On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  French policy in effect bestowed upon Ho Chi Minh the leadership of the Vietnamese independence movement, and thus he attracted the sympathy or active support of the greater part of the population. His ideological leanings as a Communist were not a significant factor in his appeal. He consolidated control of the nationalist movement under his Viet Minh, a Communist-dominated political coalition, by sanctioning the purge of thousands of his Vietnamese political opponents. The executions and political assassinations were carried out largely in 1945 and 1946, usually by what were called Honor Squads, under the direction of Vo Nguyen Giap, the master military strategist of the Viet Minh.

  When Audrey and I arrived in Indochina in 1950, Ho Chi Minh was the unquestioned leader of the Viet Minh–dominated jungle government. Although Ho’s government had been recognized by Peking, I found a strange disinterest among the French about events in China. They spoke of the Chinese Civil War with detachment as if it were far away. They were not aware that Ho Chi Minh had gone to Peking and received an assurance of military aid. But soon thereafter, they learned painfully that the presence of Mao Zedong’s troops on the Vietnam frontier and the military aid provided by Mao to Ho Chi Minh would ultimately result in their defeat.

  15

  THE CHINA FRONTIER

  By March 1950, Mao Zedong’s forces had virtually consolidated their control of South China and had taken up positions opposite the line of French forts along the Indochina frontier. Chinese Communist commanders were entering into liaison with Viet Minh guerrillas operating along the border. The French were still uncertain as to how much of a commitment Mao Zedong would risk making to the Viet Minh. They were not aware that the Chinese were making preparation for the delivery in April of large-scale military aid.

  In late March, I flew with Audrey from Saigon to Hanoi for an interview with General Marcel Alessandri, commander of French forces in Tonkin, Vietnam’s most northern region. We stayed at the Metropole, a decaying French colonial hostelry on the edge of the Red River delta whose wine menu, high-ceilinged bedrooms, and bathroom bidets were about the only remnants of its former French colonial hauteur. Ceiling fans turned futilely above huge double beds encased in white mosquito netting. The netting spared us injury on our first night in Hanoi. We were asleep when an artillery blast from a nearby French battery interdicting Viet Minh infiltration onto the delta shook loose a large, heavy section of the ceiling plaster. It struck the netting, which sagged to within an inch or two of our heads.

  The next morning, we met with Alessandri at his headquarters. One of the best of the French generals, the fifty-two-year-old officer who had spent almost all of his entire twenty-year army career in Indochina had just completed a sweep of the delta, driving most Viet Minh units out of the great northern rice bowl. He told us that his artillery was firing during the night on Viet Minh forces which had staged a lightning incursion onto the delta, and he expressed regret, with a slight smile, that we had become targets of our bedroom’s ceiling plaster. Alessandri said he was planning an offensive against Viet Minh mountain positions along the border. The general said he had not seen any evidence that the Chinese Communists as yet were shipping arms to the Viet Minh on a major scale, but recently his troops had seized American rifles smuggled by gunrunners, probably based in Macau, to the Viet Minh via China. He was confident that his troops could repulse any counteroffensive by the Viet Minh to retake their positions on the Red River delta even if they were reequipped with weapons supplied by the Chinese. When I pressed the general for permission to visit the frontier, he was hesitant. Two large French convoys traveling along Route Colonial No. 4, the main supply road serving the border posts, had just been ambushed with heavy casualties. Finally, Alessandri relented and agreed to take me and two other American correspondents who had just arrived in Hanoi, Carl Mydans, the Life magazine photographer, and Wilson Fielder of Time magazine, to Lang Son, the principal fortress town on the frontier. Audrey, then four months pregnant, stayed on in Hanoi.

