Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

  Ho Chi Minh, fast losing hope for an accommodation, told a French reporter that neither France nor Vietnam “can afford the luxury of a bloody war.” But, he added, the Vietnamese would endure an “atrocious struggle,” no matter how lengthy, rather than “renounce their liberty.” He also appealed to the French parliament to honor the agreements of the previous months, insisting on the “sincere desire of the Vietnamese Government and people to collaborate fraternally with the French people” and on “the desire of Viet Nam to be part of the French Union.” In early December, Jean Sainteny arrived for a last-ditch (as it turned out) attempt at averting a conflagration. His instructions: to back Ho and his supposed moderate allies against hard-liners, while offering no new substantive concessions. Nothing came of his efforts, as Valluy insisted on an aggressive posture and Viet Minh troops strengthened their positions in and around Hanoi. Haiphong was virtually isolated by Viet Minh roadblocks. Ho, meanwhile, played for time, hoping for U.S. mediation or the formation of a government in Paris more favorable to the Vietnamese cause.25

  The first hope was in vain; the Truman administration ruled out a mediating role. In early December, the administration had dispatched Abbot Low Moffat to Hanoi to reassure the Viet Minh leader of U.S. support for greater Vietnamese “autonomy within the framework of democratic institutions,” and to warn him against using force to achieve that objective—and not incidentally, to assess the degree to which Ho’s government was dominated by Communists and loyal to Moscow. Ho, suffering from illness during the meeting, assured Moffat that national independence, not Communism, was his first objective. Maybe in fifty years things would be different, he said, repeating the line he had used in Paris during the summer, but fifty years was a long time off. He asked for U.S. assistance and in exchange offered the use of Cam Ranh Bay as a naval base. To convey his seriousness of purpose, Ho dispatched General Giap to a cocktail party hosted by the U.S. consulate in Moffat’s honor. “To everyone’s surprise,” a British observer noted, Giap stayed a long time.26

  Moffat was noncommittal. He reported to Washington that Communists were indeed in control of the Vietnamese government and that for now a French presence would be required, so as to ward off both Soviet and possible Chinese encroachment. Moffat’s superiors took that as evidence that they should reject Ho’s overtures and steer clear of any formal role. They paid less attention to the other part of Moffat’s report, in which he expressed sympathy for the nationalist cause and a conviction that France had no option but to compromise. On December 17, the State Department issued a circular to missions abroad that made note of the Viet Minh’s Communist character and said a continued French presence in Indochina was imperative, “not only as [an] antidote to Soviet influence, but to protect Vietnam and Southeast Asia from future Chinese imperialism.”27

  Some observers despaired at this policy decision, seeing it as a missed opportunity to avert major conflict. Lauriston Sharp, a Cornell University anthropologist who had served in the region during the war and who still consulted for the State Department, complained bitterly that by its feckless lack of leadership Washington had helped create the present “vacuum” in Vietnam. After all, most Americans concerned with foreign affairs understood that the colonial era was over and that its revival was an exercise in putting Humpty Dumpty back on the wall; why not act on that basis? One firmly worded telegram from the Truman administration, reminding Paris of its obligations under the March 6 Accords—in particular to recognize the Viet Minh as a legitimate authority—could have headed off the crisis, Sharp told a colleague.28

  Ho Chi Minh had better luck with his second wish, that for new leadership in Paris. On December 17, Léon Blum became premier of France at the head of an all-Socialist cabinet—the same Blum who, earlier in the summer, had assured Ho, “I will be there at difficult moments. Count on me.” Could this be the development that the advocates of a political solution needed? There were grounds for hope. Just a week earlier Blum had written in the Socialist paper Le Populaire that French policy in Vietnam was bankrupt. “There is one way, and one way only,” he wrote, “to maintain in Indochina the prestige of our civilization, of our political and spiritual influence, and of our legitimate interests: We must reach agreement on the basis of independence, we must keep confidence and preserve friendship.” A leader of France had, at long last, uttered the magic word: independence.

