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

by Fredrik Logevall

  A subtle but crucial shift in American thinking had occurred. Washington strategists still emphasized the need for a successful political response to blunt Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist appeal, but they now connected this ambition more closely to the military struggle. Hence their vociferous support for the French plans for a new Vietnamese national army; it would, after all, serve both ends. Was there a risk that this new army could be “turned against us”? Yes, a joint State-Defense report acknowledged in early December. But that possibility had to be considered alongside the prospect of ultimate defeat if things continued on their present course. “The former is a risk, the latter well-nigh a certainty.… Much of the stigma of colonialism can be removed if, where necessary, yellow men will be killed by yellow men rather than by white men alone.” The inclusion of the word alone was telling, for the report’s conclusion left no doubt that a French presence was vital for the foreseeable future and that the Paris government should get the military assistance it needed. For France’s cause in Indochina was also America’s. “America without Asia will have been reduced to the Western Hemisphere and a precarious foothold on the western fringe of the Eurasian continent,” the authors concluded, but “success will vindicate and give added meaning to America and the American way of life.”33

  In time, as we shall see, French leaders would have second thoughts about this internationalization of the war effort. Inevitably, the growth in U.S. involvement gave Washington officials increased leverage in the decision making and lessened France’s freedom of maneuver. For now, though, only one thing mattered: The struggle demanded an infusion of resources, which only the Americans could provide.

  Vietnamese non-Communists likewise saw their leverage reduced with the Americans’ arrival. Whereas in Indonesia non-Communist nationalists under Sukarno won U.S. backing in their struggle against the Netherlands and secured independence via an international negotiated settlement in 1949, in Vietnam a different dynamic prevailed. Here the non-Communists were allied with the French against the Viet Minh and thus had far less chance to play the Americans—who saw this as a Cold War struggle first and foremost—against the colonial overlord. With each passing month, it seemed, non-Communist nationalist groups such as the Dai Viet and VNQDD saw their influence recede.

  At Ho Chi Minh’s headquarters in the Viet Bac, the hope as 1950 drew to a close was that the hour had passed for the new measures to affect the course of events. It was too late now for the enemy to raise a legitimate Vietnamese fighting force, too late for the mighty Americans to make a meaningful difference on the ground. Following the glorious victory in the Border Campaign, red bunting appeared in villages all over Tonkin to welcome the victorious soldiers. Resistance committees proliferated throughout the north. By midautumn, recalled one Viet Minh soldier who took part in the Cao Bang fighting, army political officers were assuring troops that they would be “in Hanoi for Tet,” and there was a pervasive sense that “the general counteroffensive had begun.” The soldier described a typical mass rally that he and his unit came across as they marched from the frontier ridge to the delta: “The propaganda sections were already in place and had installed an information room where a phonograph played military tunes. A propagandist on a box decorated by the red flag with the yellow star harangued the crowd and the young people. ‘The People’s Army will be in Hanoi for Tet. This is the present that the army will give President Ho for the new year.’ ”34

  Ho Chi Minh would get no such gift for the Tet holiday. Unbeknownst to the party propagandists who made their pitch, and to the cheering crowds who heard them, change was coming to Vietnam, in the form of a new French commander with a different conception of how to wage the struggle and the strength to realize that vision. And unbeknownst to them, Vo Nguyen Giap was about to make his biggest blunder of the war.

  CHAPTER 11

  KING JEAN

  FOR ONE YOUNG FRENCH LIEUTENANT, THE SITUATION IN VIETNAM in autumn 1950, following the disaster on the RC4, approached the point of no return. Bernard de Lattre de Tassigny, age twenty-three, an infantry lieutenant in the French Expeditionary Corps, had been in Indochina for a year, commanding a post some twenty miles southeast of Hanoi. He was a remarkable young man. At fifteen, he had helped his father escape from a wartime prison in daring fashion, then had joined the Free French Army and become the youngest soldier to be decorated with the Médaille militaire. Still a teenager in the campaigns of 1944–45, he was wounded in battle and received commendations for his bravery and dedication. In Indochina, he quickly won praise from his superiors, one of whom wrote, “He is one of the few officers who has really given thought to the problem of our presence here, and he has resolved it in a concrete manner.”1

