To many observers, Nguyen Van Tam seemed a pawn in French hands. A former lawyer and schoolteacher with a gray-streaked crew cut and a preference for white sharkskin suits, the fifty-eight-year-old had been born into a family of small merchants and had been educated in France. Seemingly indefatigable, he rose early and often worked past midnight and in his spare time wrote poetry. His hatred of the Viet Minh ran deep—he had had a hand in putting down Communist insurrections prior to and during World War II, and two of his sons were killed by Giap’s forces in 1946. Another son now served as VNA chief of staff. Glancing at a map, Tam told an American journalist: “The most important thing is winning the village populations over to the cause. Our nationalist fervor has got to match the Viet Minh’s, and once we take over from the French, Ho Chi Minh could well be forced into making a deal on our terms.”36 To underlings, however, Tam always stressed the need to be patient and to not press the French too hard, too fast.
In October, Bao Dai, in an effort to increase pressure on the French, convened a three-day “National Congress,” and invited representatives (all chosen by Bao Dai) of all the significant religious and political factions outside the Viet Minh. This included the Hoa Hao, Cao Dai, and Binh Xuyen politico-religious sects and their affiliated parties. Going considerably further than Bao Dai wanted (thereby showing his weakness, even within anti–Viet Minh circles), the congress declared that all treaties with France be approved by a national assembly, to be elected by universal suffrage, and it passed a resolution refusing to join the French Union. Independence should be complete, proponents said, with no Vietnamese membership in any French-dominated commonwealth.
The delegates held their breath. They needed backing in high places, they knew, one place in particular. “Rightly or wrongly,” one delegate recalled, “we had invested substantial hopes in the American connection. And these hopes had been encouraged, not officially but through a series of informal contacts with the USIA, the CIA, and embassy personnel.”37 But when they sought U.S. backing for the resolution, its sponsors found none. On the contrary, after the vote Ambassador Donald Heath summoned several key delegates, including Bao Dai’s cousin Prince Buu Loc, to his residence and castigated them for adopting a measure that could only hurt the fight against Ho Chi Minh. The United States supported Vietnam and favored independence, he said, but it was also allied to France. The resolution went too far and must be softened. Bao Dai, summoned to Paris from his perch on the Riviera to explain the congress’s action, agreed. The following day a new, milder version was passed, this one stating that Vietnam would not be part of the French Union “in its present form.”38
Heath did not come away impressed, stressing in his report to Washington the delegates’ ”emotional, irresponsible nationalism”: “It was apparent that [the] majority of the delegates had honestly no idea of [the] import of [the] language in [the] resolution they had just passed.” And in another cable: “It is a matter of extraordinary difficulty to convey [the] degree of naiveté and childlike belief that no matter what defamatory language they use, the Vietnamese will still be safeguarded from [the] lethal Communist enemy of France and [the] United States.”39
In Paris, the reaction to the congress was even more caustic, as newspapers and politicians of various stripes demanded to know what France was fighting for in Indochina. Ho Chi Minh and his Communists were evidently not the only foes. “Let them stew in their own juice,” President Vincent Auriol thundered. “We’ll withdraw the expeditionary force.” Prime Minister Joseph Laniel said France had “no reason to prolong her sacrifices if the very people for whom they are being made disdain those sacrifices and betray them,” a remark widely seen to be advocating early negotiations with Ho. Meanwhile, Paul Reynaud and Édouard Daladier, together with former colonial governor of Indochina Albert Sarraut, called for a full-fledged reevaluation of policy, while in the National Assembly the clamor for pulling up stakes and getting out of Indochina grew louder than ever before. Just how to manage the withdrawal remained a source of friction: The right sought to settle the conflict through a great-power initiative (perhaps including China) covering the whole of Southeast Asia, while the left insisted on the need for direct talks with the Viet Minh.
