For all his hyperbole and failure to grasp the dilemma of nuclear warfare— in which America demanded absolute, rather than near, invulnerability— LeMay's assessment of Soviet intentions and the need to achieve overwhelming strategic superiority seems, after the collapse of the Cold War, more rather than less correct. His distrust of the numbers crunchers in Robert McNamara's Pentagon (“so-called thinkers”) was often based on the premise that it was amoral for bureaucrats to send Americans into a war they could not win—and that those who did so had not tasted fire. Given McNamara's own confessional, LeMay's program for ending the war may have even been the more humane one, political issues aside, in the sense that an early and comprehensive campaign against all strategic targets in Hanoi and Haiphong would have saved more lives on both sides in the long run. LeMay's idea that guerrilla fighters and irregular armies could not be stopped with piecemeal use of American ground troops, but only through massive air attack on their ultimate sources of supply, seems in hindsight more logical than lunatic. LeMay, remember, thought entirely in a military sense: Airpower could be successful only when the enemy's entire infrastructure was strategically targeted. If politicians worried about subsequent escalation of hostilities, LeMay would counter that any overwhelming military deterrence precluded enemy options and hence made all-out war less rather than more likely. Current American defense doctrine of the need for overwhelming force in cases of intervention is beginning to appear more rather than less in line with LeMay's earlier advice.
Nor does LeMay's innate skepticism about idealistic but inexperienced technocrats without battle experience seem shallow. For example, he worried about the young Harold Brown—who, in 1980 as secretary of defense in the Carter administration, was to oversee the flawed and undermanned raid into Iran to try to free the American hostages in Tehran. LeMay concluded that Brown was naive and utopian and could be dangerous in his misguided view of the nature of war. In anger, LeMay correctly ridiculed Brown's dictum that the air force was to use “the minimum force available to attain those ends. We are trying to minimize our own casualties, the casualties of our allies. We are even trying to minimize the casualties of our adversaries.” In LeMay's eyes, minimizing “the casualties of our adversaries” inevitably meant prolonging war—and increasing our losses.
While it is easy to quote the garrulous LeMay to his detriment, and to find examples in which he may have exceeded authority, his subservience to civilian control was never really in doubt. Much of his rhetoric now seems to have been intended for in-house bickering over budgetary appropriations, designed to advance the extreme position in hopes that the ultimate compromise might satisfy his insatiable need for more bombers. Moreover, his public lectures and writings echo a common theme: Decisive, massive use of force—especially air-power—can shorten, even circumvent, war, thus saving more lives than it costs. LeMay had no faith in the United Nations as a preventive force, and he urged the United States to act alone or with its NATO allies according to its own interests and military capability.
If, like Sophocles' Ajax—who finds his heroic code outmoded and unappreciated in a more complex and nuanced world—we find the LeMays of our country at times dangerous, surely uncouth, and always embarrassing, we must realize that theirs is the baggage that often comes with unsurpassed courage and a willingness to step forward to take on the burden of defense in war's darkest hours. Men of that temperament organize massive armadas, create air forces ex nihilo, and cannot and should not be caged within established bureaucracies where the necessary business is maintenance, not construction; peace, not war; conciliation, not assault. In peace, of course, we want men of education, prudence, and manners guiding our military. But in times of war, as we have learned from both the fire raids over Japan and the standoff with the Soviets, we have often been served far better by the improbable emergence of warriors like Curtis E. LeMay, who somehow can find, organize, and lead men into the inferno. In the darkest hours of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy acknowledged this: “It's good to have men like Curt LeMay and Arleigh Burke commanding troops when you decide to go in. But these men aren't the only ones you should listen to when you decide whether to go in or not.” By his careful use of “only,” Kennedy acknowledged the value even of LeMay's blunt and often extreme advice.
