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

by Fredrik Logevall

  The French were in an insoluble dilemma, Giap noted: “Either they try to extend their strong-points once again, with their depleted manpower, in which case they spread themselves thin, or else they move out of their strong-points, which frees territory and population to us.”32

  Conveniently left out of Giap’s account—as least as recorded by Starobin—was what occurred after the collapse of Lorraine and the frantic French retreat. In mid-November, his confidence soaring, the Viet Minh commander moved into the second phase of his campaign against the Black River posts. His chief target was Na San, a strongpoint on the west bank of the river, totally cut off from overland supply. Giap reasoned that if he hit the post quickly and hard, it would swiftly collapse, especially given its total dependence on supply by air and its remote location (117 miles west of Hanoi). He underestimated the French, however, who on Salan’s orders moved their defensive position from the fort to the dirt airstrip, several miles away, and there constructed an entrenched camp. Mines were laid, barbed wire was hung, and extra reinforcements were flown in, some of them taking up positions in the hilltops surrounding the airstrip. The strip itself was skinned with pierced steel plates to allow the landing of American-made C-47 Dakotas, which soon began arriving at a rate of one every fifteen minutes. Giap’s intelligence officers told him that the French had only five weak battalions in place; in reality, they gathered nine full-strength battalions, supported by aircraft. Having constructed what they referred to as a base aéro-terrestre (air-ground base), the French girded for battle.33

  It began on November 23. That morning leading elements of the 308th Division had reached Na San’s outer defenses. After nightfall, they attacked, using bazookas, recoilless rifles, grenades, machetes, and wire-busting Bangalore torpedoes. Fierce fighting ensued, and some outposts changed hands several times, but the defenses held and the attackers withdrew. Viet Minh losses were heavy. Giap paused, in order for the rest of his force to arrive. The garrison, meanwhile, saw its position bolstered with the arrival of 105mm howitzer batteries and an additional battalion. Still undervaluing the size of the defending force, Giap launched his second assault after dark on November 30, using thick-packed herds of water buffalo to clear paths through the mines and punch holes in the barbed wire ringing the airstrip. Again he was beaten back with heavy casualties. His blood up, the next night he stubbornly tried yet a third time, throwing two fresh regiments against the French perimeter. Once more the Viet Minh were repulsed, as Bearcats and B-26s arrived from Hanoi to light the scene with flares and strafe the swarming attackers and sear them with napalm. Giap at last gave up and called off the operation.

  He had repeated his mistake of early 1951, had given the French what they wanted: a set-piece battle in which they could use their superior firepower to maximum effect. When it was all over, the French counted one thousand enemy corpses on the field since the first assault the previous week, many of them grotesquely rotund on account of being both swollen and clad in Chinese-style padded jackets. Total Viet Minh casualties may have been as high as six thousand, or approximately half the division.34

  RAOUL SALAN, RIGHT, VISITS THE FRENCH FORTIFICATION IN NA SAN, VIETNAM, ON NOVEMBER 28, 1952. HE IS SPEAKING HERE WITH THE COMMANDER OF THE FORT, COLONEL JEAN GILLES. (photo credit 13.1)

  News of the outcome caused jubilation in the French community throughout Indochina. Toasts rang out everywhere to the “Hedgehogs of Na San” (Hérissons) and their commander, the one-eyed, bearlike Jean Gilles. The usually frugal French commissary immediately ordered a shipment of Australian beefsteaks, fried potatoes, vegetables, fresh bread, Algerian wine, and three thousand bottles of champagne—one bottle for every four men in the embattled camp. Vietnamese troops got frozen meat, dried fish, and rice, while the North Africans received wine, live sheep, and goats, all brought in by airlift. In the underground mess, Gilles passed out cigars and liquors to his staff and declared, “We’ve done a nice job here,” while in Hanoi officers celebrated by dining sumptuously at La Manoir and the Hotel Metropole or dancing with the taxi-girls at the Ritz and Paramount. The disaster at Nghia Lo and the collapse of Lorraine seemed all but forgotten. An official spokesman declared: “Na San is no longer besieged.… [We] have recovered the initiative in the Tai country.”35