“What aim has this war still got?” asked Alain Savary, a young Socialist widely acclaimed for his intellectual brilliance. “It’s no longer even a question of defending the principle of the French Union. To fight against Communism? France is alone.… Peace will not wait, it must be actively sought. You can talk to Moscow, Peking, London, and Washington, but this will not help you deal with the real issue. The only thing that will lead to an armistice is negotiation with Ho Chi Minh.”40
Intellectuals too increasingly clamored for an end to the war. Many had rallied around the cause of Henri Martin, a Communist activist who served in the French Navy in Indochina and witnessed the violent clash in Haiphong in November 1946. Martin returned to France determined to agitate against the war. In July 1949 he began distributing political tracts to new recruits at the Toulon naval dockyard, urging them to oppose the conflict. Arrested in 1950 and tried on charges of demoralizing the army, Martin was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. But his case continued to attract attention and supporters, not least Jean-Paul Sartre, who went to press in late 1953 with L’Affaire Henri Martin. By the time the book appeared, Martin had been discreetly released at the order of President Auriol.
Portentously, a perceptible anti-Americanism crept into the discourse, as commentators noted that, with the end of the fighting in Korea, France was the only Western nation shedding blood on a major scale to fight Communism. Why, critics asked, did Washington reserve for itself a course of action—negotiations, leading to a political solution—it denied to its allies? And why, some asked (especially on the right), did these self-righteous Americans feel free to lecture France on how to treat dependent peoples, given their discrimination against Negroes within America’s own borders? The signing of the new U.S. aid agreement in Paris elicited little applause but numerous complaints about the division of labor in Vietnam. “One of the parties brings dollars, while the other makes a gift of its blood and its sons,” Daladier acidly remarked, to wide acclaim.41
The Eisenhower administration brushed off the criticism, but it looked again for ways to keep its allies in Indochina focused on the task of winning the struggle. To the Paris government, it insisted that seven years of war had not been in vain, that her cause was both just and essential, and that negotiations should be avoided until France and the West could dictate the terms. To the non-Communist nationalist groups, it preached the message that the continued presence of the French Expeditionary Corps was essential to victory. (Subtext: The VNA by itself would get crushed in no time.) Said Heath in a speech on October 24: “There is only France who can make this military contribution at this vital moment which the destinies of the free world have now reached.… I have not the slightest doubt of the final victory of the Vietnamese National Army in unity with the noble military effort being made by the expeditionary corps of the French Union.”42
VI
SO EAGER WAS THE WHITE HOUSE TO GET THESE POINTS ACROSS that it dispatched a special messenger to Indochina to articulate them. At midday on October 31, Vice President Richard Nixon, accompanied by his wife, Pat, a few staffers and Secret Service agents, and a handful of reporters, landed in Saigon. The group had spent the previous day in Cambodia, where Nixon had met King Norodom Sihanouk and Prime Minister Penn Nouth. The arrival in Saigon was preceded by a sudden squall that, sweeping across the tarmac in front of the taxiing plane, soaked both the honor guard and the reception committee. Nixon, his enthusiasm undamped, emerged and delivered a short impromptu statement, whereupon he was whisked away to meetings with Nguyen Van Tam and Henri Navarre.43 That evening Ambassador Heath hosted a dinner for the visitors at the Majestic Hotel, and in the days that followed Nixon traveled to Dalat to meet with Bao Dai, to Laos for a session with Prince Souvanna Phouma, and
to Hanoi, where High Commissioner Maurice Dejean presided over a formal dinner—complete with “starched linen napkins, sparkling crystal goblets, and silver candelabra”—and where Nixon visited a French garrison in the company of Navarre and the commander of French forces in Tonkin, General René Cogny. Outfitted with battle fatigues and a helmet, Nixon rode in a convoy of American-supplied jeeps to a hot spot north of Hanoi, where he watched an artillery barrage.44
VICE PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON TRIES TO CHAT UP A SOLDIER IN THE VIETNAMESE NATIONAL ARMY AT A BASE NEAR DONG GIAO, NORTHEAST OF HANOI, IN EARLY NOVEMBER 1953. (photo credit 15.2)