  We flew with Alessandri to Lang Son in an old three-engine German Junker, dodging through cloudy mountain passes to a red-dirt strip, where we were met by a spit-and-polish Foreign Legion honor guard and taken straight to a meeting with Colonel Jean Constans, commander of the Frontier Zone. Constans told us he was attempting to seal off the frontier. His mission was to curtail the flow of Chinese arms to the Viet Minh and to block any attempt by them to descend onto the Red River delta for an assault on Hanoi. But closing what was known as the “Chinese Door” posed enormous strategic problems. Constans commanded four major French forts athwart the four traditional invasion routes from China into Indochina. On the western flank, isolated and supplied largely by air, stood the Lao Kay fort, which dominated a network of roads. The other three major forts were linked by R.C. 4, which had been dubbed “Rue du Mort” (Road of Death) because of repeated bloody Viet Minh ambushes. The highway bent along the China frontier for 150 miles from Mon Cay on the east coast through Lang Son to Cao Bang in the west. Fifteen miles to the northwest of Lang Son lay the outpost of Dong Dang, directly opposite the mist-shrouded mountain pass of Nam Quan. This was the historical invasion route. Traditionally, imperial envoys traveling from Peking had come through the Nam Quan Pass to Lang Son and then south down what became Route Colonial No. 1 to Hanoi and Saigon. Lang Son itself was a pleasant town of ten thousand inhabitants, constructed in the French provincial style with wide streets and low yellow-brown houses.

  On our first night in Lang Son we dined at the Foreign Legion officers’ club and listened to old songs of the legion over rounds of cognac. Two days later, with Constans’s reluctant permission, in a jeep driven by Lieutenant Andre Wastin, a short, dark, cocky French officer, we set out for the China border. We were escorted by a weapons carrier loaded with ten heavily armed Legionnaires, all Germans. We followed in the trace of a foot patrol that had been clearing the road of mines planted by the Viet Minh during the night. The road twisted through bare brown hills. It was ideal ambush country. Debris of clashes with the Viet Minh lay all about. There were lines of parallel trenches across the road, “piano keys” as they were called, dug by the Viet Minh at night and filled in by the French road clearers during the day. When we turned off the road for Chi Ma, an outpost on the border, the lieutenant halted the jeep and said to us: “Gentlemen. You must now make a choice, either our jeep goes ahead on the road, which often is mined by the Viet Minh, or the Legionnaires go first in their truck. If we go first in the jeep and hit a mine, one or two of us may be killed or wounded, but the Legionnaires will be able to beat off the Viet Minh who will attack after the mine explodes. However, if the Legionnaires go first and their truck hits the mine, we probably will be overwhelmed and killed by the Viet Minh ambushers. Now take your choice—which goes first, our jeep or the truck?” We exchanged glances: Carl Mydans, a short dynamic man, wise in the ways of war, who had distinguished himself in covering World War II, Wilson Fielder, the young, amiable Time magazine reporter, newly based in Hong Kong, and me. We nodded at each other and elected to go ahead of the Legionnaires’ truck in the jeep.

  At a fast, rattling clip we made it to Chi Ma. The French army post faced two Chinese Communist-held outposts, with a village in between. We walked through paddy fields to within thirty yards of the village gate, guarded by two Chinese soldiers. Mydans photographed the sentries as one of them looked us over with field glasses. We returned to Lang Son that night. Mydans and Fielder left for Haiphong the next day en route to Korea to cover the war. I never saw Fielder again. He disappeared in Korea during the battle for Taejon. He was last seen with an American Army unit that subsequently was overrun by the North Koreans. Mydans searched for days before he learned that Fielder’s body had been found beside a road near a nameless village.

  In Lang Son, I waited to join a convoy that was forming up for a dash along R.C. 4 southeast to Khe Thu on the Gulf of Tonkin. Beyond Khe Thu lay Hong Gay, the southern terminus of R.C. 4. On the suggestion of a French officer,
I had sent a message to Audrey in Hanoi proposing she meet me at Hong Gay, which is situated on the extraordinarily beautiful Halong Bay on the Gulf of Tonkin. I did not realize then that I was launching Audrey on a journey nearly as dangerous as the convoy run I was about to make.

  The mission of my convoy was to pick up arms, munitions, medical supplies, and the all-important vin rouge at the small port of Khe Thu for transport to Lang Son. From Lang Son the supplies would be sent northwest to key forts along R.C. 4. It was a tenuous supply line. Convoys traveled northwest from Lang Son infrequently since the thirty-six-mile run to the first outpost at That Khe was extremely hazardous. Beyond That Khe, except for the isolated fort midway at Dong Khe, the Viet Minh controlled the thirty-five-mile stretch to the terminus at Cao Bang, which was provisioned almost entirely by air.

