by Max Boot
Three years later, he moved to Russia to work for the Communist International (Comintern), the Soviet organization charged with subversion abroad. He received further instruction in revolutionary ideals and practices at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, better known as the Stalin School. Here he became, in the words of a French Communist, an “accomplished Stalinist,” but he was mercifully devoid of Stalin’s megalomania, fanaticism, and paranoia. Short and thin, with a wispy beard, Nguyen impressed everyone he met with his “goodness and simplicity”9—traits that would eventually make him a widely beloved figure in Vietnam who would become known as Bac Ho (Uncle Ho). Only his large black eyes, “lively, alert, and burning with extraordinary fervor,” hinted at the zeal with which Ho pursued his twin passions, nationalism and communism.10
In 1930, by now living in Hong Kong, Nguyen helped create the Vietnamese Communist Party. It had a total of just 255 members inside Vietnam, making it smaller than rivals such as the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (VNQDD).11 The French police would imprison every Communist they could identify; many would be tortured and executed, creating a fierce anti-French hatred that one day would be transposed to the Americans. Nguyen himself was arrested, though not by the French, but by British authorities in Hong Kong in 1931, and thus received gentler treatment. He was held for eighteen months and then deported. In 1938, after another sojourn in Stalinist Moscow, Nguyen moved to southern China, where he established a fresh base to export revolution to Vietnam.
In the city of Kunming, in 1940, he was introduced to a comrade who would before long become his top general. Vo Nguyen Giap was a younger man (born in 1911), who had spent time in prison in Vietnam for nationalist agitation but had also earned a law degree and had taught history at a private school. In traveling to China, he had left behind his wife, who would be arrested by French authorities and die in prison, a fate previously suffered by his father and sister. Their deaths would harden his hatred of the colonial regime in spite of his Francophone upbringing.
Giap was “extraordinarily intelligent”—“one of the most brilliant products of our French schools,” a French diplomat called him.12 An autodidact in military affairs, he would become one of the greatest military commanders of modern times. His hero may have been Napoleon, but his model was Mao Zedong. Both Nguyen and Giap worked diligently to implement Mao’s three-stage model of revolution: a “localized guerrilla war,” followed by a “war of movement” waged by a mix of conventional and guerrilla forces, and finally a “general uprising” that would bring down the regime. This concept of “people’s war” waged in the countryside by peasants was more appropriate for rural countries such as China and Vietnam than the kind of urban uprising that Lenin had carried out in Russia.
The opportunity to launch an insurgency against French rule in Indochina presented itself when France was conquered by Nazi Germany in the spring of 1940. Japanese troops, Germany’s allies, duly arrived in Indochina a few months later, and even though the Germans allowed the Vichy regime to stay in existence until March 1945, French power and prestige never recovered. The weakness of the Vichy regime allowed Nguyen to return in 1941 to Vietnam for the first time in thirty years and establish the Vietminh as a “popular front” to galvanize a nationalist uprising. Along with Giap and a few other comrades, he established a headquarters near the village of Pac Bo in northern Vietnam, just across the border from China in a remote area of dense jungle and steep mountains. As a security measure, he adopted a new pseudonym: Ho Chi Minh (He Who Enlightens). In contrast to the colonial splendors enjoyed by foreigners at Hanoi’s Metropole Hotel, his new home was a damp and cold cave, where he slept on branches and bathed in a local stream; his meals consisted of rice with a little meat or fish. A naturally abstemious man, rugged despite his frail appearance, he told his comrades, “We must be able to tolerate all hardships, surmount the worst difficulties, and struggle to the end.”13
Two years later, in 1942, Ho Chi Minh traveled back to China to seek the help of both China’s Nationalists and Communists in his struggle against the French and the newly arrived Japanese. The Kuomintang regime, far from helping him, imprisoned him for eighteen months as a dangerous subversive before finally releasing him in 1943 because of his vow to help in the anti-Japanese struggle. Ho did not arrive back in Pac Bo until 1944. In 1945, he received a team of OSS operatives who helped to train his men and even provided him with quinine and sulfa drugs, which may have saved his life after he contracted malaria and dysentery. Like most people who met him, the OSS officers were impressed by Ho’s “clear-cut talk” and “Buddha-like composure”;14 the rebel leader shared Ramon Magsaysay’s personal magnetism, a quality that his future rival, Ngo Dinh Diem, singularly lacked. The OSS men did not notice how skillfully Ho deflected questions about whether he was a Communist. That’s what “the French label . . . all Annamites who want independence,” he replied disingenuously.15
AS SOON as the Japanese surrendered on August 14, 1945, following the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Ho Chi Minh shrewdly moved to fill the power vacuum in Indochina. On September 2, in a Hanoi bedecked with red bunting, the new Democratic Republic of Vietnam was proclaimed with Ho Chi Minh its president. For the occasion, the fifty-five-year-old Ho, demonstrating a flair for proletarian symbolism, wore a plain khaki suit with a high collar of the kind favored by both Stalin and Mao, along with cheap rubber sandals—“his standard uniform as head of state for the next twenty-four years,” noted Fredrik Logevall in Embers of War, his superb history of the French Indochina War.16 To maintain a patina of democratic legitimacy, Ho held an election early the next year and included a few opposition politicians in the government. But the Vietminh accrued all real power into their own hands while persecuting members of non-Communist parties.
