Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam
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Laniel and Bidault did their best to beat down expectations. On November 30, the premier assured the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Paris that Ho Chi Minh’s statement would not change French policy, and that bilateral Franco–Viet Minh talks were impossible. The same day Bidault told Le Monde that the statement was a mere “propaganda gesture.”39 When Defense Minister René Pleven, excited upon reading the Expressen transcript, floated the idea of having Alain Savary (whose liberal positions on colonial questions had gained respect among nationalists in North Africa and Asia) make contact with Viet Minh leaders in the Tonkin jungle, Bidault vetoed it.40 All too aware of the worrying trends on the ground in Vietnam, and resigned to the need for a political solution, Laniel and Bidault still hoped to enter talks on a multilateral basis, and to do so from a stronger bargaining position, which meant giving Navarre more time to turn the tide. As before, they felt pressure from Washington to remain steadfast in opposition to early talks, and they also kept one eye on the non-Communist nationalists in Saigon. The VNA commander, General Nguyen Van Hinh, rejected Ho’s overture as a “political maneuver,” while Ngo Dinh Nhu, brother of Diem, blasted Laniel for even contemplating negotiations with Ho Chi Minh. Prime Minister Nguyen Van Tam, Hinh’s father, was more circumspect, allowing that Ho’s opening, while hardly satisfactory, warranted a response, including some kind of counteroffer. Tam told a reporter: “Neither Vietnamese opinion nor, I am sure of it, French opinion would understand if we did not do everything possible to stop this bloody war.”41
IV
BUFFETED BY THESE COUNTERVAILING CLAIMS AND CHARGES, LANIEL and Bidault escaped the poisonous atmosphere in Paris for a three-power summit meeting in Bermuda with the leaders of Great Britain and the United States. Originally scheduled for June 1953, the conference was postponed when Winston Churchill that month suffered a serious stroke. This was perhaps an omen, for barely had the planes touched down in Bermuda, starting with Churchill’s on December 2, when several conferees began suffering from the tropical flu. Churchill, frail-looking and hard of hearing (he tried all manner of hearing aid contraptions during the sessions), was in a sour mood from the start, and it seemed contagious. The French were incensed that “The Marseillaise” was not played on their arrival, while both “God Save the Queen” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” were played. The excuse given—that Laniel was not really a head of state—did not mollify them. Nor were they pleased by the way the British and American delegations focused most of their attention on each other, figuratively and literally turning their backs on the French. According to one American observer, British officials were “constantly conferring in quite audible stage whispers and only half smothered giggling and laughter while [the] French were speaking.”42
Churchill’s choice of reading en route to the conference, it may be said, was not the most auspicious preparation: C. S. Forester’s Death to the French.
Laniel was spared the humiliation, having taken to his room with a 104-degree fever soon after arrival. Bidault had to carry the load, and the strain showed. Always inclined to drink when under pressure, he consumed a great deal of wine during the meals and fell asleep during one evening social event. He complained about his predicament, reportedly telling John Foster Dulles at a recess of one meeting: “I am in a very difficult position. Not only is my Prime Minister sick, but he is also a damn fool.” Evelyn Shuckburgh, private secretary to British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, summarized in his magnificently readable diary what he saw: “Everybody very angry, appeals, sentiment, Bidault looks like a dying man, Laniel is actually dying upstairs.… Outburst by Eisenhower and Winston, former left the conference table in a rage, came back, having changed for dinner, sat another four hours.”43
Strangely enough, in view of what was to come, the smoothest relationship at this fractious summit was that between Eden and Dulles. The two lounged together on the beach, the extremely fair-skinned Dulles donning a pair of gaudy shorts, and Eden—still recovering from a difficult operation six months earlier—soaking up the sun. They worked hard to construct a joint communiqué on the fifth and final day, even invading the hotel room of poor, bedridden Laniel to get the task done.44
