Nor did they forget the Legion. “The attitude of the troops and of the Legion in particular is of an odious brutality,” one observer wrote on March 15, 1931.
An unbridled army rabble, giving over to all its instincts, escaping almost completely from the control of its leaders, now terrorizes the entire country. One steals, one rapes, one condemns and one executes as one pleases. The legionnaires enter the houses, take what pleases them, attack women and young girls. For no reason, without proof, men, young people, are arrested and shot in cold blood, without trial. This is a real troop of pirates in uniform which has been set loose on the country.... If it is by these methods that one pretends to pacify the country, one is badly mistaken. The most obvious result of all this is to excite further passions and to raise up against us the most peaceful among the Annamites.... If this is what we want, we'll soon be there! And the communists have really been handed a golden issue to use against us.6
The actions of the Legion in Annam had been spectacular enough to earn it a special mention in the convention of March 6,1946, between Paris and the Viet Minh government installed in Hanoi—although Ho Chi Minh agreed to permit fifteen thousand French troops north of the 16th parallel, he specifically excluded the Legion from this contingent because, among other things, legionnaires had destroyed his native village in Annam.7 Even many in the French army concluded after 1954 that the savage repression of the Yen Bai revolt, in which the Legion played a small part, and of the troubles in Annam in 1930–32, in which the Legion assumed a vanguard role, had been counterproductive, and that subsequent French policy backed everything that was moribund in the country.
The second blow to French prestige in Indochina, as elsewhere in the world, came with the French defeat of May–June 1940. The Japanese, already upset with the French for aiding the Nationalist Chinese by supplying arms through Lang Son, forced Resident General and ex-Legion officer Georges Catroux to close the frontier to war supplies destined for the Nationalist Chinese, and to accept a Japanese control commission to see that it was enforced. When the new government of Philippe Pétain learned of this, Catroux was dismissed and replaced by Admiral Jean De-coux. Like Catroux, Decoux realized that his position—90,000 troops at full stretch, of which only 14,500 were white, armed with First World War equipment, with no naval or air power to speak of it—was a weak one. He proceeded to sign an agreement with Tokyo on August 30, 1940, that accorded the Japanese certain military facilities in Tonkin in return for recognition of French sovereignty there.
As the details of this accord were being negotiated in Hanoi with a great amount of bad faith on both sides, the Japanese flung a division of thirty thousand men at Lang Son on the night of September 21–22. Although the French had been beefing up their defenses at Lang Son in the expectation of a Japanese action, the attack produced complete panic.8 On the 25th, the French commander raised the white flag. The commander of the 2nd battalion of the 5e étranger protested the “humiliation” of marching off into captivity “like a herd of sheep, before an enemy whom he has not even seen in front of him,” but he marched off nonetheless. This is cited as the first instance of a Legion unit surrendering without a fight, although according to Alfred Perrot-White heavily Spanish units of the REC surrendered to the Americans without firing a shot during the invasion of Morocco in November 1942.9 The Japanese separated the battalion's 179 German and Austrian legionnaires and attempted without success to enlist them in the Japanese cause. Finally, on October 5, the Japanese officially regretted the incident of Lang Son and returned the prisoners to Tonkin.10
Successful Japanese pressure, such as the cease-fire imposed by Japan in the Franco-Thai dispute of 1940–41, accumulated incidents that contributed to a French loss of face in the eyes of the Vietnamese. But the Japanese attacks on French prestige were not merely indirect ones. As part of her Greater Asia policy, which sought to replace European imperialism in the Far East with Japanese domination, the Japanese worked directly to undermine French control in Indochina. Japanese authorities gave direct support to the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects in the south, and prevented French attempts to smash their influence.
