The drop in numbers was critical to efficiency because it meant that no men could be spared to form the “intervention platoon” to rescue any patrols in difficulty, which made men even more reluctant to venture beyond the outpost gates. Poor medical evacuation arrangements also reduced the enthusiasm to be mentioned in dispatches, especially toward the end of the day when a wound meant an all-night wait for evacuation. The result was that they ventured out less and less—in July 1952, the 1st battalion of the 5e étranger reported that it simply did not have enough men to give “breathing space” to many posts that were “seriously hemmed in” by the Viet Minh: “As the absence of reserves prohibits the small operations which clear out and give room to the posts, these feel more and more isolated.”57 “I kept coming back to all the different people I had known in the Legion who had met death and disaster in various forms,” wrote Ainley. “For some it had been countless attacks of malaria or dysentery which had finally led them to hospital and invaliding home. Others had gone under from the combined effects of heat and alcohol. The majority, however, had been the victims of the eternal guerrilla mine-laying activity which got them when least expected.”58
As the war continued, despite the better armament of the Viet Minh, the percentage of casualties lost to mines actually increased—fully 75 percent of French deaths and 56 percent of the wounds in the Tonkin delta, where most French troops were concentrated, were caused by mines between September 1953 and February 1954. Lieutenant Basset, serving with the 2e étranger in 1951, noted that on patrol men walked with a reed held out in front. When it touched a wire and bent, then they stopped. His post reciprocated by reorganizing the minefields outside their perimeter, adding however a courteous sign in Vietnamese and French warning of the danger—then they bobby-trapped the sign.59 “On patrol, we usually marched with our heads down, because of the mines and traps scattered on our itineraries,” wrote Kemencei of the early years of the war. “The mines were mostly of local manufacture, set off by a string. They were not powerful, compared to Japanese mines, but even though they were primitive, they were enough to wound the nearest soldier by putting out an eye or breaking a leg.” One of the most feared were the metal stakes that pierced the foot if stepped on and led to serious infection.60
The heterogeneous nature of the French Expeditionary Force made it difficult to keep posts up to strength. The French army in the colonies argued that its heterogeneity was a strength, for it allowed an amalgamation of national and ethnic talents to create a well-rounded force. However, the prolonged nature of the conflict caused the French army serious manpower strains, for it was unable to distribute replacements according to need. North African replacements could not be directed to the Legion, nor legionnaires to the Senegalese, and so on. This was a problem Giap did not have to face.
Henry Ainley complained that the replacements were picked over for the hard-hitting units in Tonkin, while the posts, especially in the south, got the rest:
The rare driblets affected to our battalion were those too old or too untried to be of any use for the heavy fighting up North, and barely covered our overall losses. Our officer situation was equally critical. At HQ we were reduced to four officers and the companies to an officer per company. The net result was an appallingly heavy increase in the responsibilities of the NCOs and a general decrease in discipline and morale of the men. . . . We were going through a very bad period in the Battalion and I had become heartily sick of the never-ending stream of rape, desertion and general indiscipline.61
A decline in discipline contributed to that traditional Legion problem—desertion—although desertion did not reach disturbing rates in Indochina. Desertion on the outward voyage continued, especially in Singapore, where officials refused to hand over deserters to the French after legionnaires departing before the expiration of their contracts in 1948 convinced the local press that they would be shot if returned. “The view of the coast of Sumatra with its coconut palms and its beach tempted us too much to resist escaping,” one Italian legionnaire was quoted as saying. In Suez, Aden and Colombo, Sri Lanka, the British authorities continued to hand over deserters, “after having passably roughed them up.”62 Desertions were encouraged also by the appalling conditions on board most of the troopships, and the lack of interest in the comfort of their men shown by French officers, including those of the Legion.63 In 1952, the French legation in Colombo explained “this upsurge in cases to desertion” to “disaffection with the Legion or perhaps by lack of interest in the Indochinese campaign.”64
