Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam
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Immediately there were problems. Valluy’s plan called for a concentric attack involving airborne, amphibious, and overland columns. But the key initial phase, involving the dropping of paratroops near the Viet Minh headquarters at Bac Kan, foundered on the inability to get the troops in place quickly enough. It took three trips and many hours to get a mere 950 parachutists to the target area, forfeiting the advantages of surprise. Even then Viet Minh leaders were initially caught flat-footed and suffered heavy casualties: Though the DRV intelligence network had gotten wind of the operation two days earlier, a communication snafu meant that the information reached Bac Kan just as the French were launching the attack. Ho and Giap managed to get away, but with only minutes to spare. They were forced to leave behind arms and munitions caches as well as stacks of secret documents. One senior DRV official, the well-known scholar Nguyen Van To, was killed by paratroopers as he tried to escape.20
Within a day, Giap had rallied the Viet Minh troops, and they battled the airborne troops on even terms. Meanwhile, the French northern pincer—ten battalions moving by road from Lang Son to Cao Bang and from there west to Nguyen Binh and south to Bac Kan, for a total of 140 miles—bogged down on account of ambushes, blown bridges, and piano-key ditches on the roads. Not until October 13 did the task force reach the vicinity of Bac Kan, and there the Viet Minh put up fierce resistance. Only on the sixteenth did the mechanized Moroccan Colonial Infantry Regiment break through to relieve the battered and encircled paratroopers. As for the southern pincer, consisting of four battalions moving by naval landing craft up the Clear and Gam rivers, it never reached the battle zone at all; on the nineteenth, its units, having been forced by sandbars and other obstructions to move to a land route, stumbled onto the northern task force moving south. On November 8, one month after it began, Operation Léa was called off.21
Valluy then launched Operation Ceinture (Belt), which was designed to squeeze—hence the name—enemy forces at the southern edge of the Viet Bac between Thai Nguyen and Tuyen Quang. Eighteen battalions, eighteen navy landing craft, and paratroops were committed to the task of crushing some of Giap’s best units. The French cleared a sizable chunk of the territory and captured large stocks of supplies, but the major set-piece battle never occurred. Giap wanted no part of such an encounter. As would happen countless times over the next quarter-century—to the French and to the Americans—the enemy slipped through the lines, secure in the knowledge that he could fight another day. On December 22, the French pulled back to the lowlands except for a string of isolated border forts along the Chinese border. The Viet Minh immediately moved back into the abandoned areas.22
The French took comfort from the fact that they had captured the Viet Minh headquarters and killed—so they claimed—nine thousand enemy combatants. This figure was almost certainly inflated, and in any event it missed the larger point: that at the end of 1947, the position of the French outside the delta was again roughly what it had been a year before. Valluy had failed in his aim of destroying the Viet Minh with one giant stroke. It would be more accurate to say that the enemy had managed a draw, which in the circumstances was the same as a victory. Valluy now faced the reality of a long war and a Paris government that was not about to order national conscription for this faraway Asian colony.
