phases to the next could not be determined in advance; it depended on the relative strength of revolutionary forces, the degree of support for the insurgency in the general population, and the extent of demoralization among enemy forces. The struggle would certainly be long and difficult and would require maintaining solidarity with the Cambodian and Lao peoples and indeed with all those who suffered under the French Union. More than Mao, Truong Chinh stressed the importance of international powers—in this case, principally the United States, the Soviet Union, and China—to the success of the insurgency, and he emphasized that French public opinion could ultimately prove decisive. Over time, declining morale and increasing public opposition to the fighting would seriously impair the French war effort.9
By relying on this three-phase approach, Giap hoped to retain the strategic initiative and control the tempo of the war. Not a major theoretician himself, he would nevertheless over the years leave his own mark on the Maoist strategy, as we shall see. Now, in early 1947, he set about following the strictures of the first phase: to preserve his forces, to withdraw into protected territory, and to be content with harassing the enemy’s convoys and bases. To skeptical subordinates who wanted to go right away to large-sca
le engagements, Giap offered a firm reply: Such an approach promised only defeat at the hands of the infinitely more powerful French. The Battle of Hanoi in December–January had shown the foolishness of trying to go at them directly.10
And so, 1947 would be a year of strategic defense from the Viet Minh perspective. The main force regulars—the chu luc, who numbered roughly thirty thousand early in the year—would bide their time in their Viet Bac strongholds, which were mostly remote, cloaked by forest, and largely inaccessible to the French. These main units lacked a ready arms supply and moreover needed to undergo additional training. On Giap’s orders, they were not to be committed to military action if it could possibly be avoided, leaving the task of harassing French Union troops to the regional forces. To build up support in the countryside, the Indochinese Communist Party—which, though supposedly dissolved by Ho Chi Minh in late 1945, continued to operate at the district level and below, and to control the corresponding Viet Minh government administration—created village committees and militias and established a comprehensive and popular literacy program. Indoctrination was carried out at evening meetings held two or three times per week, during which cadres expounded the Viet Minh philosophy and anticolonial propaganda. To support the armed forces, the party collected taxes—cash extortion in the towns and rice levies in the villages—and recruited porters to serve in the clandestine logistical network. When the situation demanded, the cadres reinforced education and propaganda with terror tactics, including assassination of village leaders.11
The terror had to be carefully calibrated, Giap understood, for it was a double-edged sword. There were just so many bombs you could toss into homes and theaters, only so many throats you could cut. If you went too far, if you killed too many village notables, you risked a vigilante reaction, in which people rose up and declared, “To hell with it. We’re going to get killed regardless; we might as well band together and take a few of the gangsters with us.” Terror would be a part of the Viet Minh arsenal, used when it suited their operations, but always handled with precision. It would be utilized selectively, not only in the military sense but in the sociological sense, targeting only those people who by virtue of their positions or their extensive landholdings weren’t very popular anyway.12
In time it would become clear that Giap had formidable advantages that the French, in seven years of war, would never overcome. One was the physical environment. Vietnam is a vast and varied country, running from the rugged and mountainous north to the populous rice lands along the coast, to the jungles and grasslands of the south, like the marshy Plain of Reeds (Plaine des Joncs), which creeps from the Cambodian frontier to the very outskirts of Saigon. Though the Viet Minh would face their own difficulties adapting to this diversity, they nevertheless proved far more adept at doing so than the French. Valluy had hoped in the spring of 1947 to continue his gains from the early months, but the arrival of the monsoon season, which runs from May to October and typically sees at least sixty inches of rain, ruined this possibility and forced him to call a halt. During the monsoon, valley floors turn into swamps, hillsides become saturated and treacherous, and many single-track roads turn into rivers.13
A FRENCH UNION TRUCK BOGGING DOWN IN THE MUD ON ROUTE COLONIALE 4 IN NORTHERN TONKIN ON THE CHINESE BORDER. (photo credit 7.1)
Even in dry weather, as Valluy would discover to his sorrow, the road network was primitive, an object of neglect by a succession of colonial administrators. In the Viet Bac, which for the duration of the war would remain the main headquarters, supply base, and training ground of the Viet Minh, to speak of roads was really a euphemism. Cart paths and trails were numerous, but even the grandly named Route Coloniale 3 (RC3), the main thoroughfare in the area, which appeared as a thick line on the map, was a one-lane dirt road, seldom more than twelve feet across, with weak bridges and countless ambush sites. Such was its state of repair most of the time that the fastest-moving convoy could not average more than eight miles per hour. The same was true of Route Coloniale 4 from Cao Bang to Tien Yen, and the road from Tien Yen to Hon Gai. The “highway” linking Hanoi and Haiphong consisted of little more than a series of ruts, though it did permit two-way traffic. Nor were the bridges and causeways elsewhere in the country much better—with some exceptions, such as the Paul Doumer Bridge in Hanoi, few were built to allow passage by heavy trucks and armored vehicles. As for passage off the roads by wheeled vehicles, this was usually impossible. Tanks and half-tracks frequently bogged down in the saturated earth of the deltas, and even amphibious tractors often were halted by vegetation clogging their tracks.14
