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

by Fredrik Logevall

  Navarre’s very lack of experience in Indochina was an asset, Paris leaders insisted. He could approach the issue, they told skeptical Americans, with “an absence of prejudice.” A veteran of both world wars and a graduate of Saint-Cyr, Navarre had also spent several years in pacification campaigns in Syria and Morocco and was considered an expert on intelligence matters. When U.S. forces landed in southern France in 1944, Navarre joined them. Later he led an armored regiment in de Lattre’s Armée Rhin et Danube. Seven times he was cited for bravery, and he received the Croix de Guerre. Cold and effete in personality, trim and elegant in appearance, Navarre was reputed to have a brilliant analytical mind, and he sought at all times to project an air of authority; in one author’s words, “He seemed to have both knowledge and truth, even when he was in doubt.”1 Navarre had not coveted the Indochina appointment, and he made a halfhearted effort to turn it down; once on the scene, however, he threw himself into his task with courage and dedication, ignoring as best he could grumbling from the French officer corps that he was an “arm-chair general” who didn’t know Indochina and whose senior appointments had all been in staff and intelligence work.2

  His task, he knew, was enormous: to lead a war theater larger than metropolitan France, located more than 8,500 miles from home, with a fighting force—approaching half a million men, including the VNA—as large as most combat armies of World War II.3 Using that force, he had to salvage the war effort, turn things around, and justify the immense sacrifices the Expeditionary Corps had already made—to date, the fighting had killed 3 generals, 8 colonels, 18 lieutenant colonels, 69 majors, 341 captains, 1,140 lieutenants, 3,683 NCOs, and 6,008 soldiers of French nationality; 12,019 legionnaires and Africans; and 14,093 Indochinese troops. These numbers did not include the missing or wounded—about 20,000 and 100,000 respectively.4

  Publicly, Navarre exuded confidence from the start, insisting before all comers that victory would come in due course. “We will take the offensive,” the old cavalryman declared. “We shall give back to our troops the mobility and aggressiveness they have sometimes lacked.” If the Associated States applied themselves, he said on another occasion, “la victoire est certaine.”5

  This bullishness put Navarre somewhat at odds with his primary mission in Indochina, which was not to destroy the Viet Minh or win an outright victory but merely to create the conditions for an “honorable” exit from the struggle.6 Nor did it align with some of the reports he received upon arriving in Saigon, such as the one from a Saint-Cyr classmate who greeted him by saying, “Henri, old boy, what have you come to this shithole for? I’m clearing out.” Raoul Salan, the outgoing commander, likewise gave him a grim assessment of the prospects in the fighting—General Giap, Salan warned, was organizing his big units effectively and giving them a European character—but Navarre shook it off. Later, he spoke to his staff with macho swagger: “Victory is a woman who gives herself to those who know how to take her.”7

  The remark may help explain why Navarre formed a close working relationship with General John “Iron Mike” O’Daniel, a gruff, cigar-chomping American officer prone to his own rhetorical bluster who had been sent by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to assess French strategy in the war and to dispel any idea of seeking an early diplomatic settlement with Ho Chi Minh. O’Daniel, a veteran of both world wars and Korea, where he had been a corps commander, now served as commander of U.S. Army forces in the Pacific, based at Pearl Harbor. He arrived in Saigon on June 20, 1953, one month after Navarre had assumed command.

  Initially, the two men did not see eye to eye. In several early sessions, O’Daniel pressed Navarre—or “Navarrie,” as he insisted on calling him—for a plan to win the war, and each time the Frenchman insisted he could not comply. It was for the Paris leadership to make policy, he said; his job as theater commander was merely to execute the mission set for him by the government. Currently, that mission involved maintaining a position of strength from which negotiations could be undertaken at some point in the future. The emphasis would be on holding existing territory and avoiding high-risk operations, of securing, in the first instance, a coup nul (a tied game). Frustrated, O’Daniel asked his own subordinates in Bangkok to draw up a plan, one building on the Letourneau Plan from earlier in the spring but offering a speeded-up timetable: There would be immediate small operations and raids followed by a large-scale offensive in September. Rear-area units in static defensive positions would be consolidated into groupes mobiles, and the VNA would be trained and equipped at an accelerated pace and given expanded responsibilities in the field. Reinforcements would be sought from France, including officers who would be used as cadres to build up the VNA. As in the Letourneau Plan, a final offensive in 1955 would destroy the enemy’s masse de maneuvre and force him to sue for peace.8