All of which added to the French sense of urgency regarding the political sphere. Through the fall, analysts in the Colonial Ministry, led by Léon Pignon, worked feverishly to implement the Bao Dai policy. Since Bollaert’s speech at Ha Dong, the courtship of Bao Dai had not yielded much in the way of results, and the French feared he might yet slip out of their reach. At times, he seemed alarmingly solicitous of the Viet Minh, speaking of them as the most vital force in the country (Ho reciprocated by saying of Bao Dai that “he may be far from us in distance, but not in our thoughts”); at other times, he seemed too chummy with the Americans—perhaps, the French worried, because he sought to use Washington to back up his demands for Vietnamese independence. After much coming and going of emissaries between Vietnam and Hong Kong, Bao Dai was persuaded to confer again with Bollaert. They met on December 7 aboard a French ship anchored in the Baie d’Along, north of Haiphong, where spectacular greenish-gray limestone cliffs rim the water. Bao Dai sought a firm French commitment to independence, but he got nothing of the kind. Unaccountably, he agreed to put his name to a “protocol” that did contain the magic word but so hedged it with qualifications that it lost all meaning.23
Bao Dai knew he had been had. Facing criticism from Vietnamese intellectuals of all stripes, and seeking to escape his commitment to resume his imperial duties, he fled to Europe—to Geneva, to Cannes, to Paris—where he spent his days at the bridge table (he had become an expert player) and on the tennis court and his nights at the cabaret. Whenever French officials tracked him down, he showed himself to be at once diffident and uncompromising, expressing support for negotiations but also reluctance to commit himself further without more solid guarantees. His reading of the French political scene hardly left him reassured—on the one side, the MRP as well as supporters of General de Gaulle declared the Baie d’Along deal to be too generous and independence for Vietnam out of the question; on the other, the Communists and many Socialists called for resumption of negotiations with Ho Chi Minh. None of the successive French governments—four in 1948—dared to try to force the issue.24
But Bollaert continued to champion the protocol, and Bao Dai eventually agreed to attend a follow-up meeting in the Baie d’Along. There, on June 8, 1948, with the ex-emperor present, Bollaert signed an accord with General Nguyen Van Xuan, former head of the “Republic of Cochin China” and now chief of the new French-sponsored Vietnamese national government. France “solemnly” recognized the independence of Vietnam within the French Union, and her right to bring about the union of the three sections of the country, but retained control over its army, finances, and foreign relations. Again Bao Dai suffered buyer’s remorse and promptly turned up his nose at the new agreement. He left again for the French Riviera, declaring that he would not wear the crown until “true unity and real independence” had been achieved.
The new government’s lack of credibility was starkly evident at its “grand” inaugural ceremony in Hanoi. Fewer than fifty Vietnamese were on hand—not including police and soldiers—and the event lacked any semblance of organization. General Xuan appeared in court dress and looked uncomfortable throughout. Masses of schoolchildren were herded in to wave flags and shout slogans, but this served only to accentuate the farcical nature of the event. Various receptions and dinner followed, but the air of unreality never dissipated. A British observer who took in the scene marveled at the total lack of enthusiasm, not least among the local “Annamites.”25
Still, the moment was not without significance. The French had publicly recognized Bao Dai as a potential head of state and had explicitly promised “independence”—a pledge Ho Chi Minh had failed to extract from them at Fontainebleau two years before. In the Xuan government, moreover, Vietnam now had her first formal opposition to the Viet Minh. Might Ho Chi Minh’s hold over the non-Communist nationalists now be broken, or at least seriously weakened? Ho feared as much, and he wasted no time in branding Bao Dai and those who constituted the new government as traitors. He needn’t have worried. The agreement soon generated more support for the DRV than for the ex-emperor, as the colons in Vietnam immediately denounced Bollaert’s “surrender” and said real power was and would remain in French hands, and as Paris leaders dithered over whether to extend formal ratification to the agreement. Weeks went by without even a debate in the National Assembly, and Bollaert, his frustration building by the day, eventually flew back to Vietnam without an explicit vote of confidence. Only a sense of sheer loyalty to his party kept him from staying put in France. At the end of September, he announced that he would not accept the prolongation of his appointment.26
The Xuan government, meanwhile, was without funds and without an army—and, in a real
sense, without a leader. Nguyen Van Xuan had been educated at the prestigious École polytechnique in Paris and spent most of his life in France; French was now his language of choice. As head of Admiral d’Argenlieu’s pet project, the Republic of Cochin China, he had actively worked against Vietnamese unity, and he developed a reputation for utter untrustworthiness. Charming and articulate, he devoted most of his time to scheming and conniving and developed no mass following among the Vietnamese. For many anti–Viet Minh nationalists, the Bao Dai solution in which they had put so much faith and effort now seemed like no solution at all. They grasped the obvious point: The French government, by pushing this solution without at the same time moving on decolonization, had grievously undermined their cause.
