Which meant, ultimately, American assistance. Pleased though Paris officials were by the large number of countries that opened relations with the Associated States, only one really mattered. (It’s telling that all the others moved only after Washington did.) Yet even after the glorious news of February 7, the French worried that they might still lose the prize. Specifically, they feared that the Truman administration might, as a means to boost its influence in Vietnam and also avoid the taint of colonialism, choose to bypass France and give the aid directly to Bao Dai. And indeed, American decision makers gave the idea consideration, especially after Bao Dai’s defense minister Phan Huy Quat proposed to U.S. consular official Edmund Gullion in Saigon in March that the United States assume direct responsibility for training and equipping a Vietnamese army.28
To which the French replied: no, never, not a chance. General Marcel Carpentier, the new French commander in Vietnam, told The New York Times that if military equipment went directly to Bao Dai, “I would resign within twenty-four hours.” The Vietnamese “have no military organization which could effectively utilize the equipment. It would be wasted, as in China, and the United States has had enough of that.” Carpentier’s civilian counterpart, High Commissioner Léon Pignon, echoed these sentiments, patiently telling a reporter that only France had the technical capability to accept and distribute weapons and other equipment. Bao Dai was lazy and had few followers, Pignon confided to a British diplomat, and though Vietnamese troops fought reasonably well when brigaded with French forces, they were apathetic and undisciplined when left to their own devices. Lest there be any ambiguity regarding their position, the French also brought out their trump card: They might quit Indochina altogether if Washington failed to come up with aid or demanded too many concessions to Bao Dai. “My country might cut her losses” in such an eventuality, Foreign Ministry secretary Alexandre Parodi told Ambassador David Bruce, and other Paris diplomats issued that same warning elsewhere.29
A mere bluff? Possibly, but the Truman team was not willing to call it. In March, Secretary of State Acheson, with customary candor, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “We do not want to get into a position where the French say, ‘You take over; we aren’t able to go ahead with this.’ We want the French to stay there.… The French have got to carry [the burden] in Indochina, and we are willing to help, but not to substitute for them.” Acheson cautioned the lawmakers that “the thing we want to be careful about is that we do not press the French to the point where they say, ‘All right, take over the damned country. We don’t want it,’ and put their soldiers on ships and send them back to France.”30
Acheson had more on his mind than Indochina in making these remarks. He also sought to avoid destabilizing the Paris government as it was preparing to make concessions to the administration over allied policy toward Germany. It all combined to limit Washington’s leverage over France, and it frustrated the secretary. On May 1, President Truman formally approved an aid program of $23.3 million for the Indochinese states. He did so on Acheson’s recommendation, yet the secretary was frustrated, telling associates that the French seemed “paralyzed, in a state of moving neither forward nor backward.” The only thing to do was to press on, in the hope that Carpentier and his Expeditionary Corps could turn things around and bring Ho Chi Minh to his knees. A few weeks later Dean Rusk, the newly appointed assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, summarized the policy in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The United States must support France in Indochina, he said, because without the French presence, the Communists would win. How long would the disorder last? a senator asked. Rusk replied that he did not know but added that he personally was not pessimistic. Asia, he said, was waiting to see who won.31
A TECHNICIAN APPLIES A QUICK PAINT JOB TO A U.S.-SUPPLIED C-119 TRANSPORT PLANE AT HAIPHONG AIR BASE, CHANGING THE WHITE STAR OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE INTO THE FRENCH TRICOLOR. (photo credit 9.1)
Rusk may not have been pessimistic, but others in Washington were. As had been the case ever since Franklin Roosevelt vowed during the Second World War to keep the French from returning to Indochina, there were those who envisioned disaster ahead should America join the war against Ho. Some were in the State Department—for example, Charlton Ogburn, head of the Southeast Asia division, who doubted that the introduction of U.S. military aid would make any real difference to what was a futile colonial effort—and some were outside the executive branch. Some were not in government at all. Walter Lippmann, the most influential columnist in the land, had tried some weeks earlier, in early April, to nudge the administration away from doing what in fact it seemed about to do. “We shall not be able to reverse our whole position in Asia and to support a colonial war against national independence,” he wrote. “That would shatter our prestige in the rest of Asia. And even if we were willing to do that, there is no way that this Congress would or could promise enough money and enough military aid to enable the French army to plan a campaign of pacification which would last for many years.”32
One can imagine Acheson nodding solemnly as he read Lippmann’s words; he very likely disagreed with none of them. Yet he gambled that the United States would be able to keep that prestige—by continuing to pressure Paris to grant more rights and freedoms to the Associated States—even as she threw her lot behind France’s four-year-old war.
