For the first years of the war, Giap concentrated on small-unit operations. The logical French response was to strike at the Viet Minh while they were weak, in an attempt to “decapitate” the leadership and disorganize the fledgling army. But French operations, while enjoying some success, failed to inflict decisive damage on an elusive foe. Meanwhile, the 1949 Communist victory in China initiated a series of events that produced a decisive turn in the war, for China gave Giap a sanctuary in which to train brigade—and eventually division-size—forces. After the summer of 1950, these were well supplied largely with American arms collected on the battlefields of Korea.
The posts along the R.C. 4 were now on the front line of the conflict. Isolated and vulnerable, many of their satellites were little more than log bunkers that would not have looked out of place on the American frontier three quarters of a century earlier. As early as 1948, Giap had begun to pressure the convoys that supplied the garrisons, and soon there was a murderous struggle to keep these posts alive.
A sergeant of the Third Regiment of the Foreign Legion later described one such attack to French journalist Lucien Bodard. It had occurred at a point where the road passed through a narrow gorge.
First, the Viets paralyzed the convoy. Mines blew just behind the leading armored cars, separating them from the trucks. As soon as this happened, a dozen impregnable machine guns, perched on the limestone cliffs above, opened fire, enfilading the entire column. Then a hailstorm of grenades came down. Regulars, hidden elbow to elbow on the embankment which dominated the roadway, threw them with precision, a dozen per vehicle. It was a firestorm. Trucks burned everywhere, completely blocking the way.
As the Viet Minh attacked, the legionnaires jumped from their trucks and climbed the embankment through a surging tide of Vietnamese. There the legionnaires grouped to defend themselves. “The Viets proceeded methodically,” the sergeant continued:
The regulars went from truck to truck picking up the abandoned arms and supplies, then they fired the vehicles. Others attacked the French who still fought on the embankment. The coolies finished off with machetes the wounded who had fallen on the roadway or at the bottom of the bank. It was hand to hand everywhere. There were hundreds of individual fights, hundreds of reciprocal exterminations. In this slaughterhouse, the political commissars, very calm, directed the work, giving orders to the regulars and the coolies which were immediately executed…. The Red officers circulated in the middle of the battle, crying in French, “Where is the colonel? Where is the colonel?” They were looking for Colonel Simon, commander of the Troisieme etranger, the man who had a bullet in his head—a bullet lodged there from years ago…. He was in the convoy and Giap had or-dered that he be taken alive.
I was in the part of the convoy which was destroyed. I was on the embankment with several legionnaires. We defended ourselves furiously there for a half hour, then we were overrun. I escaped into the forest. I hid in a thicket fifty yards from the road. Just next to me I heard several shots. It was legionnaires who blew their brains out. They had been discovered by the Viets. They didn't find me.
I don't know how this nightmare finished. It seems that Colonel Simon succeeded in assembling around him a hundred of his men. Formed in squares, they fought off the Viet waves with grenades for hours. Three hours later, reinforcements arrived—heavy rescue tanks. A few minutes before one heard the noise of their tracks, the Viets had beat it. At the beginning, to attack, they had blown the bugle charge. They gave the signal for the retreat by a new bugle call. They disappeared into the jungle in perfect order, unit after unit. Special formations of coolies took their killed, their wounded, as well as all the booty they had picked up.
We were masters of the battlefield. The road was a cemetery, a charnel house. The convoy was nothing but a tangle of disemboweled corpses and burned-out machines. It already stank. The survivors reassembled. They cleared the road and collected the dead and wounded. The convoy, or what was left of it, departed.
That night, upon reaching Cao Bang, they all drank themselves into oblivion.
As casualties mounted on the road that the legionnaires had already baptized the route de sang or the route de la mort, the French began to wonder if this string of isolated outposts was worth the blood and treasure required to secure them. In May 1949 the government dispatched the army chief of staff, General Georges Revers, to Indochina to report his opinion. Revers returned to recommend, among other things, that these posts be evacuated, a recommendation endorsed by the Comite de defense nationale on July 25. The commander in chief in Indochina, General Roger Blaizot, made preparations to withdraw from the R.C. 4 in September.
