by Max Hastings
Through 1951–52 Nga worked devotedly as Le Duan’s political secretary, and gave birth to a daughter named Vu Anh. Her husband seemed to love her, and once astonished her by a gesture of shameless frivolity when she approached COSVN through a patch of elephant grass. Glimpsing her he ran forward, seized her by both hands and swung her joyfully around himself. Here was an almost unique glimpse of human frailty in the life of this icily focused man who would play a role in Vietnam’s wars second only to that of Ho.
From 1951 onwards, the Vietminh emphasised ever more strongly the centrality of ideology, which in earlier years Ho downplayed. The Chinese supplied not merely military tutelage, but also political advice about how to establish a communist society, for which a key imperative was suppression of dissent: in the first two years of Mao Zedong’s rule, he killed an estimated two million of his own people. Now, in many Vietminh-controlled areas, radios were banned, to deny peasants access to information save that dispensed by the Party. Most intellectuals and middle-class adherents of the movement became outcasts.
Because the most fiercely contested battlefields lay in the north, that region’s people suffered dreadfully at the hands of both sides. Nguyen Cong Luan grew up in a small village near Hanoi, which reluctantly accepted French suzerainty. In consequence his father was seized by the Vietminh, subjected to torture, and eventually met death in one of their punishment camps. Yet colonial troops frequently detained his son, and on several occasions the boy feared for his life. France’s definition of its own role in Indochina as a mission civilisatrice was mocked by the reality. Luan wrote: ‘Our submission to the French military authority did not protect us from being looted, raped, tortured, or killed. Every private, whether he was a Frenchman, an African, or a Vietnamese could do almost anything he wanted to a Vietnamese civilian without fear of being tried in a court or punished by his superiors … A sergeant … had the power of a viceroy in the Middle Ages … People addressed him as “Ngai”, a word equivalent to “Your Excellency”, only used in connection with gods and mandarins.’
The colonists’ conspicuously privileged existence enabled the Vietminh to exploit their own austerity as a propaganda gift. Lt. Gen. Sir Gerald Templer, Britain’s security overlord during Malaya’s insurgency, observed with dry wit: ‘You can see today how the communists work. They seldom go to the races. They don’t often go to dinner or cocktail parties. And they don’t play golf.’ Since French draftees were not obliged to serve in Vietnam, most of their army’s rank and file were mercenaries – North Africans, West Africans or Vietnamese. Half the Legion’s men were Germans. A licensed indiscipline prevailed among off-duty troops, with widespread alcoholism. The scent of burning caramel revealed the proclivity of old hands for opium-smoking as surely as did their yellow complexions and an oily smudge on the left forefinger. When Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny assumed proconsular powers in December 1950, he began to create an explicitly Vietnamese conscript army. ‘Vietnamisation’ would become a dirty word by 1971, but the French made it so twenty years earlier with their term for de Lattre’s policy – ‘jaunissment’ – ‘yellowing’ the war, or at least its corpses. No one held the new Vietnamese force in much esteem, partly because a fifty-thousand-piaster bribe procured escape from service.
Giap now deployed in northern Vietnam six ten-thousand-man divisions, well-armed with light weapons, though short of food, clothing and equipment. In the early years the Vietminh had no waterproof clothing or weather protection. Only in 1952 were there issues of flimsy coverings, which seemed miraculous to those simple peasants. In the words of a communist soldier, ‘We marvelled that mankind had produced a piece of paper that rain ran off.’
The French continued to have their successes: gunboats in the Red River delta choked rice shipments to communist forces further north. On 25 May 1950, after the enemy bombarded a French camp at Dong Khe, a few miles inside Vietnam’s border with China, parachute-landed reinforcements drove the attackers scuttling away into the jungle. Nonetheless, colonial garrisons in the mountainous far north, holding positions linked by ribbons of road strung along narrow valleys, remained vulnerable, especially when Giap’s regular units acquired mortars and artillery. The French had been rash enough to extend delicate tendrils – relatively small forces – into antheaps crawling with Vietminh. While the colonial power had far more soldiers countrywide, in the north-west Giap could sometimes outnumber his foes.
Early on 16 September, five Vietminh battalions, supported by artillery, once more attacked the French base at Dong Khe. The communists had spent weeks preparing and planning, a hallmark of all their important operations. Early in the battle, Giap’s headquarters was alarmed by reports that one regiment had lost its way, failing to reach the start line, and that initial casualties were heavy. But Ho Chi Minh, who had walked many miles to witness the assault, urged calm and perseverance. After fifty-two hours of fierce fighting, the attackers prevailed: Dong Khe fell at 1000 on the 18th. An officer and thirty-two Foreign Legionnaires escaped just before the end, emerging from the jungle to rejoin French forces after a terrible week-long march.
