by Max Hastings
Only one in ten of 14,324 Vietnamese troops taken prisoner in French uniform during the course of the war returned alive. In justice to the Vietminh, their own people lacked medical support, and existed on the edge of starvation. It is nonetheless plain that Giap and his comrades were indifferent to the survival or extinction of compatriots who had chosen the losing side. How could it be otherwise, when they had sacrificed an estimated twenty-five thousand of their own followers to secure victory at Dienbienphu? Nguyen Thi Ngoc Toan, the mandarin’s daughter who had become a fervent revolutionary, served as a twenty-one-year-old medic in Giap’s army. In the wake of its triumph she was married to Cao Van Khanh, deputy commander of the 308th Division, at a ceremony held in de Castries’ command bunker.
On paper, the battle need not have been the decisive event of the war, because the French still possessed powerful forces. Giap’s army had exhausted itself, and was incapable of translating this local triumph into a successful general offensive. Yet France’s government and people could stand no more. Pierre Rocolle has written: ‘Dienbienphu became an imperious invitation to stop the shooting, because the will to pursue the struggle no longer existed.’ France’s American quartermasters had the worst of all worlds: they had provided sufficient military aid to fight a war, yet not enough to win it.
It is usually mistaken to assume that the outcome of any historical drama was pre-ordained, but there is an absolute lack of suspense about a narrative of France’s Indochina experience between 1945 and 1954: colonial rule there became unsustainable amid the strength of nationalist resistance together with the weakness of non-communist political elements – the mythical ‘Third Force’ which many Americans yearned to identify. Doug Ramsey, a US foreign service officer who would become a significant figure in Vietnam a decade later, said: ‘I wonder that we could have taken ourselves in, that many years in a row. It went back to Roosevelt making accommodations with the colonial powers. Think of the inanities of John Foster Dulles.’
There has been speculation about how much Giap’s success owed to his Chinese advisers. Mao’s men obviously provided technical instruction. For the most part, however, subsequent history shows that the North Vietnamese – as we might now begin to describe them, though many communist leaders came from the south and centre of the country – needed and accepted remarkably little guidance from others. A decade’s experience of war had made Giap and his comrades proficient, even inspired soldiers, fortified by the indifference to casualties common to all communist armies: foreign admirers later dubbed the North Vietnamese ‘Prussians of the Orient’. Hanoi’s histories pay effusive tribute to the personal role of Ho Chi Minh. Such claims are rooted in the demands of an authoritarian state’s official legend. Yet thus far, at least, they must be valid: Giap could not have accomplished what he did, nor survived so many bloody setbacks as commander-in-chief, without the support of Ho in good times and bad. The general himself was hugely respected, but his egotism made him little loved. In his subsequent writings about the battle, and indeed Vietnam’s wars, he tells a story of Giap, Giap, Giap, with scarcely a nod to the contributions of his subordinates. Nonetheless his victory at Dienbienphu stands as one of the military epics of the twentieth century.
3 GENEVA
News of the capitulation was broadcast in Paris at 4.45 p.m. on 7 May, and acknowledged in Geneva somewhat later, just hours before the assembled foreign ministers began to debate the political future of Vietnam. Georges Bidault, making the announcement, paid implausible tribute to France’s ‘civilising’ role in Vietnam, speaking of ‘this conflict that was forced upon us’. What was extraordinary about subsequent events at the conference tables – Dulles refused to sit at a common board with the Chinese – was that French humiliation yielded no triumph for the Vietminh. After expending torrents of blood to strengthen their negotiating position, they were eventually obliged to go home with half a loaf. How so?