In Indochina, Viet Minh appeals to legionnaires, especially to those from central and eastern European countries with Communist governments, enjoyed only limited success. In 1945, five deserters from the 5e étranger joined Giap and eventually rose to positions of responsibility in the Viet Minh organization. The following year, a dozen German legionnaires came over to Giap, but were executed after a few weeks when, disillusioned, they demanded to be sent home. This was followed by the execution of another group of Legion deserters in 1948.65 There were a few spectacular cases, like those of two deserters named Koch and Klement, who wrote propaganda tracts directed at German legionnaires and who were even credited with the assassination of the governor's aide in Hue.66 Stefan Kubiak, a Pole and a Communist who had deserted the Polish army after World War II and drifted into the Foreign Legion, defected to the Viet Minh in 1947. Although distrusted by them at first, he eventually earned his way into their good graces as an expert armorer, and for his courageous conduct at the Battle of Hoa Binh in 1951–52. Promoted to captain, he served with the 312th division and participated in the attack against his former Legion companions on the defensive position of Beatrice at Dien Bien Phu.67 A German deserter named Heinrich Peters was placed in French uniform and used for assassinations of officials. Other incidents involving legionnaires, although minor, raised questions about their trustworthiness.68
A report of January 15, 1949, said that the Legion had registered 721 deserters since September 1945—a 3.2 percent desertion rate—the vast majority Germans. Some had returned voluntarily, sixteen had died fighting for the Viet Minh, and 530 were “presumed” still to be in rebel ranks.69 Most probably regretted their decision, like the Pole Eugene Mazurek of the 2e BEP, who fled to the enemy in October 1951 from a discipline company. He returned to the French and reported that the life of a deserter was essentially that of a POW, distrusted, insulted, badly fed and obliged to attend interminable “re-education” sessions by the Viet Minh. “The VM know that the deserter is not dependable and, to be more precise, he's a coward who is afraid to be killed in the posts by the VM and comes over to them to rest,” confessed Mazurek. Quite a few had been shot for attempting to get back to the French, he claimed. Far more important than the deserter himself were his weapons and the propaganda value the Viet Minh gained from repatriating those from Communist countries through China and the Soviet Union.70
Few who defected to the Viet Minh did so for political reasons. The rapports sur le moral written by each unit four times a year stressed that the legionnaires paid not the slightest attention to Viet Minh propaganda.71 Most who deserted were simply demoralized by life in the isolated posts. Of twenty-three deserters from the 2nd battalion of the 5e étranger in the first six months of 1954, ten surrendered voluntarily and only three went over to the enemy. “In the majority of cases, it is a question of flight explicable by eight months spent in the rice paddies without a single rest day and which last as long as the piasters in his possession,” the battalion commander concluded.72 Of eight desertions in the 3e étranger in the second quarter of 1953, four were put down to “concrete”—that is, the boring life of the posts—and four to “feminine contacts.”73
“Feminine contacts” were another possible influence on desertion. Already in 1951 the 3e étranger had categorized Viet Minh propaganda aimed at the Legion as “badly done. But it is not the same with the verbal propaganda of the women, combined with the coups de cafard, which is behind a
certain number of departures.”74 The congaïs were a factor in some desertions, although they probably prevented more than they provoked. Some legionnaires and their congaïs may have decided to desert for greener pastures. But as a general rule, legionnaires were only temporary husbands, while the Legion offered a permanent source of livelihood for these women. Documents captured by French intelligence revealed that the Viet Minh had failed to turn the congaïs against the Legion. The vast majority of congaïs remained loyal to their legionnaires, especially when they had children, and hesitated to betray a post. Attempts to persuade some in the revolutionary ranks to act as congaïs failed because they did not want to lose their chastity to the enemy, even though it was explained to them that chastity was a bourgeois notion. In the end, the Viet Minh preferred to deal through prostitutes because their attitude to intelligence and betrayal was far more businesslike.75
If the Legion was considered especially vulnerable to demoralization in its fixed posts, by common consent it was in its element in offensive forms of warfare. One of these was familiar to legionnaires—the groupe mobile, brought to Indochina by General Boyer de La Tour and developed by de Lattre to help defend the Tonkin delta in 1951. These consisted of three partially motorized battalions of different origins—Legion, North African, Senegalese or Vietnamese—in keeping with the colonial army's views on the worth of heterogeneous formations. To these were joined an artillery battalion, or one of heavy mortars if artillery was in short supply. For larger operations, armored, engineering or amphibious units were sometimes attached. By the end of the war, the French had organized eighteen groupes mobiles, including Vietnamese units.
