Flying back to Saigon, I came to jarring conclusions as I reviewed what I had observed on the frontier. In Saigon and Hanoi, American and French officials told me that the French troops had effectively sealed off the frontier except for small-scale infiltration by the Viet Minh. In fact, the Viet Minh could quite easily transit to China through the gaps between the forts on R.C. 4 over roads they now controlled. The isolated French forts and smaller posts were highly vulnerable to Viet Minh attacks and difficult to keep supplied, particularly in the rainy season. They might very well be overrun if the Chinese Communists elected to bolster the Viet Minh forces by supplying them with weapons and training their assault troops in safe havens on the China side of the border. The Viet Minh could thus be provided with an excellent base area from which to prepare a massive descent upon the Red River delta and Hanoi. The future course of the Indochina War was thus in effect being decided in Peking.
On June 19 I was back in Lang Son, where I found the military situation fundamentally changed. The French no longer thought that Mao Zedong, preoccupied with Korea and girding for an invasion of Taiwan, might exercise restraint. In April they had become aware by reports from intelligence sources and reconnaissance flights that the Chinese had initiated a large-scale program of military aid for Ho Chi Minh’s forces. Roads leading to the Indochina frontier were being built or improved employing the labor of thousands, many of them captured Nationalist soldiers. On these same roads one day in the 1960s and 1970s Russian trucks would carry Soviet and Chinese arms and supplies to the North Vietnamese in the war against the Americans. A Chinese Military Advisory Group (CMAG), headed by General Wei Guoqing, had been established at Nanning in South China, with a staff of almost three hundred advisers. Thousands of Viet Minh were being trained there and closer to the border in centers at Yanshan, Longzhou, and Jingxi in Yunnan Province. Field hospitals had been erected to care for Viet Minh wounded. Viet Minh troops were beginning to return from the training centers uniformed, equipped with field kits, and fully armed with automatic weapons, bazookas, and other modern weapons, many of which were American arms captured by the Chinese Communists from the Nationalists during the Civil War. The guerrilla units were being reorganized into regular army divisions and regiments with political commissars and Chinese advisers attached.
Earlier, on May 25, Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese military commander in chief, had tested the French defense line along R.C. 4 by attacking and taking the post of Dong Khe, the strategic midway staging point, between Cao Bang and That Khe. For the first time, Viet Minh employed antiaircraft guns, which scored hits on the French King Cobra fighter planes intervening in support of the post. Only about 10 percent of the garrison of four hundred French-officered Moroccan and Vietnamese partisan troops managed to escape. Two days later, a French parachute battalion airlifted from Hanoi was dropped on Dong Khe and retook the post. But I found that the Viet Minh strike had shaken the confidence of the French officers, who told me privately that the R.C. 4 defense line might become untenable. Fears were expressed to me by French officers of a debacle if the frontier force was not pulled back to more defensible positions on the Red River delta perimeter. Secretly, the plan for an offensive against the Viet Minh mountain strongholds, described to me by General Alessandri in March, had been ruled out by the commander in chief of French forces in Indochina, General Marcel Carpentier. A new plan was put in place that would precipitate the most significant battle of the French Indochina War. Over the vehement protests of Alessandri, Carpentier decided to withdraw the garrison at Cao Bang in a move designed to reorganize and consolidate the French defense line.
I was in Saigon when the Viet Minh roll-up of the French frontier line began on September 16, 1950, with the blow falling again on Dong Khe. Four Viet Minh battalions newly trained and outfitted in China and supported by heavy mortars and artillery struck at the post, defended by about 250 Foreign Legionnaires. The attack had been planned meticulously in conjunction with the chief Chinese field adviser, General Chen Geng, a veteran of the Chinese Civil War and a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. The Legionnaires fought gallantly for sixty hours, retreating foot by foot to the southern section of the citadel while French fighter planes and bombers flying through heavy mists hit at the attackers. The Viet Minh were estimated to have suffered some five hundred casualties. On the morning of September 18, when a French Junker observation plane flew over the post, the firing had ended, the post was burning, and the Tricolor had disappeared from above the defense works. There was no radio contact. Only one officer and some twenty others managed to escape into the jungle. Dong Khe was a prelude to the most decisive battles of the French Indochina War.