  Not long after dawn, our convoy formed up in the drizzling morning mist that hangs over Lang Son during the rainy season. I was in a jeep, which was mounted with a light machine gun, seated with a carbine across my knees beside the convoy commander, a cheerful, lean lieutenant of the French Marines. The commander had insisted that I accept the carbine, which I did with some hesitation. As a former infantryman, I had no problem in handling the weapon, but journalists by custom usually worked unarmed. Led by a French sergeant, a patrol of ten Goumiers, Moroccan mountain fighters, brown-skinned bearded men, their soft-brimmed French campaign hats atop shaven heads, trudged past our fog-shrouded jeep and ahead of us down R.C. 4. The red clay road twisted for fifty miles through steep foothills to Khe Thu. Our convoy would have to reach the safety of Khe Thu before dark because the road belonged to the Viet Minh at night. Our jeep was the lead vehicle in the point detachment that was to clear the first six miles of road. We moved slowly behind the Goumiers’ patrol, which scrutinized the hillsides and checked the road for mines. Behind us came two armored personnel carriers, each mounting a .30- and a .50-caliber machine gun covering two truckloads of Legionnaires. Three miles out of Lang Son, the detachment began dropping off files of Legionnaires, who climbed to the top of the ridges bordering the road to screen the passage of the convoy. French posts all the way to Khe Thu were sending out similar security patrols. Some of the posts were only small brick blockhouses, each manned by about six native partisans. Others ranged from those with several watchtowers within a bamboo enclosure perched atop a hill to that at Dinh Lap, which was garrisoned with infantry, artillery, and tank units. The isolated posts were favorite targets for Viet Minh night raids made in overwhelming force. By day, when the French made retaliatory forays into surrounding territory, if they came upon deserted villages, indicating they belonged to the Viet Minh, the patrols would burn them and shoot the water buffalo in the rice fields.

  Our advance detachment moved forward another mile before meeting the tank patrol from Loc Binh, six miles away. The road was open. From Loc Binh, the signal went back to the convoy. The Viet Minh were not on the road, and once more with the morning, R.C. 4 southeast from Lang Son belonged to the French. At 10 A.M. the convoy, led by a truckload of Legion-naires and an armored radio vehicle, followed our advance detachment into Loc Binh, a small town of clay-plastered buildings and a gray stone Catholic church. Traveling at 200-yard intervals behind us came thirty-three civilian and forty-five military trucks mounting machine guns. Another radio car and a truck carrying Legionnaires brought up the rear of the column. The convoy moved on slowly to Dinh Lap, the largest French post between Lang Son and Khe Thu. Here were stationed the intervention troops with their tanks and artillery. When the radio cars of a convoy signaled a Viet Minh attack or contact was lost, the intervention troops moved swiftly to its assistance.

  Southeast of Dinh Lap, the convoy passed from the land of the Thos, a people of Tibetan origin, into the Nung country inhabited by mountaineers closely related to the Chinese. With the foothills more densely covered with jungle foliage, it was ideal ambush country and the most dangerous leg of the journey. The convoy commander checked the grenades in the open glove compartment of the jeep and the Tommy gun beside him with the safety off, and I fingered my loaded carbine as I wondered what I would do if the Viet Minh attacked. The Viet Minh attacks were very much alike, the lieutenant said. They usually came within the large gaps between French posts with hundreds of Viet Minh hiding in the thick roadside jungle growth. A convoy often would know it was under attack only after it had suffered its first casualties. The convoy would speed up, but if a truck was crippled, blocking the narrow road for the vehicles behind, anywhere from hundreds to thousands of Viet Minh would swarm down throwing grenades. Trucks would be burned. French wounded would be killed. The Viet Minh would then disappear into the mountains, taking with them prisoners and captured matériel. They were usually gone when intervention troops arrived and the King Cobra fighter planes from Lang Son came overhead.

  At 5:10 P.M. our command jeep halted with its accompanying radio vehicle at the Na Peo outpost to drop off a truck with engine trouble. The radio operator tuned into an English-language broadcast of the Voice of America. Legionnaires gathered around to listen. One German, a baker by trade, asked if he could settle in the United States after completing his enlistment. About half of the Legionnaires were Germans who had signed up for the five-year enlistment; only one-fifth were French, and most of the others were central Europeans who did not want to return to their countries behind the Iron Curtain.

  Several miles beyond Na Peo, the heavy roadside jungle had been cleared away. The Viet Minh had attacked a convoy here. Twenty-five had been killed, fifteen wounded, and twenty-five men taken prisoner. Fourteen trucks were burned.