  French sources do not support this contention that the “Navarre Plan” was entirely American in conception and structure; they see the French commander as shaping the basic contours on his own. But there is no doubt that U.S. pressure for a more vigorous application of military power lay behind the scheme. That’s clear from the documentary record, and Navarre himself would later lament the degree to which Washington’s influence dictated French policy.9 Whatever his exact role in the planning, Navarre pronounced himself pleased with the particulars, and O’Daniel returned triumphantly to Washington, confident he had a road map for victory in Vietnam. He claimed to detect an “increased aggressiveness in attitude” on the part of the French High Command and a greater openness to American ideas and recommendations. Navarre, he enthused, possessed “a new aggressive psychology to the war” and seemed determined “to see this war through to success at an early date.”10

  Others were doubtful, believing that O’Daniel’s close personal rapport with Navarre caused him to exaggerate by a considerable margin the French commander’s commitment to offensive action. The raw numbers remained a problem: Even though Navarre had a basic numerical superiority in terms of men under arms, for offensive operations he could muster the equivalent of only about three combat divisions as against the enemy’s six, due to the French commitment to provide all major cities and hundreds of villages and posts with an increasingly flimsy measure of security.11 These U.S. skeptics also found little to cheer in French counterinsurgency efforts, whether through the oil-spot method (occupying a central point in a given area and pushing outward from it) or the opposing “gridding” (quadrillage) approach, whereby one divided a territory into grids and occupied progressively the outside areas and worked inward. Both methods required a degree of manpower saturation that the French simply did not have available in Vietnam.

  But the bigger problem, as far as some American analysts were concerned, was the growing evidence of disillusion in Paris. On July 3, Laniel pledged publicly that France would “perfect” the independence of the Indochinese states. Washington officials took this as a positive step—recall that Eisenhower had pressed for such a pledge in the spring—but only if it did not signal an intention to bug out of Indochina entirely. Laniel, they noted, had given scant evidence that he intended to fight the war vigorously come the end of the monsoon season. As always, Americans had a hard time grasping the crux of the problem: While granting full independence to Vietnam might be necessary to undermine Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist appeal, it also risked making the war irrelevant to French interests.

  Nor did Bidault offer more assurances during three days of talks in Washington in July. In the first session, a lengthy affair at Dulles’s Georgetown home, he bluntly remarked that French public opinion had turned against the war and that there was broad support in the Assembly for direct talks with Ho Chi Minh. Talk of peace in Korea had a contagious effect in France, and as a result Paris would be forced to seek an early end to the war, by negotiations if necessary. Dulles countered that in Korea the United States had fought her way to a strong bargaining position and that France needed to do the same; only after the military outlook improved should she enter talks with Ho
. Bidault nodded in seeming agreement but offered no assurances, beyond the murky promise that France would “liquidate the war with honor.”12

  Privately, most French leaders had given up entirely on the idea of victory but were unwilling to admit it to the Americans. Former prime minister René Mayer was blunt: “It seems evident that among French businessmen and civil servants who know Indochina well, nobody believes any more that it is possible to beat the Viet Minh militarily. Nevertheless, in order to induce Washington to grant France sizable direct assistance, the notion has been propagated that additional efforts might yield decisive results.”13

  II

  THE KOREAN ARMISTICE, SIGNED ON JULY 27, HAD A DEVASTATING effect on French thinking, causing a further slackening of the will to continue the fight. Marc Jacquet, the minister for the Associated States, told British officials a few days later that his compatriots were nonplussed: They saw the United States securing a truce in Korea and Britain trading with China and could not understand why their allies should expect them to continue a war in Indochina in which there was no longer a direct French interest. France, he said, wanted the future Korea peace conference extended to cover also Indochina and sought Britain’s help in that regard. He added that American aid for the French war effort was insufficient and speculated that Laniel’s government was the last that would continue the struggle.14