  But it was too little, too late. Blum presided over a weak government, a kind of stopgap regime meant to serve out the final weeks of the Provisional Government until the constitution of the Fourth Republic would go into effect. He was in no position to quickly reverse the aggressive Indochina policy that had taken shape over the previous months. Even had he been able to implement a reversal in Paris, in Vietnam the momentum for major war was now too great. Hanoi had become a checkerboard of areas controlled by the French and the Viet Minh, and the tension was enormous. Tens of thousands of residents fled for the countryside. The Viet Minh plan was to compel the French to fight house by house, block by block. This would enable the Viet Minh government and key army units to evacuate the city for a base in the mountains. Accordingly, militia and army units dug up streets, built roadblocks, and cut holes through neighboring houses to facilitate troop movement.29

  On December 17, after Valluy ordered the removal of the Viet Minh barricades, tu ve militiamen and French troops clashed at various spots in Hanoi. Both sides suffered significant casualties. “If those gooks want a fight, they’ll get it,” Valluy declared. Legionnaires lined the streets from the Citadel to the Paul Doumer Bridge, and French armored cars began demolishing the Viet Minh roadblocks. The next day Valluy issued an ultimatum that no additional obstructions be erected in Hanoi, and he further announced that, beginning two days thence, French units would assume control of public security in the city. In response, Ho Chi Minh ordered preparations for an assault on French installations the following day, December 19.30

  IV

  THE ATTACK WAS SCHEDULED FOR SEVEN P.M., BUT THE HOUR passed without incident. Throughout the day, there had been rumors of possible eleventh-hour peace moves, and the DRV Central Committee, meeting early in the afternoon, appeared hesitant. At eight P.M., however, there was an explosion, and the streets were plunged into darkness. This was the signal for tu ve units to strike. Their few pieces of artillery opened up on French installations just as many French troops were returning to their barracks after a special movie screening. Bursts of gunfire and the explosions of grenades and mortar shells could be heard through the night, and trucks and armored vehicles roared through the darkened streets. An early casualty was Sainteny, who was seriously hurt when his armored car hit a mine. Vo Nguyen Giap had withdrawn many of his regular forces to the mountain fastnesses to the north, but he had three divisions near the racecourse in the suburbs to the southwest and beside Le Grand Lac (now West Lake, or Ho Tay); he did not, however, use them that first night.31

  The following day, December 20, as the fighting spread to various parts of the country—to Bac Ninh and Nam Dinh in the north, to Hue and Tourane (Da Nang) on the central coast, to Saigon in the south—Ho Chi Minh issued an appeal for national resistance, vowing that though the struggle would be long and difficult, victory would come in the end. The Vietnamese people responded. Hundreds of thousands of them, north and south, declared their commitment to the cause, the ouster of the French and the creation of a Vietnam for the Vietnamese. Youths volunteered in droves for the military. “The flame of nationalism never burned as bright in the hearts of the people, and the Vietnamese never united as strongly behind the Viet Minh, as in those first days and months of the resistance,” recalled Mai Elliott, who resided in Hanoi with her family that December.32

  The French soon swept into Elliott’s neighborhood, with shouts of “En avant!” and accompanied by German shepherds, searching for Viet Minh soldiers or collaborators. “The streets echoed with the furious barking of the dogs, the crunching of French boots, and the angry voices of the
soldiers, who were spoiling for retaliation.” Her brother Giu, a member of the Vietnamese militia, surrendered rather than risk being shot. Narrowly escaping death at the hands of a bare-chested French soldier, Giu was taken away to a makeshift POW camp at Hoa Lo prison, where he witnessed acts of extreme brutality by some French guards and unexpected acts of kindness by others. One prisoner, a Viet Minh security officer, interrogated just moments before Giu’s turn came, was led away, shoved against a wall, and shot in the mouth. Giu himself won release a few months later. He would survive both the French and the American wars and later settle in France and then California.33

  In short order, French units moved to seize control of key installations but usually found, to their frustration, that the Viet Minh leadership had quietly slipped away. Even then, house-to-house fighting proved laborious and dangerous, despite the fact that the enemy was composed largely of a hodgepodge of lightly armed militia and policemen, who would fire on the French—with ancient French muskets, old American rifles, Japanese carbines, and British Bren automatics—and then disappear inside the labyrinth of homes whose walls had been pierced to allow easy movement. The French were further slowed by the proliferation of hastily built barricades on Hanoi’s streets, many of them rigged with crude mines.