The Geneva story began with the arrival of the first delegations, on 24 April 1954. Representatives of the world’s media thronged around the two-hundred-strong Chinese group, led by the urbane, handsome, supremely sophisticated Zhou Enlai, fifty-six-year-old scion of a scholarly family. Zhou bore to his grave the respect of the international community, despite serving as Mao Zedong’s instrument through decades of mass murder. The Russians arrived bearing a large consignment of caviar with which to enrich their hospitality at the multilateral feasts they intended to hold, though none eventually took place. John Foster Dulles sustained his usual standard of diplomatic courtesy, turning his back on Zhou when the Chinese extended a hand. The British were far more nervous of the US secretary of state than of the communists: they feared that Dulles’ rancour might provoke him to sabotage the proceedings. The obvious dominance of China and Russia reinforced the American conviction that Ho Chi Minh was their pawn: at Geneva the delegations of Zhou and Molotov were seen everywhere, that of the Vietminh only in conference sessions.
As the disparate national groups dispersed to their various hotels and mansions, Dulles led the only party stubbornly anxious to sustain the Indochina war. He expressed disgust that he had been invited to attend a diplomatic sell-out to the communists, comparable with that at Yalta in 1945. The veteran liberal columnist Walter Lippmann observed: ‘The American position at Geneva is an impossible one, so long as the leading Republican senators have no terms of peace except unconditional surrender of the enemy and no terms for entering the war except as a collective action in which nobody is now willing to engage.’
Yet the obduracy of the US secretary of state played a critical role in producing a settlement far less favourable to the communists than their victory at Dienbienphu made likely. In 1972, President Richard Nixon would fail in an attempt to convince the North Vietnamese that he was reckless enough to commit any military excess – the ‘Madman Theory’. Yet in 1954, common to all the communist delegations at Geneva was morbid dread of an American troop commitment in Asia. The Chinese and Russians had enjoyed the Korean war even less than did the Western Powers. They read newspapers, and were acutely conscious of the conservative forces in play within the US. They knew that the Eisenhower administration needed scant further provocation to commit American firepower – just conceivably, nuclear weapons. Moreover, though the Vietminh were often hailed as possessing an infinite capacity for sacrifice, by May 1954 the leadership knew that its followers were weary. Vietnam’s ‘liberated zones’ groaned under the stresses of fighting a war while simultaneously implementing a social revolution.
The word ‘partition’ seems to have crossed Russian lips before anyone else’s. The Vietminh dominated the north, while remaining weak in the south. Korea’s division at the 38th Parallel, insouciantly mandated by Dean Rusk in 1945, set a precedent. On 3 May, before the formal Vietnam sessions opened in Geneva, Bao Dai’s pantomime government threatened to boycott the conference without a French guarantee that partition was not on the agenda. That same day, Dulles returned to Washington to sulk, leaving deputy secretary Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s wartime chief of staff, to lead the American team. Everybody heaved a sigh of relief, because ‘Beadle’ was rational, as Dulles was not. A flurry of private bilateral conversations followed, involving all the delegations, before formal proceedings began on 8 May, beneath the shadow of Dienbienphu’s fall.
For the first week, the Chinese remained almost mute: the only two foreign ministers who displayed impatience were Eden and Molotov. On 10 May Pham Van Dong made an opening statement, proclaiming the Vietminh’s commitment to full independence for all three states of Indochina. He promised that those Vietnamese who had fought against Ho Chi Minh would be ‘free from repression’. Then, to the amazement of the Westerners, he expressed willingness to consider partition. It seems almost certain that the Vietminh had been heavily pressured by the Chinese and Russians to initiate such a proposal.
Once the communist camp had tabled it, this outcome became overwhelmingly likely, though much horse-trading was bound
to follow about where a line should be drawn between a new North and South Vietnam. The French initially favoured a ‘leopard-skin’ distribution of territory, identifying regions that should be conceded to the communists, with the special objective of excluding Hanoi and Haiphong. On 12 May, Bao Dai’s delegation reasserted its rejection of any divide. Yet bilateral staff conversations about ways and means began between French and Vietminh representatives, encouraged by the British.