The groupes mobiles performed excellent service as intervention groups, especially during Giap's offensives against the Tonkin delta in 1951—already in 1951, the 3e étranger noted that legionnaires left in posts were envious of those in mobile groups.76 However, they did not prove to be a war-winning formula. In part, they were meant to make up for a desperate lack of French air power. They were essentially roadbound, which limited their effectiveness to those areas with developed road networks, like the Tonkin delta. Once in broken and/or forested country, with their 120 vehicles strung out along a road, they became vulnerable to ambush. This is precisely what happened to G.M. 100 when it was ordered to evacuate An Khe in the central highlands on June 24, 1954, in conditions similar to those that had prevailed four years earlier on the R.C. 4. Tipped off well in advance by its intelligence, the Viet Minh caught it in a massive ambush that destroyed all of its artillery and vehicles and 1,200 men.77
The complaint about the mobile groups was that they were too heavy to pursue if the enemy slipped away, and too light to fight if the Viet Minh divisions and even corps that began to challenge them by early 1953 decided to offer battle. This caused the French command to begin to organize light divisions by combining several groupes mobiles, but this was done too late to provide decisive results. Besides, Indochina simply did not have the road network that allowed larger groups to operate effectively. As the war progressed, the increasing strength of the Viet Minh and the lack of tanks forced the groupes mobiles to devote an increasing percentage of its manpower to defending its artillery and command company, which lessened its punch. While service in the groupes mobiles was very popular in the Legion, they suffered from the same shortage of personnel, especially NCOs and specialists, as other units. In fact, Captain Masselot of the 1st battalion of the 5e étranger complained in November 1952 that the success of the groupes mobiles was bought at the expense of other Legion units who were stripped of materiel, reinforcements, specialists, even short-changed in leave and decorations, for the benefit of the more prestigious mobile sections.78
The effectiveness of the groupes mobiles, as with the rest of the French forces, gradually declined as the pace of the war, the wear and tear on equipment, and the irreplaceable loss of experienced cadres took its toll. An inspector of Legion units in November and December 1952 believed that aggressive battalion commanders were pushing their units too hard during their six months of command, and then passing on to their successors a battalion whose force had diminished. “One has the impression that some battalion commanders are in a hurry to complete their six months of command, and during this time squeeze their battalion like a lemon to extract the maximum, to their own profit of course,” the inspector reported on January 12,1953. “In this way, our battalions lose an enormous amount of their combat potential. And the troops, who see an endless parade of new commanders at their head, are less coherent, less aggressive under fire.”79
The 5e étranger complained in 1953 that its battalions assigned to the groupes mobiles “arrive on the battlefield in skeletal strength.”80 It was the same story the following year when two battalions of the 5e étranger had to be combined to keep its groupe mobile up to strength. “The instrument (GM5) did not have the operational capacity corresponding to its mission,” it noted. “A battalion whose operational strength is not 600 men is not a battalion.” Two-thirds of its legionnaires were new men with less than six months’ service. “The accumulated fatigue, forgetfulness or the loss by the soldiers of the most elementary reflexes translate into unnecessary losses.” The groupe mobile had been reduced to only two battalions, which allowed it to execute only “elementary manoeuvres” and placed even more strain on the troops, whose morale nevertheless was high.81 The commander of the 3rd battalion of the 5e étranger believed that the Legion had become a prisoner of its myths, trying to organize units without specialists to staff them: “It is time to put an end to the LEGION prejudice which believes that for one driver's slot, we will find ten, and which nourishes itself on the illusion that every legionnaire knows how to use a trowel,” he wrote in 1954. “The battalion has all it can do to utilize its materiel due to lack of competent specialists.”82
Some of the groupes mobiles were also used unimaginatively. The 3rd battalion of the 3e étranger assigned to a groupe mobile in 1951 complained that it had been used to build fortifications for five months, which had “diminished the combative qualities of the units, destroyed the homogeneity of the battalions, considerably undermined the spirit of discipline.. ,”83 Manning problems in the groupes mobiles were complicated by the decline of morale in North African and Senegalese units. Problems in the North African units had been encouraged by the reorganization of 1945, which ended the tradition of providing them with specialized Arabic-speaking officers. The friction and low morale in these units caused the principle of operational heterogeneity to be abandoned. This offered another example of how the heterogeneous nature of the French forces in a prolonged war limited the flexibility of the Expeditionary Force, and put it at a disadvantage against the homogeneous Viet Minh.