  DEAD BODIES BEING REMOVED FROM A HANOI STREET DURING THE BATTLE OF HANOI, DECEMBER 20, 1946. (photo credit 6.1)

  It all portended trouble for French officials, who had expected to seal off and destroy Viet Minh forces in Hanoi within a matter of days. Two months it would take before the Viet Minh units, under the cover of darkness, withdrew from the city, their primary mission accomplished. They had succeeded in pinning down French forces in the capital, thereby buying the necessary time to move the government and main military force to their mountain base.

  Whatever date one chooses for the start of the First Vietnam War—September 1945, with the outbreak of fighting in Cochin China, or November–December 1946, with the conflagration in Tonkin—by the start of 1947 there was fighting throughout Vietnam.34 Both sides had taken the necessary steps toward war, and in hindsight it’s tempting to see the whole thing as inevitable, especially after the failure of the Fontainebleau talks. But wars are never inevitable; they depend on the actions of individual leaders who could have chosen differently, who had, if not a menu of options, then at least an alternative to large-scale violence.

  Yet if it takes actions by two sides to make a war, both sides are not always equally culpable. And if it’s true that the Vietnamese fired the first shots on December 19, ultimately France bears primary responsibility for precipitating the conflict. D’Argenlieu, dubbed the “Bloody Monk” by the left-wing press in Paris, had enormous power to formulate policy, often without consulting Paris, and as we have seen, he thwarted the prospects for a negotiated solution at several junctures in 1946; he seemed determined to provoke the Hanoi government into full-scale hostilities. D’Argenlieu, upon returning from a brief visit to France in late December 1946, vowed that France would never relinquish her hold on Indochina. The granting of independence, he declared, “would only be a fiction deeply prejudicial to the interests of the two parties.”35

  It would be too much, however, to call this “D’Argenlieu’s War.” The high commissioner’s core objective—to keep Indochina French—was broadly shared among officials in Paris as well as colons in Saigon and Hanoi. It is striking, the degree to which all parts of the political spectrum in France in 1945–46 shared the conviction that Indochina ought to remain within the French colonial empire. The left, to be sure, favored bona fide negotiations with Hanoi, but both the SFIO and the PCF were adamant that they did not want to see France reduced to what the Communist newspaper L’Humanité called “her own small metropolitan community.” Both attached importance to reclaiming and maintaining French prestige and saw the preservation of the empire as essential to that task. The Socialists, who dominated French politics in the crucial early postwar years, professed opposition to d’Argenlieu’s efforts to sabotage the March 6 Accords, but in practice they tolerated his actions, just as they tolerated Valluy’s provocations in Haiphong and Hanoi; at the Fontainebleau talks, the Socialist representatives were as intransigent as any on the French side. PCF leaders, meanwhile, despite becoming the largest party in the November 1946 elections (taking 28 percent and 170 deputies), kept a low profile on Indochina in the critical weeks thereafter, anxious as they were to appear a moderate and patriotic force.36

  Even Léon Blum, a broad-thinking humanist and fundamentally decent man who genuinely despaired at the onset of war, could say at once on December 23, less than a week into the Battle of Hanoi, that the old colonial system was finished and that renewed negotiations were possible only once “order” was restored. Minister of Overseas France Marius Moutet likewise said there could be no talks without an “end to terrorism.”37

  Most important of all in this constellation of voices on the French political scene was the MRP under Georges Bidault, which opposed not only negotiations with Ho but the granting of independence to any Vietnamese regime. Thrust into the heart of government not long after liberation, the MRP would maintain a tight hold on foreign and colonial policy for years to come and as such would hold extraordinary sway over the speed and complexion of imperial reform. As a group, the party’s leaders lacked experience in colonial affairs, and its senior figures—Bidault, Robert Schuman, and René Pleven—adhered to a rigid and intransigent colonial policy that stood in marked contrast to their often supple and forward-thinking approach to European affairs.38

