k Warren served as deputy district attorney of Alameda County, California, from 1920 to 1925; as district attorney from 1925 to 1939; and as attorney general of California from 1939 to 1943.
TWENTY-TWO
Dien Bien Phu
You boys must be crazy. We can’t use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than ten years.
—DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER,
May 1, 1954
While Eisenhower struggled with Bricker and McCarthy, and sought to make peace in Korea, the French position in Indochina deteriorated. The French had acquired Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) in the nineteenth century during a period of European colonial expansion. Following the fall of France in 1940, the Japanese occupied the area and remained there until Japan’s surrender in August 1945. When the French sought to reassert control, they found themselves in conflict with a wartime resistance coalition of Vietnamese nationalists and Communists under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. Known as the Viet Minh, the resistance movement had been supported by the United States during the war, and had wrested control of the countryside from the Japanese.
In September 1945, Ho Chi Minh declared independence for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. At that point the French returned in force, and bitter fighting ensued. The French Army regained control of Vietnam’s major cities, but the Viet Minh continued to dominate the countryside. In 1950, Ho again proclaimed independence for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and this time was recognized by the Communist governments of China and the Soviet Union. The battle for Vietnamese independence played out in the context of the Cold War.
For the French, the struggle in Indochina was a colonial war—“La guerre sale,” as it was called back in France, “the dirty war”—and the longer it went on, the less popular it became. Just as American public opinion turned against the war in Korea, the French public wanted out of Vietnam. As early as 1950, the National Assembly voted against sending draftees to fight there, and the government kept a tight rein on expenditures. The United States picked up the slack. Even before the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, the Truman administration had begun to finance French forces in Vietnam. By 1953, America had spent more than $2.6 billion ($21.2 billion currently) in military aid and had converted the war into part of the larger struggle of democracy against Communism. When Eisenhower took office, the United States appeared to have more interest in continuing the war than the French did.1
The fact is, the French Expeditionary Force in Vietnam, some five hundred thousand men, was swallowed up in rice paddies and jungles fighting a guerrilla war against an elusive enemy who held the initiative. Commanded by the resourceful General Vo Nguyen Giap, the Viet Minh struck the French only when they were vulnerable, usually in well-prepared ambushes, and preferably at night. The cost to the French Army was high. Every year at least a third of the graduating class at Saint-Cyr, the French military academy, were killed in Vietnam. By early 1953 it was clear that France was on the defensive, and that the continued hemorrhaging of French forces could not be sustained.
Into this quagmire the government of the Fourth Republic sent General Henri Navarre with orders to reach a settlement with the Viet Minh. But Navarre was not ready to admit defeat. He switched from defense to offense, determined to lure the Viet Minh into a fixed battle in which French artillery and airpower would prove decisive. On September 28, 1953, Time magazine featured Navarre on its cover. “A year ago none of us could see victory,” an aide was quoted as saying. “Now we can see it clearly—like light at the end of a tunnel.”2
The site for Navarre’s set-piece battle would be Dien Bien Phu—a small outpost on the Laotian border. General Navarre believed he was setting a trap. The Viet Minh would be lured into attacking the well-fortified French position and would be worn down by superior firepower. There were three problems Navarre failed to anticipate: First, the fighting quality of the Viet Minh, who, like the Chinese veterans the U.S. Army encountered in Korea, were first-class soldiers, well trained, well equipped, and fighting for their country against French colonialism. Second, the ability of General Giap to concentrate his forces. Navarre assumed he would be fighting one Viet Minh division at most. As the battle developed, Giap brought more than fifty thousand soldiers into action supported by an additional one hundred thousand Vietnamese peasants to supply the combat troops. Most important, however, was the location. Dien Bien Phu (which in Vietnamese means “large administrative center on the frontier”) was a cluster of villages eight miles long and five miles wide on the floor of a valley surrounded by rough mountainous terrain. It was remote, difficult to resupply except by air, and had no strategic importance. One high-ranking French defense official likened it to a chamber pot (vase de nuit), with the French garrison on the bottom and the Viet Minh sitting on the rim above.3
In late 1953, when Eisenhower learned of Navarre’s plan to lure the enemy into battle at Dien Bien Phu, he was appalled. “You cannot do this,” he told Henri Bonnet, the French ambassador in Washington. “The fate of troops invested in an isolated fortress is almost inevitable.”4 Eisenhower instructed both the State and Defense departments to communicate his concern to their French counterparts, but the French took no notice. “We cannot find them [the Viet Minh] in the jungle,” Ike was told. “This will draw them out where we can then win.”5
Eisenhower was caught betwixt and between. On the one hand he saw the fighting in Vietnam as part of the global struggle against Communism. On the other, he deplored France’s unwillingness to grant independence to the Vietnamese. “I wholeheartedly agree,” he wrote Republican senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont, “that France should announce a firm intention of establishing self-government and independence in the associated states of Indochina [Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos]. I have personally urged this upon the French authorities and secured their agreement in principle. So far the trouble has been that they have made such announcements only in an obscure and round-about fashion—instead of boldly, forthrightly, and repeatedly.”6
On March 13, 1954, the siege of Dien Bien Phu began. “Hell in a very small place,” French writer Bernard Fall called it.7 Within two days perimeter strongpoints were overrun and French airstrips immobilized by Viet Minh artillery. General Giap did not deploy his fieldpieces on the reverse slope, as is common practice in the artillery, but placed them in well-entrenched positions on the forward slope firing directly into the French position. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. The battle was over almost before it started. The fifteen-thousand-man French garrison could be supplied only by dropping supplies from aircraft flying at high altitudes, and relief columns were unable to break through. As casualties mounted and supplies dwindled, it was evident that the only hope for Dien Bien Phu—and it was a slender hope at best—was some form of American intervention.
