The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The snub was not given in ignorance of conditions in Vietnam. A report in October by Arthur Hale, of the United States Information Service in Hanoi, made it apparent that French promises of reform and some vague shape of autonomy, which American policy counted on, were not going to satisfy. The people wanted the French out. Posters crying “Independence or Death!” in all towns and villages of the north “scream at the passerby from every wall and window.” Communist influence was not concealed; the flag of the Provisional Government resembled the Soviet flag, Marxist pamphlets lay on official desks, but the same might be said for American influence. The promise to the Philippines was a constant theme, and a vigorous enthusiasm was felt for American prowess in the war and for American productive capacity and technical and social progress. Given, however, the lack of any American response to the Viet-Minh and such incidents “as the recent shipment of French troops to Saigon in American vessels,” the goodwill had faded. Hale’s report too was prophetic: if the French overcome the Provisional Government, “it can be assumed as a certainty that the movement for independence will not die.” The certainty was there at the start.

  Other observers concurred. The French might take the cities in the north, wrote a correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, “but it is extremely doubtful if they will ever be able to put down the independence movement as a whole. They have not enough troops to root out every guerrilla band in the north and they have shown little capacity to cope with guerrilla fighting.”

  Asked by the State Department for an evaluation of American prestige in Asia, which it suspected was “seriously deteriorating,” Charles Yost, political officer in Bangkok and a future Ambassador to the UN, confirmed the Department’s impression, and he too cited the use of American vessels to transport French troops and “the use of American equipment by these troops.” Goodwill toward America as the champion of subject peoples had been very great after the war, but American failure to support the nationalist movement “does not seem likely to contribute to long-term stability in Southeast Asia.” The restoration of colonial regimes, Yost warned, was unsuited to existing conditions “and cannot for that reason long be maintained except by force.”

  That American policy nevertheless supported the French effort was a choice of the more compelling necessity over what seemed a lesser one. George Marshall as Secretary of State acknowledged the existence of “dangerously outmoded colonial outlook and methods in the area,” but “on the other hand … we are not interested in seeing colonial empire administrations supplanted by philosophy and political organizations emanating from and controlled by Kremlin.” This was the crux. The French peppered Washington with “proof” of Ho Chi Minh’s contacts with Moscow, and Dean Acheson, Under-Secretary of State, was in no doubt. “Keep in mind,” he cabled Abbot Low Moffat, chief for Southeast Asia affairs, who went to Hanoi in December 1946, “Ho’s clear record as agent international communism, absence evidence recantation.”

  Moffat, a warm partisan of the Asian cause, reported that in conversation Ho had disclaimed Communism as his aim, saying that if he could secure independence, that was enough for his lifetime. “Perhaps,” he had added wryly, “fifty years from now the United States will be Communist and then Vietnam can be also.” Moffat concluded that the group in charge of Vietnam “are at this stage nationalist first” and an effective nationalist state must precede a Communist state, which as an objective “must for the time being be secondary.” Whether he was deluded history cannot answer, for who can be certain that, at the time Ho was seeking American support, the development of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) was as irrevocably Communist as the course of events was to make it?

  The compulsion of the French to regain their empire derived, after the humiliation of World War II, from a sense that their future as a great power was at stake, but they realized the necessity of some adjustment, at least pro forma. During temporary truces with the Viet-Minh in 1946 they tried to negotiate a basis of agreement with promises of some unspecified form of self-government at some unspecified date, so worded as never to ruffle the edges of sovereignty. These were “paper concessions,” according to the State Department’s Far East desk. When they failed, hostilities resumed and by the end of 1946 the first, or French, Indochina war was fully under way. There was no illusion. If the French resumed the repressive measures and policy of force of the past, reported the American Consul in Saigon, “no settlement of situation can be expected foreseeable future and period guerrilla warfare will follow.” The French commander assigned to carry out the reconquest himself saw, or felt, the truth. After his first survey of the situation, General Leclerc said to his political adviser, “It would take 500,000 men to do it and even then it could not be done.” In one sentence he laid out the future, and his estimate would still be valid when 500,000 American soldiers were actually in the field two decades later.

  Was American policy already folly in 1945–46? Even judged in terms of the thinking of the time, the answer must be affirmative, for most Americans concerned with foreign policy understood that the colonial era had come to an end and that its revival was an exercise in putting Humpty-Dumpty back on the wall. No matter how strong the arguments for bolstering France, folly lay in attaching policy to a cause that prevailing information indicated was hopeless. Policy-makers assured themselves they were not attaching the United States to that cause. They took comfort in French pledges of future autonomy or else in the belief that France lacked the power to regain her empire and would have to come to terms with the Vietnamese eventually. Both Truman and Acheson assured the American public that the U.S. position was “predicated on the assumption that the French claim to have the support of the population of Indochina is borne out by future events.” To assist her now for the sake of a strong presence in Europe was therefore no crime—though it was a losing proposition.

