Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  In October Ho was back in Tonkin. The battle for Vietnam began a month later over the collection of customs duties in Haiphong. The French insisted it was their right; the Vietminh insisted it was not. When gunfire erupted between Vietminh and French soldiers, D’Argenlieu decided to “teach the Viets a lesson” On November 23, after giving the Vietminh two hours to evacuate Haiphong, the French attacked guerrilla hideouts in the city. French infantry and armored units swept through Haiphong; French aircraft provided tactical air support; and the French cruiser Suffren unloaded a sustained artillery bombardment. When the day was over, much of Haiphong was rubble. Six thousand people, including a few Vietminh, were dead.

  Four weeks later, the Vietminh retaliated in Hanoi, destroying the city’s electrical power plant and assassinating several French officials. Ho Chi Minh fled the city and established new Vietminh headquarters in the jungle sixty miles from Hanoi, where he controlled several provinces with 40,000 Vietminh troops. General Etienne Valluy, who replaced Leclerc, announced that if “those gooks want a fight, they’ll get it” General Vo Nguyen Giap was obliging: “I order all soldiers and militia in the center, south, and north, to stand together, go into battle, destroy the invaders, and save the nation” The war was on.

  Firmly in control of Tonkin’s major cities, the French high command knew it would have to conquer the Red and Mekong River Deltas to deprive the guerrillas of their rice supplies and the mountains near the Laotian and Chinese borders to strip them of their sanctuaries. General D’Argenlieu’s strategic approach seemed logical: Build isolated military outposts that the French termed hedgehogs, man them with crack troops, and roam into the countryside seeking out and destroying the Vietminh. Eventually, D’Argenlieu assumed, the Vietminh would run out of hiding places and be forced into a conventional set-piece battle, where superior French firepower could annihilate them. The French hoped to conclude a quick victory; otherwise, the war would be expensive, both politically and financially.

  Among the greatest challenges facing French soldiers, and later their American counterparts, was the climate, especially in southern Vietnam. Beginning in September, monsoon winds hit central Vietnam from the northeast, blowing across the South China Sea, picking up enormous amounts of water, and dropping them on the countryside until early February. Rainfall averages 100 to 200 inches a year there. Meteorologists classify it as tropical monsoon, but French troops dubbed it “wet hell” Farther south, in the region of Saigon and the Mekong Delta, a tropical savanna climate prevails. Summers receive large amounts of rainfall, with temperatures and humidity hovering in the nineties. French soldiers on summer patrols, especially if they were working their way through swamps and wetlands, often joked that they could not tell where the waterline stopped and the air began. A remark in the mid-1940s by Jean Dubé, a French soldier stationed in Cochin China in the late 1940s, sums up the experience: “I know what those GIs are going through. It really didn’t matter if we were wading through swamps or grasslands. We sweat so much we got just as wet in either place” The Vietnamese were not going to give the French a quick victory.

  Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap prepared for guerrilla war. They assumed that France would not have the resources to stay for the long haul. French politics was already a quagmire, and socialists as well as communists were calling for an end to the war. A bloody guerrilla conflict of ambushes, booby traps, and assassinations, with high casualties but no set-piece battles—at least not yet—was Giap’s strategy. While the French saw the war in military terms—defeating the Vietminh on the battlefield—Ho Chi Minh saw it in political terms: destroying the French will to continue.

  Throughout 1948 and 1949 the French established their hedgehogs on Route 3 from Bac Ninh to Cao Bang, Route 18 from Bac Ninh to Haiphong, Route 5 from Hanoi to Haiphong, Route 1 from Hanoi to Lang Son, and Route 4 from Cao Bang to Lang Son. In the Mekong Delta, they sought out the guerrillas in search-and-destroy missions. On the political front, the French had Bao Dai, whom they restored to the throne in 1946, sign the Elysée Agreement on March 8, 1949, which created the State of Vietnam as an independent nation but placed France in control of defense, finance, and diplomacy. France promised elections to incorporate Cochin China into a unified Vietnam and held them one month later. Convinced the elections were a sham, the Vietminh boycotted them. Only 1,700 people showed up at the polls, and they voted overwhelmingly to join the State of Vietnam. D’Argenlieu proclaimed that democracy had prevailed.