So little seemed to have changed. Wage and salary scales for French and Vietnamese remained different. A Vietnamese working for the government earned only 60 percent of the salary of a Frenchman in the same position with the same qualifications and seniority. At Le Cercle Sportif, Saigon’s swank athletic club, membership was still restricted to “Europeans and assimilated,” the latter being the Eurasians and the small group of Vietnamese who had become French citizens. And the leading French-language newspaper, L’Union Française, still carried on the top of its front page a decades-old quotation from France’s great imperialist, Marshal Hubert Lyautey: “Claim the fine title of colonialist, at this time above all when a whole school seems to deny the grandeur and effectiveness of France’s colonial effort.”27
V
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1948 CAME A DEVELOPMENT THAT WOULD ALTER the calculations on all sides in both France and Vietnam and, in due course, profoundly affect the nature of the Indochina War: In China’s long-running civil war, the fortunes swung sharply in favor of Mao Zedong’s Communists. With the fall of Jinzhou in October, the remaining Nationalist positions in Manchuria collapsed. The following month Mao’s forces prevailed in the crucial Huaihai battle in east-central China, despite the commitment of half a million Guomindang troops. By early December, Beijing and Tianjin were within reach.28 For French war planners, the implications were obvious: A victory by Mao would inevitably strengthen Ho Chi Minh and thereby perhaps doom forever their hope of splitting the Vietnamese nationalist movement. Time was against them, they understood, and the Bao Dai solution must either be applied without delay or be overtaken by events. The new high commissioner, Léon Pignon, who unlike Bollaert was a genuine Indochina expert, had been a hard-liner on the war but now was given the pressing task of following this policy through.29
Adding to the French concern in 1948 were the meager economic figures and the state of the military campaign. The two were of course connected. Production in rice, rubber, coal, and cement in Indochina as a whole rose above the 1947 totals but was still far below prewar levels, chiefly owing to labor difficulties and lack of security. Chaotic and hazardous communications made it difficult to bring goods down to the ports. Consequently, Indochina still experienced a large adverse balance of trade. Whereas in 1938 rice exports had totaled 1.5 million tons, in 1948 the figure was a mere 170,000 tons. Meanwhile a French plan for the reconstruction and re-equipping of Indochina remained at an early blueprint stage.30
On the military side, 1948 saw no major operations of the type General Valluy attempted in the fall of 1947. The size of the Expeditionary Corps remained static at roughly one hundred thousand, which was far too few to allow large-scale engagements, or even significant penetrations into Viet Minh areas. So Valluy focused instead on holding what he had taken the previous year, including the string of frontier forts in northern Tonkin along Route Coloniale 4, which snaked along the Chinese frontier for 150 miles from Tien Yen to Cao Bang. Even this proved difficult, owing to the vulnerable lines of communication. Many posts had to be supplied by air, and road convoys were repeatedly attacked. On February 28, 1948, for example, a Foreign Legion company inching its way along the RC4 was ambushed and took 22 dead and 33 wounded—about 40 percent casualties. A few weeks later there was another such attack, and then another—by year’s end, French forces suffered close to three dozen major ambushes along the RC4 alone.31
French commanders spent endless hours trying to find a way to thwart the ambushers. No alternative existed, they determined, but to work to open all important routes using infantry forces, and to try—at least for long convoys—to hold all hills from which fire could be brought to bear on the road. Major convoys involving two hundred or more vehicles would also be backed by several infantry battalions and artillery groups and by two squadrons of armored cars. These measures helped, but only at the margins. The attacks kept coming.