Much of the discussion at the conference concerned nuclear weapons, with the Europeans expressing unified horror at the Americans’ threat to use the bomb against Chinese targets if the Communists violated the Korean truce.45 On European security, the Americans and British pressed the beleaguered Bidault to ensure swift French approval of the EDC. Should France fail to do so, Dulles warned, the United States would be forced to undertake an “agonizing reappraisal” of American policy toward European defense. Regarding superpower relations, Eisenhower generated nervous smiles from the Europeans with his graphic description of the new, post-Stalin Soviet Union. Russia, he declared, was “a woman of the streets, and whether her dress was new, or just the old one patched, it was certainly the same whore underneath.” America intended to drive her off her present “beat” into the back streets.46
LEADERS OF THE “BIG THREE” MEET IN BERMUDA IN DECEMBER 1953. FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: GEORGES BIDAULT, WINSTON CHURCHILL, JOHN FOSTER DULLES, ANTHONY EDEN, DWIGHT EISENHOWER, AND JOSEPH LANIEL, WHO WOULD SHORTLY TAKE TO HIS ROOM WITH A HIGH FEVER. (photo credit 16.2)
Indochina received less focused attention at Bermuda, in part because of French claims on the first day that the military trends were favorable, with the Viet Minh on the defensive. But the discussion of the war was revealing nonetheless. The negotiations question was plainly on French minds. Before his fever felled him, Laniel told Eisenhower that while many in Paris wanted immediate talks, he was determined first to establish a position of strength. Bidault, for his part, said he personally wanted to stay the course but that French popular will was faltering, especially in light of the cease-fire in Korea. Although Ho Chi Minh’s recent proposal was unacceptable, implying as it did bilateral talks, a five-power conference (including China) might represent a solution provided the Associated States were included.
In response, Eisenhower praised French efforts in Indochina but called a five-power conference “a bad word for the United States.” Still framing the conflict in military terms, the president assured Bidault that additional U.S. military aid was on the way, which to the Frenchman was not exactly the point. Churchill, visibly exhausted, thanked France for all she was doing for empire and freedom, including in Indochina, and said he regretted that Britain had given up India. He urged the French to consider longer terms of military service (which would permit troops to “breed their own kind”) and vaguely suggested that the British counterinsurgency experience in Malaya might have lessons for the French in Indochina.47
And then it was over, this first meeting involving the three Western leaders. No one doubted it would also be the last (as indeed it was). For all their differences, however, for all the indecorous behavior and bad chemistry, on Indochina the delegations seemed to agree: The final communiqué saluted “the valiant forces of France and of the three Associated States” and recognized “the vital importance of their contribution to the defense of the free world.”48 But this boilerplate language evaded the central issue: namely, when and under what format to enter negotiations. Bilateral Franco–Viet Minh talks were ruled out, and Bidault’s tentative suggestion of a five-power conference, a “bad word” in the American lexicon, failed to find support where it counted. The war, Eisenhower had made clear, should go on. General Navarre should be given more time.
CHAPTER 17
“WE HAVE THE IMPRESSION THEY ARE GOING TO ATTACK TONIGHT”
HENRI NAVARRE NEEDED NO ENCOURAGEMENT FROM THE POLITICIANS. On his own, he had made the decisions first to occupy and then to seek battle at Dien Bien Phu. He still believed, at the moment the leaders’ airplanes departed the Bermuda idyll half a world away in early December 1953, that the remote Tonkin valley could be the scene for a spectacular victory, like Na San a year earlier but bigger and more devastating. It would be Na San to the power of ten
. But already there were ominous signs of trouble, visible if not to the French commander then to some of those around him. Battalion-size sorties outside the valley continued to run into difficulties. Major Jean Souquet’s First Colonial Parachute Battalion, for example, came under fierce attack three miles to the northeast on December 4. Eventually the battalion extricated itself, but at the cost of fourteen dead and twenty-six wounded. Documents found on Viet Minh corpses (who were clad in the quilted jackets Ho Chi Minh had called for) indicated they were not regional troops, as hoped, but regulars from Regiment 176 of the 316th Division.1
Major General René Cogny, aware of the division’s rapid advance, now ordered the full evacuation of Lai Chau. Most regulars were evacuated by air, but some 2,100 soldiers, most of them Tai auxiliaries, were ordered to leave on foot, bound for Dien Bien Phu, fifty-five miles to the south. They left in relays between December 5 and 11. Despite supporting air strikes, the poorly trained and lightly armed Tai soon ran into trouble, suffering one ambush after another. Survivors, forced off the tracks, tried desperately to elude rapacious pursuit or chose to give their lives in heroic last stands. Final losses are impossible to determine, but one source has a mere 185 survivors reaching Dien Bien Phu by December 22. Not all the rest were killed, certainly—sizable numbers were able to melt into the jungle and thereby escape their pursuers—but the losses were staggering. Of the larger groups, only Lieutenant Wieme’s three companies were able to straggle into Dien Bien Phu more or less intact by taking a circuitous route far to the east.2