Ho realized that his nascent state soon would be imperiled by the arrival of Chinese troops in the north and British troops in the south, tasked by the Allies with overseeing the surrender of Japanese forces. Before long, he knew, the supercilious French would be back as well. To forestall this eventuality, he vainly tried to enlist the United States as an ally. He even quoted liberally from the Declaration of Independence in proclaiming Vietnam’s own independence. But his appeals to President Truman—there were at least eight letters from Ho between October 1945 and February 1946—went unanswered. Administration officials had little enthusiasm for the return of French colonialism, but they also had no desire to aid a veteran Comintern operative. Many analysts would later see this as a squandered opportunity, although in those days, before Tito’s 1948 break with Stalin, few Americans could have imagined that a Communist leader could be independent of the Soviet Union.
Failing to get American help, Ho Chi Minh could not prevent the return of the French. On November 23, 1946, in an attempt to drive the Vietminh out of the port of Haiphong, French warships and aircraft opened fire on the Vietnamese quarter, killing thousands of civilians. The French then secured Hanoi after a brief battle, but Vietminh units slipped out to continue the struggle—a pattern that would recur in the years ahead. The French forces could inflict casualties, but they could not achieve victory. The French war machine, like the American one that would come after it, was simply too slow, too ponderous, and, above all, too clankingly loud to annihilate the elusive Vietminh fighters in la guerre sans fronts (war without fronts). The guerrillas would inevitably hear the attackers coming and scatter long before they could be pinned down.
In frustration, the French resorted to old colonial habits, torturing prisoners and bombing villages that were suspected of harboring insurgents. In the process, they made many of the same mistakes the Philippine army had made in its losing battles against the Huks before the reforms instituted by Magsaysay and Lansdale—only on a much bigger scale. What made the situation even more dismal from the French perspective was that the government they were asking the people to support was far more illegitimate than that of Elpidio Quirino. Quirino may have been elected presiden
t in a crooked election, but at least he was a Filipino and he did have a real base of support. Few if any Vietnamese, by contrast, backed the continuation of the French colonial regime. The only course of action that could have made the anti-Communist cause truly popular would have been transferring complete authority to a genuinely independent Vietnamese government, or at least promising to transfer such authority in the near future, as the British were then doing in Malaya. But this the French resolutely refused to do.
Having already alienated much of the Vietnamese population, the French suffered a blow from which they would never recover with the ascendance in 1949 of the Communists in neighboring China. Mao Zedong sent military advisers and weapons to the Vietminh. Outside assistance or lack thereof is usually the surest indicator of the fate of any insurgency, and the Vietminh, unlike the Huks, now had it in abundance.