In the US Dulles made plain his own alienation, and conservative media whipped up a frenzy. Time said that Britain’s leaders ‘look alarmingly like appeasers’. Bedell Smith told a press conference that partition was unacceptable, and in private became increasingly irked by Eden’s apparent eagerness to indulge communist aspirations. In secret bilateral talks, Washington sought to stiffen Paris’s resistance, but the French responded that only immediate US military action could dissuade them from cutting a deal. Once again, Eisenhower and Dulles explored the possibilities of forging a coalition for military action even without the British. However, Australia and New Zealand declined to participate, which snuffed out that final flurry of American enthusiasm for belligerence. The Spectator described the early talks at Geneva as ‘an appalling mess’, and none of the participants disagreed.
To comprehend the events of the next few weeks, it should be recognised that capitulation at Dienbienphu did not check the fighting and dying elsewhere across Vietnam: the French continued to suffer punishment, even as the flow of desertions from their locally-recruited forces became a flood. On 4 June Navarre was relieved of command, making way for Paul Ely to become proconsul. Two new military disasters took place. In the first, Groupe Mobile 100, while conducting a withdrawal from An Khe in the Central Highlands, fell victim to a devastating succession of ambushes commencing on 24 June. About half GM100’s personnel were killed and four-fifths of its vehicles destroyed; one of France’s finest regiments, 1st ‘Korea’, was wiped out. On 12 July Groupe Mobile 42 suffered a similar fate. Meanwhile Giap was known to be preparing a big new offensive in the Red River delta: a Chinese rail link to the northern border of the ‘liberated zone’ was now delivering to the Vietminh four thousand tons of munitions and equipment a month.
Protraction of the Great Power negotiations, even as the killing went on, attracted the dismay and impatience of a global audience. At London’s Café de Paris, Noël Coward introduced Marlene Dietrich by declaiming a superbly witty verse in praise of female allure through the ages. Laughter reached its climax in response to his lines about Cleopatra: ‘The Serpent of Nile/could achieve with a smile/far quicker results than Geneva.’ Yet suddenly, there was hope: in the midst of France’s continuing battlefield reverses, in Washington awareness dawned that there could be worse outcomes than partition. Absent US intervention, all Vietnam might be overrun by the communists. Bedell Smith accepted the need to take a deal. Meanwhile in Geneva, on 15 June the communist camp held a secret strategy session: Zhou pressed the Vietminh to become more realistic, notably by abandoning their big lie that they had no forces in Laos and Cambodia. Molotov seconded his Chinese counterpart.
Three days later there was another dramatic development: Joseph Laniel quit as France’s leader, to be replaced by Pierre Mendès-France. The new prime minister immediately announced that he too would resign unless he could achieve an Indochina ceasefire within thirty days. He thus imposed a deadline on the Geneva talks, and Zhou told Eden and others that he was keen to see this met. On 23 June in Bern he held private talks with Mendès-France, at which the two men got on well. Zhou made no bones about his prime objective: to keep US forces out of Indochina. To achieve this, they agreed that there must be a partition.
The anti-communist Vietnamese representatives, led by their own new prime minister Ngo Dinh Diem, whimsically chosen by Bao Dai, remained implacably hostile. Yet only one dissenter mattered: would Washington impose a veto? Churchill wrote to Eisenhower: ‘I think Mendès-France has made up his mind to clear out on the best terms available. If that is so, I think he is right.’ On 24 June, Dulles told congressional leaders that the US would adopt a new policy: to defend southern Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia from communist takeovers – ‘Hold this area and fight subversion with all the strength we have.’ His statement implicitly acknowledged loss of the north.
Meanwhile, Chinese and Vietminh leaders reviewed their position, in advance of the crucial next round in Geneva. At a 3–5 July meeting in the southern Chinese city of Liuzhou, premier Zhou Enlai recalled the reversal of the communist invasion of South Korea in the summer of 1950. Zhou told Ho Chi Minh and his delegation: ‘The key to the Korea issue lay in US intervention … It was completely beyond our expectation that [MacArthur’s] reinforcements would arrive so quickly … If there had not been US intervention, the Korean People’s Army would have been able to drive Syngman Rhee’s [forces] into the ocean.’ Here was an expression of fears that mirrored those of the Americans: the Chinese were apprehensive that if the Vietminh overplayed their hand, as had North Korea’s Kim Il-sung, a geostrategic disaster could unfold.