  Bernard B. Fall, a French-raised World War II veteran who would in time become one of the most astute analysts of both the French and American wars, and who would be killed while accompanying U.S. Marines on a mission near Hue in early 1967, saw firsthand the effect of the Korean truce as he toured Vietnam in 1953 in order to conduct field research for his Syracuse University doctoral dissertation. Born into a Jewish merchant family in Vienna in 1926, Fall lost both parents at the hands of the Nazis and joined the French underground in November 1942, at age sixteen. As a maquisard he soon got a taste of what it meant to fight a guerrilla war against an occupying force. Later, he saw action in the First French Army under de Lattre before being shifted—thanks to his fluency in German—to the French Army’s intelligence service. A stint as a researcher for the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal followed, whereupon Fall resumed his studies, first at the University of Paris and then in Munich. In 1951 he arrived in the United States, the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to pursue graduate work at Syracuse. During a summer seminar in Washington in 1952, Fall’s instructor encouraged him to pursue research on the Indochina struggle, about which little scholarship had as yet been produced.

  Fall took up the challenge with zest. He recalled in an interview in 1966: “By pure accident, one sunny day in Washington, D.C., of all places, in 1952, I got interested in Viet-Nam and it’s been sort of a bad love affair ever since.”15

  On May 16, 1953, Fall arrived in Hanoi, carrying a military-style duffel bag and with his precious Leica camera and a new shortwave radio slung over his shoulder. Granted special access as a former French army officer, Fall accompanied units on combat operations, attended lunches and dinners with officers, and kept his eyes and ears open. The signing of the Korean armistice, he later wrote, “brought a wave of exasperation and hopelessness to the senior commanders that—though hidden to outsiders—was nevertheless obvious.” For no longer could it be said that France was fighting one front of a two-front war, necessary for the defense of the West. Washington had broken the deal: It had agreed to a separate peace in Asia. And now the Chinese, being no longer preoccupied in Korea, could turn their focus southward. About Navarre, meanwhile, Fall heard mostly complaints—he was timid and uncommunicative, many in the officer corps said, disliked even by his own staff—and few commanders had much good to say about the fighting abilities of Bao Dai’s Vietnamese Nationalist Army.16

  BERNARD FALL ON A SUPPLY DROP MISSION WITH FRENCH UNION FORCES, 1953. (photo credit 15.1)

  Fall sought to understand the security situation inside the Red River Delta. A French officer assured him that defenses were strong: “We are going to deny the Communists access to the eight million people in this Delta and the three million tons of rice, and will eventually starve them out and deny them access to the population.” Did the Viet Minh hold any areas in the delta? Fall asked. “Yes,” the officer replied, pointing to his map, “they hold those little blue blotches, 1, 2, 3, 4, and a little one over here.” How did he know? “It is simple, when we go there we get shot at; that’s how we know.”17

  Suspicious after hearing Vietnamese friends laugh mockingly at the officer’s claims—in their native villages, all the village chiefs were Viet Minh, whatever they told the French—Fall decided to study village tax rolls. These showed conclusively that most of the delta had not paid taxes for years. If the villages were contributing revenues to anyone, it was not to the French-backed government. Equally revealing was the teacher-assignment data: In a school system where teachers were designated by the central government, these same villages were not being assigned teachers from Hanoi. Fall produced his own maps that showed a picture of control “frighteningly different” from what French authorities were reporting. He concluded that the Viet Minh dominated 70 percent of the delta inside the French perimeter—more or less every part of it except Hanoi, Haiphong, and the other large garrison areas.18

  He wrote home of one excursion in the delta, in which his unit passed an artillery convoy and then passed through an “ominously calm” village. “A few miles further, all of a sudden [we] heard the harsh staccato of automatic weapons, then some more of the same, and a few minutes later, the heavy booms of gunfire. The artillery convoy had been ambushed in the village through which we had passed.” Fall’s unit had been spared because the Viet Minh were waiting for bigger game. “The whole thing was a matter of sheer, unforeseeable luck, because for a while we had toyed with the idea of staying with the convoy for more protection.” The convoy too was fortunate, Fall continued, losing only one dead and a few wounded, but the overall situation was perilous. “In the south today, a train blew up on a bridge and fell into a ravine.… Situation is not so hot right now.”19