On October 1, French troops executed a surprise thirty-six-mile sweep northwest from Hanoi and the Red River delta up through the rugged Tonkin ese Mountains to seize Thai Nguyen, the principal political stronghold of the Viet Minh. Two flanking columns and paratroopers dropped north of the city and successfully enveloped the mountain communications center. It was an important psychological victory, but the French assault force did not seize the Viet Minh political leaders in the hastily abandoned town, nor did it divert the Viet Minh from their targets on the frontier. In fact, the operation served Giap well by tying up badly needed French troops—sixteen battalions, two squadrons of tanks, four groups of artillery, and most of the air force—which could have been usefully employed against him in the impending battle for the frontier.
To carry out his plan for a withdrawal of the garrison from Cao Bang, Carpentier had three choices: an airlift to Lang Son, a retreat southwest down R.C. 3 to Thai Nguyen, or a dash along R.C. 4 to the safety of the frontier post at That Khe. Overriding Alessandri’s warning that it was an invitation to disaster, Carpentier chose withdrawal to That Khe.
On October 3, after blowing up their military stocks and a good part of the town, the Cao Bang garrison, comprising 2,600 troops, including crack Foreign Legionnaires and Moroccan Goumiers, set out southeast on R.C. 4 toward Dong Khe. Some 2,500 civilians, including all the women, children, and sick, had already been evacuated by air in late September, but some 500 civilian men weighed down with personal possessions accompanied the garrison. The Cao Bang evacuation plan, dubbed Operation Therese, called for a relief force of 3,500 Moroccan troops commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Marcel Le Page to fight northwest up R.C. 4 from That Khe, retake Dong Khe from the Viet Minh, then proceed north to the village of Namnang and meet the Cao Bang garrison there, whereupon they would undertake a joint withdrawal to the safe haven at That Khe. Both Le Page and the Cao Bang commander, Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Charton, complained repeatedly but to no avail that the plan was deeply flawed given the hilly jungle terrain and the vulnerability to Viet Minh attack. In fact, prior to the attack on Dong Khe, the chief Chinese adviser, Chen Geng, as Chinese archives would later reveal, had made plans with Giap to ambush the Cao Bang column if the French chose to withdraw overland.
The Cao Bang column reached Namnang, the rendezvous point, twenty miles from Cao Bang, at noon on October 4, and there Colonel Charton received a stunning message. Giap’s battalions in overwhelming strength had been waiting in ambush on the heights above Dong Khe and had descended and shattered Le Page’s column. Le Page’s troops had been driven off R.C. 4 and were now trapped in the Cocxa jungle ravine southwest of Dong Khe. Charton was ordered to hasten down a jungle trail, the Quangliet, which paralleled R.C. 4, to the relief of the Le Page column. Charton in evacuating Cao Ban had ignored orders to destroy his heavy equipment, including artillery and motor vehicles, and make the dash down R.C. 4 on foot. Confronted now with orders to move along the jungle trail, the garrison destroyed its heavy equipment and proceeded along the ill-defined Quangliet jungle trail but soon came under repeated devastating attacks by thousands of well-armed Viet Minh troops. Survivors of the Cao Bang column finally joined the Le Page columns on October 7, but the combined force was overrun by the Viet Minh as they struggled to break out through the m
ountains to That Khe. A few survivors made it to That Khe after days of wandering in the jungle only to find that it had been abandoned and was in Viet Minh hands.
Altogether, in the debacle of Operation Therese, the French lost six thousand troops, including some of the finest units of the French Army, and enough equipment to outfit another Viet Minh division. The faces of the gallant French soldiers I had known on the frontier paraded through my mind as I wrote my dispatches. Unnerved, the French command undertook a precipitant wholesale abandonment of the frontier.