At this point two things occurred to postpone an evacuation order that was already dangerously overdue. The first was one of those bizarre scandals with which French politics appear to abound. On September 18 a fight broke out on a bus in Paris's Gare de Lyon between Thomas Perez, a former legionnaire, and two Indochinese students just back from the Communist-sponsored World Youth Congress in Budapest. The origins of the dispute are obscure, in part because Perez disappeared into the legion, which refused to identify him. But the fracas appears to have been manufactured by the colonial intelligence service, to call attention to a serious security leak: When the two students were arrested, a copy of the Revers report was found in their possession. Subsequent police raids on the Vietnamese community in France turned up literally hundreds of copies of the Revers report held by both pro-French and pro–Viet Minh factions.
What became known as “the Generals' Plot” had important results, both in France and in Indochina. In France, the discredit heaped upon Revers and his report further obfuscated, if that was possible, an already hopelessly confused French policy in Indochina. It revealed an indecision and confusion that stretched from the highest echelons of the French Fourth Republic, a regime badly riven by ideological, party, and personal quarrels. This made it vulnerable to pressure by colonial and military interests hostile to Revers's recommendation that a greater degree of autonomy be accorded the French-sponsored Vietnamese government under Emperor Bao Dai. For these reasons, the Fourth Republic was not a government capable of setting a firm policy for the war, but one in which prevarication and unsatisfactory compromise were the order of the day. In Indochina, Giap was alerted that sooner or later, the French would pull out of their posts along the R.C. 4. And he would be waiting for them.
The second event that postponed the planned withdrawal occurred in Hanoi. Just at the moment when General Blaizot was preparing to evacuate the R.C. 4, he was replaced as commander in chief by General Marcel Carpentier.
On the surface, at least, Carpentier's appointment appeared to offer the French army in Indochina the quality leadership they had often been lacking. He was one of the French military's “stars” and had already made a name for himself by 1915, when, as the youngest captain in the French army, he had won both the Legion d'Honneur and the Croix de Guerre with five citations. He rose from major in 1940 to major general by 1944 as a result of brilliant service as chief of staff to both of the French army's leading commanders in the later stages of World War II: General Alphonse Juin and General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. Carpentier had himself commanded the elite 2nd Moroccan Infantry Division during the hard fighting in Alsace in the winter of 1944–45. Outwardly confident, cordial, and full of common sense, he appeared the embodiment of the perfect commander.
Yet Carpentier's veneer of self-assurance thinly disguised a deep apprehension about his new command. Like so many officers who had spent most of their careers in the European or North African theaters, he found Indochina complex and disorienting. His unease at being thrust into a situation for which he felt unprepared accentuated a lack of imagination and a lack of instinct for command, which Juin had detected earlier. With no firm convictions of his own and no definite orders from Paris, Carpentier found it difficult to dominate the old Indochina hands led by General Marcel Alessandri, who commanded the Tonkin region.
Alessandri had been a candidate for supreme command in Indochina, but his absence from the corridors of power in Paris and his associations with the pro-Vichy factions that had ruled Indochina during World War II combined to remove his name from the list. In Indochina his opinions carried extra weight because he was a good general: He had earned fame by leading a fighting retreat of five thousand French troops through the jungles of northern Tonkin to China after the Japanese treacherously attacked French garrisons in 1945. His campaign in 1949 to shut the Viet Minh out of the Tonkin Delta, thus depriving them of rice and recruits, was one of the most successful carried out by the French and added to his prestige. And Alessandri firmly believed that the R.C. 4 garrison of Cao Bang must not be abandoned.
As often in history, there are many good reasons for doing the wrong thing. Alessandri and Carpentier, each in his way, would bear that out. The argument was advanced that the victory of the Chinese Communists made maintenance of the line of frontier posts more important than ever as a way to constrict the arrival of supplies to the Viet Minh from the north. The R.C. 4 was the first line of defense for the vital Tonkin Delta, the barrier upon which any Viet Minh offensive must invariably shatter. Alessandri even drew up plans for an ambitious offensive against Viet Minh bases in the Tonkin highlands, plans Carpentier rejected out of hand as pure adventure.