The hectic schedule left some in the entourage exhausted, but Nixon reveled in the fast pace, seemingly gaining in energy with each passing day. In speech after speech, he made the same basic points: that the defeat of Communism in Indochina was essential to the safety of the free world; that it was only in union with France that Vietnam could—and would—achieve her aims; and that no negotiated solution should be sought. “It is easy,” he said in Dalat, “in the name of nationalism and independence to call for the immediate withdrawal of the French Republic. At first glance this meets with popular favor, but those who call for such a step must also know that, if it were taken, it would mean not independence or liberty but complete domination by a foreign power.” In Hanoi, he declared himself convinced that all differences between France and the State of Vietnam could easily be solved, and added: “We must admit that in no circumstances can we negotiate a peace which would deliver into slavery the peoples whose will is to remain free, and we must know that by a close union of our efforts, this struggle will end in victory.… The tide of aggression has reached its peak and has finally begun to recede. The foundation for decisive victory has been laid.”45
And with that, Nixon and his party were off from Hanoi, bound for home. No one could know then that nineteen years later, as president of the United States, Nixon would send B-52s to hit the city during the Christmas period in a massive and highly controversial air offensive. But what was amply evident even now, exactly a year after the Eisenhower-Nixon team’s election victory, was the administration’s determination to win in Vietnam, to keep the French fighting, and to rein in the Saigon nationalist groups. Any notion of cultivating a Third Force, one in between the Communists and the French, seemed to have vanished. Said an obviously impressed British diplomat to his superiors in London: “By this constant reiteration that the one immediate goal was the defeat of the enemy and that this must be done in union with France, Mr. Nixon has, I am sure, done something to bring the Vietnamese back to reality after pipe dreams of the National Congress.”46
Nixon’s confident pronouncements masked deep private chagrin. The Navarre Plan was sound and could succeed by 1955 as planned, he told the National Security Council a few weeks later, but the administration should not count on it. The Communists had a sense of history, they had determination and skill, and they believed time was on their side. Bao Dai and the non-Communist groups were weak entities, while in the French High Command there was legitimate fear that Paris would seek premature negotiations. “There is a definite need to stiffen the French at home,” Nixon said, because Washington’s recent aid increase, though essential, would do little good if Navarre did not have full support from the metropole. For the French commander Nixon offered mostly praise, but he lamented Navarre’s failure to utilize the VNA effectively and his reluctance to accept American advice regarding how the native army should be trained.47 Even here, though, the vice president was sympathetic to the French dilemma. He told a group of State Department officers:
Deep down I sense that Navarre, and Cogny, the Field Commander, and the other field commanders I talked to on the scene at the present time have very little faith in the ability of the Vietnamese to fight separately in independent units which don’t have French noncoms. That may be a cover for the fact that the French naturally have a reluctance to build up a strong independent Vietnamese army because they know that once that is done and once the Vietnamese are able to handle the problem themselves, that despite all the fine talk about the independence within the French Union—when that time comes, the Vietnamese will kick out the French.
My own opinion, of course, as I have expressed it publicly, and I believe it very strongly, is as far as the Vietnamese and the Cambodian and Laotians are concerned, and weak as they are and weak as they will be, even with their national armies, that their only hope to remain independent is to have their independence within the French Union, which the French are now willing to give, but which, unfortunately, they have not been able to sell to the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians.48
There was candor here, but also a seeming unwillingness to face the obvious paradoxes. If the Communists had the motivation and the “sense of history” on their side, and the good guys didn’t, what did that say about the cause? And how could the French be induced to step up the war effort in order to hold Vietnam and at the same time commit to true independence for the Vietnamese? What would be the point of expanding their efforts to retain their colonial possession if they then had to give it up?