Giap now embarked upon a banquet at his enemy’s expense in the mountainous Chinese border region. The French resigned themselves to abandoning another camp at Cao Bang, twenty miles north of Dong Khe. On 3 October its foul-mouthed but popular commander Lt. Col. Pierre Charton led forth a truck column bearing 2,600 mainly Moroccan soldiers, five hundred civilians including the personnel of the town brothel, together with a tail of artillery and heavy equipment. Charton had ignored orders to abandon such baggage: he determined to retreat with dignity and honour, a gesture of stubbornness that cost hundreds of lives. In defiles nine miles south of Cao Bang his straggling caravan was checked by a succession of blown bridges and ambushes. Within twenty-four hours the retreat stalled, amid teeming enemy forces firing from dense vegetation on higher ground.
Charton’s predicament represented only one-half of a horror story, however. A second force, designated Task Force Bayard and composed of 3,500 mainly Moroccan troops stiffened by a crack paratroop battalion, was dispatched north to meet the Cao Bang column and support its passage to safety. Bayard left That Khe on 30 September, commanded by Col. Marcel Le Page. As the force approached Dong Khe it too was halted by Vietminh, raking and pounding the column with machine-gun and mortar fire. Higher headquarters ordered Le Page to adopt desperate measures: burn his vehicles, abandon his guns, take to the jungle, march his men around the Vietminh to meet Charton. The experience that followed was dreadful indeed. In accordance with his almost deranged instructions, Le Page led his men away from the French lines, ever deeper into a wilderness, to link hands with another doomed force.
Marchers soon began to fall out and vanish, never to be seen again: a man wounded was a man fated to die. Each climb and descent was agony for heavily-laden infantry, drenched by rain that also denied them air support. The Vietminh were weary too, after days of strife and pursuit, but they enjoyed the peerless thrill of winning: they knew the French were in desperate straits. Giap issued an exultant 6 October order of the day: ‘The enemy is hungrier and colder than you!’ Charton and Le Page met next day, their columns alike shrunken by losses, lacking water, food, ammunition. Then the Vietminh struck again – fifteen battalions pouring fire into their exhausted enemies. The Moroccans broke in panic. Their commanders ordered dispersal into small parties, what became almost literally a ‘Sauve qui peut!’ Charton was wounded and taken prisoner; most of the other fugitives were killed piecemeal. Just six hundred men eventually reached French positions further south; some 4,800 were listed as dead or missing, while material losses were immense: 450 trucks, eight thousand rifles, 950 automatic weapons and a hundred mortars. Giap celebrated by getting drunk with his Chinese advisers, for what he later claimed was the first time in his life.
On 18 October the French abandoned another northern camp at Lang Son, where huge stocks of munitions fell into communist hands. The cost of these battles was hi
gh for the Vietminh – an estimated nine thousand casualties. But whereas the world quickly discovered the scale of the French disaster, now as in the future the communists suppressed all tidings that might tarnish their triumphs, demoralise their supporters. Not all the fighting went one way: during the early months of 1951 Giap failed in a succession of large-scale assaults. In January when the Vietminh attacked a base thirty miles north-west of Hanoi, French air power and especially napalm inflicted crushing losses – six thousand dead, eight thousand wounded. The lesson for the communist commander was that he must still expect to be beaten when he committed large forces within reach of French air- and firepower.
A Western general who suffered such a succession of defeats as did Giap in the spring of 1951, creating such hecatombs of his own men’s corpses, would have faced a political and media storm, almost certainly been sacked. The Vietminh politburo, however, faced no public scrutiny. Ho Chi Minh, the only arbiter who mattered, kept faith in his general. Giap, like Marshal Zhukov in World War II, was never held to account for the shocking ‘butchers’ bills’ his victories imposed. This gave him an important edge over an enemy whose people were reading daily, in newspapers back home in France, about the anguish of their army in Indochina.
2 WASHINGTON PICKS UP THE TAB
Perhaps the most famous lines in Graham Greene’s novel set in Saigon during the late French era are delivered by his protagonist, the cynical British journalist Thomas Fowler, who says of The Quiet American Alden Pyle: ‘I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused … impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance.’ The most historically important trend in the war was that as the French reeled before its soaring cost, they turned to the Americans to pay the bills. Which, from 1950 onwards, they did. Far away in Washington, policy-makers became ever more alarmed by the notion that South-East Asia might follow China, submerged beneath a communist inundation. Moreover, the US sought leverage to reconcile a bitterly reluctant France to the rearmament of Germany. Dollars, not francs, soon paid for almost every bomb and bullet expended on the Vietnam battlefield.
American largesse was prompted by communist threats to the stability and democratic institutions of many nations, notably including Greece, Italy, France, Turkey. George Kennan, head of the State Department’s policy planning staff and author of the famous 1946 Long Telegram from Moscow, characterised Soviet assertiveness as a ‘fluid stream’ that sought to fill ‘every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power’. Stalin and later Mao supported revolutionary movements wherever these seemed sustainable. On 12 March 1947 America’s president proclaimed before Congress what became known as the Truman doctrine: ‘At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one … I believe that it must be the policy of the US to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.’