French weakness also permitted various national and revolutionary groups to re-form and even to infiltrate the imperial civil service, which Vichy had belatedly opened to Vietnamese recruitment. The Communists were especially active in reforming an infrastructure that had been destroyed in the repression of the early 1930s, recruiting intellectuals to their cause and organizing a panoply of apparently benign front organizations to attract adherents. Two clandestine military bases were established in the northern highlands near the Chinese border, from which the Viet Minh would eventually expand. The leader of the embryonic Vietnam Liberation Army, Vo Nguyen Giap, slowly built his force from forty-four to almost three thousand soldiers by the spring of 1945. Although most of his arms were gathered up in attacks on French posts, his military organization was given a boost in 1945 when the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) dropped over five thousand weapons to the insurgents under the mistaken belief that they were to be used against the Japanese, whom Giap had no intention of attacking. Ho wrote enthusiastic letters to President Truman declaring that “the great American Republic is a good friend of ours.”
The decisive events that were to allow the great expansion of the Viet Minh were the Japanese coup against the French of March 9, 1945, followed by their surrender in August. After 1940, the Japanese had gradually increased the numbers of their troops in Indochina to thirty thousand, stationed primarily in the cities and masking major French garrisons. The loss of Burma and the fall of the Philippines and of Iwo Jima in February 1945 caused Tokyo to fear an Allied invasion of Indochina. On the night of March 9, ironically perhaps the birthday of the Legion, the Japanese, reinforced with troops they had withdrawn from Burma, pounced on the French. The French army was in a poor position to defend itself. Although the French counted sixty-five thousand troops, many of them were unreliable native formations. The white troops had received no reinforcements of supplies for over four years. Consequently, units like the Legion had aged considerably—in one company of the 5e étranger, the average age was thirty-seven. The lack of medical supplies had translated into an increase in malaria, dysentery and venereal disease. The climate, the isolation from France and from the war, the need to maintain the status quo with the Japanese, and the deadly routine of a garrison army in the tropics had stifled what was left of a spirit of initiative among most of the officers. Although the French had drawn up plans to counter just such a possibility, the leading generals chose to ignore intelligence reports and rumors rife in Hanoi and Saigon of an imminent Japanese strike—the two armies had lived side by side in relative harmony, and already there had been so many false alarms of Japanese movements that the top generals were not prepared to give serious credence to these latest ones. No alert was posted for the evening of March 9, and many soldiers were not even in barracks.
In these conditions, the French reaction to the Japanese surprise could only be disjointed and haphazard. Many officers were seized at home or while strolling in the streets with their wives, and a group of officers from a regiment of tirailleurs were inhospitably captured as they hosted an apéritif for their Japanese counterparts. The few garrisons that did resist, such as the legionnaires in the disciplinary section at Ha Giang, quickly exhausted their ammunition, surrendered and were brutally executed by the Japanese. The prize for resistance went to the garrison at Dang Dong near Lang Son, which did not contain any legionnaires, and held out for three days before surrendering. Another group of legionnaires at Lang Son intoned the “Marseillaise” before being machine-gunned to death. A column of around five thousand troops that included the remnants of the three battalions of the 5e étranger, some tirailleurs tonkinois and artillerymen made a fighting retreat to China. Here, too, despite the lack of arms and supplies, and the poor physical condition of the men, the morale and cohesion of the legionnaires and the artil
lerymen remained superior to that of the Vietnamese troops.