  Salan was more circumspect in his evaluation, but he too saw Na San as a great victory. To him, it showed what could be done when he had adequate numbers and equipment at his disposal. He and his lieutenants took particular satisfaction in the failure of the Viet Minh intelligence service, which, when operating away from the Viet Bac or another sympathetic environment, seemingly was as capable of missteps as theirs was. More portentously, in Salan’s eyes, the theory of the air-ground base appeared to have been vindicated. Na San, it would turn out, was a dress rehearsal for a bigger battle to come.

  V

  THROUGHOUT THE FALL CAMPAIGN, HO CHI MINH HAD BEEN LARGELY invisible to the outside world. In the West, rumors were rife that he had died, either from tuberculosis, or an assassin’s bullet, or a French bombing raid. Or perhaps he had been done in by an internal party purge. The announcers who spoke in Ho’s name were, according to the rumors, imposters. He was, of course, very much alive, as evidenced by his trip (kept a closely guarded secret, even within the DRV zone) to Beijing in September. From there, he had continued on to Moscow, where he attended the Nineteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Not until December, after Giap’s failure at Na San, did Ho Chi Minh return to Vietnam.

  As before, he played a key role in shaping overall Viet Minh strategy and acted as chief recruiter and cheerleader for the revolutionary cause. Early in 1952, a French POW reported, upon being released, that Ho was a highly visible fixture in the area around the headquarters, often seen in the villages, among the farmers in the rice fields, and at cadre gatherings. Dressed in his now-standard simple peasant garb, he exhorted one and all to commit fully to the anti-French struggle and to sacrifice everything for the common goal. To avoid detection or capture by the French, Ho moved residence every three or four days and followed a strict fitness regimen: He rose early to do exercises and, after the workday was over, played volleyball or swam. Though now past the age of sixty, he could still walk thirty miles a day, in difficult mountain terrain, with a pack on his back.36

  But all was not good for Ho Chi Minh as 1952 drew to a close. Throughout the liberated zone, morale problems were on the rise, as the war entered its seventh year with no end in sight. Most people continued to support the Viet Minh, if only because of their leading role in the independence struggle, but there were worrying signs of disaffection, not least among the peasantry, who formed the backbone of the revolution. The peasants provided the food that kept the government functioning and the People’s Army fighting, and the sons that made up the bulk of that military force—a force that now numbered more than a quarter of a million men. Peasants also served as porters, carrying the tons of munitions, weapons, and rice to the battlefield, and the wounded troops away from it.

  What had they gained in exchange for this sacrifice? Precious little. The leadership had promised to give them land but had put off implementing land reform, out of fear of alienating the middle class and thereby disrupting the national unity essential to ultimate success in the war effort. With discontent on the rise, the Viet Minh now asked landowners to drastically reduce rents so that tenant farmers could keep a greater percentage of crops and live better. When that voluntary system failed to produce results, leaders tightened the screws, demanding not only that landlords lower the rent but also that they return to the tenant farmers the “excessive” rent that they had charged over the years. Devoted cadres were dispatched to the villages to enforce the new regulations; in many cases, they drummed up false charges against landlords and compelled them to sign papers “confessing” their wrongdoing.37

  Mai Elliott, in her remarkable account of her family’s experience during the long struggle for Vietnam, relates what happened to h
er uncle Chinh, a landowner, when zealous cadres came to enforce the new policy. Believing that he had done nothing wrong, and that his steadfast support of the Viet Minh would ensure fair treatment, Chinh greeted the cadres calmly. They immediately accused him of cheating his tenants, and, feeling flustered by their threatening attitude and harsh accusations, he signed the papers “confessing” his wrongdoing. She writes: “The cadres told him that over sixteen years—from 1936 to 1952—he had collected a total of about eighty tons of paddy, or unmilled rice—more than his rightful share. Now he had to give all this back to his tenant farmers, each of whom would get a proportionate share depending on the excessive acreage they had rented and the number of years they had worked the land. My uncle felt as though he had been hit by a bolt of lightning.”38