Yet while the international communist threat was real, and the Western commitment to resist it deserves historic admiration, it caused the US and its allies to commit some grievous injustices. For almost two generations Washington acquiesced in the fascist tyranny of Spain’s Gen. Francisco Franco, and also sustained Central and South American dictatorships whose only merits lay in their protestations of anti-communism. In southern Africa, the British and Americans indulged white minority rule for decades after its indefensibility had become apparent. And in Indochina the French persuaded the West’s Croesus-state that the cause of colonialism was also that of anti-communism. After Mao Zedong’s forces swept China, conservative Americans appalled by the ‘loss’ of their favourite Asian nation demanded stern measures to ensure that such an outcome was not repeated elsewhere. Henry Luce, proprietor of Time-Life and a passionate supporter of the Chinese Nationalists, threw the weight of his empire behind the anti-communist cause in Vietnam, for which it remained an advocate through two decades.
The Sino–Soviet treaty of February 1950 seemed to create a real threat of a Red Asia. The American conservative Michael Lind has written in his revisionist study of Vietnam: ‘On the evening of February 14, 1950, in a banquet hall in the Kremlin, three men whose plans would subject Indochina to a half century of warfare, tyranny and economic stagnation, and inspire political turmoil in the United States and Europe, stood side by side: Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh … There was an international communist conspiracy, and Ho Chi Minh was a charter member of it.’ Kim Il-sung’s June invasion of South Korea galvanised a frightened West. US and allied forces hastened to the Korean peninsula where they fought a three-year war, latterly against the Chinese. The Korean experience goes far to explain why the Americans threw their support behind French colonialism in Indochina, without diminishing the rashness of the policy.
At the State Department Dean Acheson and his assistant secretary Dean Rusk were haunted by memories of the disasters that had followed the democracies’ 1930s appeasement of fascist dictators. The Democratic administration faced mounting congressional pressure to show steel towards the ‘Moscow–Beijing axis’. Sen. William Fulbright observed later that it was essential to judge contemporary US policies against the background of indisputable Soviet expansionism: ‘Here we were in this deadly confrontation with the Russians, and we thought it our duty to thwart them everywhere.’ The McCarthyite witchhunt for left-wing sympathisers in the US government caused the foreign service officers who knew most about Asia to be winnowed out of the State Department, leaving behind an awesome ignorance, especially about Vietnam.
Not everyone in Foggy Bottom, however, wanted to see America embrace colonialist France. State’s Raymond Fosdick early in 1950 urged presciently against repeating America’s China blunder, of becoming ‘allied with reaction’. Whatever were residual Parisian delusions, Fosdick wrote, Indochina would soon become independent. ‘Why, therefore, do we tie ourselves to the tail of their battered kite?’ The French were losing their war not primarily because they lacked guns and ammunition, but because they would offer nothing that any reasonable Vietnamese might want.
In the following year a young congressman from Massachusetts visited Saigon and wrote in his trip diary: ‘We are more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people. Because everyone believes that we control the U.N. [and] because our wealth is supposedly inexhaustible, we will be damned if we don’t do what the new nations want.’ Here was wisdom from John F. Kennedy, but Americans were in no mood to heed it. George Kennan in old age bemoaned the manner in which his advocacy of containing the Soviets, and later the Chinese, was misinterpreted in Washington to justify employing to this end almost exclusively military tools, whereas political, cultural, economic and diplomatic ones were often more appropriate.
During 1950’s Korean winter panic, when outright defeat for UN forces seemed possible, Washington signed off a massive Indochina aid increase. Thereafter, as France’s will to fight weakened, that of the US stiffened: the colonial army became increasingly an American proxy. Truman and Acheson, far from pressing Paris to negotiate with the Vietminh, urged it to do no such thing. Here was Washington’s first big blunder in Indochina, from which US policy-making never recovered. Its military aid contribution ballooned to $150m, delivered almost without strings – the proud French refused to confide in their paymasters about operational plans. By early 1951 they were receiving more than 7,200 tons of military equipment a month. The imperial power waged its war wearing American helmets, using many American weapons, driving American jeeps and trucks, flying mostly American planes. Under such circumstances, it is scarcely surprising that when American soldiers a decade later arrived in Vietnam, they appeared to its people children of their earlier oppressors.
By September 1951 it had become apparent to objective observers that the French had no realistic prospect of holding Indochina. Yet after their warlord Gen. de Lattre de Tassigny staged a brilliantly theatrical personal mission to the US, withi
n four months Washington shipped to his forces 130,000 tons of equipment, including fifty-three million rounds of ammunition, eight thousand trucks and jeeps, 650 fighting vehicles, two hundred aircraft, fourteen thousand automatic weapons and 3,500 radios. This was de Lattre’s last important contribution before his abrupt departure from Indochina, and death from cancer.
By the end of 1953, the new Eisenhower Republican administration was paying 80 per cent of the cost of the war, a billion dollars a year. The British, still important allies and increasingly expert at retreats from empire, deplored this: they believed that no quantity of guns and bullets could avert looming French expulsion from Indochina. The government of Winston Churchill was alarmed by what it considered an ill-directed US obsession. Selwyn Lloyd, a Foreign Office minister, wrote in August 1953: ‘There is now in the United States an emotional feeling about Communist China and to a lesser extent Russia which borders on hysteria.’ The Vietminh were branded, of course, as instruments of the satanic forces in play.