The Americans did little to help this retreating column. No doubt Roosevelt had little sympathy for these tattered remnants of a colonial regime. But this Japanese action must have seemed to be a very minor incident in an obscure corner of a very large war. The Gaullists might have called attention to the plight of these retreating troops. But even they appear to have taken the view that the staunchly Vichyite loyalties of an Indochina garrison that had spent the war playing volleyball with the Japanese and inviting them to cocktail parties little qualified them for sympathy. A report of January 1, 1946, castigated French commanders for their lack of preparation and foresight, and the poor degree of professionalism of those commanders who did opt to defend themselves. Only the Legion escaped the general condemnation.11
Although the French emphasized the treachery of the Japanese action and the often heroic martyrdom of their soldiers, especially of the legionnaires and troops of la Coloniale, the inescapable fact was that the French presence in Indochina had been terminated by force. The sheer ease with which the Japanese had rounded up, butchered, dispersed, tracked down or driven from the country an army that had occupied Indochina for sixty years was a serious loss of face for the French, not only in the eyes of the population, but also in the eyes of the Allies, who no longer consulted them in deciding the fate of Indochina—the Potsdam Conference of July 1945 authorized the British to accept the Japanese surrender south of the sixteenth parallel, roughly near Tourane (Da Nang) south of Hue, while the Chinese accepted it to the north of that line. More seriously, the French departure followed by the Japanese surrender created a political vacuum that the communists were well prepared to step into—Ho Chi Minh's “August Revolution” of 1945 upon the surrender of the Japanese installed the Viet Minh in Hanoi as a prelude for the declaration of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on September 2, 1945.
The Outbreak of War to the Fall of Cao Bang in 1950
When, on November 20, 1946, what became known as the Haiphong incident touched off a full-scale shooting war between the French and the Viet Minh, the French discovered that they entered the conflict with some serious handicaps. Their army was small, weakened by the defeat and reorganization of the war, and virtually without supplies. Its first priority was to rebuild a force to occupy Germany. Indeed, when the possibility was discussed in 1945 of reoccupying Indochina with two divisions, the only troops available were Senegalese, which the high command was reluctant to use because “The reconquest of this country with an old and refined civilization by a troop composed of a majority of blacks would risk making a bad impression.” When the French finally did equip two divisions, it discovered that it lacked the means to get them there. Only in September 1945 did the first French troops land in Saigon. By February 1946, however, the garrison had been stiffened to almost fifty-six thousand soldiers. Nevertheless, the reoccupation would have to be quickly done, for the high command calculated that rotations and replacements would reduce this number to thirty-eight thousand within a year.12
Nor could the French economy support a substantial conflict far from home with resources that were badly needed to rebuild a country seriously debilitated following four years of German occupation and Allied invasion. French commanders must have been betting that they would not have to, for they placed the fighting qualities of the Vietnamese in the same category as those of the Malagasies—that is, near the bottom.
None of this is to say, however, that Ho Chi Minh was in a terribly strong position to resist them in 1946. The Viet Minh force of about thirty thousand soldiers at the time of the August Revolution of 1945 had perhaps doubled by the outbreak of hostilities in December of the following year, although estimates vary depending upon whether one includes Viet Minh regional forces and guerrillas in the tally. If the French troops were poorly armed by western standards, the armament of the Viet Minh was primitive. They also lacked supplies and medicines. Their commanders, including Giap, who would develop into one of the most redoubtable generals of the twentieth century, lacked experience in 1946. Furthermore, Ho Chi Minh found his control of Tonkin compromised by the Chinese Nationalists, whose occupation north of the 16th parallel was rapacious. Therefore, he had to tolerate, even to encourage, a French return to Indochina as a lever to pry the Chinese back over the border, on the theory that the French were too weak to remain over time whereas a Chinese occupation risked becoming permanent. “It is better to sniff French dung for a while than eat China's all our lives,” Ho replied to critics of his March 1946 decision to permit fifteen thousand French troops (excluding the Legion) north of the 16th parallel, in return for the departure of almost 180,000 Chinese soldiers.13
As the political maneuvering of Ho Chi Minh in 1945–46 suggests, perhaps the greatest strength possessed by the Viet Minh was patience. In military terms, this caused the Viet Minh leaders, Giap foremost among them, to plot a war of longue durée. Mao Tse-tung's theories on revolutionary warfare supplied Giap with a strategic outline for his campaign against the French. According to Mao, revolutionary war passes through three phases. In the first phase, the superior strength of the enemy force causes the revolutionaries to avoid decisive combat and fall back on a strategy of small-scale raids and attacks. As the guerrillas build their strength and achieve rough parity with the enemy, then the commander can enter the second phase: a mix of conventional and guerrilla actions to keep the enemy off balance. In Indochina, this meant placing the French before a series of choices, both in terms of geography and force structure, all of which were made equally unattractive. Giap could concentrate his activity in upper Tonkin, in Laos, in the deltas around Hanoi or Saigon, in the desolate coastal areas or the remote central highlands of Annam, or in more than one of these areas simultaneously. The French had to be strong everywhere, or at the very least maintain the flexibility to intervene anywhere a serious threat materialized, while Giap could conserve and concentrate his forces in those areas where the greatest military or political advantage could be achieved. The final stage in Mao's guerrilla war occurs when the government army, like a bull confused, badly bloodied and exhausted by the matador, is forced onto the defensive. When this happens, then the revolutionaries can move to a “general counteroffensive,” which will culminate in the enemy's defeat.