  Among intellectuals too murmurings of discontent could be heard about the food shortages, about the constant demands for sacrifice, about the endless indoctrination sessions and propaganda meetings. On the military side, recruitment was a growing concern. By 1952, the source of manpower from cities had more or less dried up, in part due to French success in disrupting the Viet Minh apparatus in urban areas. The Viet Minh were forced to use more aggressive methods to obtain conscripts in the rural areas, creating further alienation among peasants. There were even widespread reports that some peasants had migrated to other areas to avoid serving.39

  None of these problems was as yet acute for Ho Chi Minh and other party leaders, but neither was there a sense that they would soon be resolved. Much would depend on how quickly the war against France could be won. Here too, the picture at year’s end was cloudy. Up to now, Vo Nguyen Giap’s forces had delivered numerous blows against the enemy and had steadily expanded Viet Minh territorial control throughout Indochina. By most measures, the French were losing the war. But they were not losing quickly, and the ultimate outcome remained unknown. Broadly, the war could still be considered a stalemate, and there was a rough balance of forces on the two sides. Giap had made inroads in the Red River Delta but had not done enough to really test French control there; the same was true in the urban areas to the south. In Saigon, the French position if anything seemed stronger now than in the spring and summer, as evidenced by the drastic reduction in the number of assassinations and bombings in the city in the final months of the year. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese National Army, though still a weak entity, showed at least fleeting signs of becoming a legitimate fighting force. One VNA unit at a small post thirty miles south of Hanoi at the end of December fought off a significant Viet Minh attack, and there were scattered reports of other units showing improved performance in the field. Was it, Ho had to wonder, a sign of things to come?40

  More worryingly still from Ho’s perspective, the enemy’s effort at pacification in the south was showing some signs of success. Utilizing the “oil-spot” (tache d’huile) technique pioneered in African colonies in the late nineteenth century by Joseph-Simon Gallieni (so named because it resembled an oil spot gradually spreading outward), the French in 1952 worked to extend their control from secure to contested to insecure areas through a mix of military, political, and economic means. This was the approach Bernard de Lattre de Tassigny had called for in 1950, one aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the peasantry and based on the premise—later central to U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine—that although political action alone is insufficient to defeat an insurgency, neither can military force alone achieve decisive results.

  The French had made sporadic efforts in this direction since 1948; even now their commitment to it was fitful at best. Smart French planners knew that what worked in the Sahara—where there were obligatory watering points that could be occupied and denied to the rebels—might not work so easily in Indochina. They understood that the oil-spot approach is usually an expensive, time-consuming, chancy proposition, especially for a foreign power—it is always hard for a local population to feel that an army of occupation is its friend. Success is often temporary and tends to come only in areas were revolutionary forces are not already entrenched. Still, the gains, however modest, were a source of concern to Viet Minh officers, one of whom candidly confided to a French counterpart that he had no enemy more dangerous than a doctor who treated the villagers without regard to their political allegiance.41

  And what about developments outside Vietnam? Always a keen observer of international events, not least those in the United States, Ho Chi Minh knew that a new president had been elected in Washington, a war-hero general whose Republican Party had hammered Democrats for “losing” China and negotiating in Korea, and whose vice-president-elect, Richard Nixon, was a Red-baiter of the first order. What would the new administration do in Indochina? It was too soon to tell, but Ho had ample reason to be worried. When Joseph Starobin interviewed him at a secret location in the mountains of Tonkin early in 1953, Ho used every chance to turn the conversation to things American. He reminisced about seeing the Statue of Liberty and Harlem as a young man and asked Starobin why the supposedly anticolonial Americans would supply bombers to imperial France for use against innocent Vietnamese. Yet again, as 1953 opened, U.S. plans and policies were very much on Ho Chi Minh’s mind.