  The alternative was present and available: to gain for America an enviable primacy among Western nations and confirm the foundation of goodwill in Asia by aligning ourselves with, even supporting, the independence movements. If this seemed indicated to some, particularly at the Far East desk, it was less persuasive to others for whom self-government by Asians was not something to base a policy on and insignificant in comparison to the security of Europe. In Indochina choice of the alternative would have required imagination, which is never a long suit with governments, and willingness to take the risk of supporting a Communist when Communism was still seen as a solid bloc. Tito was then its only splinter, and the possibility of another deviation was not envisaged. Moreover, it would be divisive of the Allies. Support of Humpty-Dumpty was chosen instead, and once a policy has been adopted and implemented, all subsequent activity becomes an effort to justify it.

  An uneasy suspicion that we were pursuing folly was to haunt the American engagement in Vietnam from beginning to end, revealing itself in sometimes contorted policy directives. In a summary of the American position for diplomats in Paris, Saigon and Hanoi, the French desk in 1947 drafted for Secretary George Marshall a directive of wishful thinking combined with uncertainty. It saw the independence movements of the new nations of Southeast Asia, representing, so it said, a quarter of the world’s inhabitants, as a “momentous factor in world stability”; it believed the best safeguard against this struggle’s succumbing to anti-Western tendencies and Communist influence was continued association with former colonial powers; it acknowledged on the one hand that the association “must be voluntary” and on the other hand that the war in Indochina could only destroy voluntary cooperation, and “irrevocably alienate Vietnamese”; it said that the United States wanted to be helpful without wishing to intervene or offer any solution of its own, yet was “inescapably concerned” with the developments in Indochina. Whether foreign service officers were enlightened by this document is questionable.

  2. Self-Hypnosis: 1946–54

  Inchoate cold war entered maturity with Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech at Fulton, Miss
ouri, in March 1946, in which he stated that no one knew “the limits, if any, to [the] expansive and proselytising tendencies” of the Soviet Union and its Communist International.

  The situation was in fact alarming. Roosevelt’s vision of a postwar partnership of wartime allies to maintain international order had vanished, as he knew before he died, when on his last day in Washington he acknowledged that Stalin “has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.” By 1946, Soviet control had been extended over Poland, East Germany, Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania and more or less over Yugoslavia. Domestic Communist parties in France and Italy appeared as further threats. From the Embassy in Moscow George Kennan formulated “a long-term patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansionist tendencies.” In 1947, Secretary Marshall summoned America to develop “a sense of responsibility for world order and security” and a recognition of the “overwhelming importance” of United States acts and failures to act in this regard. Moscow answered by a declaration that all Communist parties in the world were united in common resistance to American imperialism. The Truman Doctrine was announced, committing America to support of free peoples resisting subjugation by “armed minorities” or by external pressure, and the Marshall Plan adopted for economic aid to revive the weakened countries of Europe. A major effort was launched and succeeded in obstructing a Communist takeover in Greece and Turkey.

  In February 1948, Soviet Russia absorbed Czechoslovakia. The United States re-enacted the draft for military service. In April of that year Russia imposed the Berlin blockade. America responded with the bold airlift and kept it flying for a year until the blockade was withdrawn. In 1949, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) was formed for a common defense against attack on any one of its member countries.

  The event that shook the balance of forces was the Communist victory in China in October 1949, a shock as stunning as Pearl Harbor. Hysteria over the “loss” of China took hold of America and rabid spokesmen of the China Lobby in Congress and the business world became the loudest voices in political life. The shock was the more dismaying because only a few weeks earlier, in September, Russia had successfully exploded an atomic bomb. As 1950 opened, Senator Joseph McCarthy announced that he had a list of 205 “card-carrying” Communists in the employ of the State Department, and for the next four years Americans joined in more than they opposed his vilification of fellow citizens as Communist infiltrators of American society. In June 1950, North Korea, a Soviet client, invaded South Korea, an American client, and President Truman ordered American military response under United Nations authority. During these abject years the Rosenbergs were tried for treason, convicted in 1951, and when President Eisenhower refused to commute a death sentence that would make orphans of two children, were subsequently executed.

  These were the components of the cold war that shaped the course of events in Indochina. Its central belief was that every movement bearing the label Communist represented a single conspiracy for world conquest under the Soviet aegis. The effect of Mao’s victory in China seemed a terrible affirmation and when followed by the attack on South Korea induced a panic period in American policy regarding Asia. It was now “clear” to the National Security Council “that Southeast Asia is the target for a coordinated offensive directed by the Kremlin.” Indochina was viewed as the focus, partly because a war was already in progress there with European troops pitted against an indigenous force under Communist leadership. It was declared to be the “key area,” which, if allowed to fall to the Communists, would drag Burma and Thailand in its wake. At first, the Communist offensive was seen as generated by Soviet Russia. After Chinese troops entered the Korean combat, China was seen as the main mover, with Vietnam as its next target. Ho and the Viet-Minh took on a more sinister aspect as agents of the international Communist conspiracy and ipso facto hostile to the United States. When Chinese Communist amphibious forces seized the island of Hainan in the Gulf of Tonkin, held until then by Chiang Kai-shek, the level of alarm rose. In response, on 8 May 1950, President Truman announced the first direct grant of military aid to France and the Associated States of Indochina in the amount of $10 million.