The evacuation of Lai Chau was a major blow for the French-Vietnamese antiguerrilla forces operating in the Tai country. It also allowed the Viet Minh to extend their all-weather road from Kunming to the frontier near Phong Tho, down through Lai Chau, and toward Tuan Giao. Even the most skilled army press officer could not cover the fact that the loss of Lai Chau was, in these ways, a significant military defeat. Psychologically too it hurt, for the town was the capital of the Tai tribes and a symbol of French support and strength in the region. Now it was gone. On December 12, regiments of the 316th Division entered the abandoned town.3
The division’s pace had been relentless, even for an army that had long since proved its ability to traverse wide stretches of difficult country at speed. Troops covered twenty miles by day, usually just off the roads, or up to thirty by night, since under darkness they did not have to worry about concealment from the air. Each man carried his weapon, a week’s supply of rice (usually replenished at depots along the way), a water bottle, a shovel, a mosquito net, and a little salt in a bamboo tube. He marched from dawn to dusk, or vice versa, with a ten-minute rest every hour. The nighttime marches were blissfully cool but physically much more grueling. Upon arrival, groups of soldiers dug a foxhole in which to take shelter and sleep, spreading a piece of nylon on the bottom. Then they washed their feet with salt water. Some men had footwear, while some made do with sandals cut out of tires. Fatigue was constant, and food was sometimes limited to greens and bamboo shoots picked in the jungle.4 Vietnamese accounts give few hints of the morale problems alluded to by Ho Chi Minh back in September, but surely they existed, among some units at least. The pace was too rapid, the conditions too punishing, the terrain too treacherous, for it to have been otherwise. But neither can it be doubted that the 316th showed extraordinary resilience and cohesiveness, moving so far so fast, nor that its positioning posed a serious danger to the garrison at the south end of the Pavie Piste.
The man given the task of meeting that threat was Colonel Christian Marie Ferdinand de la Croix de Castries, age fifty-one, a tall, debonair, aristocratic cavalryman who became commander at Dien Bien Phu early in the Lai Chau evacuation. De Castries, however, didn’t convey much concern. It was his nature to assume a nonchalant air when confronted with major challenges, and conversely to be overly serious about less important matters. Descended from a long line of high military officers—one marshal, one admiral, and eight generals, one of whom had served with Lafayette in America—de Castries was dashing and courageous, a notorious womanizer, a dilettante with a file full of youthful peccadilloes. If there was a fashionable high-society event in interwar Paris, chances were de Castries was in attendance, each time with a different woman on his arm. A superb horseman, he had won two world riding titles in the 1930s—he was the only person to hold both the high- and broad-jump records. Taken prisoner by the Germans in the Battle of France, he escaped in 1941 and, as a major in the liberation army, led troops in the Italian, French, and German campaigns. In 1946 de Castries went to Indochina, and he returned for a second tour in 1951, sustaining injuries at Vinh Yen. Navarre had known him for years and had been his regimental commander during the victorious dash into Germany in 1944–45; the two cavalrymen got on well. Cogny gave his assent to the appointment, but mostly because he thought de Castries supercilious and vain and wanted him away from his own headquarters in Hanoi.5
De Castries arrived at Dien Bien Phu on December 8, sporting a glittering shooting stick, a scarlet foulard, and the red calot, or peaked overseas cap, of his old cavalry regiment. No shrinking violet he. Jean Gilles, relieved to be leaving, showed him around the camp and introduced him to the officers, some of whom were quick to point out that commando operations outside the valley were already encountering severe problems. The enemy was in close, they told him; they were hemmed in. For de Castries, whose dislike for static, defensive warfare was well-known, who indeed had been selected for the job in part because he, possessing the cavalryman’s gambler mentality, would activate Navarre’s plan for offensive operations, it should have been a sobering message. But he struck an upbeat tone in those early days, even as news filtered in of the terrible fate suffered by the Tai partisans struggling southward from Lai Chau. Probably the officers were exaggerating the difficulties of the mobile operations, he thought. And besides, the enemy would not have heavy weapons at his disposal. Even if by some miracle he got some of them in place on the hillside, the French artillery would soon annihilate them.6
