Women, children, the elderly—all contributed to the common cause. The author Le Ly Hayslip recalls a song her mother sang to her during her childhood in a village in Central Vietnam:
In our village today
A big battle was fought,
French kill and arrest the people;
The fields and villages burn,
The people, they run to the winds;
To the north, to the south,
To Xam Ho, to Ky La.
When they run, they look back;
They see houses inflames.19
For the French, the problem was in part one of intelligence, though not in the way one might think. French military intelligence services in Indochina were generally highly competent and professional. Most of the time the French High Command could read, on charts and maps prepared by its various intelligence sections, the full order of battle of Viet Minh units, with an accuracy that was often greater than, and rarely less than, 80 percent. Almost never did the Viet Minh initiate an operation of major significance that had not been anticipated by these services. At the lower levels, however, battalion commanders and detachment commanders were often victims of the most brutal surprises—in the form of road mines, ambushes, and grenade attacks. When a French Union patrol would enter a village, it lacked the information that would have allowed it to screen the inhabitants and identify nonuniformed Viet Minh. “It is clear,” a postwar French study would conclude, “that a distinction must be made here between the precise, deep intelligence which was always available to the High Command, and the immediate and local intelligence that was almost never obtained by subordinate units. Thus it was written: ‘It was the Commander in Chief who kept the battalion commander informed while the latter was never able to reciprocate.’ ”20
The issue for these battalion commanders was in large part the political character of the war. To gather information by technical means—signal intelligence, aerial photography, and other technical collection systems—was a relatively straightforward task: The French had the means and the expertise to do it. Human intelligence, or “humint,” was another matter. It didn’t take French commanders long to realize that many Vietnamese agents had contacts with both sides; one could never be assured of their loyalty. At times, an agent might seem a little too eager to spout whatever information the French wanted to hear, particularly if he or she sensed that payment might follow. Prisoners, likewise, often were so anxious to please their interrogator that their information was unreliable, or they deliberately provided false information. Even in those instances when the information from an agent or prisoner seemed legitimate, it was often out of date before it could be confirmed.
To try to improve the quality of the humint, French officers sometimes resorted to coercive interrogation methods, including torture. (Their DRV opposite numbers did the same.) Just how often they did so remains impossible to know in the absence of methodologically reliable studies of the issue, but Vietnamese memoirs and histories of the war leave no doubt that the army and the security services used torture from an early point in the fighting and at various points thereafter. As for the efficacy of the practice, a postwar internal study by the Deuxième Bureau was unambiguous: The use of torture during interrogations of Viet Minh prisoners did not improve the quality of the intelligence provided.
For the Expeditionary Corps, as for the Americans two decades later, it was all intensely frustrating—the enemy’s elusiveness, his capacity for surprise and for striking at any moment, and the impossibility much of the time of telling friend from foe. It was a war without fronts, where the enemy was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Time and again French units would move into a target area in force, only to find no one there; the adversary had vanished, as if vaporized. So the French would pull out—for they had not nearly enough troops to occupy permanently the sites they had taken—and the Viet Minh would return, as swiftly as they had left. Whenever a French commander did choose to occupy a locale, he invariably found it isolated and hard to supply, his troops doomed to defensive action or to no action at all, and limited in their control to the small area immediately surrounding their base. Not only that, each soldier used for such occupations was one fewer combatant available for large-scale action against the main centers of Viet Minh power.
The numbers just didn’t add up. General Leclerc, who went to Indochina on a brief inspection tour at the start of 1947, returned to the metropole filled with foreboding, telling associates that France would need a minimum of five hundred thousand troops to subjugate a people so committed to their independence. Such a figure being utterly impossible, for logistical as well as political reasons, the general concluded that “the major problem from now on is political.” A French Foreign Legion officer who refused to be identified told The New York Times in the same week that France faced an unwinnable war against an elusive adversary. He echoed Leclerc’s claim that Paris had far too few boots on the ground in Vietnam, and he noted that “the Annamese are better organized than is the French Army for war in Indo-China.” The same sentiments were expressed by midlevel British and American officials. Abbot Low Moffat of the U.S. State Department, for example, told a senior British diplomat over dinner in Singapore that France was headed for disaster.21
No doubt the foregoing litany of obstacles in the path of success stands out more sharply in retrospect than it did at the time. Hindsight can distort; prophets become prophets only in time. Alongside the gloomy prognostications of Abbot Low Moffat and other skeptics could be placed other contemporaneous judgments, also plausible, that emphasized the precariousness of the Viet Minh’s position. Ho Chi Minh himself succumbed to such concern on occasion, as did Giap. The French, after all, had scored big victories in the first months of 1947, and they could conceivably have had more, had not the monsoon season intervened and compelled Valluy to lie low for the summer months. Their firepower vastly exceeded that of the Viet Minh, who also lacked supplies and medicines, and whose commanders had woefully little battlefield experience. Internationally, the sympathy that many felt for the Vietnamese revolutionary cause had not translated into tangible—whether material or diplomatic—support.