Revealing a prejudice that was to afflict the French throughout the Indochina war despite ample evidence to the contrary, Alessandri argued that operationally and tactically, the Viet Minh lacked the ability to overrun these garrisons, especially Cao Bang, which he believed could be held against an attack of fifteen Viet Minh battalions backed by artillery. To bolster their case, those who advocated holding fast on the R.C. 4 pointed to Giap's failure to take the company-size satellite posts around Lao Cai on the Red River, which he attacked in 1949. These arguments would find a tragic echo four years later, when it was alleged that Giap's inability to take Na San the previous year proved that bases aero-terrestre like Dien Bien Phu were invulnerable. (These represented a new military concept in 1952—posts linked to French bases only by air.)
Departure from Cao Bang would also require abandoning much equipment, which could never be evacuated via the ambush-lined route. In the end, the French were victims of their own prejudices and myths: They believed in the historical inferiority of Vietnamese soldiers, labeled anyone who argued for withdrawal a defeatist, and asserted that abandoning the cemeteries that lined the R.C. 4 would insult the memory of dead comrades.
While the French high command was ruled by discord and division, Giap forged a clear, if flawed, strategic picture based on Mao Tse-tung's theories. Giap believed that the Communist victory in China permitted him to pass to a stage in which the two armies could meet on the battlefield as military equals. Guided by these theories and aided by his Chinese allies, he trained and equipped five combat divisions—the 304th, 308th, 312th, 316th, and 320th— of twelve thousand men each. These divisions were primitive by Western standards, but their rusticity was actually advantageous in the battle conditions of the remote Tonkin highlands against the road-bound French. Giap's next task was to make them proficient in the art of attacking French fortified posts.
In February 1950, Giap hurled his 308th Division, which would come to be celebrated as the “Iron Division,” at the company-size post of Pho Lu on the R.C. 4 and overran it in a matter of hours. Nghia Do, another outpost in the Lao Cai area near the Chinese border, was attacked by the 308th the following month and was saved only by the timely arrival of an entire French paratroop battalion. Rather than expend casualties on such an isolated and strategically insignificant place—and perhaps also because his supply lines, assured by an army of coolies, were overextended—Giap backed down. Instead, he decided that his army was ready to take advantage of the French overextension on the R.C. 4.
At 6:45 on the morning of May 25, 1950, a violent artillery barrage suddenly rained down upon the two companies of Moroccans at Dong Khe, on the R.C. 4 some two hundred miles to the east of Lao Cai. Unobserved by the garrison, the Viet Minh had succeeded in hoisting five well-camouflaged 75mm cannon onto the heights above the town. There, for two days, they “fired down the tubes” into the French post, using the same techniques they were to employ at Dien Bien Phu, seconded by a number of heavy mortars and machine guns. A heavy monsoon cloud cover, together with well-positioned antiaircraft guns, kept French air support to a minimum.
On the evening of May 26, the bombardment increased in intensity as prelude
to an attack by the 308th, which was unleashed on the citadel of Dong Khe just before midnight. Early on May 27, around fifty survivors of Dong Khe filed down the R.C. 4 toward That Khe. Cao Bang had been cut off.
In Hanoi, Alessandri reacted immediately. Collecting thirty-four aircraft, he dropped a battalion of French colonial paratroopers on Dong Khe at around five o'clock on the evening of May 27. Despite having to run a gauntlet of violent antiaircraft and machine-gun fire, the paratroopers took a brigade of the 308th completely by surprise as they ransacked the town and, after fierce fighting that cost the Viet Minh three hundred dead, ejected them into the jungle. In the following days, operations were carried out to clear the R.C. 4 of Viet Minh.
Despite the impressive amount of heavy equipment lost by the French, and the fact that twenty-five of the thirty-four aircraft that had flown the paratroopers in had been damaged by antiaircraft fire, the French persisted in calling Dong Khe a victory. They attributed the success of the Viet Minh assault to skittishness of the Moroccan garrison, while the counterattack by the French paratroopers proved to French satisfaction that one of their parabattalions was worth an entire brigade of the Iron Division.