  But in 1949 the war became part of a much larger global struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. From 1945 to 1948, anticommunist rhetoric had grown shrill in Washington. President Truman announced the Truman Doctrine in 1947 to provide $400 million in military and economic assistance to Greece and Turkey in the fight against leftist-backed guerrillas. The fall of Greece and Turkey, Truman argued, would threaten all the eastern Mediterranean and the Mideast. To save Western Europe, Truman launched the Marshall Plan in 1948, a $12.6 billion program of American economic assistance.

  Three events in 1949 elevated anticommunism in the United States from fear to paranoia. In 1948, hoping to starve West Berlin into surrender, the Soviet Union had blocked the highway from West Germany to West Berlin. Truman responded with the Berlin Airlift, an unprecedented daily resupply of a city of two million people. Tension escalated well into 1949 until Moscow backed down. When the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb in 1949, a wave of fear swept throughout the United States. Finally, at the end of 1949, Mao Zedong and the Chinese communists drove Jiang Jieshi and the Chinese nationalists off the mainland out to the island of Taiwan.

  Many Americans were convinced that an international communist conspiracy was set to take over the world from Moscow. Whenever communists caused any trouble anywhere, the Truman administration blamed Moscow. Late in 1948 the Republican Congressman Richard M. Nixon of California accused Alger Hiss, a Democrat and former State Department official, of being a communist. The trial, which resulted in Hiss’s conviction for perjury, generated headlines throughout much of 1949. Early in 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, charged that 205 communists were working in the State Department. Congress passed the Internal Security Act in September 1950 requiring registration of communist and communist-front organizations. Communist subversives seemed to be everywhere.

  Ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pronouncements on the inherent problems of French imperialism, prominent Americans had at least been able to recognize the existence of Vietnamese nationalism.

  But as the fear of communism increased, they subsumed the country’s nationalism under Ho Chi Minh’s communism, which they believed tied him inextricably to the Soviet conspiracy. They had no idea of the extent of Ho’s political independence.

  A few people expressed a different point of view. In Paris, General Leclerc repeated his conviction that “anti-communism will be a useless tool unless the problem of nationalism is resolved” Raymond Fosdick, a State Department expert on Asia, claimed that whether “the French like it or not, independence is coming to Indochina. Why, therefore, do we tie ourselves to the tail of their battered kite?” But Leclerc and Fosdick were lonely voices. Far more typical was Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state. In 1949 Acheson remarked that whether “Ho Chi Minh is as much nationalist as Commie is irrelevant . . . . All Stalinists in colonial areas are nationalists”

  Out of that fear of Indochinese communism emerged the “domino theory,” the belief that the fall of one country to communism would topple the next, as though in a row of dominos. For a time in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was central to the way Americans interpreted the world. It appeared as if the whole free world depended on the survival of French Indochina. If Ho Chi Minh succeeded in conquering Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin China, Laos and Cambodia would succumb; then Thailand and Burma, Pakistan and India. Afghanistan, Iran, and the rest of the Middle East were sure to follow. Next communism would infect North Africa and the entire Mediterr
anean.

  The dominos could fall in either direction. On September 20, 1951, during a visit to Washington, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the commander in chief of French Indochina, described a chain of dominoes reaching from Tonkin to Europe: “Once Tonkging [sic] is lost, there is really no barrier before Suez . . . . The loss of Asia would mean the end of Islam, which has two-thirds of its faithful in Asia. The fall of Islam would mean upheavals in North Africa jeopardizing strategic defense bases situated there” American leaders preferred to describe a row of dominoes in the other direction. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles warned in 1953 that if “Indo-China should be lost, there would be a chain reaction throughout the Far East and South Asia,” posing a “grave threat to Malaya, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand” Thomas Dewey, the Republican governor of New York, claimed that the “French are holding Indo-China, without which we would lose Japan and the Pacific” In 1965 Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut carried the domino theory to its extreme: “If we fail to draw the line in Vietnam we may find ourselves compelled to draw a defense line as far back as Seattle and Alaska, with Hawaii as a solitary outpost”