A new day had dawned. At the time Acheson announced the recognition of Bao Dai, there were perhaps a dozen Americans living in Saigon, and not all that many more elsewhere in Vietnam. The French had resisted U.S. business ventures, and the majority of Americans in Indochina were missionaries, numbering perhaps 120, mostly from the Christian and Missionary Alliance along with a small contingent of Seventh-Day Adventists. Now, though, the U.S. presence grew markedly, as the Truman administration began to assemble what journalist Seymour Topping, who arrived in Saigon in February to take up his post as Associated Press bureau chief and thus saw it firsthand, called “the usual panoply of intervention”: large diplomatic and information staffs as well as economic and military aid missions. American warships called at the city’s port as “a sign of friendship for Vietnam.”33
The liberal New Republic summarized the new reality: “Southeast Asia is the center of the cold war. Indo-China is the center of Southeast Asia. America is late with a program to save Indo-China. But we are on our way.”34
V
AT VIET MINH HEADQUARTERS, LEADERS UNDERSTOOD THAT THEY now faced the very real prospect of a major increase in U.S. support for the French war effort. The possibility worried them, especially as the balance between the two sides in the war remained so delicate. But most senior officials also felt certain that they had achieved a monumental victory. They had won formal recognition from the world’s two leading socialist states and the promise of significant assistance from one of them. Vietnam was back on the map of nations and part of the internationalist Communist world now stretching, in ICP general secretary Truong Chinh’s words, from the Elbe to the Mekong. The humiliation of the colonial past seemed as if it could finally be swept away. In early February 1950, while Ho was still away, the party resolved that it would follow Mao Zedong’s lead and lean to the Soviet-led Communist side in the Cold War. Fighting a war of national liberation would not be enough, Truong Chinh told his colleagues; Vietnam must do her part in the internationalist struggle against the imperialist bloc led by the United States:
When it comes to the struggle of the democratic camp against the imperialists, Indochina is an outpost, a fortress on the antiimperialist defense perimeter in Southeast Asia.… In Indochina, not only are the interests of our people and the French colonialists in conflict, but in reality the interests of the two camps, the imperialist and democratic ones, are also in conflict at the world level. The Indochina problem has become an entirely international problem.35
The new Sino-Vietnamese arrangement soon had tangible effects. In short order, Beijing created a Chinese Military Advisory Grou
p (CMAG) and sent senior PLA officers south to assist in the training of Viet Minh units and plot strategy. The Fourth Field Army of the PLA set up a military school for the Vietnamese. Sizable amounts of Chinese military and nonmilitary equipment followed, though it paled next to what the Americans were providing the French. The outbreak of the Korean War in late June, and the announcement by the United States that she would intervene militarily on behalf of South Korea, only strengthened these Sino-Vietnamese ties. With the arrival of the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Straits, Beijing leaders felt certain that Washington was embarked on a course of aggression aimed at China, North Korea, and Vietnam. In July, the CMAG, led by General Wei Guoqing, was formally established, its seventy-nine officers instructed that they had a “glorious internationalist duty” to carry out in Vietnam. By August, group members were in place in Vietnam.36
French installations in northern Tonkin were now extremely vulnerable. Long before August 1950, in fact already in early 1949, as PLA units became more active along the border and on a few occasions joined in operations with Viet Minh forces, French commanders fretted about the extension of Mao’s power into South China. In May 1949, Paris sent the ominously named General Georges Revers (Revers means “setback” or “reverse” in French), chief of the general staff, to Vietnam to examine the military situation and make his recommendation in the light of the probability of a Communist win in China. The first months of the year had not produced a change in the overall nature of the war; it remained a stalemate, which as before was to the disadvantage of the French. The Viet Minh did not have the capacity to wage major attacks on the deltas, but they continued to infiltrate behind the lines, and to reduce the number of villages under Bao Dai’s administration. In Tonkin, the all-important line of communication between Hanoi and Haiphong was still subject to frequent guerrilla attacks, and meanwhile the French had too few troops to consolidate gains made during operations. The same was true in Annam. In Cochin China, the French efforts at pacification achieved some successes, but the Viet Minh remained strongly rooted in the Plain of Reeds and in the Ca Mau peninsula. In a measure of that strength, the Viet Minh under commanding general Nguyen Binh were able to mount numerous large operations, involving hundreds of troops, in and around the Mekong Delta in the latter part of 1949; the French were obliged to send major reinforcements and were able to prevail only at considerable cost.37
A Viet Minh attack could come anywhere. Edmund Gullion of the U.S. embassy recalled witnessing the assassination of the head of the French Sûreté in late April 1950:
It was in the morning but I hadn’t come from my flat, and I just walked by the square and I saw Bazin [the Sûreté chief] just about to get in his car, and he was carrying this leather folder. And in front of him was another parked car with some Vietnamese in it. As he started to get into it, this other Vietnamese jumped out of the parked car right in front of him, holding an enormous revolver in both hands, the way they do in American movies now, two-handed, and pumped shots into his belly. I was right across the street from him, a narrow street, and I ducked behind a barber’s chair [in the open]. The assassin got in the car and drove away. The irony of it was that they were expecting some kind of ceremony and there was a French squad rehearsing for it, and I remember seeing this fellow go right past them—and he was never found.
