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

by Fredrik Logevall

  The dilemma was acute, as Shuckburgh observed in his diary that evening: “If we refuse to cooperate with the US plan, we strain the Alliance. If we do as Dulles asks, we certainly provoke the bitterest hostility of India and probably all other Asiatic states and destroy the Commonwealth. Also, a war for Indo-China would be about as difficult a thing to put across the British public as you could find.”53

  Eden and his team landed at 10:20 P.M., got into two waiting cars, and drove straight to Churchill’s country estate, Chequers, arriving shortly before midnight. There to greet them was the prime minister, wearing a silken two-piece suit covered by a dressing gown. Drinks were distributed, whereupon Eden laid out the essentials of the situation. Churchill heard him out, then ruminated on “our glorious Empire, our wonderful Indian Empire, we have cast it away”—the implication being, thought Shuckburgh, why should Britain fight for a decrepit French colonial effort after that? Then a cold supper, during which general agreement was reached that Britain should reject the American request. In London the following morning, the cabinet, in a rare Sunday meeting to which the chiefs of staff were also summoned, needed little persuasion to confirm the rejection. The chiefs of staff said the proposed action would be ineffective and added that even a total collapse in Indochina would not decisively affect the British position in Malaya. The domino theory did not hold.54

  VII

  BUT THE WEEKEND DRAMA WAS NOT OVER. THAT SAME MORNING in Washington Walter Bedell Smith, having learned that the French cabinet had in fact declined late on Saturday night to accept Dulles’s letter and instead wanted simply an air bombardment at Dien Bien Phu, made a new offer to the French ambassador: If Paris could persuade the British to join even nominally a coalition dedicated to preventing Communist expansion in Southeast Asia, and if the Laniel government would agree to grant America strategic command in Indochina, then the administration could seek a congressional resolution that would allow a carrier-based strike force to go into action at Dien Bien Phu in three days’ time, or by April 27. The action might come too late to save the fortress, but it could stiffen French resistance elsewhere in Indochina.

  Eden learned of this new American proposal in the early afternoon during a hastily arranged meeting with René Massigli, the French ambassador. Immediately the ministers and the chiefs of staff were told to return for a second session, which convened at four o’clock. Eden made no attempt to hide his fury. This was a naked attempt by Washington to make Britain responsible for any failure to prevent Communist expansion in the region, he told the group, and he resented “this indirect approach [by the Americans] to the United Kingdom Government through the French.” It spoke volumes that Smith had spoken only to the French ambassador in Washington and not to the British. The plan for a strike at Dien Bien Phu would be unsuccessful and was likely a red herring, Eden continued; the real objective would turn out to be China. The cabinet had no authority from Parliament to support such action, and it might be condemned by the United Nations. A dangerous escalation might follow, leading ultimately to a “third world war.”

  Churchill agreed. He told the group he disliked being asked to “assist in misleading Congress” into authorizing a military operation that would not salvage the situation for France and that could take the world to the brink of a major war. The request must be rejected. No voice rose up in opposition, and the meeting reaffirmed the consensus of the earlier meeting. Eden flew to Geneva, touching down briefly at Orly airport in Paris to inform Bidault of the government’s decision. The Frenchman, never confident he would get a positive reply, took the news stoically.55

  Not so Admiral Radford, who made the case for intervention personally to Churchill at Chequers on April 26. He held nothing back. Defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and failure by the United States and Great Britain to take appropriate action to try to prevent it, would be a huge victory for Communism and a turning point in history. The French government would fall, the EDC would fail to win ratification, and NATO itself might be destroyed. Southeast Asia would be lost, Japan would turn toward Communism, and Australia and New Zealand would be in danger. Nationalists in North Africa would rise up against the French, which would spread unrest and disquiet into the rest of Africa and the Middle East. In short, the effects would be global and calamitous. But it was not too late. Radford said he had been present at a meeting with congressional leaders at which the legislators made clear that they would approve action to save Indochina—if Great Britain was willing to cooperate. There was no time to waste, however, for each day that passed meant a proportionate gain for the Communist powers at the West’s expense. Now was the hour to make a stand against China, and the prime minister need not fear that the Russians, who were fearful of war, would join in the struggle and openly aid the Chinese.

  Churchill did not deny that the fall of Dien Bien Phu could be a momentous turning point in history. He was reminded, he said, of the situation at Warsaw in 1919, when the Russians, sweeping westward, were stopped by Pilsudski with the advice and help of General Weygand and Lord d’Abernon. The tide was halted and indeed turned back. The question was if the same thing could be done this time. Churchill thought not, and said it was in any event premature to take action prior to Geneva. Diplomacy, what he called “conversations at the centre,” must now assume primary importance. Such negotiations might or might not prove successful, but they would be understood by the British people far better than taking up arms in far-off Southeast Asia. A great part of his life and strength, the prime minister concluded, had been directed toward strengthening the bond between English-speaking peoples and in particular between Great Britain and America. But the two allies could not now allow themselves to commit to a policy that might lead to their destruction and that was almost certain to be militarily ineffective. “The loss of the fortress must be faced,” Churchill said bluntly, and France had insufficient forces to hold down all the rest of Indochina. The sensible policy was for France to withdraw to areas she could realistically hold, and for London and Washington to await the outcome at Geneva before taking further measures.56