  Specifically, de Lattre had determined that the key to success lay in capturing the active support of the rural population; in the phrase of a later era, French soldiers and officers had to win the “hearts and minds” of the peasantry. The war had to be won politically if it was to be won at all, and that meant striving to meet the needs of people where they lived, whether in the form of providing security, or building schoolhouses or athletic fields, or improving sanitation. If killing had to be done—and the young lieutenant didn’t doubt it—it should be done as quietly as possible, with a knife or rifle, not with heavy artillery or aerial bombardment.

  From the start, de Lattre immersed himself in the often-mundane tasks of pacification. Judging from his letters home and the reports of his superiors, he had success: One report exulted that de Lattre “has captured the hearts of the local population.”2 Over time, though, his letters began to take on lugubrious tones, especially as news reached him of the calamity in Cao Bang. He despaired at the “fear psychosis” gripping some fellow officers, and at the louche lifestyle led by others, and he complained of the absence of firm, purposeful command. “Tell Father we need him, without him it will go wrong,” he wrote his mother on October 23.3

  The son got his wish. In early December, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny was appointed commander in chief of the Expeditionary Corps and high commissioner for Indochina, with complete control over the conduct of military operations as well as governmental affairs. Paris authorities, convinced that the conflicts of authority had impeded essential action at critical moments, chose to give both military and civilian powers to one individual. The elder de Lattre’s appointment did not come as a surprise, but neither was it entirely expected. Bernard was overjoyed. “What we need,” he wrote his father after the appointment was made, “is a leader who leads, fresh blood and new machinery, and no more niggling, no more small-time warfare; and then, with the morale that we still have in spite of it all, we could save everything.”4

  We could save everything. Those words would resound often in the months ahead. A savior had come, or so for a time it seemed. Jean de Lattre, one of France’s great military leaders of the twentieth century, with a string of accomplishments already under his belt, would have perhaps his biggest success in Vietnam. Born in 1889 in Mouilleron-en-Pareds, a village in the Vendée whose other famous son was Georges Clemenceau, young Jean went to Saint-Cyr and from there to the trenches of World War I. Five different times he was wounded, swiftly earning a reputation for courage and calmness under fire. Once, during a German cavalry charge, an enemy lance pierced de Lattre’s chest; unmounted but undaunted, he killed two of the enemy with his sword, then escaped.

  Between the wars de Lattre served under France’s famed Marshal Lyautey in Morocco and at the outbreak of the Battle of France led the Fourteenth Infantry Division as it tried valiantly to hold the German Panzers near Rheims. Later jailed by the Vichy regime for defying orders to keep his troops in barracks rather than fight the Germans, he escaped with the help of his wife and the young Bernard, who smuggled into his cell a small saw hidden in a bouquet of flowers and a ten-yard rope stuffed in a bag of laundry. De Lattre joined the Free French and in 1944–45 led the First French Army (which landed with the Americans in Provence on August 15, 1944) in its
glorious march from the southern coast to the Rhine and the Danube. Among his prizes after crossing the Rhine were Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, and Freudenstadt. At one time, his command included 125,000 American troops.5

  Even then, de Lattre’s temperament was the stuff of legend. Like Douglas MacArthur, to whom he bore a strong physical resemblance and was often compared, he could be impatient with superiors’ instructions; like MacArthur, he was vain and had a flair for the intensely dramatic. “General de Théatre,” some called him. A brilliant mimic, he was excellent company, and even detractors acknowledged his extraordinary personal magnetism. More than one observer compared him to Churchill for his singular ability to dominate any room he entered, to attract all attention to himself, and to keep listeners enthralled with his magnetism, his self-deprecating wit, his eloquence.