Just prior to his death, Bazin had told a French reporter: “Every day the Viet Minh radio says, ‘Bazin, you are going to die.’ ” He said he hoped he would get them before they got him.38
More and more, the French High Command found itself committing valuable manpower to the basic task of keeping a minimum number of road and river axes of communications open, if only during daylight hours. It established a chain of military posts along specified routes, whose task was to maintain visual surveillance over key sections and extend security over more distant sections by calling in mortar and artillery fire. Watchtowers began dotting the landscape in Cochin China in 1948 and were extended to central Vietnam the following year; generally, these fieldworks were within sight of one another, at an interval of approximately one kilometer, and were manned by five or six men, usually auxiliaries. The system achieved some success but tied down a lot of troops in static positions, and the posts often proved vulnerable to nighttime Viet Minh attacks.
Revers in his report catalogued many of these problems and drew sobering conclusions. No military solution favoring France was possible, he argued, not in the long run. All actions must proceed from this basis, and ultimately Paris leaders would need to seek a “peace of the brave” with Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Bao Dai was a poor leader whose government had minimal support, and France did not have enough manpower in Indochina to impose her will on the population. Since the Viet Minh were bound, sooner or later, to gain significant assistance from the Chinese Communists, France could not realistically hope to hold the whole of Tonkin (at least not without the introduction of American ground forces); instead, she should withdraw from all of Tonkin except a rough quadrilateral around the Red River Delta anchored on Haiphong, Hoa Binh, Viet Tri, Thai Nguyen, and Mong Cai. The fortresses on the Chinese frontier along Route Coloniale 4, already suffering from the relentless attacks on the convoys, would become indefensible if the PLA reached the border and decided to aid the Viet Minh. They were, moreover, strategically unimportant and were tying down troops badly needed in the Red River Delta.39
The Revers report was top secret and was made for the private information of senior French policy makers. It thus caused an uproar when excerpts from it were broadcast on Viet Minh radio and when, following a fight between a French soldier and a Vietnamese student on a Paris bus, a copy of the report was discovered in the latter’s briefcase. The student, Do Dai Phuoc, led French counterespionage agents to another Vietnamese student’s apartment, where they found seventy-two additional copies. Subsequent investigation revealed that the document had circulated widely within the French capital’s large Vietnamese community. A major political scandal—“The Generals’ Affair”—erupted, preoccupying the chattering classes for months and delaying a final decision on Revers’s call for an evacuation of the northern forts.40 The months went by. In late 1949, Giap stepped up pressure on the convoys along the RC4, and the consolidation of PLA control in South China increased his determination to subject the French installations to a major assault. He grasped what the new French commander in chief, Marcel Carpentier—a wunderkind who had gone from major in 1940 to lieutenant general in 1946, but who knew little about Indochina—also grasped: that these posts were forlorn islands in a Viet Minh sea.
CHAPTER 10
ATTACK ON THE RC4
AT 6:45 IN THE MORNING OF MAY 25, 1950, A VIOLENT FUSILLADE suddenly rained down on the small French garrison (eight hundred men, mostly Moroccan) at Dong Khe, a post situated between Cao Bang and That Khe along the RC4. The post was a bastion in the French military system where convoys could stop to rest in the shelter of the French flag. Giap’s aim: to take and hold Dong Khe, thereby isolating Cao Bang from its links with That Khe. In the days prior, four Viet Minh infantry battalions succeeded in hoisting five 75mm cannons onto the heights surrounding the town without being detected by the garrison, and then proceeded to unleash barrage after barrage on the post. It was a preview of the technique they would use at Dien Bien Phu. For forty-eight hours the shelling continued, whereupon the Viet Minh overran Dong Khe in a human-wave assault.
The French responded quickly, dispatching thirty-four aircraft to drop a battalion of paratroops upon the town. They caught the Viet Minh units completely off guard and after intense fighting forced them to flee for the jungle. Giap had reinforcements he could have called in, but the monsoon was fast approaching, and he chose to call it a day. The French congratulated themselves on their quick deployment of the paratroops rather than face the deeper truth of their extreme vulnerability in the Viet Bac. They chose not to take this last great chance to evacuate the frontier posts while time rem
ained.1
Giap, having seen what his forces could do in a major engagement, believed the time had come to shift to the strategic offensive. With China as a secure rear base, a sanctuary where his troops could be trained, reorganized, and equipped for more conventional operations, he could prepare to strike the first hammer blow against the French Union. By the late spring, the Viet Minh had grown to a force of about a quarter of a million troops, organized into three components: a regular army (chu luc), regional units, and guerrilla-militia forces. The regular forces, with an estimated strength of 120,000, Giap organized into six divisions, on European lines—the 304th, 308th, 312th, 316th, 320th, and 325th; five were rooted in Tonkin, and the sixth (the 325th) was based in central Vietnam. Each had three infantry regiments, an artillery battalion, and an antiaircraft battalion, as well as staff and support elements. The task of these regular forces was to conduct a war of maneuver, aimed at drawing French units into combat in locales and under conditions in which French advantages in firepower and air support would be neutralized. The isolated French garrison in an outlying area was thus always a tempting target, and if the attack could occur during the crachin, or misty season in Tonkin, when the low cloud cover inhibited French aerial bombardment and resupply, so much the better.2
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam Page 28