Even in domestic political terms, there were questions. It was not yet certain that Ho and his colleagues would be able to fully harness the seething anti-French opinion prevalent among large majorities of Vietnamese and turn it into deep and lasting support for the DRV. The embryonic state launched in 1945 remained in many respects just that: embryonic. How to create a state apparatus that would enable the center to direct and coordinate regional affairs remained, in many ways, a problem to be solved.
III
CERTAINLY, FEW IN METROPOLITAN FRANCE IN EARLY 1947 BELIEVED their country was heading over a cliff in Indochina. For one thing, the newspapers they read each day tended to present a very different picture of developments on the ground. None of the Parisian dailies had a correspondent anywhere in Indochina in those early months, and colonial officials in Hanoi and Saigon therefore found it easy to transmit only an official version of events—one that emphasized Viet Minh perfidy and French restraint, and that blamed Ho Chi Minh both for the outbreak of fighting and for the failure of diplomacy. And anyway, hadn’t Valluy racked up victory after victory in the early fighting? Though a few publications geared to the intelligentsia, such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes, condemned the government’s resort to war in Indochina, public opinion surveys showed little support for early withdrawal. Most politicians too were united around the proposition that France must not quit Indochina—such a course, many parliamentarians declared, would only cause the Americans to come in and establish an economic stranglehold over the territory. France, many on both the left and the right declared, still had a mission civilisatrice to play in the region.22
Stirrings of unrest in various parts of the empire also caused officials to wish to clamp down in Indochina. The Ministry of Overseas France became convinced that North African, Malagasy, and V
ietnamese nationalists planned to foment rebellions to throw off the colonial state. In this “atmosphere of imperial paranoia” (as historian Martin Thomas calls it), local administrations acquired increased latitude to suppress any dissent.23 Often they took full advantage. In the Madagascar rebellion, for example, French authorities depicted the leaders of the Mouvement démocratique de la rénovation malgache (MDRM) in the most sinister terms possible and ordered a staggeringly brutal military retribution, much of it administered by the Expeditionary Force bound for Indochina. The massacre, combined with extreme deprivation, killed an estimated one hundred thousand Madagascans, a figure acknowledged and then withdrawn by French officials in 1949.
And yet in March 1947, as the National Assembly took up the issue of military expenditures, one could detect the beginnings of a serious rift over Indochina. In January, Premier Paul Ramadier, a Socialist whose government inaugurated the Fourth Republic, had received almost unanimous support in the Assembly for his policy of establishing security and order before entering talks with “representative” Vietnamese; now that support was splintering. The Communists (PCF), having moved in previous weeks to a confrontationist posture on a range of domestic and foreign policy issues, called for immediate and serious negotiations—involving mutual concessions—with the Viet Minh. The desire on the part of the Vietnamese for independence was completely understandable, party spokesmen declared, and they blasted High Commissioner d’Argenlieu for contributing to the outbreak of warfare with his various violations of the March 6 Accords. On the right the MRP, led by Maurice Schumann, pointed to Valluy’s success in securing control of the major population centers and communication links in Tonkin and called for a continued application of a politique de force. The Viet Minh should be crushed, Schumann declared, and there could be no compromise agreement with Ho Chi Minh.
In between these extremes, the Socialists groped for a middle way but in effect endorsed the MRP line. Ramadier pledged to seek a negotiated settlement and to end the war swiftly, but he heaped scorn on the traitorous Viet Minh and their “criminal” leader. Overseas Minister Moutet vigorously asserted France’s right to be in Indochina and continued to blame the Viet Minh for the failure to achieve a political solution. France, he thundered on the floor of the Assembly chamber, would never accept a settlement imposed by violence. Or, it seemed, any settlement involving Ho Chi Minh: When the Viet Minh leader proposed reopening talks on the basis of the restoration of the status quo ante bellum, Ramadier offered an immediate and categorical no. Paul Reynaud, the prime minister at the time of the defeat in 1940 who now sat as an Independent, won broad backing for his claim that if France left this “admirable balcony on the Pacific,” she would cease to be a great power.24
So stormy did some of the sessions get that blows were exchanged, not only in the corridors but on one occasion in the chamber itself. The Socialist reformer Maurice Viollette, having advocated broad concessions to the Viet Minh, was punched to the ground by angry deputies from the opposition benches. On three separate occasions, the Communists walked out. Tensions reached a fever pitch when Reynaud, reading from a document purportedly showing that one of Ho Chi Minh’s representatives in Paris, Duong Bach Mai, was responsible for atrocities committed against Frenchmen in Indochina, was told by a deputy that this man was present in the public gallery at that very moment. Amid cries of “This is the criminal!” and “Arrest him!” the session had to be suspended. Duong Bach Mai was soon detained and deported to Vietnam.25
The government’s aggressive posture prevailed in the March parliamentary debate in good part because hard-liners occupied the key positions in the French policy-making structure—as they would for much of the war. Though a dozen prime ministers came and went between September 1944 and mid-1950, only two men—Georges Bidault and Robert Schuman, both of them militant on Indochina—presided over the Foreign Ministry. Likewise, the two most important ambassadors, Henri Bonnet in Washington and René Massigli in London, hewed close to the MRP line on foreign policy in general and on Indochina in particular. The same was true of the Socialist Moutet at the Ministry of Overseas France, as well as his successor (in November 1947) Paul Coste-Floret of the MRP.26
The real problem for the government, in terms of managing opinion on Indochina in 1947, was not at home but abroad. Neither the Soviet Union nor Great Britain nor the United States had tried hard to prevent the outbreak of war in late 1946; in 1947, all three continued to tread warily, a reality that worked to the general advantage of France. To the relief of Paris leaders—and to Ho Chi Minh’s intense disappointment—Joseph Stalin remained primarily concerned with keeping Soviet relations with France on a smooth plane, and he avoided expressing any open support for the DRV. The British too could be counted on to continue to affirm French sovereignty over Indochina; London officials might urge restraint, might recommend that Paris avoid undue provocations and work toward a “political solution,” but they would not do more, concerned as they were with maintaining dominion over their own colonial holdings. They indeed faced growing turmoil of their own in the region: In Malaya, postwar economic and political dislocation had generated labor unrest and a deep sense of alienation among the Chinese community.