More than any other night, that of October 20, 1950, is burned indelibly into my memory. It was the night I reported the fall of Lang Son, and it was the night that Susan, our first child, was born. Cascading flares lit up the skies over Saigon, and there was the distant thud of artillery fire as Audrey in labor was wheeled on a cot into the surgery of the French military hospital. At the door of the operating room, I was listening apprehensively to the distant crackle of small-arms fire when I heard Audrey cry out. Susan, the first of five daughters, was born. The delivery was a harbinger of the violent world in which our family would live. The French doctor who cut Susan’s umbilical cord wore a smock stained with the fresh blood of wounded soldiers. Artillery fire was still puncturing the night. The French were laying down a protective barrage around a perimeter outpost under attack by Viet Minh guerrillas. I left the hospital distraught on leaving Audrey and our newborn baby girl, but Audrey typically urged me to go back to my typewriter, knowing that one of the most important stories of the war was taking shape. I went directly to the little alcove in our apartment, which served as my office, and checked with my assistant, Max Clos, who had been in touch with his French military sources. French officials had revealed that Lang Son had been abandoned, the evacuation being undertaken so hastily that the military installations and the supply depots had been left intact. French planes were at the moment bombing the depots, which contained enough matériel to outfit an entire Viet Minh combat division.
As the French border posts fell, I reported in a dispatch to the Associated Press that the Viet Minh had “won control of the North Indochina frontier and ended French chances of winning a decisive military victory.” Describing the loss of the frontier forts as “the turning point” in the war, I wrote: “Yielded to the Viet Minh is a near impregnable mountain base area with good trans-frontier connections to supply sources and training centers in Red China. This means that the Ho Chi Minh regime now has the space and means of preparing a full-scale military offensive against the principal French strongholds located further south. The purely guerrilla phase of the war in Indochina has ended.”
Washington was not unaware of what would be the impact on French military prospects if Mao provided large-scale assistance to the Viet Minh. As early as March 27, 1950, the National Security Council estimated that “it was doubtful that the French Expeditionary Forces, combined with Indochinese troops, could successfully contain Ho Chi Minh’s forces should they be strengthened by either Chinese troops crossing the border or by Communist-supplied arms and materiel in quantity.” The secret memorandum NSC 64, recorded in the Pentagon Papers, the official history of the American role in Indochina, balanced this warning against the need to contain Communist expansion in Southeast Asia. The memorandum propounding the domino theory stated: “The neighboring countries of Thailand and Burma could be expected to fall under Communist domination if Indochina were controlled by a Communist-dominated government. The balance of Southeast Asia would then be in grave hazard.”
The domino theory, which would be shown by subsequent events to be fallacious, provided a strategic rationale for meeting President de Gaulle’s demands for assistance in Indochina in return for French military cooperation in Europe. Six weeks after the NSC 64 estimate was made, President Truman recognized the Bao Dai government and initiated his assistance program to the French with an allocation of $10 million for the year. The allocations mounted steadily to $1.06 billion in 1954, the year of the final French military collapse. When Chinese Communist “volunteers” entered the Korean War on October 25, 1950, the National Intelligence Estimate submitted to the president in December concluded that large-scale Chinese intervention in Indochina was “impending.” Aid to the French in Indochina moved higher on the list of priorities. The French Union Army, made up of 130,000 troops, including a cadre of French soldiers, Foreign Legion units, African Colonials, and 50,000 Indochinese auxiliaries, were seen as the most reliable force for the containment of China.
Despite the loss of the frontier, the French were buoyed with the arrival on December 19, 1950, of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny as the new commander. Anticipating momentarily a Viet Minh descent on Hanoi and the Red River delta, the French were in a panic. General de La Tour, who replaced General Alessandri as the commander in Tonkin, had ordered the evacuation of women and children from Hanoi. While pledging to defend the city, de La Tour began emptying military depots and trucking the matériel to the port of Haiphong to be shipped out. De Lattre, a World War II hero, sometimes referred to as the “French MacArthur,” flew to Hanoi at this moment. The imperious general lined up the northern military commanders on arrival, questioned them, and reassigned several whom he found failing on the spot. He electrified the Expeditionary Force by declaring that they would “no longer give an inch.” He took the risky decision of ordering the evacuation of civilians in North Vietnam halted. The passenger liner Pasteur at Haiphong, dispatched to bring out French civilians, was instead loaded with wounded soldiers and sent back to France two-thirds empty. The construction was begun of new fortifications at the mountain passes leading to the Red River delta backed up by mobile infantry-artillery teams.