In 1954 Mao Zedong’s civil war triumph, together with the perceived humiliation of the US and its Nationalist clients, were only five years in the past. Some American conservatives still cherished hopes, however fanciful, of reversing the ‘loss of China’. Four years earlier, the Chinese had entered the Korean war because they felt unable to tolerate MacArthur’s victorious army on their Yalu River border. At the time of Geneva, Mao felt far less secure than his regime’s subsequent longevity might suggest. Zhou Enlai’s priority was Chinese security. This seemed best advanced by appeasing American sensitivities: he could live with a non-communist South Vietnam, if this would calm Dulles and Eisenhower.
Thus the Liuzhou conference took its course. If the Indochina war continued inconclusively – as well it might, with the French still deploying some 470,000 troops against 310,000 Vietminh – and wider East–West tensions worsened, Washington might yet lash out. Everything gained in a decade of struggle might be forfeit. Giap acknowledged that, without a political settlement, it could take two to five years to achieve absolute military victory, a view shared by his Chinese advisers. The French were then proposing a far northern partition at the 18th Parallel, just south of Vinh. The initial Vietminh offer was for a boundary at the 13th Parallel, in the midst of the Central Highlands of Annam. The Chinese suggested a compromise at the 16th, from which Ho Chi Minh appears not to have demurred. When Zhou reported to Mao on 7 July, the chairman accepted the need for concessions and a swift settlement. The Russians agreed, for similar geopolitical reasons.
Dulles petulantly declined to attend the first meetings of the final session of the Geneva conference on 10 July. He regarded the deal under discussion as representing a surrender comparably odious and craven to that of the 1930s to the fascists: it would likely prove a mere way-station towards a communist takeover of all Vietnam. This, after the US had expended $2.5 billion on funding the anti-communist war effort, more than France itself had received in economic aid since 1945. Meanwhile Mendès-France had not troubled to inform Bao Dai about the progress of negotiations. In Saigon the newly-installed prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, still resisted partition, even when the US ambassador urged him to accept that half a country was preferable to none. Diem instructed his foreign minister in Geneva to pursue the fantasy of keeping Hanoi and Haiphong under Saigon’s rule – here was a foretaste of his later rejections of unwelcome realities. He insisted upon placing on record his government’s view, that partition ignored ‘the unanimous desire of the Vietnamese people for national unity’.
On 16 July deputy secretary of state Bedell Smith arrived in Geneva to lend a reluctant American presence. Under instructions, however, he took no part in the horse-trading now conducted through a tense round of bilateral and ad-hoc meetings. Two days later the foreign ministers agreed that the proposed ceasefire would be supervised by an international control commission composed of Indians, Canadians and Poles. On 20 Ju
ly a partition was agreed between the French and the Vietminh close to the 17th Parallel, which gave the new South Vietnam a short, defensible border with the North. This partition ‘would be provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary’. All Vietnamese were granted a three-hundred-day grace period in which to decide under which regime they would henceforth live, with a guaranteed freedom of movement northward or southward. General elections would be held within two years. Both Vietnams would join Laos and Cambodia as avowed neutral states. The French would go home.
There were two main documents constituting the Geneva Accords. The Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities was signed on 21 July 1954 by the French and the North Vietnamese. The Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference was verbally endorsed by the French, the British, the Chinese and the Russians. Dulles issued a statement emphasising his nation’s special interest in the fate of the newborn twins: he warned that any violation of the deal’s terms would be ‘a matter of grave concern and seriously threaten international peace and security’. Everyone involved save the Americans gave credit to Anthony Eden for his performance as co-chairman, through many weeks when the talks seemed doomed to fail. An eyewitness wrote of his ‘almost inhuman good humour and patience’: this was the finest hour of the career as a statesman of the brilliant, unstable, absurdly handsome British foreign secretary.
