On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  The AP Foreign Desk then cabled me suggesting that, since the Communists were ignoring my visa application, I visit “Saigon, Indonesia” for a month. Confusing Indochina with Indonesia might simply have been a typo, but it was indicative of how remote and out of the news Vietnam was at the time. Typical of virtually all American newspapers, the New York Times had published only one article on Indochina in 1942, seven in 1943, and four in 1944. A few days after my return from Hainan, Audrey and I flew to Saigon.

  We were in Vietnam when word came that Hainan had fallen to the Communists after two failed amphibious assaults in March and mid-April. But on April 17, Lin Biao’s troops swarmed onto the north coast landing from more than a hundred junks while another column transported aboard some sixty junks, landed west of Haikou. The Communist guerrillas struck from the interior. The Nationalist garrison retreated south to the port of Yulin, where some troops found ships to take them to Taiwan, the last Nationalist retreat. On April 21, having waited more than two decades, guerrilla chief Feng Baiju was the unchallenged ruler of Hainan, and on May Day he raised his red flag over Haikou. Within two years all the foreigners were gone, except perhaps for the lonely French German leper. The guns were silent now on the mainland with the Nationalists confined to Taiwan and its small offshore islands.

  Reading the brief item in a Saigon newspaper, I reflected on my experience in covering the Chinese Civil War for three years from Manchuria down to that obscure island off the southern coast. How much of my reporting, and that of other American correspondents, had been digested by the people of our country? On leave in the United States four months earlier, I had found a vitriolic debate in progress on “Who lost China?” It had been touched off by the Republicans in the 1948 presidential campaign elections by their candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, who accused the Truman administration of failing to provide sufficient support for Chiang Kai-shek. Initially, I was simply flabbergasted and somewhat amused by this question of “Who lost China?” The answer seemed so obvious from the weight of documentation in the White Paper on China published on August 2, 1949, by the State Department covering relations with China from 1944 to 1949, the reporting of General Barr on the incredibly inept performance of the Nationalist military, and what journalists, including me, had been filing to our publications for years. The record of Chiang’s strategic bungling in military engagements with the Communists, his cronyism in the selection of inept army commanders, his tolerance of corruption, and the failure of the Kuomintang to carry out the political and economic reforms needed to rally the Chinese people to the banner of a democratic state—these were the factors unmistakably which enabled the Communists to come to power despite the two billion dollars of American military aid given Chiang. It was estimated that 75 percent of the arms provided the Nationalists had fallen into the hands of the Communists beginning with the collapse in Manchuria.

  I was less amused by the hypocritical question of “Who lost China?” when Alan Gould, executive editor of the Associated Press, received a letter from Alfred Kohlberg accusing me of covering up Stalin’s control of the Chinese Communist Party. Kohlberg, a wealthy New York importer of lace from South China ports, was a member of the “China Lobby,” a group of American supporters of Chiang Kai-shek, notable among them Henry Luce, the publisher of Time magazine. Kohlberg took issue with the statement, which I had made in a widely published report, in which I had said: “All the dependable evidence we have points to the premise that Moscow does not have direct control over the Chinese Communists.” In reply to Kohlberg, Gould stood by my record as an observer of China developments, pointing out that in the next sentence I had said: “Peking obediently follows Moscow’s lead; almost certainly not on direct orders but rather because of ideological faith.”

  Other targets in the press, academia, and government were not as fortunate as I in the support they received from their superiors for their reporting. Fear of Stalinist aggression and Communist infiltration into the United States, the Communist coup in Czechoslovak in 1948, and the invasion of South Korea in 1950 by the North were among the factors that generated a public atmosphere of suspicion and insecurity which obscured undisputable facts. Spurred on by the China Lobby and later by the accusations of Senator Joe McCarthy, blame for the so-called loss of China was heaped on the revered General Marshall and leading academic China experts such as Owen Lattimore and John King Fairbank. The most knowledgeable China specialists in the State Department, among them John S. Service, John Davies, John Melby, and Edmund Clubb, were falsely labeled security risks or pro-Communist and accused of helping to bring about Mao’s triumph through their criticism of Chiang Kai-shek’s policies. China journalists, notably Edgar Snow, suffered the Cold War umbrage. Careers were blighted or destroyed, and those individuals most qualified to provide guidance in the framing of an intelligent China policy were silenced or their voices muffled when they were most needed by the American people.

  The fiction that the so-called loss of China could be attributed to pro-Communist bias was propagated on occasion even by someone as well informed as Dwight Eisenhower as he sought to cope politically with the impact on public opinion that McCarthy made with his broadsided accusations. In a speech in Milwaukee in 1952 while campaigning for the presidency, Eisenhower asserted: Two decades of tolerance for Communism reaching into high places in Washington had meant “contamination in some degree of virtually every department, every agency, every bureau, and every section of our government. It meant a government by men whose very brains were confused by the opiate of this deceit” resulting in the fall of China and the surrender of whole nations in Eastern Europe.