  French public opinion, meanwhile, did not register significant opposition to the use of military force in Indochina. Information, for one thing, was hard to come by. In 1946, French newspapers did not have their own correspondents in Indochina, which left journalists dependent on the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse (AFP) for news. D’Argenlieu, deeply suspicious of independent journalism, maintained strict control over the AFP, making it in essence a government propaganda arm. Not surprisingly, therefore, the six main Paris dailies did little in-depth reporting in November and December and generally blamed the Vietnamese for the outbreak of violence. On November 28, after the French bombardment of Haiphong had leveled parts of the city and killed thousands, Le Monde’s Rémy Roure assured readers that, from the French side, “not a single shot had been fired, except in defense.”39

  Looming large over the entire process was one man: Charles de Gaulle. Though technically absent from the political stage after January 1946, his influence remained enormous, as historian Frédéric Turpin’s careful research makes clear. As leader of the Free French, he had possessed the power in 1944–45 to foil the plans of his country’s colonial lobby; he did not do so. Indeed, the general’s policy during and after World War II had been to reclaim Indochina for France, on the grounds that French grandeur demanded it. The choice of Admiral d’Argenlieu for high commissioner had been his. He, no one else, instructed d’Argenlieu and Leclerc to be uncompromising in their dealings with Vietnamese nationalists and to prepare to use force. During the conference at Fontainebleau, de Gaulle pressed Bidault to resist giving in to Vietnamese demands, and he announced publicly his conviction that France must remain “united with the territories which she opened to civilization,” lest she lose her great power status. Throughout the autumn, he stuck firmly to this position, and in the November-December crisis, he maintained staunch backing for d’Argenlieu’s uncompromising posture. On December 17, de Gaulle hosted the admiral for more than three hours at his home in Colombey-fes-Deux-Églises and assured him that as far as Indochina was concerned, it was d’Argenlieu and not the government that represented France.40

  A week later d’Argenlieu, now back in Saigon, expressed satisfaction with the turn of events. “Personally,” he wrote in his diary, “I have since September 1945 loyally executed the policy of agreement in Indochina. It has borne fruit everywhere, except with the Hanoi government. It’s over.”41

  It
was anything but.

  CHAPTER 7

  WAR WITHOUT FRONTS

  THE FIGHTING WAS FIERCE FROM THE START. BY THE MIDDLE OF January 1947, less than a month into the hostilities, large portions of Hanoi were reduced to rubble, and public buildings such as the Pasteur Institute and numerous hospitals suffered major damage. Elsewhere in the Red River Delta the clashes were likewise intense, notably in Nam Dinh, forty-five miles southeast of Hanoi, and Bac Ninh, nineteen miles to the northeast. The Vietnamese used artillery and mortars as well as sabotage—they repeatedly cut vital roads, including that between Haiphong and Hanoi, and they set off bombs to sever rail lines and destroy bridges. The French responded with tanks and Spitfires. Food supplies grew scarce, especially in Hanoi. By early February, after six weeks of combat, the French reported 1,855 men killed or severely wounded. Vietnamese casualties are harder to determine but were far higher.1

  Bit by bit, the superior French arms forced the Vietnamese back. By late February 1947, the French Expeditionary Corps had taken control of Hanoi, Haiphong, Hon Gai, and Hue, and by March it had gained a tenuous hold over the Red River Delta. By the start of April, the French controlled most of the main towns in Tonkin and Annam. The lightly armed local militia and regional fighting units, charged by Vo Nguyen Giap with the defense of key areas, were no match for General Valluy’s then-still-fast-moving mechanized columns. Ho Chi Minh was forced to withdraw his government to a shifting series of jungle headquarters in its long-standing stronghold in the region of Thai Nguyen–Bac Kan–Tuyen Quang.