The United States was another story. French mistrust of American intentions ran deep, both among colons and among officials in the metropole. There was the suspicion, expressed in the March parliamentary debate and in the press, that Washington sought to displace France and incorporate Indochina within its growing economic empire. There was the persistent fear that the U.S. military would tighten restrictions on the Paris government’s ability to transfer American-built military equipment to the Far East. And most of all there was the worry that American leaders would act on their deeply held anticolonial instincts and promote a settlement of the war that would force a French departure from Indochina. Already, it seemed, the Truman administration was moving to oppose any effort by the Dutch to use military means to restore control in Java; could Indochina be next? From Washington, Bonnet said that the Truman administration would likely stick to its policy of noninterference in Indochina in the short term, but he warned darkly that “circumstances could change,” on account of Americans’ innate “Puritanism” and overbearing sense of “superior moral duty.” Or as Reynaud put it on the floor of the Chamber: The task of “the colonizing peoples” of the world was now more difficult, on account of Americans’ hostility to the enterprise.27
IV
THE OLD MAN KNEW WHEREOF HE SPOKE: A BROAD CONSENSUS existed in American officialdom that colonialism was a spent force in world affairs. But the divisions of old—between conservatives (many of them Europeanists in the State Department), who thought it essential to preserve close ties to France, if necessary by tacitly supporting her policy in Indochina, and liberals (predominantly Asianists), who believed that war would only radicalize Vietnamese nationalists and make compromise more difficult—had not gone away. More than many histories of the period have suggested, planners were divided about the proper American course of action.28 But just as in France, albeit for different reasons, the conservatives ultimately triumphed, in large measure because of senior officials’ growing tendency in early 1947 to see Indochina in the context of the deepening confrontation with the Soviet Union. “The Cold War,” as Walter Lippmann would christen this conflict that year, would continue to shape U.S. policy choices on Vietnam for the next quarter-century (and not merely in geopolitical terms; the domestic political Cold War, as we shall see, mattered enormously).
Soviet-American relations had deteriorated sharply by mid-1946; the wartime Grand Alliance was but a fading memory. Few close observers were all that surprised. Even before World War II had ended, perceptive analysts anticipated that the United States and the Soviet Union would seek to fill the power vacuum sure to follow the armistice, and that friction would result. The two countries had a history of hostility and tension, and both were militarily powerful. Most of all, they were divided by sharp
ly differing political economies with widely divergent needs, and by a deep ideological chasm. Sure enough, in 1946 and early 1947, Moscow and Washington clashed over a range of issues: over European reconstruction, over the division of Germany, over Iran, and over the civil war in Greece. Harry Truman, warned by leading GOP senator Arthur Vandenberg that he would have to “scare the hell out of the American people” to gain congressional approval for a $400 million aid package for Greece and Turkey, delivered an alarmist speech in March 1947 intended to stake out the American role in the postwar world. Communism, the president declared, fed on economic dislocation and imperiled the world. “If Greece should fall under the control of an armed minority,” he gravely concluded in an early version of the domino theory, “the effect upon its neighbor Turkey, would be immediate and serious. Confusion and disorder might well spread throughout the entire Middle East.”29
Then the key sentence in what came to be called the Truman Doctrine: “I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Never mind that the Soviet Union was little involved in the Greek civil war, that the Communists in Greece were more pro-Tito than pro-Stalin, and that the resistance movement had non-Communist as well as Communist members. And never mind that the Soviets were not threatening Turkey at the time. Congress approved the funds, and the United States was launched on the construction of an international economic and defensive network to protect American prosperity and security and to advance U.S. hegemony.
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam Page 22