  One of Churchill’s assertions in particular stuck in Radford’s craw. The prime minister said he doubted Britain would be willing to help save Indochina for France when she had not been willing to save India for herself. It was almost incomprehensible, Radford confided to Richard Nixon three days later, that the same Churchill who had understood the seriousness of the Communist menace so fully back in 1947 and 1948 could make such a foolish statement, could equate the two crises in terms of their importance.57

  Radford thanked the prime minister for his time and said he would report the full content of their conversation to Eisenhower upon returning to Washington the next day. In the absence of close Anglo-American cooperation, he added obliquely, both the United States and the United Kingdom would drift to disaster.58

  It did not help Radford’s cause that British officials judged him a rather dim bulb, lacking in subtlety and always seeming, as one said, to be “raring for a scrap” with Beijing. It irritated them that he would come to England to pressure them into joining what Eden contemptuously referred to as “Radford’s war against China.”59 The Foreign Office surmised that Radford’s unvarnished stridency was not fully representative of the administration’s position, which was true enough but missed a crucial point: It had been Eisenhower’s idea to have the admiral dash across the Channel after Paris to try to talk some sense into the selfish and pusillanimous British.

  When a dejected Radford boarded his plane for the return flight across the Atlantic, it brought to an end a remarkable fortnight in American diplomacy. On two occasions—starting in this same city on April 11—John Foster Dulles had come to Europe to make the case for an internationalization of the Indochina War. Both times he had shown a willingness to mislead his allied counterparts regarding the state of congressional and military opinion in the United States and the necessary conditions for American military intervention. Yet both times he had failed to
find support where it mattered most, in London. Anthony Eden had refused to play along. He and his colleagues saw the stakes and the possibilities in Indochina differently than their American cousins, and they were much more fearful of the dangers of escalation. The poor chemistry between the two men, evident for months, had evolved into obvious and open dislike. Nor was the feud likely to end anytime soon: Both were now in Switzerland for the start of the Geneva Conference. There would be no avoiding each other there, no avoiding the need to strategize about the crucial negotiations to come.

  In Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, sounding very much the hawk, fumed about London’s obstructionism and “morbid obsession” with World War III. The British, he complained in his diary on April 27, were showing “woeful unawareness” of the risks “we run in that region.” And the French were no better. “The French have used weasel words in promising independence and through this one reason as much as anything else, have suffered reverses that have really been inexcusable,” the president told childhood friend Swede Hazlett the same day. Even as he railed against his allies, however, Ike continued to frame the issue in military terms. To Hazlett, he said he wanted to see the Communists “take a good smacking in Indo-China,” while to Republican legislative leaders, he warned of the dangers of not coming to France’s aid. “Where in the hell can you let the Communists chip away any more? We just can’t stand it.”60

  Therein lay the rub, as Eisenhower knew. Having determined that Indochina must be held, and having stated publicly that failure to hold it could have disastrous consequences for American and Western security, his administration felt pressure to act forcefully to prevent such a calamity from occurring. Its credibility was on the line, both internationally and at home—or so the president and his aides feared. The public information campaign launched a month earlier had achieved considerable gains domestically—Congress and the press largely bought the administration’s claims regarding Indochina’s vital importance, and its domino theorizing—but that very success also had the effect of reducing the president’s maneuverability. Fail now to prevent a Viet Minh victory, and a lot of powerful voices in American society would attack the White House for standing by as the Communists gained a crucial piece of territory.

  Yet the prospect of unilateral intervention involving U.S. ground troops carried its own political risks, Eisenhower understood, with memories of an unpopular war in Korea still fresh in people’s minds and with Republicans facing midterm elections in the fall. Sure, people would initially rally around the flag and around the president, as they always did in times of international crisis. But Vietnam was too remote from Middle America, and the core issues too murky, for the support to last long. It would be a “little war,” and under the administration’s massive retaliation policy, such interventions were to be avoided—nations that persisted in hostile action were to be warned, given a chance to be peaceful, then hit with the full force of American striking power if they failed to relent. A-bombs and H-bombs would take the place of GIs as the counter to aggression.

  And there were other grounds too, Eisenhower knew, to question the wisdom of going in alone. The number of troops required, for one thing, would likely be large, given the size of the area involved. Viet Minh forces in Indochina in late April 1954, as superimposed on a map of the United States, were spread from Vermont down to Savannah, Georgia. Fighting had been raging, in this analogy, around a fort near Rochester, New York, while nightly attacks were common in New England, in the Carolinas, and with thrusts made into western Pennsylvania.61 Nor was it clear where the U.S. troops would come from. Of the twenty-two current combat divisions (nineteen army and three marine), five were tied down in Europe, unavailable to be withdrawn for limited war elsewhere. Nine were committed in Korea, or were standing by in Japan to prevent a resumption of fighting in Korea. That left eight divisions at home in the United States, in training or standing by in case of a “big war,” a number that Pentagon planners insisted was close to the minimum force required at home for basic security. Finally, in geostrategic terms, would the United States be perceived as a colonialist aggressor in the eyes of the world if she went in unilaterally? Would America’s prestige (and Eisenhower’s own personal historical legacy) be irrevocably tied to achieving victory in such a war? Yes and yes, the president feared.