Like Grant and Patton, the LeMays can do what Lincoln called “the terrible arithmetic,” and so understand that the American way of war is to throw vast amounts of men and matériel into the fire in order to end, not prolong, the killing. They know battle for what it is, so have no illusions that even a democracy must sometimes go to war wholeheartedly and therefore kill—thousands of the enemy if need be—to survive. Their legacy is that while being branded bellicose, they have saved more lives than they have taken. Their tragedy is that their brutal success in war produces a peace uneasy with their continued presence, and that their continued ardor asks us to make sacrifices we cannot and should not make. Just as they have come out of nowhere, so, too, when their foul business is done, should they disappear into the dark recesses that they inhabit. LeMay himself seemed to concede this: “I had blood upon my hands as I did this, but not because I preferred to bathe in blood. It was because I was part of a primitive world where men still had to kill in order to avoid being killed, or in order to avoid having their loved Nation stricken and emasculated.”
Embattled and caricatured in his later years, LeMay understood his own Sophoclean dilemma. Many of his reckless pronouncements, as chilling as they sound today, were more likely the final proud bluster of an epic figure onstage who would rather perish in his absolute code of good and evil than change to meet the necessities of a far more nuanced and complex world for which he was so poorly suited in both comportment and speech. That he was not secretary of defense during the Cold War was wise; that he was even chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force with nuclear weapons under his command was cause for legitimate concern; that he commanded our bombers against Japan was a stroke of fortune for us all. And so now I tend to agree with my father that he had survived the war largely because of the daring and genius of the loudmouthed, cigar-chewing General Curtis E. LeMay.
IV
VIETNAM: THE LONG GOOD-BYE
Calamity on the R.C. 4
DOUGLAS PORCH
The historian George G. Herring opens his notable study, America's Longest War, with a scene that in retrospect is suffused with an unforgettable (but almost forgotten) poignance. The date was September 2, 1945, the same day that representatives of the Japanese government signed a formal surrender agreement on the battleship Missouri. At Hanoi that day, the former cabin boy Ho Chi Minh, wearing a faded khaki suit and rubber sandals, proclaimed the independence of Vietnam from French rule.
As Herring writes:
[H]e borrowed liberally from Thomas Jefferson, opening with the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal.” During independence celebrations in Hanoi later in the day, American warplanes flew over the city, U.S. Army officers stood on the reviewing stand with Vo Nguyen Giap [the commander of the stillinsignificant Viet Minh army] and other leaders, and a Vietnamese band played the “Star Spangled Banner.” Toward the end of the festivities, Giap spoke warmly of Vietnam's “particularly intimate relations” with the United States—something, he noted, “which it is a pleasant duty to dwell upon.”
For several months Ho's Communist front organization, the Viet Minh—which translates roughly as the “Vietnamese Independence League”—occupied the government headquarters in Hanoi. But France was determined to hold on to Indochina, which comprised not only Vietnam but also Cambodia and Laos. Vanguards of the French army, helped by British occupation forces that had taken responsibility for accepting the Japanese surrender south of the 17th Parallel, drove the Viet Minh out of the area then known as Cochin China, centered around Saigon. The U.S. gave tacit approval to the French reoccupation of its richest colony. Our backing of nationalist movements in Southeast Asia, wh
ich FDR had advocated before his death, would have to wait. The threat of a Communist takeover in France kept the U.S. from interfering in its colonial affairs. The risk of alienating, and perhaps losing, a key nation in the Western alliance was one the Truman administration did not want to take.
The French attempted to negotiate with the Viet Minh, which all the while continued to build up strength. The talks went nowhere. “Their own stubbornness,” the journalist and historian Bernard Fall writes, “and their unwillingness to see the situation as it was” doomed the halfhearted French overtures. To Indochina, the appeal of nationalism, stiffened by Communist discipline, was becoming irresistible. Part of the genius of Communism, especially in colonial nations, was that this system of ultimate repression seemed forever on the side of liberation.