On January 16, 1951, Vo Nguyen Giap initiated a general offensive toward Hanoi with an attack on Vinh Yen, at the western end of the Red River delta. He employed the “human wave” tactics which the Chinese had employed in Korea. De Lattre was prepared, his reinvigorated command having been reinforced with newly arrived American fighter planes and artillery. The Viet Minh were beaten back with more than 4,000 dead left on the battlefield. The French suffered some 400 dead in repelling the repeated attacks. Many of the Viet Minh panicked as they were caught for the first time in the open on the flat Red River delta by King Cobra fighter planes dropping napalm bombs. Two subsequent “human wave” drives were also repulsed in March and May. In June, on the advice of his Chinese advisers, Giap conceded in a radio broadcast to his army’s political workers that Viet Minh troops were not yet ready for “the final phase” and ordered them to prepare for a “long and arduous war.” Giap reverted to Mao’s strategy of protracted war. For the French, de Lattre’s stand before Hanoi was their army’s finest hour in the Indochina War, but it was only a respite.
16
BURMA
THE CIA OPERATION
While posted in Vietnam in the spring of 1951, I became aware of frequent clandestine air movements through the Saigon airport to destinations outside Vietnam. Unmarked American-built transports were landing there, refueling under heavy guard, and then taking off for an undisclosed destination. In June, I learned that the planes were coming from Taiwan and were under charter from CAT, Claire Chennault’s commercial airline, now based on the island. The pilots included a number who had flown in his World War II “Flying Tigers” squadron and others from the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force, which had been based in Kunming. The coordinating agency for the flights through Saigon was a “Sea Supply Company” with an office in Bangkok. The company, whose cable address was “Hatchet,” represented itself as a commercial trading firm.
In July, leaving our infant daughter, Susan, in the care of a Chinese amah, Audrey and I flew to Bangkok tracking the story. I learned in the Thai capital that Sea Supply was a cover for covert operations by the Central Intelligence Agency. The unmarked CAT planes flying from Saigon were landing on a strip in eastern Thailand and then continuing on to Burma. We then flew on to Rangoon. From confidential sources in the di
plomatic community in Rangoon, I began to piece together what was an incredible story. Three Chinese Nationalist Army columns, comprising some fifteen thousand men, had thrust about sixty-five miles into China’s Yunnan Province from a refuge in northeastern Burma. They had retreated earlier across the China border into the Burma refuge pursued by Communist troops. The Nationalist columns had seized a base area, about 100 miles long, embracing the Kengma Airfield, some 200 miles southwest of Kunming. Chinese Communist troops were counterattacking, attempting to cut the Nationalist supply corridor to Burma.
The Nationalist units were commanded by General Li Mi, who had escaped from the Communist encirclement in the final engagement of the Battle of the Huai-Hai, which I had covered in January 1949. The CIA had flown Li from Taiwan into northeastern Burma, where he had reorganized the Nationalist Eighth Army’s Ninety-third Division and other units which had fled across the border before the Communists’ advance. Chiang Kai-shek had named Li as the ruling governor of Yunnan, an empty gesture because the province was largely in Communist hands. Transports, under charter to the CIA, flying via Indochina and Thailand, were bringing in arms, radio, and other equipment, as well as food and funds for Li. CIA liaison agents were operating on the ground with the Nationalists. The operation apparently had begun the previous May at the onset of the Korean War and was a diversionary action designed to harass the Chinese Communists more than anything else. However, it had unforeseen political ramifications. Mao Zedong was pointing to the Yunnan operation as further evidence that the United States was seeking to provide a base area for a future effort by Chiang Kaishek to stage an effort to retake the mainland.
On the Front Lines of the Cold War Page 20