To be fair to the French, the struggle along the R.C. 4 was one part of a large war, a war that they could claim with some justification to have stabilized by the summer of 1950. They had enjoyed great success in Cochin China, the southernmost of Vietnam's three provinces, in pushing the Viet Minh away from Saigon. Indeed, a Viet Minh offensive launched in the south in August– September 1950 to cover Giap's preparations in Tonkin resulted in heavy Viet Minh losses. The pacification campaign in the Tonkin Delta appeared to be going well, although, as time would show, it lacked the essential political ingredient to make it stick: The absence of a government political infrastructure on the local level allowed the Viet Minh to filter back as soon as French troops had waded out of sight over the rice paddies. The French government also had authorized reinforcements for the expeditionary corps, and a Vietnamese army was on its way to being established. Furthermore, the outbreak of war in Korea in June 1950 promised to produce active U.S. support for the French in Indochina. The Indochina war was no longer an unfashionable colonial conflict. It now was one front in a global struggle being waged by the free world against international Communism.
Carpentier believed that a Korea-style invasion of Indochina by Chinese and Viet Minh forces was imminent, and that the frontier posts must be maintained at all costs. Nevertheless, he was not blind to the danger he was running on the R.C. 4. Convoys could no longer travel beyond That Khe, and Dong Khe and Cao Bang were supplied entirely by aircraft, a commodity in which the French were not rich. Cao Bang and Dong Khe were islands in a Viet Minh sea, and on September 2, 1950, Carpentier at last decided to abandon them.
The next question was how. There were three options open to him, and Carpentier chose the worst. He rejected the first, an air evacuation of Cao Bang, because while the troops could be withdrawn by Dakotas and old German Ju-52s in two days, it would mean sacrificing Cao Bang's several hundred civil-ians—a motley of Chinese and Vietnamese merchants and prostitutes. A more prolonged air evacuation would attract Viet Minh attention and make life very difficult for the elements holding the perimeter.
The second option was to pull the garrison out down the R.C. 3. This would mean a l15-mile trek through Viet Minh territory to the Tonkin Delta. The advantage of this route was that it would march the garrison
away from the main Viet Minh divisions along the Chinese frontier, through country that was less difficult and less tightly held by the enemy.
However, Carpentier decided to pull out along the R.C. 4, reasoning that the thirty-three miles from Cao Bang to Dong Khe, and the thirteen miles separating Dong Khe from That Khe, could be covered in quick stages. On September 16 he ordered Alessandri to prepare to evacuate Cao Bang and Dong Khe just as soon as French forces launched a successful diversionary capture of Thai Nguyen on the R.C. 3, which he expected to be complete by October 1.
Even before Carpentier's order was issued, it was hopelessly out of date. At seven A.M. on September 16, another hail of artillery and mortar shells pummeled Dong Khe, this time held by two companies of the Troisieme etranger. After the two days of softening up, by now familiar, a human wave overran the post at dawn on September 18. A week later, an officer and thirty-one legionnaires appeared out of the jungle at a French post on the R.C. 4 just outside of That Khe—the only survivors of Dong Khe.
The commander of the frontier zone, a Colonel Constans, was directing the battle by radio from Lang Son over fifty miles away. He tried to organize a repeat of the successful May 27 paratroop assault on Dong Khe, but was overruled by the man who had temporarily replaced General Alessandri, now on leave in France. The replacement—a General Marchand—concluded correctly that the Viet Minh would not be surprised by this maneuver a second time. In fact, they were waiting for it, guns pointed skyward. That Colonel Constans was willing to try shows the measure of the fantasy world in which some French commanders lived, and how little they appreciated the Viet Minh's strengths.
At this point Carpentier made a series of decisions that turned what was already an unpromising plan into a catastrophic one. With Dong Khe strongly held by the Viet Minh, it no longer made any sense to evacuate the Cao Bang garrison down the R.C. 4. The only options were an air evacuation or a retreat down the R.C. 3 toward French forces moving upon Thai Nguyen from the delta.
The Cold War Page 33