  CHAPTER 14

  EISENHOWER IN CHARGE

  THE NEW AMERICAN PRESIDENT HAD NOT PROVIDED MUCH DETAIL ON his foreign policy plans during the campaign. He didn’t have to. For millions of voters, it was enough that he was Ike, supreme commander of the D-day invasion that liberated Nazi-occupied Europe and later chief of staff of the army and supreme commander of NATO. Even many of the delegates at the 1952 Republican convention knew little about his policy stances and didn’t care. With his famous grin and soldierly presence, Eisenhower seemed the perfect candidate to restore stability to a troubled land—and to win back the White House after twenty years of Democratic control. Though a Republican, he seemed to much of the electorate somehow above politics, a trusted father figure who could unite a country wracked by division over the Korean War and McCarthyite Red-baiting.

  In reality, Eisenhower was a savvy political operator, the possessor of what his vice president, Richard Nixon, termed, with no little admiration, a “devious mind.” Well aware of the enormous political advantage that his military pedigree conferred on him, Eisenhower was content to follow what scholars later called a “hidden-hand” political strategy. In the campaign, this meant taking the high road and letting others make the most strident attacks on the Democrats and their candidate Adlai E. Stevenson. It was Nixon—who seemed to relish taking the low road—who saddled Stevenson, an ardent Cold Warrior, with the designation “Adlai the Appeaser,” and with having “a PhD from Acheson’s College of Cowardly Communist Containment.” It was McCarthy who charged George Marshall, five-star general and secretary of state and then defense under Truman (and a mentor to Eisenhower), with participating in “a [Soviet-led Communist] conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.”1

  Eisenhower privately cringed at such rhetoric, but he didn’t repudiate it. He frowned on the “purple, prosecuting-attorney style” of the Republican Party platform but didn’t disavow it. To the dismay of friends, he did not come to Marshall’s defense, even removing, at McCarthy’s urging, a passage praising Marshall from a Milwaukee speech.2 Though Eisenhower didn’t entirely trust Nixon, he chose him as his running mate because he believed that Nixon—the man who had “gotten” Alger Hiss—could help him win over Polish American and other ethnic minorities and the Republican Old Guard. When his foreign policy adviser John Foster Dulles got carried away vowing to dump the Democrats’ feckless containment strategy in favor of one dedicated to the liberation of “captive” peoples, Eisenhower reprimanded him, but gingerly, in a way that made him, Eisenhower, seem sensible and prudent but allowed the underlying charge to remain. He himself castigated Truman for “losing” China and for weakening America’s posture in the Far East, and he vowed to stop Communist advances elsewhere in the region. In due course, t
hese assertions would come back to haunt him, to box him in and limit his options on Indochina. In the near term, though, they worked: The Stevenson camp had no effective answer, and on election day the Republican ticket rolled to victory.

  Foreign policy issues dominated much of the campaign, and no wonder: America was at war in Korea, and no end seemed in sight. Moreover, all signs that autumn pointed to deepening Cold War tensions. Soviet-American relations were marked by intense mutual suspicion, and an atmosphere of hysteria gripped life within both superpowers. In the United States, McCarthy and his allies searched for Communists in the government and in Hollywood, while in the Soviet Union, Stalin unleashed another of his campaigns of “vigilance” against “internal enemies,” this one targeting a supposed Jewish “doctor’s plot” against the Kremlin leadership. The Americans that fall tested their first thermonuclear weapon, and the Soviets were not far behind. In Asia, the two superpowers jockeyed for supremacy and cast a wary eye on Mao Zedong’s China.

  It stands to reason that intense speculation surrounded Eisenhower’s choice for secretary of state. He named Dulles, a fateful selection that determined the basic coloration of the administration in international affairs, and therefore also the contours of U.S. foreign policy, for the rest of the 1950s. A formidable duo they were. Some early studies exaggerated Dulles’s role in policy making, while more recently some historians have unduly minimized it. The truth is that both men were crucial, with Eisenhower ultimately controlling policy but Dulles doing much to shape decisions.3