And so, de Castries got to work supervising the construction of strong-points in the valley. Eventually there would be nine of them, all given female names—reputedly those of former de Castries mistresses (though also representing letters of the alphabet). Most of the garrison was packed in defensive positions around the airstrip—Dominique, Huguette, Claudine, and Eliane—while to the west stood the smaller Françoise. On two small hills to the north and northeast, a mile and a half away, there were Gabrielle and Béatrice, each holding a battalion. Beyond Huguette to the northwest, a series of loosely connected points manned by Tai auxiliaries was christened Anne-Marie, while three miles to the south, all by herself, stood Isabelle. Two battalions were given the tasks of supporting the central position with artillery fire and of defending a secondary airstrip. Much effort went into protecting the defensive positions with bunkers, trenches, and barbed-wire entanglements and into the construction of an underground central headquarters and hospital. There would be water filtration plants (amoebic dysentery was endemic), generating stations, maintenance repair shops for tanks, ammunition dumps, and general stores.
The problem was acquiring sufficient building material for this work—some thirty thousand tons, according to the estimate of Major André Sudrat, the engineering commander. Realizing quickly that having even a fraction of that tonnage flown in would be impossible (especially given that food and ammunition would have priority), Sudrat asked for what he considered the bare essentials: three thousand tons of barbed wire. If he expected the resources of the valley to provide a significant substitute for the missing shipments, he was soon disappointed. There was no cement, no sand, no stone, no brick, and curiously enough, almost no wood. The basin was almost completely devoid of trees, while the wooded slopes were trackless. Venturing farther out for timber was a fool’s errand, for there lurked Viet Minh scouts and skirmishers. The chief engineer thus saw no option but to order the demolishing of local peasants’ dwellings to obtain
what little wood could be had—thereby, of course, earning their enmity. With the shrubbery going to fuel the garrison’s cooking fires, the valley soon began to resemble a barren moonscape. This in itself did not trouble the French; for them it was standard procedure to open fields of fire and deny cover to the enemy. But it was welcome news to the Viet Minh, whose forward observers, from their positions on the hills, could distinctly see the French coming and going like ants in the valley basin, could observe their routines, could learn their ways. With binoculars, even de Castries and his red scarf could easily be discerned.7
II
NO DOUBT THE BINOCULARS WERE OUT WHEN A SPECIAL VISITOR deplaned on Christmas Eve. It was General Navarre, there to celebrate mass with his troops. The garrison was by then a formidable entity, at least in terms of size, each day over the past weeks having brought reinforcements by air: Foreign Legion, Moroccan, and Algerian battalions; colonial artillery batteries with sizable numbers of black African gunners; intelligence and engineer units; doctors and nurses; and even, for the Legion, prostitutes of two bordels mobiles de campagne—mobile field bordellos. The number of French Union troops in the valley now totaled 10,910, and the steady stream of Dakotas was also bringing large amounts of weaponry and ammunition. American-supplied Bearcat fighters were in place. Navarre could even view the first platoon of three U.S.-made M-24 “Chaffee” tanks being readied for action. They had been airlifted into the camp in two sections—chassis and turret—and were being reassembled laboriously with a block-and-tackle rig.8
Word of the general’s arrival soon spread from one strongpoint to the next. He was not a popular man among the officers and men, but he won credit for making this effort to be with his troops for the holiday—which, in the Continental tradition, was celebrated on Christmas Eve. He might be cold and distant, clumsy in his shyness, a mere armchair general, they told one another, but at least he’s here. The visit raised spirits among the battalions and around the spindly, vaguely sinister-looking Christmas tree decorated with whatever colored bits of paper and cotton a group of soldiers and nurses had managed to find. By nightfall the strains of “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,” sung by German legionnaires, could be heard rising into the darkness, accompanied by faint mortar shots in the distance. At the officers’ mess of the Legion, meanwhile, there was more singing, and much coarse conversation, as the champagne flowed.9