  A British officer reached a similar conclusion after accompanying a French unit on a sweep of the delta a few miles south of Hanoi. He wrote of seeing an “innocent looking village” mortared and shelled by tanks and artillery for two hours, and then joining the French troops as they proceeded carefully into the town. A captured villager, presumably Viet Minh, pointed to a pile of debris in the center of the village and said it hid the entrance to a tunnel.

  The large heap is quickly swept away and the Moroccans vigorously set-to with their spades. After a quarter of an hour’s digging the tunnel is found far beneath the ground. Two hand grenades are then almost daintily dropped within; after the smoke from the explosion has almost blown away, a tiny head appears above the ground and then another. Seemingly from the depths of the earth ten muddy-looking individuals emerge. They are arrested and a little Moroccan soldier with a cocky smile prepares to descend with a torch to look for the weapons which are bound to be there. But he does not get far. It seems impossible but there are still more communists below. A grenade is hurled at him from the darkness and after an ear-splitting explosion the poor screaming wretch is extracted with both his legs shattered. However, after a few more acts of persuasion the remaining two come up. “Who threw the grenade?” the officer shouts at them. The more timid looking of the two points to his partner who when asked confesses to the deed without the least sign of concern. “Where are the arms?” he is asked but he only shakes his head. The Moroccans gladly shoot him but the prisoners are unmoved by the execution and do not even turn their heads away. And when faced with the same question and the same threat they refuse to answer.

  “What is it that they have that we don’t have?” the Briton plaintively asked himself, with reference to the villagers and their dedication to Ho Chi Minh. “No doubt [the French] found the weapons but there were plenty of others they did not find. When I left the village all was quiet excep
t for the odd mine going off. Probably the same little drama was going on in all the villages. The following day the troops would leave the area. The Viet Minh would emerge from the many undiscovered tunnels and set to work and rebuild their defences. And next year all these little scenes will be repeated.”20

  A frustrated French intelligence colonel said at about the same time: “As long as the village populations are against us, we’ll just be treading water.”21

  III

  JOURNALISTS TOO EXPERIENCED THE WAR UP CLOSE, AS THEY HAD since the shooting started seven years earlier, though not all of them got as close to the action as Bernard Fall and the British officer did. The terrace bar at the Continental in Saigon remained the rendezvous point, where they discussed and debated the pressing questions: Would the taciturn Navarre inspire his troops and turn the tide? Would America step up her involvement in the war, perhaps to the point of sending troops? Would China intervene? Would the French (with Washington’s help) be able to keep the non-Communist nationalists in Vietnam in check? Would Laniel and Bidault seek direct negotiations with Ho?

  No piece of reporting that summer received more attention than a devastating photographic essay in Life in August. “Indochina, All But Lost,” read the magazine cover, and the article, by Dennis Duncan, depicted a lethargic and fading French war effort. “It is a year when ineffective French tactics, and the ebbing of French will, make it seem that Indochina is lost to the non-communist world,” Duncan wrote. “Staff officers keep hours that would delight a banker … [and] the troops, following the example of their commanders, take long siestas.” U.S. aid, meanwhile, does not reach its intended recipients, because of the French practice of appointing Indochinese officials on the basis of their political affiliations rather than their competence. As a result, “in the background of this war is a society that has become corrupt.” Millions cast their lot with the Viet Minh not out of attachment to Communism but out of frustration with the lack of strong nationalist alternatives. An editorial in the same issue endorsed Duncan’s findings and accused Paris of pursuing “sophisticated defeatism,” even as it called victory “entirely feasible” and advocated more U.S. support in the war. Bidault, well aware of Life’s huge circulation in the United States, was outraged by Duncan’s claims and threatened to have the magazine pulled from Parisian store shelves. He also instructed officers at the embassy in Washington to register a complaint.22