In October 1950, Giap threw thirty thousand of his newly trained and equipped troops against the isolated French posts along the 200-mile border between Vietnam and China. By the end of the month, the French Far East Expeditionary Corps had lost control of the border, along with six thousand troops and enough weaponry to equip an entire Vietminh division.17 It was, as a French correspondent noted, an “appalling, stupefying, unbelievable defeat.”18 An indomitable new French general, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, momentarily retrieved the situation and stymied Giap’s Red River offensive in 1951, securing for the time being Hanoi, Haiphong, and the rice-growing regions of the north. But on November 19, 1951, de Lattre left Vietnam, suffering from cancer. He would die in France two months later, leaving behind a grieving widow and a stalemated war effort. As an American diplomat in Paris put it, invoking a phrase that would become associated with Vietnam, “France could see no light at end of tunnel.”19 French leaders had already abandoned hopes of victory; they were simply looking for “an honorable way out”20—a quest that would also obsess American policymakers in years to come.
THE STALEMATE in Indochina was of growing concern to Washington because the United States, having long ago abandoned a posture of neutrality, was now paying 80 percent of the bill for the French war effort. In 1953, the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to send Lieutenant General John W. O’Daniel, commander of the U.S. Army in the Pacific, to Indochina to assess whether the French had adequate war plans and, if not, to assist in the creation of better plans. Only five feet six inches tall but with a foghorn voice and a swagger that made him appear much larger, “Iron Mike” O’Daniel was, in the words of one newspaper correspondent, a “jut-jawed, gravel-voiced, outspokenly colorful leader of combat troops” who had compiled an impressive record in World War I, World War II, and Korea. The origins of his nickname remain in dispute, but “by one account, he won it in France in World War I as a lieutenant when he fought for 12 hours at St. Mihiel, although hit in the face by a German machine-gun bullet.” Thereafter his face looked as if it “might have been carved out with an axe.” In World War II, he led the Third Infantry Division from Italy to France and into Germany. When asked by a British general how much ground the division had lost in a German counterattack at Anzio, O’Daniel replied, “Not a goddamned inch, sir.” While an outstanding combat soldier in the mold of George S. Patton, O’Daniel was, like Patton, no diplomat; after serving as military attaché in Moscow from 1948 to 1950, he caused a ruckus by publicly describing Moscow as a “vast slum.” Nor was he an expert in either nation building or counterinsurgency. But he found such an expert when he briefly stopped at Clark Air Base in the Philippines on the way to Indochina.21
O’Daniel sat down with Colonel Edward Lansdale on the night of June 19, 1953, and was so impressed by what he had to say that he asked the CIA man to accompany him to Vietnam. Lansdale was in the midst of managing Ramon Magsaysay’s presidential campaign, but, thinking he would be gone only two or three days, he agreed. This was at nearly midnight. “What time are you going over there?” Lansdale asked. “Wheels up at 0900 in the morning,” O’Daniel replied.22 Lansdale barely had time to pack a suitcase and let his colleagues know he would be leaving before he was off to Saigon. He would spend much of the next three weeks scrambling for clean clothes.23
Over those weeks Lansdale would travel all over Indochina. “The Vietminh have forces nearly everywhere and have friends where they don’t have forces,” he wrote. “It is a secret, hit-and-run business which bewilders the usual person used to an enemy who fights in an orthodox manner. Here the enemy fires from the ground where you don’t expect him, tosses a grenade or fires a bazooka at you when you are in a safe rest area, or comes howling in on your fort in a Chinese mob attack, when he’s supposed to be miles away. I’ve been living with such problems now since the middle of 1950, so a lot of the strange pattern seemed all too familiar.”24
What did not seem so familiar to Lansdale was the extent to which the French army occupied static defensive positions—quite different from the active combat patrolling and civic action conducted in the Philippines under his prodding. “The chief feature of the landscape in Vietnam,” he found, “is the nearest fort, a slender stone pillar two stories high with a flag on it, looking as though it were just put there for a movie version of Beau Geste. Some of the forts get quite elaborate, halfway between log-and-dirt versions of the Maginot Line and some frontier stockade in the French-and-Indian wars over on our continent. The Communist enemy, the Vietminh, are the Indians . . . the French, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians are too often reminiscent of Braddock . . . brave and gallant folks, but not as cunning as their enemy.”25 (General Edward Braddock was the unfortunate commander of a British column that was ambushed and nearly wiped out by French and Indian fighters near present-day Pittsburgh in 1755.)