  As Andrew Rotter and Gabriel Kolko along with other historians have pointed out, there was more to the domino theory than anti-Soviet rhetoric and anticommunist paranoia. Communist expansion was no idle threat. The Philippines were already dealing with communist guerrillas, and in Malaya and Burma the British government faced similar threats. Radical insurgents in Indonesia were undermining the Dutch colonial regime. Political leaders in Australia and New Zealand were genuinely concerned about the prospects of a communist victory in Vietnam. The fall of Vietnam might topple Malaya, the Philippines, and Indonesia, and once Indonesia fell, so would Australia and New Zealand.

  In strategic and economic terms, Southeast Asia was also thought to be critical to American interests. The fall of Southeast Asia would threaten the island chain stretching from Japan to the Philippines, cutting off American air routes to India and South Asia and eliminating the first line of defense in the Pacific. Australia and New Zealand could be isolated. The region was loaded with important natural and strategic resources, including tin, rubber, rice, copra, iron ore, copper, tungsten, and oil. Not only would the United States be cut off from those resources, but huge potential markets for American products were threatened.

  The United States was particularly concerned about the relationship between Southeast Asia and Japan. Japan was notoriously poor in resources, and with China now in communist hands, one reliable source of raw materials for the Japanese economy was gone. If the Japanese economy stagnated, the nation’s communists might gain power. One way to preserve the economic integrity of Japan was to effect an economic integration of Japan and Southeast Asia. But if Southeast Asia fell to communism, such an integration would be impossible, or so policy makers feared. A 1952 National Security Council memo specifically stated that concern: “In the long run the loss of Southeast Asia, especially Malaya and Indonesia, could result in such economic and political pressures in Japan as to make it extremely difficult to prevent Japan’s eventual accommodation to the Soviet Bloc”

  Washington even detected a connection between Southeast Asia and the survival of Western Europe. In 1949 Great Britain was still in the economic doldrums and dangerously low in dollar reserves. Recovery required huge capital investments, and the entire British empire needed to increase its exports to the United States. Southeast Asia was critical to that process. Before World War II a vigorous triangular trade had existed between Great Britain, the United States, and British Malaya, which had valuable rubber and tin assets. That trade needed to be revived. Nor could the French economy be restored to health as long as the war in Indochina was such a financial drain.

  Throughout 1950 political events in Asia seemed to confirm American fears. Early in 1950, the Soviet Union and China extended diplomatic recognition to Hanoi, which for Dean Acheson revealed “Ho in his true colors as the mortal enemy of native independence in Indochina” The United States responded quickly, confirming the Elysée Agreement by recognizing Bao Dai’s State of Vietnam as an “independent part of the French Union” In February the National Security Council declared “that the threat of communist aggression against Indochina is only one phase of anticipated communist plans to seize all of Southeast Asia” On May 15, 1950, President Harry Truman announced his decision to supply $15 million in military assistance to France to fight the Vietminh.

  At the time, Mao Zedong had decided to contest Joseph Stalin’s status as leader of the communist world by fashioning his own image of the “Stalin of the East,” the de facto leader of all communist parties in East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Vietnam provided the first opportunity to upstage Stalin and the Soviet Union. United States policymakers would not really appreciate the reality of the Chinese-Soviet split until the mid-1960s, but it first emerged in the early 1950s when the Soviet Union and the Chinese competed to win the loyalty of Ho Chi Minh.

  In the race to keep the Vietnamese, armed, clothed, and fed, Mao enjoyed a distinct geographic advantage, one he began to exploit almost as soon as American aid started flowing to Vietnam. For Russians to send massive volumes of supplies, the goods would have to travel by sea. Goods from the heavily industrialized Soviet west had to be shipped by rail either to Vladivostok or the Black Sea and loaded on supply ships. From Vladivostok, the ships would make their way through the Sea of Japan and Straits of Molucca to the South China sea and the northern Vietnamese port city of Haiphong. From the Black Sea, Soviet ships bound for Vietnam had to sail west through the Bosporous and the Dardanelles straits into the Mediterranean, then through the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean and from there to the South China sea and Haiphong. To give China the upper hand, Mao constructed multiple railroad lines connecting Guangxi and Guangdong provinces in southern China with trunk lines in northern Tonkin. The railroads allowed for massive shipments of supplies to the Vietminh.