On negotiations, the vice president again spoke frankly, while again ignoring the contradictions. Diplomacy should be firmly resisted, he asserted, for it would inevitably lead to Communist domination of Indochina. The French “cannot get out,” and “we cannot have them get out because if we do the Communists—the Viet Minh are the only ones capable of governing, the only ones capable of controlling the country”—would take over. “So what we end up with here is a hard choice. It is a real risk and a real gamble, but what we end up with here, with all that is at stake, it seems to me we have to continue our military aid and, in that connection, I think the military are going to be as flexible as they can be, and, if there is any doubt, they will put in the additional material equipment that is necessary.”49
Hence Nixon’s determination, while in Vietnam, to strike only upbeat notes, to urge Navarre on, and to trumpet the robust health of the French Union. The stakes were huge, and victory must come. Now was no time to give up. And indeed, though Nixon’s optimistic pronouncements did little to lift spirits in metropolitan France, where the charcoal autumn sky matched the prevailing mood, they had a noticeable effect on colons and high French officials in Saigon and Hanoi. Navarre and Dejean had more of a bounce in their step after hearing him extol them for the job they were doing and simultaneously admonish the Vietnamese to keep their nationalist ambitions in check. The new U.S. aid package, Nixon had promised them, would soon make itself felt on the ground. How soon was soon? Nobody knew for sure, but Navarre and the high command took satisfaction from the fact that the campaigning season was by now well under way and Giap had yet to launch a major attack anywhere. In past years, he would have moved sooner than this. French intelligence speculated that he felt insufficiently strong to attack in the delta, and that he would concentrate his attention on the highland region of northwestern Tonkin.
Navarre was determined to meet the threat. Rather than concede the highlands and husband his resources for the defense of the deltas and of Annam in the center, he moved to take on the enemy here, in the remote and menacing northwest. As part of that effort, he ordered the reoccupation of a post near the Laotian border. This seemingly innocuous action would trigger a series of moves and countermoves in several world capitals and ultimately bring the war to its climax. The post bore the unlikely name of “Big Frontier Administrative Center,” or, in Vietnamese, Dien Bien Phu.
CHAPTER 16
ARENA OF THE GODS
THE VILLAGE WAS SET A THIRD OF THE WAY DOWN A HEART-SHAPED basin measuring eleven miles in length and seven miles across at its widest point. It was surrounded by mountains, some round and gentle, others sharp limestone masses rising in irregular tiers to pointed peaks. A small river, the Nam Youm, ran past the village, through the plain from north to south. Although flat, the basin contained small features that sprouted up here and there, and there were numerous ti
ny hamlets and isolated dwellings scattered about. The inhabitants, perhaps ten thousand total, were mostly ethnic Tai who grew rice and mangoes and oranges on the fertile plain and marketed the opium brought down from the mountains by Hmong tribes, but there were also other tribal groups and Vietnamese. The Tai called the place Muong Thanh. To the Vietnamese, and to the French, it was known as Dien Bien Phu.
A strategic position it certainly was. The Laotian border lay just over the mountains, ten miles to the west, and the basin was one of the few hollows in the vast and largely impassable highland region, with its dense vegetation and forbidding terrain. The village was also at the junction of three routes. One went north, to China by way of Lai Chau, another was to the northeast to Tuan Giao, and the third ran southward to Laos via Muong Khoua. Whoever controlled the basin, legend taught, controlled the region and the entry to Laos and the upper Mekong—which was one reason the Tai referred to the bowl of land and its rim of hills as the Arena of the Gods.
Occupied in turn by the Chinese, the Siamese, the Hmong, and the Tai, Dien Bien Phu in 1889 was taken by French explorer-diplomat Auguste Pavie, who stuck around long enough to give his name to the horse path, the Pavie Piste, that ran north to Lai Chau. A French column subsequently camped in the village during operations against the Tai tribes, and in time it became an administrative post manned by a small group of local troops under French command. A lowly—and, one can guess, lonely—French colonial administrator took up residence as well, charged with the task of controlling the size of opium shipments, which in French Indochina was a state monopoly. In 1939, a small airstrip was built to allow supplies to be flown in from Hanoi (about a hundred and seventy miles away by air) for the garrison at Lai Chau, and during World War II the French used this strip for clandestine landings of agents of Force 136, an anti-Japanese resistance unit. On two occasions, French pilots used Dien Bien Phu to evacuate American fliers shot down over Japanese-controlled parts of Tonkin. When the Japanese launched their coup de force in March 1945, Dien Bien Phu became, for almost two months, the headquarters of French anti-Japanese resistance activity. Small planes from General Claire L. Chennault’s U.S. Fourteenth Air Force used the airstrip to bring supplies to the French and to evacuate wounded, and two obsolete French Potez 25 fighter aircraft used it as a base of operations against the advancing Japanese.1
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