In January the French had asked for twenty-five bombers and four hundred mechanics to maintain them. Eisenhower gave them ten planes and two hundred mechanics. Even then, Congress was skeptical. “First we give them planes, then we send men,” Senator John Stennis of Mississippi warned.8 Richard Russell of Georgia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, voiced similar doubts. Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, who chaired the committee, asked Ike directly: Was another president going to take the country into yet another war by the back door?9 Eisenhower admitted that he was “frightened about getting ground forces tied up in Indochina” and promised that the mechanics would not be in the combat zone and that he would withdraw them by June 15, 1954.10
In late March, as the French position at Dien Bien Phu eroded, General Paul Ely, the French chief of staff, came to Washington to seek additional assistance. Ely was highly regarded in American defense circles and had served as France’s representative on the NATO Standing Group when Eisenhower commanded NATO forces. Ike knew Ely well, and during a meeting at the White House agreed to provide additional C-119 Flying Boxcars that could drop napalm, “which would burn out a consi
derable area and help to reveal enemy artillery positions.” But he declined to offer additional support and pressed Ely for a definite statement on Vietnamese independence.11
The Joint Chiefs of Staff were more forthcoming than Eisenhower. Meeting with the JCS at the Pentagon, Ely, together with Admiral Arthur Radford, who had succeeded Omar Bradley as chairman, devised a plan for massive American air support for Dien Bien Phu. Known as Operation VULTURE, the JCS plan, which quickly obtained French approval, would involve carpet bombing of the Viet Minh position by 60 B-29 bombers stationed at Clark Field in the Philippines, supported by 150 fighter-bombers from the carriers of the Seventh Fleet (Essex and Boxer) on station in the Gulf of Tonkin. Three so-called tactical atomic bombs would be used. General Nathan Twining, Air Force chief of staff, thought one would be sufficient. “You could take all day to drop a bomb, make sure you put it in the right place … and clean those Commies out of there and the band would play the ‘Marseillaise’ and the French would come marching out … in great shape.”12
Publicly, Eisenhower kept American options open. As Ike saw it, there was no reason to foreclose U.S. intervention, and that uncertainty might help dissuade China and the Soviet Union from becoming involved. On April 4, Eisenhower wrote Churchill (who was serving his final term as prime minister) seeking British support. “We failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time,” said Eisenhower.13 Churchill was unimpressed. The British had given up India and were fighting guerrilla wars in Malaya and Kenya. The last thing they wanted was to be involved in another Korean-type conflict on behalf of the French.
Nevertheless, Eisenhower pressed on. At his news conference on April 7, Ike invoked what he called the “falling domino” principle. “You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.” By implication, if Indochina fell, Burma, Thailand, Malaya, and Indonesia would follow.14 a
Privately, Eisenhower was setting out the conditions for American involvement in such a way so as to ensure that it did not happen. It was typical of Ike at his best. Feint in one direction publicly, move privately in another. First, there must be an ironclad commitment by France to grant independence to the countries of Indochina. Second, the United States must be part of an international coalition, including not only Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, but Thailand and the Philippines as well. Third, the allied forces would assume direction of the war and not operate under French command. Finally, and most significantly, the United States would not send ground forces into combat without specific congressional authorization.15 There was little likelihood that any of these, let alone all four, would occur.
In addition to his own doubts, Eisenhower received reinforcement from the field. General Matthew Ridgway, who had succeeded Mac-Arthur in Korea and was now Army chief of staff, weighed in heavily against intervention. On his own authority, Ridgway dispatched a blue-ribbon team of staff officers to Vietnam to determine what intervention would involve. Their report was devastating: at least five infantry divisions, possibly ten, plus fifty-five engineering companies. (There had been six divisions in Korea.) Altogether, that meant between five hundred thousand and a million men. Draft calls would be far greater than those for Korea. In addition, local political conditions in Vietnam were much worse than in Korea, where the local population had supported American intervention. In Vietnam, because of French colonialism, that would not be the case.16 As for airpower, Ridgway told the president it was like a high-tech aspirin. It provided some immediate relief but did not cure the underlying problem.17 Eisenhower respected Ridgway’s judgment. In 1943, Ridgway had resisted Ike’s order to drop an airborne division on Rome, and Ridgway had been right. There was no reason to believe he was wrong now.