  But there was also a dark side. Egocentric to the point of megalomania, de Lattre was prone to moodiness and to volcanic expressions of anger toward underlings. Meticulous in his personal appearance—he wore uniforms tailored by Lanvin, the stylish Paris couturier—he demanded that subordinates be likewise, and he bristled when on inspections his hosts failed to welcome him with the ceremonial he considered his due (hence a second nickname: Le Roi Jean, or King Jean). Always he was notoriously touchy about honor—both his own and his country’s. On one occasion, during a dinner for Allied commanders, de Lattre refused to touch his food and wine because Marshal Zhukov of the Red Army neglected to mention France in a toast praising Allied armies. Informed of his mistake, Zhukov offered a separate toast to France. A mollified de Lattre began to eat and drink.6

  At the conclusion of the war, General de Gaulle sent de Lattre to Berlin to participate in the Armistice ceremony, even though France hadn’t been invited. De Lattre signed as a witness and exulted: “Victory has arrived … radiant victory of springtime, which gives back to our France her youth, her strength and her hope.” This was not mere rhetoric. De Lattre believed in his country, believed in the empire, and in the postwar years did everything he could to restore France to what he considered her rightful place among the leading powers. Beginning in late 1945, he served as inspector general and chief of staff of the French Army and then as commander of Western Union (the precursor to NATO) ground forces—in effect, Western Europe’s top general.

  His acceptance in late 1950 of the Indochina posting surprised some who saw it as a step down in professional terms, but for de Lattre there could be no question of declining. A gambler by nature, he had always trained his troops to embrace the need to take risks; now he had to live up to his teaching. More important, his country was at war, and the war was going badly, with his only son in the heart of the action. An outright defeat seemed all too possible. In this hour of maximum need, he had to answer the call. “I have nothing to gain and doubtless much to lose,” de Lattre replied when Prime Minister René Pleven asked him to take up the post. “All the more reason for accepting, and, as a good soldier, I shall do so without hesitation.”7

  De Lattre saw as his foremost aim keeping Indochina firmly within the French Union, but his initial utterances emphasized the menace posed by the forces of international Communism. He told the American journalist Robert Shaplen that France was in Vietnam “to save it from Peking and Moscow.” Paris might have acted out of colonialist motives in the past, but no more. “We have abandoned all colonial positions completely,” he assured a skeptical Shaplen. “The work we are doing is for the salvation of the Vietnamese people”—and the security of the Western world. The Vietnam struggle, he insisted at every opportunity, was another front in the war that the West was waging in Korea. The stakes were huge: “Tonkin is the keystone of the defense of Southeast Asia. If Tonkin falls, Siam falls with Burma, and Malaya is dangerously compromised. Without Tonkin the rest of Indochina is soon lost.”8

  Did de Lattre really believe it was so simple? It’s hard to be sure. His hatred of Communism knew no bounds, and he was convinced that his actions in Indochina ultimately mattered as much to the West’s defense as did MacArthur’s in Korea. But he also knew that the imagery of countries falling one by one, like bowling pins—or, as it were, dominoes—resonated in the halls of power in Washington, among both civilians and military men. And on this point de Lattre needed no schooling: The success or failure of the daunting task that confronted him, he knew, depended in large measure on the attitudes and policies of the Truman White House.

  II

  HE SET OUT FROM ORLY AIRPORT AT MIDNIGHT ON DECEMBER 13. Some two thousand old comrades of the First French Army turned out to see him off, their banners fluttering in the nighttime breeze. It was a moving moment for de Lattre, proof, he said, that les gars (the boys, as he called his men) still trusted him, that the spirit of the First Army still lived. Five days later his plane touched down in Saigon. It was December 19, four years to the day since the outbreak of major war.

  “His plane came in and de Lattre stood at the top of a flight of stairs, on the platform, the gangplank, and he turned his profile this way,” Edmund Gullion, second in command at the American legation, recalled of the scene. “He had a magnificent profile (something like MacArthur), and watching him arrive, he seemed seven foot tall, stiff and straight and he took white gloves and pulled them carefully on his hands, like that—a very symbolic gesture, symbolizing in the honor of the corps [that] a gentleman aristocrat was in office. But the symbolism of pulling on the gloves was lost on no one.… He was coming down to clean up this mess.”9