  Over the next years, I found this distortion of Chinese history ever more excruciatingly painful. The politician most responsible for the collapse of Nationalist China, Chiang Kai-shek, was comfortably ensconced on Taiwan enjoying renewal of American military and economic aid. In January 1951, speaking in Taipei of his determination to retake the Communist-held mainland, Chiang Kai-shek said that past mistakes must be avoided if a successful invasion was to be mounted. The mistakes he cited were disunity and factionalism within the Kuomintang, incompetence, defeatism, selfishness, and lavishness. He made no direct reference to the failure of his own military strategy. Chiang remained president of the Nationalist government on Taiwan until his death there at the age of eighty-seven. Madame Chiang retired to an estate on New York’s Long Island and died there in 2003 at the age of 105. In that year, when Audrey and I toured Chiang Kai-shek’s palace headquarters in Nanjing, we were told by officials that the government was amenable to the interment of Chiang’s remains there, as he wished, if the family and the government on Taiwan would approve of the reunification of the island with the mainland. Chiang’s remains are buried in Taipei, the Taiwan capital, in an elaborate tomb modeled after that of Sun Yat-sen in Nanjing.

  We may ask: What kind of a China would have emerged if Chiang Kaishek had risen to his epic challenge and defeated Mao Zedong? On Taiwan, the Chiang government, spurred by conditional American aid, instituted economic reforms and built a prosperous society. After Chiang’s death in 1975, it evolved from an authoritarian into a multiparty democratic state. With competent governance, Chiang or his successors conceivably could have founded a democratic society on the mainland comparable to that which later emerged on Taiwan. Under a Communist government the people of the mainland are enjoying much improved living standards, largely as a consequence of the free market incentives introduced in the late 1970s by Deng Xiaoping, but promises of democratic reform remain unfulfilled.*

  14

  SAIGON

  In early February 1950, just a few days after my return from Hainan Island, Audrey and I flew to Saigon in an old French commercial airliner and checked into the Continental Hotel. In our room, weary after the long flight, we had just sprawled on the large bed beneath mosquito nets and a ceiling fan that was barely stirring the sultry air when an explosion shattered the square beneath our window. We scrambled to look.
There, on the other side of the square we saw a sidewalk café that had been blasted by a bomb. More than a score of rickshaw cabs were streaking away from the café. One of their drivers obviously had thrown the powerful bomb. French soldiers and sailors, dead and wounded, lay sprawled beside overturned tables and splintered glass within the café and along the sidewalk terrace. A badly wounded soldier clutching his groin stumbled into the street. This was our introduction to French-ruled Indochina, which for three years had been seething with the burning hatreds of colonial war and terrorism.

  In the struggle against Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh guerrillas in the jungles, mountains, and on the great river deltas of Vietnam, the French Union forces had suffered about 100,000 casualties, including 25,000 dead and captured. It was a war of surprise attacks on isolated French garrisons, of ambush and massacre, and ruthless retaliation with napalm air attacks and torching of villages suspected of harboring the Viet Minh. At night, the French remained in their fortified posts, and the Viet Minh became masters of the countryside. Millions of Vietnamese had been uprooted in the merciless warfare and flooded as refugees into Saigon, Hanoi, and the other French-held cities and towns. The world knew little or did not care very much about this vast human tragedy unfolding in a remote colony. Few foreign correspondents ventured into Vietnam to tell the story. Resident French journalists were subjected to military censorship. The war was overshadowed by events in China.

  Under the French, Saigon was a much less safe place in which to live than the city I came to know in the 1960s, when it was policed by American troops. Viet Minh terrorists would throw an average of three or four plastic bombs each night into cafés crowded with French soldiers and sailors or into establishments that refused to pay taxes to their underground. Political assassinations were staged on open café verandas or on busy thoroughfares. No one was safe. I was nearby when Marcel Marshal Bazin, the dreaded chief of the political section of the French Sûreté police, was shot in the back while walking on a crowded street. Three Vietnamese policemen observed the killing without pursuing the assassins. Bazin had commanded the Sûreté shock force against the death squads of Battalion 905, the Viet Minh underground, which was terrorizing the city. His agents in retaliation for Viet Minh assassinations had been dumping the bodies of executed suspects on sidewalk corners to pressure the underground to desist. Shortly after I interviewed Jean de Raymond, French commissioner for Cambodia, he was murdered in his bedroom, struck on the head and stabbed in the throat, by a Vietnamese servant.

  Yet stubbornly the French were resisting transforming Saigon into a barricaded city, as did the American military command in later years. Saigon remained a vividly colorful city of tree-lined boulevards with sidewalk cafés serving superb wines and gourmet food—a vibrant metropolis of 2 million encompassing Saigon and the twin Chinese city of Cholon. French soldiers in a mélange of uniforms—Foreign Legionnaires, African Senegalese, Moroccan Goumiers, and French paratroopers—thronged the streets, bars, casinos, and brothels. For the affluent, the friendly, opium-smoking Corsican who ran our hotel, the Continental, imported French prostitutes from Paris. There were lavishly furnished opium dens in Saigon and Hanoi whose patrons included occasionally prominent members of the French community. They would recline on the couches taking perhaps five or ten pipes, not the thirty or forty smoked by addicts, tended by Vietnamese girls in white diaphanous dresses who were available to those male patrons whose sexual desires were not quenched by the suppressant effects of the opium. Remote from the cement blockhouses and shanties on the outskirts of the city where most Vietnamese lived, the French colons dwelled in opulent style in luxurious villas.