Already in 1945–46, in the early fighting in Cochin China, French Union officers learned that they were prisoners of the roads. They learned it again when hostilities commenced in the north. Theirs was a European army, whose great advantage was in its heavy weapons but that needed roads and bridges to bring those weapons to the battlefield. Very quickly the guerrillas and regional forces proved adept at sabotage, often by digging “piano-key” ditches from alternate sides of the road. Crews would be sent out to repair them, whereupon they were dug up again; inevitably, some of the villagers recruited by the French to refill the trenches were those who, come nightfall, returned to dig them up again. The process repeated itself endlessly, but the overall effect was to seriously hamper French mobility—and, of course, leave convoys dangerously exposed to ambush. Typically the guerrillas would establish themselves on both sides of a narrow pass and then drop grenades onto the slow-moving convoy almost directly beneath them. Simultaneously they would open up with machine-gun fire from close range. When one truck was forced to halt, blocking the road for the vehicles behind, the guerrillas would charge down the hillside, using more grenades and more gunfire. Antivehicle mines, fashioned from unexploded French shells and bombs that were ingeniously (and courageously) re-fused, were another constant danger to the convoys, as were snipers hiding in the often dense brush along the roadways. Bridges, so vital to French mobility, were subject to frequent sabotage and would often be booby-trapped to explode when French engineers arrived to rebuild them.15
Even when no ambushers were present, travel along many roads in Tonkin was treacherous. North of Lang Son, the notorious RC4, destined to bring nightmares to a succession of French commanders, became hair-raisingly difficult. At Dong Dang it passed within 750 yards of the Chinese frontier, then climbed over narrow passes and snaked along mountain ledges and innumerable hairpin bends, before plunging down steeply to more tight turns. Drivers, often alone in the cabin—manpower was too short for two-man crews—had to navigate the road in old beat-up American-made GMC trucks, many lacking spare tires or functioning springs. Usually the cabin would be baking hot, and the driver, swinging the steering wheel from lock to lock on the hairpins, had to strain to see through the mist to make sure he was a safe distance from the truck in front of him. Breakdowns were common and could halt the entire convoy for long, nerve-racking hours.16
Much of the Viet Minh activity occurred at night, giving rise to one of the leitmotifs of the war: Areas controlled by the French during the day would become guerrilla territory after sundown. But this truism is also misleading, for even in daylight hours the Viet Minh in mid-1947 controlled as much as half the territory of Vietnam. The French were lords of the towns and the main roads; the Viet Minh of the countryside, the remote villages, and the walking trails. In Tonkin, Giap’s forces controlled the whole area northeast and east of the Red River and Hanoi, as well as the fertile provinces south of the Red River Delta down to northern Annam, including the towns of Thanh Hoa and Vinh. In northern and central Annam, between the towns of Vinh and Qui Nhon, the French held only a narrow coastal strip beginning just north of Quang Tri and ending slightly south of Tourane (Da Nang), in addition to part of the thinly populated highland; the rest of the territory, perhaps 80 percent of the total, was from the start of the conflict in Viet Minh hands. In southern Annam and in Cochin China, French control was more extensive. They held all
the cities, including the distant highland towns of Pleiku and Kontum, and they had at least nominal control (though not at night) of the major roads. Even here, though, guerrilla action was frequent, and a few areas were under Viet Minh control—including Ca Mau in the extreme south, and the region around Ha Tien on the Cambodian border. Saigon, meanwhile, featured regular grenade attacks on cafés and bars frequented by colons, and French authorities felt compelled to maintain a strict curfew of eleven P.M.17
Which points to a more fundamental problem confronting the colonial power: the strong anti-French and nationalist feelings among the vast majority of Vietnamese. Seven years earlier, in 1940, France had been able to control all of Indochina with a few thousand troops; now Valluy had upward of a hundred thousand, and it was not nearly enough. The presence of Vietnamese regional forces and smaller guerrilla units (in addition to the regular army), many of whose members lacked uniforms and were peasants and laborers when not fighting, is evidence of the broad participation in the war against the French (though not necessarily of affection for the Viet Minh). The pervasive anti-French animus enabled Viet Minh forces to assemble undetected, to withdraw when the enemy appeared in force, to hide their weapons, to expand their ranks, and to gather excellent intelligence concerning the strength, the maneuvers, and often even the plans of the French. And when the enemy, unable to determine who was a fighter and who was not, reacted to the guerrilla attacks by killing civilians, the main effect was to deepen the hatred for the French and to bring new guerrillas into the fold.18
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam Page 21