On April 26, Eisenhower wrote to his old friend General Alfred Gruenther, who now held Ike’s position at SHAPE. Gruenther had written to warn Ike against intervening in Vietnam. “Your adverse opinion exactly parallels mine,” Eisenhower replied. “As you know, you and I started more than three years ago to convince the French that they could not win in the Indochina War.” Ike told Gruenther that his administration had repeatedly advised the French that no Western power could intervene in Asia except as part of a coalition that included Asian people. “To contemplate anything else is to lay ourselves open to the charge of imperialism and colonialism or—at the very least—of objectionable paternalism. Even if we could by some sudden stroke assure the saving of the Dien Bien Phu garrison, I think that under the conditions proposed by the French, the free world would lose more than it would gain.”18
Later that day, addressing the annual meeting of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Eisenhower spoke of the necessity of achieving a modus vivendi in Vietnam. “We would hope that the logic of today’s situation would appeal to all peoples,” said Ike, “regardless of their ruthlessness, so that they see the futility of depending upon war, or the threat of war, as a means of settling international difficulty.”19 At his press conference three days later, the president was asked about his use of the term “modus vivendi” in Vietnam. “You are steering a course between two extremes,” Eisenhower responded. “One of which, I would say, would be unattainable, and the other unacceptable.” A French victory was most likely unattainable, and a total Communist victory would be unacceptable. “The most you can work out is a practical way of getting along.” He then referred to the situation in Berlin as an example.20
At the meeting of the National Security Council on April 29, 1954, Eisenhower laid down the law. There would be no intervention in Vietnam. Dulles, who was in Geneva, had cabled that strong American leadership was required. Eisenhower rejected that advice. “In spite of the views of the Secretary of State,” he told the NSC, for the United States to intervene unilaterally seemed “quite beyond his comprehension.” For almost two hours Eisenhower waged a one-man battle against the statutory members of the NSC, all of whom advocated coming to France’s rescue. Admiral Radford, Vice President Nixon, Undersecretary of State Bedell Smith (on Dulles’s behalf), and Harold Stassen, the director of foreign aid, placed the issue in the Cold War context. As Stassen put it, Congress and the American people would support intervention “if the Commander-in-Chief made it clear to them that it was necessary to save Southeast Asia from Communism.”
Eisenhower remained unmoved. “It was all well and good to state that if the French collapsed the United States must move in to save Southeast Asia,” he told Stassen. “But if the French indeed collapsed and the United States moved in, we would in the eyes of many Asiatic peoples merely replace French colonialism with American colonialism.” The president noted that the Vietnamese people had no interest in fighting for the French, and as a practical matter, where would the United States find the troops to intervene? It would require a general mobilization, said Eisenhower.
Ike then upped the ante. If the United States intervened, China and perhaps the Soviet Union would come in as well. Were his advisers ready for a general war? “To go in unilaterally in Indochina or other areas of the world which were endangered, amounted to an attempt to police the entire world. If we attempted such a course of action, using our armed forces and going into areas whether we were wanted or not, we would lose all our significant support in the free world.” Unless we had reliable allies who joined us, said Ike, “the leader is just an adventurer like Genghis Khan.”
Nixon and Bedell Smith countered that American air support would encourage the French to fight on. Eisenhower would have none of it. “The cause of the free world could never win, and the United States could never survive, if we frittered away our resources in local engagements.” The discussion closed. Eisenhower did not explicitly say that the United States would not intervene, but his decision was obvious.21
By the beginning of May it was clear that the French position at Dien Bien Phu was hopeless. The garrison’s defensive perimeter had shrunk to an area fifteen hundred
yards in diameter and there were fewer than ten thousand men available for duty—against a Viet Minh force five times that size. On May 1, Robert Cutler, the president’s national security assistant, presented Eisenhower with the Joint Chiefs’ plan for Operation VULTURE. Ike dismissed it out of hand. “I certainly do not think that the atomic bomb can be used by the United States unilaterally,” he told Cutler. “You boys must be crazy. We can’t use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than ten years. My God.”22
Eisenhower had made the final crucial decision. At any time during the last few weeks at Dien Bien Phu he could have ordered an air strike, but he refused to do so. As at D-Day, it was his decision. And in many respects, it was of far greater import. The landing on D-Day was a purely military matter. If not June 6, then sometime later. At Dien Bien Phu it was a matter of war and peace. Eisenhower overruled the highest national security officials in his administration and chose peace.
On May 7, 1954, Dien Bien Phu surrendered. The garrison numbered fewer than five thousand effectives, and the final position had been reduced to the size of a baseball field. French premier Joseph Laniel, barely able to control his voice, broke the news to the National Assembly.23 That night all French television and radio programming was canceled in favor of the Berlioz “Requiem.” Shortly thereafter, meeting at Geneva, the foreign ministers of China, the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, and France worked out a settlement. The French left the scene, and Vietnam was divided. North Vietnam became a Communist state under Ho Chi Minh; in South Vietnam, an anti-Communist state was formed under Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic mandarin who had sat out World War II in the United States and was vigorously supported by American officials on the scene. As Eisenhower had hinted in his address to the Chamber of Commerce, the United States preferred partition to free elections. If the Vietnamese had been given a choice, it was clear that Ho Chi Minh would have won decisively.
Eisenhower in War and Peace Page 68