  And so, he determined, the focus would have to remain on collective action, both diplomatically at Geneva and militarily in Vietnam. London would have to be coaxed into coming on board, or some means be found to get around what Radford, on his return to Washington, despairingly called Britain’s “veto power” over U.S. policy.62 Perhaps it would be possible to cobble together a coalition without her. But it wouldn’t happen quickly, not quickly enough to affect the situation at Dien Bien Phu. For all the disagreement and ill will between the Churchill and Eisenhower governments, on this point they were now in full accord: The garrison was in all likelihood doomed. No allied intervention would be sufficient. Only a miracle could save it.

  CHAPTER 21

  VALLEY OF TEARS

  TUESDAY, APRIL 27, 1954, DAWNED GRAY AND DAMP AT DIEN BIEN Phu. So thick were the clouds during the night’s storms that hardly any planes got through, and twenty Dakotas, laden with supplies to be air-dropped over the camp, turned around and flew back to their base in the delta. Only fifty volunteers were dropped in as reinforcements for the garrison. The following night the Dakotas again were forced to turn back, though some eighty legionnaires succeeded in parachuting in over strongpoint Isabelle.

  The abortive missions were a common occurrence now, for the monsoon season had begun. Some five months it would last, during which sixty inches of rain could be expected to fall in the Tai highlands. Life in the garrison, arduous enough before, now became almost unimaginably grim, particularly in the lowland sector in the west of the camp and at Isabelle to the south, as the ground turned to mud and as the perimeter continued to shrink in the face of shellfire, mortars, and sniping. Movement was largely confined to the crumbling labyrinth of trenches, where the liquid mud could be knee-deep and where the men, unwilling to risk making a dash for the latrine trench, relieved themselves on the spot. It was Passchendaele 1917 all over again. Food was in short supply, and exhaustion from lack of sleep a constant concern. Most of the paratroopers and legionnaires had now been in action for at least forty-five days—the point after which, studies of World War II soldiers show, fatigue no longer causes merely dangerous carelessness but physical and emotional breakdown.1 Support aircraft, meanwhile, were often denied sight of the ground, if not by turbulent masses of cumulonimbus clouds, then by the crachin, the dry fog characteristic of the Tonkin highlands at all times of the year.

  The rains worsened the already-miserable conditions for the wounded in the camp and for the medical staff, headed by the estimable Major Grauwin. The team of doctors and its one fully trained nurse—Geneviève de Galard-Terraube, age twenty-nine, who along with a few prostitutes was the only woman left in the camp and whom the Paris press heralded as the “Angel of Dien Bien Phu”—had worked indefatigably for weeks on end and had succeeded in creating a makeshift but reasonably well-functioning surgery. But now the system suffered a breakdown. On April 17, the hospital reported its first confirmed case of gangrene, and in the days thereafter, monsoon rains began seeping in everywhere. Space limitations became still more acute, and the Moroccan sappers of the 31st Engineering Battalion were set to work, night after night, to dig new tunnels into the ground in order to make room for the wounded, some eight hundred of whom were awaiting evacuation. Grauwin meanwhile faced an enemy of a different sort, as maggots invaded the infirmary and laid their eggs under bloody bandages and plaster casts. “At night,” Grauwin later recalled, “it was a shocking sight to watch those repugnant little white worms moving over the hands, the faces, and in the ears of the sleeping wounded.” He tried to reassure the panic-stricken men that the maggots, by eating dead and infected tissue, were hastening the healing process.2


  Through it all they carried on, these dwindling battalions, and, remarkable though it seems, kept their discipline largely intact. April to this point had seen 701 men killed, 1,948 wounded, 375 unaccounted for, and 47 deserters.3 Yet volunteer replacements continued to come forward and, despite the weather problems, to descend into the camp. Their numbers were never large enough to make up for the casualties—which ran between fifty and a hundred per day in late April—but they were a welcome sight nonetheless. Even more extraordinary, many of the troops maintained the belief, well into the first week of May, that victory would come in the end, that the enemy would be broken and have to withdraw. These men reacted with incredulity whenever a newly arrived comrade would speak of the pessimism that reigned in Hanoi. How could this be? The enemy was suffering no less than they were, after all, indeed had it much worse, judging by the far greater number of casualties he was incurring. His trenches must be filling up as quickly as theirs. As long as the key strongpoints held, the men told one another as they peered out of the bunkers at the darkened mountains surrounding them, their eyes red with exhaustion, it would all work out in the end. The politicians in Geneva would make a deal, or a relief column would arrive from Laos. Or, best of all, the rumors were true and the Americans would send in their B-29s and annihilate the Viet Minh positions and supply lines.