  Immediately he made clear that spit and polish, flourish and ceremony, would be the order of the day. The Guard of Honor presented arms, and the band played “The Marseillaise.” To de Lattre, however, the guard appeared slovenly, and in front of bystanders he ripped into the colonel in charge, a terrifying treatment known in French slang as the “shampoo.” He then unleashed a torrent of abuse on the bandleader, on the grounds that one instrument was out of tune. To all assembled, there could be no doubt: King Jean had arrived.10

  Later that day the general addressed a gathering of French officers, telling them he couldn’t guarantee any easy victories or early improvement in the battlefield situation. What he could promise was firm command: “From now on, you will be led.” He promptly canceled the order for the evacuation of women and children from Hanoi—“As long as women and children are here, the men won’t dare let go”—and announced that his wife would soon join him from Paris. He vowed that Tonkin would be held, rejecting claims by some French officers that a concentration on southern Annam and Cochin China was unavoidable. These statements immediately bolstered morale among civilians and troops, as did his announcement that he would fly immediately to Tonkin. (At this departure too there was a ceremony, and again de Lattre went on a tirade: He ordered twenty-five days’ confinement for the pilot of his plane, for failing to put the new commander’s insignia on the fuselage. To a bearded copilot, de Lattre snapped: “You’ve got five minutes to shave yourself clean!”)11

  In Tonkin, there was no denying the gravity of the situation. French Union garrisons on the northern and northeastern frontiers had been forced, due to the Viet Minh assaults in the Border Campaign, to withdraw to the Red River Delta, the possession of which de Lattre deemed essential to the defense of Indochina as a whole. Upon arriving in Hanoi, he reaffirmed that dependents would stay and again said he would not allow Tonkin to fall.

  DE LATTRE AND BAO DAI DURING AN AWARDS CEREMONY IN EARLY 1951. (photo credit 11.1)

  In the days thereafter, he shuttled all over the delta in his small Morane spotter plane, showing scant regard for his own physical safety—more than once his entourage came under enemy fire—and a level of energy that left aides utterly exhausted. Everywhere he touched dormant chords of national pride and brought forth cheers from the assembled French troops; everywhere he ruthlessly weeded out the incompetent and the (by his standards) lackadaisical. His mantra at each stop: There will be no quitting Indochina until the Communists have been defeated.

  But
de Lattre knew that bucking up the fighting spirit of his soldiers, essential though it was, wouldn’t be enough. He consequently undertook a regrouping of French forces and reorganized the system of defense in Tonkin. Relying on the Armée d’Afrique tactics he had learned under Marshal Lyautey in Morocco in the 1920s, de Lattre emphasized the need for mobility, even in terrain that limited rapid movement to roads, with the accompanying dangers of ambush. Accordingly, he organized groupes mobiles (striking groups), each consisting essentially of a headquarters with sufficient command and communication facilities, to which could be assigned three or more infantry battalions and supporting troops. These groupes mobiles would move quickly to engage Viet Minh units and relieve besieged posts; when attacked, they would use the Armée d’Afrique tactic of simultaneous assault from at least two, and sometimes three or more, different encircling directions. The artillery, firing from the road deep into the jungle, would be dispersed throughout the length of a column and thus could not all be lost in a single ambush.12

  To enhance mobility and protect the delta, de Lattre ordered the construction of a series of self-contained and mutually supporting defense works, or blockhouses, all around the area. This chain of fortified concrete positions—built in groups of five or six, one or two miles apart, and designed to accommodate between three and ten soldiers—which became known as the “De Lattre Line,” had been recommended in the Revers Report of May 1949, but nothing had been done. Until now. De Lattre supervised much of the construction personally and drove the crews mercilessly; by the end of 1951, more than a thousand of the posts had been created, on a line that stretched in a rough semicircle from the sea near the Baie d’Along, along the northern edge of the delta to Vinh Yen, and then southeast to the sea again near Phat Diem, enclosing protectively both Hanoi and Haiphong. (See map on this page.) Supported by these positions, the groupes mobiles could set forth in search of enemy units, and also—in theory, at least—protect against rice smuggling as well as major Viet Minh assaults.