In other words, Giap retained the strategic initiative and controlled the tempo of the war. And here the question of French force structure became critical. For the Indochina over which the French and Viet Minh fought is a vast and extremely diverse land running from the sparsely inhabited and jungle-covered mountains of the north, to the populated rice lands along the coast, to the jungles and savannahs of the south, like the Plaine des Jones, which creeps to the very outskirts of Saigon and becomes a shallow, reed-filled lake in the rainy seasons. The Viet Minh adapted to this diversity better than the French, for the Vietnamese Liberation Army units theoretically could fight anywhere in the country, while the French were required to develop units specializing in regional combat. Of no troop was this more true than the Legion, which supplied four regular infantry regiments for operations in the mountains and pacification duties in more populated areas, two battalions of parachutists, and the REC, which created amphibious forces for the marshes of Cochinchina as well as regular armored formations. The Legion also organized its own engineer, transport, supply, maintenance and even medical services, as well as contributed battalions to the groupes mobiles, inspired by tactical experiments in Morocco and imported into Indochina in 1951. Not only did this stretch available manpower and limit the ability to assign replacements, but also units developed for one area or one type of warfare frequently operated badly in a different combat environment, depriving the French of a certain degree of strategic flexibility. Frequent transfers of forces from one area to another in response to a Viet Minh initiative or a change in strategic priorities brought on by one of the many French command changes also meant that French troops seldom knew their area well.
On October 7, 1947, the French paratroops floated out of the air upon Bac Can in what had been baptized “Operation Lea.” While the early rumors that Ho Chi Minh had been captured in this surprise attack proved untrue, reporter and writer Bernard Fall, among others, recounted that the resistance leader had escaped in such haste that he had left behind correspondence ready to be signed on his desk.14 French troops also captured substantial stocks of Viet Minh arms and munitions, although the rebels vanished into the jungle without a fight.
The belief that they had only narrowly failed to win the war at Bac Can encouraged the French in their belief in the utility of paratroop landings. While no unit more exemplified the taste for risk and forward combat than the Legion, the decision to transform legionnaires into paratroops had first to overcome the objections that had become customary each time the Legion wished to depart from its normal heavy infantry organization. However, when volunteers were called for in April 1948, there was no shortage of available manpower. Some may have regretted their decision when they were dropped in a tent village in the forest of Khamisis, about 13 miles south of Sidi-bel-Abbès. “How could such an attractive Mediterranean forest hide such misery!” asked Janos Kemencei, one of these first volunteers.15 Water had to be rationed, there were no washing facilities for men or their clothes, neither beds nor mattresses, nor was there a mess tent, so that the food, abundant but insipid, was eaten standing up. One smelled the latrines long before they came into sight, and a fine dust permeated everywhere. To top it all off, the training was fairly tough, and centered on marching five miles in full combat kit in less than an hour. Those who passed these physical tests were dispatched to Philippeville to train with the chasseurs parachutistes, where the training was equally severe, and the punishments, which consisted of shaving the head, were frequent and usually arbitrary.
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