Out of frustration, the French abandoned political means in favor of military ones. In November 1946 a French cruiser shelled Haiphong, Indochina's biggest port, killing an estimated six thousand and setting off, in Herring's words, “a war which in its various phases would last nearly thirty years.” Between 1946 and 1949, the French, who lacked both the manpower and the necessary weight of modern weaponry, struggled in vain to smother the Viet Minh rebellion. All attempts to pin down and destroy the Viet Minh in set-piece battles failed. Whenever their losses threatened to become insupportable, Giap's men simply faded into the jungle that covered more than half of Indochina. For France, this guerre sans fronts soon proved a gamble as foolhardy as the Communist decision to invade South Korea. As Ho expressed it in a neat parable: “If ever the tiger pauses, the elephant will impale him on his mighty tusks. But the tiger will not pause, and the elephant will die of exhaustion and loss of blood.”
Whatever chance the French had of pulling out a face-saving victory, or even of achieving a measure of stabilization, ended when the Chinese Communists arrived on the borders of Indochina in November 1949. Now Giap could train Viet Minh recruits in safe bases across the Chinese border. By this time Viet Minh regulars and guerrillas numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The French might control an area by day; the Viet Minh, by night. In fact, the Viet Minh held about two thirds of the country. The French, meanwhile, were losing about a thousand men a month trying to win it back.
The Soviets recognized the Viet Minh at the end of January 1950. France may have been saved, but the U.S. was openly afraid that all of Southeast Asia was about to fall to the Communists, and pledged economic and military aid to the beleaguered French. (There was a quid pro quo: French support for the rearmament of West Germany.) In April 1950, two months before the invasion of South Korea, Truman's National Security Council cautioned that further “extension of the area under the domination of the Kremlin would raise the possibility that no coalition adequate to confront the Kremlin with greater strength could be assembled.” A line was being drawn in the undergrowth; it may already have been too late.
On October l, Giap's troops attacked the French border forts strung out along the road called the Route Coloniale 4, just south of the border with China. The battles, which Douglas Porch recounts here, would last two weeks and would result in France's worst colonial disaster—ever. The loss of the R.C. 4 would happen within days of another Communist border triumph: the invasion of Korea by Chinese “volunteers.” The difference was that the French, unlike the Americans, never had the strength to bounce back. Nor did they possess a soldier of the stature of Matthew Ridgway.
DOUGLAS PORCH, one of America's most prominent military historians, is the author of such books as The French Foreign Legion; The French Secret Services: From the Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf War; and The Path to Victory: The Mediterrean Theater in World War II. He is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA.
A SMALL GLAZED TILE inconspicuously set in a corner wall of the French Foreign Legion's retirement home at Puyloubier, in the South of France, bears the inscription “R.C. 4.” Hardly noticed by the old men who shuffle past it while conversing in most of the languages of Europe, it is a memorial that seems out of place among the umbrella pines and vineyards that crowd the foot of Mont Sainte-Victoire. But it is a reminder of a forgotten battle that had repercussions undreamed of forty-five years ago.
In the long and bloody conflict that churned Indochina between 1946 and 1975, the struggle along the road known as the R.C. 4 was eclipsed in the public mind by later confrontations, such as those at Dien Bien Phu and Khe Sanh. However, the contest between the French and the Viet Minh to dominate the strategic highway—a contest that climaxed in October 1950 with what is often referred to as the Battle of Cao Bang—must count among that dreary war's most significant. For the first time, the Viet Minh commander Vo Nguyen Giap resoundingly demonstrated his ability to crush a large European force in a set-piece battle. On the R.C. 4, Giap grasped the strategic initiative in his war against the French, and he never relinquished it. The ghost of the R.C. 4 haunted subsequent French attempts to defeat Giap's main-force units in the highlands of Tonkin, Vietnam's northernmost province. Indeed, the climactic battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 was, in a very real sense, an attempt by the French to avenge their defeat on the R.C. 4. Unfortunately for them, the French demonstrated at Dien Bien Phu that they had done nothing to correct the serious shortcomings glaringly revealed in the savage battle on the Chinese frontier four years earlier.