  I soon learned that much of that opulence was financed corruptly by covert manipulation of the piaster, the Indochinese currency. Fortunes were made by buying piasters—the official Vietnamese currency—on the black market and then obtaining authorization, usually through bribery from the French Office of Exchange, to remit the currency to banks in France at the official rate. The discrepancy yielded enormous profits at the expense of the French government.

  Outraged Frenchmen told me that the Viet Minh had been exploiting this corrupt traffic to buy weapons, which were used in operations against French troops. The weapons were bought with hard currency from gunrunners operating out of Hong Kong and Bangkok. To obtain the hard currency, usually American dollars, the Viet Minh collected piasters from shopkeepers and restaurant owners through taxes, actually extortion. These piasters were then sold in Saigon to agents of a French syndicate at cheap market rate for hard currency payable in Switzerland. One of these syndicate agents, I learned, was a senior Chinese employee of the Bank of Indochina, which had semiofficial status. The syndicate made its profit by taking the piasters to the official French Office of Exchange in Saigon, where, with the connivance of French bureaucrats, the syndicate would obtain authorization from the office to remit the piasters at the official rate to France. The syndicate would make a profit of as much as 100 percent. I was told by my French sources that information about this traffic had been given to the French government by one of its intelligence agencies, Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre Espionage (SDECE), but the government refrained from taking action to avoid a public scandal that would damage it politically.

  To bypass the military censorship in Saigon, Audrey and I went to Bang-kok to file my story on this piaster racket. French agents who trailed me searched my room at the Oriental Hotel and obtained details of my story, apparently from my discarded drafts left carelessly in a wastepaper basket. Upon my return to Saigon, my French assistant, Max Clos, and I were called to the office of the Sûreté police chief. We found him in a state of great agitation, and to my astonishment, he began to plead for our understanding. He had assumed, incorrectly, that I knew his office was linked with the pi-aster traffic. He told me that income from dealing in piasters had been used in his office to pay his agents, and he showed us records of such payments to prominent personalities in Saigon. The Sûreté chief accused his SDECE counterpart of attempting to ruin him and said that the SDECE chief was obtaining funds by illegal sales of import licenses.

  The French war effort was being undermined by this corrupt piaster traffic, and it was also having a cancerous effect on metropolitan France. The burden was shared by the United States, since Washington started picking up the bills for the French Indochina War in 1950 and by 1954 was paying about 80 percent of the costs.

  This was the morass of corruption and deadly guerrilla warfare into which the United States plunged in February 1950. Just a few days after our arrival in Saigon, President Truman extended recognition to the newly created French-sponsored Vietnamese government headed as chief of state by Bao Dai, last emperor of the Nguyen dynasty. Truman also pledged military aid to the French in the war against the Viet Minh. The president put aside the traditional American reservations about French colonial policies and a pending post–World War II proposal by the late president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to free Indochina from French colonial rule by converting it into a United Nations Trusteeship. Shortly before Truman made his commitment, Vietnam was incorporated with Laos and Cambodia into a new Indochinese federation with the three states granted limited autonomy within the French Union.

  At the time of our arrival, there were only about a dozen Americans living in Saigon, most of them attached to the small U.S. Consulate. The American community in Indochina was made up largely of about 100 missionaries, most affiliated with the Christian and Missionary Alliance. The alliance had founded a church of some 50,000 members drawn from the 28 million people of the three Indochinese states. The missionaries, like Americans generally, were popular with the Indochinese, who deemed them anticolonialist, since the United States had recently granted independence to the Philippines. However, many French officials regarded Americans with deep suspicion. There was lingering anger about the support given in 1945 to Ho Chi Minh by agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central
Intelligence Agency. Many French colons were convinced that the United States was intent on replacing France as the dominant presence in Indochina.

  On February 9, 1950, Edmund Gullion, the newly appointed American consul general in Saigon, arrived and delivered a formal note to the Bao Dai government proposing diplomatic relations. On February 25, the consulate was raised to a legation, and Gullion was named chargé d’affaires, with the personal rank of minister-counselor. Almost immediately, the United States began to assemble in Saigon the panoply of intervention: large diplomatic and information staffs, economic and military aid missions. U.S. naval vessels called at the port of Saigon.

  The AP had directed me to spend a month looking into vague reports of unrest in what was viewed as an obscure little country. But now, suddenly and unexpectedly, Indochina was thrust by the Truman commitment into American consciousness. I was directed to open a bureau, and I became the first American correspondent after World War II to be stationed in Indochina. Prior to my arrival French stringers covered news developments for foreign news agencies filing to Paris in French. Audrey and I stayed two years and witnessed the United States becoming mired in a struggle which was to evolve into one of the most painful episodes in American history.