  When our jeep entered Khe Thu at 6:10 P.M., a French Tricolor was flying over the post at half mast. There had just been a funeral for twelve soldiers; one of them a French warrant officer who had arrived in Indochina four days before. They had died two days earlier in a Viet Minh ambush eight miles south on Route No. 18. A detachment was going out in the morning to reopen the road. I went with the detachment.

  The hills were steaming in a hot early morning sun when our detachment, a section of Legionnaires and a company of Nung partisans, reached the area where the small convoy had been ambushed. It was a “classic ambush,” a French lieutenant told me. There had been thirty-five officers and men in four trucks who had been building a brick blockhouse at a ferry landing of the Song Ba Che River. The first truck, carrying a French lieutenant, a warrant officer, a sergeant, and three Moroccan privates, was going through a road cut lined with bamboo when ambushed. It was a complete surprise. The Viet Minh opened with one machine gun firing along the axis of the road, and three other machine guns blazed from the hillside, where more than two hundred Viet Minh were concealed. Everyone in the first truck was killed in the first hail of fire. The other three trucks halted at intervals of 100, 200, and 500 yards. Two men manning the machine gun on the second truck were picked off quickly. Several of the men in the second truck retreated to the next, where a defense was mounted. The Viet Minh charged down the road. They were repulsed, but only after they had reached the first truck and collected the weapons of the dead. Six Nung partisans stationed in a tiny nearby post were the first to come to the assistance of the convoy. Two were wounded by the Viet Minh. One of them dragged himself off, taking the bolt of his rifle with him so it could not be used by the enemy. The Viet Minh withdrew when they heard vehicles of the Khe Thu intervention force approaching. They carried off about twenty of their own dead.

  “That is all that happened,” the lieutenant said. “That is all that ever happens.” Soon another convoy would go out to complete the building of the river blockhouse.

  I returned to Khe Thu to spend the night, and the next morning with a French security detail I drove to Hong Gay, worried sick about Audrey. It was March 29.

  Audrey had received my message five days earlier saying that I hoped to be in Hong Gay on March 27. She had approached the French Information Service in Hanoi for help in getting to Hong Gay. Contrary to the advice given
me in Lang Son, she was strongly advised against making the trip. Viet Minh guerrillas were operating along the sixty-five-mile road between Hanoi and Haiphong. The small riverboats, which plied between Haiphong and Hong Gay, passed through hilly country where the banks were controlled by the Viet Minh. Determined, nevertheless, to go to Hong Gay, Audrey found a Vietnamese taxi driver in Hanoi whose fears about driving to Haiphong were assuaged by a wad of bills. Perched on the back seat of an old Citroen, dressed in slacks, all of twenty-one, with her blonde braids piled on top of her head, Audrey was driven at high speed to the Haiphong port. She checked into a decrepit French guesthouse and was lying in a four-poster bed in her room when in amazement she heard familiar American voices. In the adjacent room, she found Mydans and Fielder. After failing to dissuade her from making the dangerous trip, the two took her the next morning to the river dock. The boat to Hong Gay was a native craft, less than thirty feet in length, pushed by a gasoline engine, and loaded with bags of rice, sixteen Vietnamese, and a Frenchman carrying a submachine gun. The Frenchman had been assigned to look after Audrey and was not at all happy about making the trip. The Vietnamese looked uneasily at Audrey’s blonde braids, a target that might draw fire from the Viet Minh.

  As the boat slipped out of Haiphong port and upriver, the Frenchman popped a conical Vietnamese peasant hat on Audrey’s head and ordered her down among the rice sacks. “Keep your blonde head out of sight,” he said as he crouched beside her. As the boat nosed through the narrow defiles for the next six hours, the Frenchman kept his machine gun trained on the cliffs towering above them. There were happy cries from the Vietnamese when the boat entered Halong Bay, chugging through limpid waters afire with the intense colors of the sunset. In Hong Gay, at a French guesthouse fronting the bay, Audrey waited for three days hearing rumors of a Viet Minh ambush of a convoy—in fact the convoy that had preceded my own. That is where I found her. She was in a screened-in porch munching bananas, the only decent food available. “Is that you?” she cried out. She tugged at my black beard, and embracing, we told our stories. We remained in Hong Gay for several days, boating on the magnificent bay amid the strange rock formations jutting up like temple altars and huge idols carved by denizens of a forgotten land now covered by the sea.