  The Associated States, comprising Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, were a creation of France in the previous year under the Elysée Agreement, which had recognized the “independence” of Vietnam and resurrected Bao Dai as its chief of state. Thereupon, the Soviet Union and China, in February 1950, promptly recognized the Democratic Republic in Hanoi as the legitimate government, followed in the same month by the United States’ recognition of Bao Dai. No actual transfer of administrative powers or authority into Vietnamese hands resulted from the Elysée Agreement, and the French retained control of the Vietnamese army as before. The Bao Dai regime, with officials more efficient in graft than in government, was inept and corrupt. Yet Americans tried to persuade themselves that Bao Dai was a valid nationalist alternative to Ho Chi Minh and that they could thus support France, his sponsor, without incurring the stigma of colonialism. As the hoped-for alternative, however, the Bao Dai solution proved empty, as even its titular figure acknowledged. “Present political conditions,” he said to an adviser, Dr. Phan Quang Dan, “make it impossible to convince the people and troops that they have something worthwhile fighting for.” If he expanded his army, as the Americans were urging, it could be dangerous because they might defect en masse to the Viet-Minh. Dr. Dan, a sincere nationalist, was more emphatic. The Vietnamese army, he said, officered by the French and with virtually no leaders of its own, was “without ideology, without objective, without enthusiasm, without fighting spirit and without popular backing.”

  American government was in no ignorance of this state of affairs. Robert Blum, of the American Technical and Economic Mission accredited to Vietnam, reported that Bao Dai’s government “gives little promise of developing competence or winning the loyalty of the population,” that the situation “shows no substantial prospect of improving,” that in the circumstances no decisive military victory was likely to be achieved by the French, leading to the gloomy conclusion that “the attainment of American objectives is remote.” After eighteen months of frustration, Blum returned home in 1952.

  While Washington departments continually assured each other that the “development of genuine nationalism” in Indochina was essential to its defense, and repeatedly tried to push France and the passive Bao Dai himself to perform more actively in that direction, they continued to ignore the implications of their own knowledge. Regardless of the absence of popular backing for the Bao Dai regime, the specter of advancing Communism demanded aid to France against the Viet-Minh. Immediately following the invasion of Korea, Truman announced the first despatch to Indochina of American personnel. Called the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), starting with 35 men at the opening of the Korean war and increasing to about 200, it was supposed to introduce American know-how—which the French did not want and persistently resented—and supervise the use of American equipment, the first consignment of which was airlifted to Saigon in July. At French insistence, the materiel was delivered directly to the French themselves, not to the Associated States, demonstrating all too patently the fiction of independence.

  With this step onto the ground of the struggle, American policymakers felt impelled to assert the American interests that justified it. Policy statements about the vital importance of Southeast Asia began to pour from the government. It was presented as an area “vital to the future of the free world,” whose strategic position and rich natural resources must be held available to the free nations and denied to international Communism. Communist rulers of the Kremlin, President Truman told the American people in a radio address, were engaged in a “monstrous conspiracy to stamp out freedom all over the world.” If they succeeded the United States would be among “their principal victims.” He called the situation a “clear and present danger” and raised the Munich argument that was to become a staple: if the free nations had then acted
together and in time to crush the aggression of the dictators, World War II might have been averted.

  The lesson may have been true, but it was misapplied. The aggression of the 1930s in Manchuria, North China, Ethiopia, the Rhineland, Spain and the Sudetenland was overt, with armed invasions, planes and bombs, and occupying forces; the envisaged aggression against Indochina of 1950 was a self-induced state of mind in the observers. In a revealing appraisal, the National Security Council (NSC) in February 1950 called the threat to Indochina only one phase of “anticipated” Communist plans to “seize all of Southeast Asia.” Yet a State Department team investigating Communist infiltration of Southeast Asia in 1948 had found no traces of the Kremlin in Indochina. “If there is a Moscow-directed conspiracy in Southeast Asia,” it reported, “Indochina is an anomaly so far.”

  That the Russian danger in the world was nevertheless real, that the Communist system was hostile to American democracy and American interests, that Soviet Communism was expansionist and directed toward the absorption of neighboring and other vulnerable states, was undeniable. That it was joined in aggressive partnership with Communist China was a natural conclusion but exaggerated and soon to prove mistaken. That it was right and proper in the national interest for American policy-makers to try to contain this inimical system and to thwart it where possible goes without question. That the Communist system threatened American security through Indochina, however, was an extrapolation leading to folly.