In general, the weather, the terrain and the dispersion of Viet Minh forces limited the role for armor in Indochina largely to infantry support. Therefore, few possibilities for spectacular action that tankers might find in Europe were opened for the REC. From 1953, there were attempts to organize armored task forces with organic infantry, but this was hampered by the shortage of infantry and frequent mechanical problems with the half-tracks that carried them. Like the groupes mobiles, the tanks were largely roadbound. Where the REC did excel was in the development of amphibious units in the south, cleverly adapting Alaskan “crabs,” called weasels by the Americans, designed as support vehicles for cold-weather operations, and Mississippi Delta “alligators,” of purely civilian origins, for combat use.
To understand the amphibious units developed by the REC in Cochinchina, one must first visualize the countryside in which they operated. In 1950, a narrow, potholed road ran southwest out of the Cholon district of Saigon into a waterlogged countryside of paddy fields and jungles. Every few kilometers, wooden watchtowers surrounded by sandbags stood sentinel over a humpback bridge or a small village settled on the edge of the marsh. Senegalese, Arab or Vietnamese troops casually surveyed the traffic of cars filled to axle-breaking capacity and buses painted in
the yellow and scarlet colors of Vietnam, which nestled closely to any military vehicle for protection. The road entered the town of My Tho, which straddled a branch of the Mekong River. On the far side of the river, one could see the armored car that waited beneath the ubiquitous flags of France and Vietnam to escort the traffic deeper into the countryside, until, that is, a rainstorm swept in, obscuring the opposite bank from view.
The Legion camp was on the south side of the river, a collection of dilapidated stucco buildings and newer, but equally dilapidated, huts, all of which was surrounded by pillboxes, barbed wire and painted sentry boxes. The “crabs” were easy to spot—a trail of churned mud ran from the edge of the swamp to two large sheds where they were housed. A Vietnamese slum ran up to the wire on one side of the camp, while a dark wall of jungle loomed beyond two watchtowers on the other. The mosquitos were voracious. Beyond lay an expanse of reeds and islands of forest that stretched a hundred miles to Cambodia. It was in this land, where dry footage was at an absolute premium, that the Viet Minh had decided to make their headquarters in the south.
The first crab companies were organized in 1948 in the Plaine des Jones. “The crab was a tracked vehicle about the overall size of an average car, with thin, very thin, armour-plating,” wrote Liddell Hart.
There was one bucket seat in front beside the engine for the driver. In the main body-space there was a bench for the three other members of the crew with stowage room for ammunition and arms and a mounted bracket for the machine-gun. At the rear there were several closed-in lockers for supplies and other gear, and a fixed pair of rudders were attached with which to steer the vehicle when it floated on the water and became a paddle-boat. A collapsible tarpaulin awning could be drawn over the crew space on a supporting frame.84
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