Echoing Lansdale’s concerns, O’Daniel was convinced that if only the French troops would leave the forts and take the fight to the enemy, they could prevail in short order. A French officer who met with O’Daniel found that he viewed Indochina as a “simple problem” that could be “solved” with an “attitude agressive.”26 The only thing that gave O’Daniel pause was all the defeatism he encountered: in his initial meetings, the French briefers used the word “difficult” to describe the situation “50 or 100 times.” “I finally made it a rule in my group,” O’Daniel said, “that anybody that even spoke the word ‘difficult’ would be fined a dollar and I think by the end of the visit we were out of the habit of using it.” If only the Vietminh could be banished as easily as the word “difficult”!27
O’Daniel recommended to the French commander, General Henri-Eugène Navarre, that he reorganize his forces to create seven new divisions to strike at the Vietminh. In the end, only seven extra battalions would be sent by a war-weary nation. O’Daniel also won a commitment from Navarre to launch a general offensive in the north in September 1953 and in the meantime to organize various “raids,” “clearing operations,” and “breaking out operations.” The ambitious, verging on delusional, goal these two generals came up with was to defeat the Vietminh by 1955. In return, O’Daniel promised to go home and endorse an extra four hundred million dollars in U.S. aid that the French desperately wanted.28
There is no evidence to indicate that Lansdale shared Iron Mike’s faith in the potential of offensive action by itself to deliver victory in short order. His focus lay elsewhere: he wrote the “guerrilla warfare” and “psychological warfare” annexes of the blueprint that O’Daniel presented to the French. His psychological warfare memo recommended that the war be turned from a “colonial” struggle into a “war of free and independent Vietnamese, advised and aided by the French Union, fighting to free the country of Chinese-Communist controlled forces, which are made up of brother Vietnamese.” “With this political basis,” Lansdale argued, “victory can be gained.” But he recognized there was scant chance that the French would grant true independence; he found to his dismay that the French were waging a “white man’s war against the Asians,” one that was very different from the way in the Philippines “Asians [were] fighting Asians
.” “The Vietnamese were the orderlies, the guys sitting out at front desks stamping papers, going through the pro forma stuff without any real responsibilities.”29 Lansdale was later to say, “I didn’t see how Navarre was going to win, unless he made radical changes to get the Vietnamese nationalists much more deeply involved.”30
Nevertheless, Lansdale argued that “aggressive psychological warfare need not wait upon the establishment of a political basis” for the war effort. He advocated the creation of “a strong troop education program on behavior towards civilians; each wrong act by a soldier makes more enemies, [while] good behavior makes promises and propaganda accepted as truth by the civilian population.” Even this, however, was too ambitious a goal for the French forces, which continued, as if 1950s Indochina were nineteenth-century colonial Africa or Asia, to treat civilians with casual brutality and contempt.31
Lansdale’s other memorandum advocated “waging guerrilla warfare against the Viet-minh” primarily in the far north, where conventional French troops were no longer able to operate. He called for raising more guerrilla forces composed of mountain tribes to hamper Vietminh supply lines from China in order to “start pricking the bubble of Viet-Minh superiority, and give a big morale boost to loyal Vietnamese.”32 As Lansdale acknowledged, the French were already conducting some operations along these lines with secret CIA support, but while French-supported tribes were able to tie down Vietminh forces to guard rear areas, they never came close to cutting Giap’s supply lines. Eventually, after the end of the French Indochina War, these tribal fighters would be left behind to be slowly hunted down by the vengeful Vietminh.33
BY MID-JULY 1953, after three hectic weeks in Indochina, Lansdale was back in the Philippines to supervise the denouement of the presidential campaign. “My house boy is eating a cut up avocado in a glass tumbler, with sugar and canned milk on it, the foothills of the Zambales range are green with new kunai grass, and the distant gunfire is all small arms stuff . . . ,” Lansdale wrote to his family, “so it’s good to be back where a war has become small time and might be over some day before long if we are wise enough.”34 He was also glad to be back with Pat Kelly. During his time in Vietnam, he told her, “I’ve just worn out shoes running around and haven’t even had a chance to kiss a girl’s hand much less other parts of her anatomy.”35 Although Lansdale breathed an audible sigh of relief to be out of Vietnam, he had tasted “the magic potion,” and, like Graham Greene, he would be drawn back to Vietnam time after time.