  When North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, the Truman administration became all the more convinced that the Soviet Union wanted all of Asia. Led by the United States, the United Nations pledged to defend South Korea. Besides sending troops to Korea, Truman increased the American commitment to France, sending more than $133 million in Indochina aid at the end of the year. He extended another $50 million for economic and technical assistance. A contingent of DC-3 Dakota aircraft landed in Saigon in June. Waiting on the runway with paintbrushes, the French enraged American pilots when they replaced the aircrafts' white star markings with the French tricolor insignia. Late in November, Chinese troops joined the Korean War, killing thousands of UN troops. To most Americans, the international communist conspiracy was well under way.

  In Hanoi, Vo Nguyen Giap was not thinking about any international communist conspiracy. From Mao Zedong’s writings on revolutionary warfare, Giap developed a three-stage formula for defeating the French. Beyond that, he had no passionate interest in the spread of communism.

  During the first stage that the Vietminh strategist projected, the insurrectionists would just survive, avoiding confrontations until they built up their reserves. If they could achieve surprise and complete superiority, they would strike, but otherwise the Vietminh bided their time Giap’s fear of premature battle was not sentimental. He possessed a unique philosophy about death. “Every minute,” he remarked to a French reporter, “hundreds of thousands of people die on this earth. The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands of human beings, even our compatriots, means little” What Giap did not want was an engagement that destroyed his fledgling army. Stage one characterized Vietminh operations in 1946 and 1947.

  The second stage employed guerrilla tactics—ambushes, road destruction, hit-and-run attacks, and assassinations. At night the Vietminh placed booby traps along French patrol routes. Their favorite ones were sharpened bamboo “punji stakes” dipped in human feces or poison and driven into holes or rice paddies, o
r attached to bent saplings; hollowed – out coconuts filled with gunpowder and triggered by a trip wire; walk bridges with ropes almost cut away so they would collapse when someone tried to cross; a buried bamboo stub with a bullet on its tip, activated when someone stepped on it; the “Malay whip log,” attached to two trees by a rope and triggered by a trip wire; boards studded with iron barbs and buried in stream beds and rice paddies. In 1948 and 1949 Vo Nguyen Giap’s second stage was under way.

  By 1949 Giap thought he was almost ready for the third stage. He wanted a real fight with the French Expeditionary Corps. Between 1945 and 1947, he had built the People’s Army from a ragtag group of 5,000 to more than 100,000, most of them irregular troops but also including thousands of highly disciplined, well-trained Vietminh soldiers. Events in 1949 made the general offensive even more inviting. Mao Zedong’s victory gave Giap a sanctuary at his rear. Vietnamese peasants constructed four roads from the Chinese border to staging areas, and Chinese and Soviet supplies began to arrive. By 1950 the Vietminh had five fully equipped infantry divisions, along with an artillery and engineering division. It was time for what Giap termed the “general counter- offensive”

  Giap set his sights on the French outpost at Dong Khe. The hedgehog sat astride Route 4, a road the French considered the Vietminh “jugular vein” in northern Tonkin. They reasoned that control of Route 4 would cut Vietminh supply lines from China and stall their troop movements. French truck convoys supplied Dong Khe on a daily basis, but in early 1950 Giap blocked all shipments to the garrison. On May 26, 1950, with monsoon rains drenching the land and Vietminh infantry surrounding the outpost, he began the artillery bombardment. Two days later, thousands of Vietminh soldiers stormed the garrison. It fell on May 28. French paratroopers retook Dong Khe a few days later, but the Vietminh successfully attacked again on September 18. Early in October, they took Cao Bang, the northernmost city on Route 4, and over the next several months the French abandoned Lang Son, their southern outpost on Route 4, and Thai Nguyen, the city on Route 3 between Hanoi and Cao Bang. Vo Nguyen Giap killed or captured 6,000 French troops and eliminated the French presence all along the Chinese border.