Traveling northeast from Hanoi, the R.C. 4 stretches through a flat, cultivated land of rice paddies before it plunges into the mountains separating the rich Tonkin Delta from the Chinese frontier near the border garrison of Lang Son. Lang Son straddles what in 1950 was one of the most important road junctions in Indochina. From the north, the old Mandarin Road, a traditional invasion route, ran from China's Kwangsi Province through the “Gates of China” to the Tonkin Delta beyond. This was intersected at Lang Son by the R.C. 4, which began at Mong Cai near the Gulf of Tonkin and paralleled the Chinese frontier.
From Lang Son, the R.C. 4 ran northwest, a ribbon of road that twisted, rose, and tumbled through a turmoil of jagged limestone ridges and high needles of jungle-covered rock, linking the delta with the strategic posts of That Khe, Dong Khe, and finally, Cao Bang some sixty miles distant. From Cao Bang, another road, the R.C. 3, curved south through Bac Kan and Thai Nguyen back to Hanoi. It was joined by the area's third major road, the R.C. 2, which ran northwest to the Chinese border at Lao Cai.
These villages were military camps, fortified citadels rising out of rural communities where the only permanent buildings were often churches. They had been inserted in narrow valleys carved out of the rock by rivers bloodred with the clay of the terraced rice fields on their banks. These remote approaches were traditionally utilized by brigands and opium smugglers who were willing to travel the miles of almost trackless jungle that stretched to the south toward the Tonkin Delta or west toward Laos.
By 1950 this frontier region had become infested with another formidable enemy—the “Viet Minh,” short for the Vietnam Independence League founded by Ho Chi Minh in 1941. During World War II, the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had supplied Ho's movement with arms to use against Japanese troops who had established an uneasy joint rule with the Vichy French in Indochina. However, the Viet Minh carefully avoided tackling the Japanese, who, on March 9, 1945, launched surprise attacks on the unprepared French garrisons, capturing, butchering, or dispersing most of them. That the French could be defeated and driven out of Indochina did not escape the Viet Minh, and soon after the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, the Viet Minh emerged in Hanoi to proclaim the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
However, Ho's initial political victory rested upon foundations too narrow to maintain. The Viet Minh forces numbered perhaps thirty thousand men at the time, and though this figure doubled by the following year, they were poorly armed and trained. French forces began to disembark at Saigon as early as September 1945 and by February 1946 numbered fifty-six thousand men. Furthermore, Ho Chi Minh found it expedient to invi
te the French to return to the northern part of the country to replace rapacious Chinese Nationalist troops assigned to occupy Tonkin under the Yalta Agreement. “It is better to sniff French dung for a while than eat China's all our lives,” Ho replied to critics of his decision to allow 15,000 French troops north of the 16th Parallel in return for the departure of almost 180,000 Chinese Nationalist soldiers.
At the end of 1946, growing tensions between the Viet Minh and the French finally erupted into open conflict. On November 23, French warships opened fire on Haiphong, the port city of Hanoi, after the Viet Minh refused to relinquish control of it. On December 19 the Viet Minh rejected French demands that they disarm, instead withdrawing their forces to the mountains of Tonkin behind a barrage of diversionary attacks against French targets in Hanoi. The war was on.
In the early phase, the Viet Minh's greatest strength was patience. Ho and his military commander, Giap, plotted a war of longue duree, based on Mao Tse-tung's theories of revolutionary warfare. According to Mao, revolutionary war passes through three phases. In the first, the superior strength of the enemy force causes the revolutionaries to avoid decisive combat and to fall back on a strategy of small-scale raids and attacks. In the second phase, the guerrillas build their strength and achieve rough parity with the enemy; their commanders are able to mix conventional and guerrilla actions to keep the enemy off balance. The final phase occurs when the enemy—like a bull confused, badly bloodied, and exhausted by the matador—is forced onto the defensive. When this happens, the revolutionaries move to a general counteroffensive that culminates in victory.
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