Bac Kan was a case in point. Though the French attack on the town in Operation Léa the previous fall had failed to capture the Viet Minh leadership, French commanders had noisily announced their capture of the seat of Ho’s government. Bollaert boasted that the tricolor would forever fly in the town. What a difference a year made. Through the first half of 1948, the road to the garrison, covering mostly dangerous mountainous territory from Cao Bang, had been open to military convoys, though at a cost of many French lives lost and weapons captured. In August, Viet Minh forces gained control of the road; thereafter the garrison of three hundred men and a roughly equal number of civilians had to be resupplied entirely by air. And the enemy kept closing in. French outposts near Bac Kan faced frequent attacks in September and October; one of them claimed the lives of thirty legionnaires and three French officers and wounded fifty more. Bac Kan had no strategic value, but the French would lose face if they ever gave up Ho Chi Minh’s former headquarters. So they grimly hung on.32
In the Red River Delta too, the Viet Minh maintained the pressure in 1948, launching pinprick attacks on Hanoi and its environs and doing everything possible to disrupt the flow of supplies along the vital Hanoi-Haiphong corridor. In a single three-day stretch in mid-September, four trains running from the port city to the capital were blown up using mines, causing numerous deaths and injuries, and forty-five trucks were destroyed. By October, not a drop of gasoline was available for civilians in Hanoi.33
In Cochin China, the security situation seemed better, at least in the major towns. The cafés along Saigon’s fashionable rue Catinat remained packed with colons and other Westerners, with Foreign Legion officers and their women, as white-clad Vietnamese waiters hurried among the tables with glasses of cognac and Pernod. The French still lounged by the pool and played tennis at Le Cercle Sportif, still gathered at fashionable La Pagode to sip coffee and people-watch, still dined lavishly at Au Chalet. But appearances were deceptive. A midnight curfew was in effect for the city, and military trucks rumbled through the streets. Each night the sounds of fighting on Saigon’s outskirts—rifle, machine gun, mortar, artillery—could be heard, and only a foolish foreigner ventured outside the city limits after nightfall. (During the day, the prudent did so only in armed convoy.) Even within the limits, the war could intrude with sudden and deadly ferocity—through a grenade attack on a café, or a roadside bombing of a French truck, or a shooting in broad daylight of a French man or woman.
“Every night the explosions, coming one after another like a stick of bombs, formed the background of the city’s noise,” the journalist Lucien Bodard, who was in Vietnam for much of the war, would write of the grenade attacks, which usually took place in the twilight, just after sunset. “Each outburst lasted only a few seconds; each grenade was a sharp bang, a few shrieks from those who had been hit, one or two flying shadows, and then several minutes later the klaxon of an ambulance and a police car.”34 In retaliation, French agents assassinated Viet Minh suspects and dumped their bodies on street corners as a warning to the insurgents to desist.
A young Canadian who would go on to become prime minister of his country was traveling through Asia that fall and winter. Handsome and cosmopolitan at age twenty-nine, Pierre Elliott Trudeau arrived from Thailand to find in Saigon “hate, strife, and inevitable waste of men, money, and morals.” Once again, he wrote his m
other, the youth of France were in uniform, fighting a war that was going “nowhere fast.” Soldiers filled the streets, and people could travel only in convoys. The French held the towns and main roads while the insurgents ruled the countryside, and “nobody holds the peace, though on both sides men die, [are] wounded, suffer and atrocities are committed in the name of elusive righteousness and honor.” After a brief visit to Angkor Wat, Trudeau returned to Saigon, where he managed to get admission to Le Cercle Sportif and saw women whose “bathing suits have gone one better than those in France.”35
Elsewhere in the south, the Viet Minh were strongly entrenched in the Plain of Reeds west of Saigon and in the Ca Mau peninsula in the far south. In 1948, they regularly ventured outside these areas to stage numerous successful attacks, not all of them under the cover of darkness—in one daytime assault, on a convoy of seventy vehicles traveling between Saigon and Dalat on May 1, a Viet Minh battalion killed 82 persons and took 150 civilians hostage. (The hostages were freed by a Moroccan unit following an intense firefight.)36 The French countered with an impressive security sweep in the Mekong Delta in the second half of the year. With Vo Nguyen Giap content to rely on guerrilla attacks and the French unable to mount major operations, the war settled into an uneasy stalemate in all three regions of the country. And a stalemate, while ideal to neither side, suited Giap’s purposes much more than they suited Valluy’s, not least because Giap’s troop count was increasing much more rapidly than his opposite number’s—by year’s end, Viet Minh forces numbered some 250,000 men. By then, more than half the population of the country lived in territory controlled by the Viet Minh.37
Casualties, meanwhile, continued to mount. When a British officer visited the French military hospital in Saigon at the end of the year, he found that the number of wounded was much increased over the previous December. The total was now almost eight hundred men, roughly a quarter of whom had serious injuries—the loss of one or more limbs, head wounds, lungs pierced by shrapnel. During the officer’s two-hour visit, twenty-four serious operation cases were received. Nearly all were the result of road mines.38