In mid-December, Ho Chi Minh sent a message to Prime Minister Blum in which he proposed concrete ideas to reduce the growing tensions between the two countries. But Ho and his colleagues were by no means counting on a political solution. He had already consulted with Vo Nguyen Giap and other military leaders on the need to make preparations for war. In October, the ICP Central Committee, now operating entirely in secret, had established a new Central Military Committee to provide Party leadership over the armed forces. Party commissars were assigned to key positions in the army and Party committees were established in the various military zones. The entire operation was placed under the command of a promising officer named Van Tien Dung, later to be renowned as the commander of the final offensive on Saigon in the spring of 1975.
During the autumn, military preparations intensified. The army, now renamed the Vietnamese People’s Army, was expanded. According to French sources, by the end of the summer the Vietminh had organized thirty-five infantry and three artillery regiments, with a total force of about 60,000 troops, in addition to 12,000 more fighting in Cochin China. Membership in the local militia and guerrilla units had reached almost one million. Villages under government control throughout the country were instructed to make preparations for self-defense as “combat villages.” Weapons, however, were still in short supply (according to a French source, the Vietnamese had about 35,000 rifles, 1,000 automatic weapons, and 55 cannons), so a major effort was undertaken to establish weapons plants in secure areas of the Viet Bac. Informed by Vo Nguyen Giap that Hanoi could be held for only about a month, Ho ordered preparations for a new base area headquarters at Tan Trao, site of the jump-off point for the August Revolution.70
After the Haiphong incident, the situation became even more urgent, and a special Party committee began to plan for the defense of Hanoi, in order to allow time for the evacuation of the government into the nearby mountains. There were a few government troops at the Northern Palace and at an army camp nearby, but most of the Vietnamese military strength in the region was located in the outskirts of the capital. To compensate, there were nearly 10,000 combat militia and youth assault teams in the city itself. Composed of the most enthusiastic young supporters of the revolution, these groups were armed mainly with homemade weapons and wore square badges with a gold star in the middle. Arrayed against them as potential adversaries were several thousand French Legionnaires, mostly stationed in the Citadel; the rest were scattered at other locations, such as the Don Thuy Hospital, the former Governor-General’s Palace, the railway station, the Bank of Indochina, the Paul Doumer Bridge, and, on the eastern side of the river, Gia Lam Airport.
As the defense of the city got under way (the Vietminh National Committee called for such preparations daily in the newspaper Cuu Quac), government offices were surreptitiously transferred one by one to prepared locations outside the city. Inside the capital, government troops began to erect barricades, and French troops responded by strengthening their own defenses. On December 6, Ho Chi Minh appealed publicly to the French to withdraw their own troops to positions they held before November 20, but he received no answer. In an interview with a French journalist the following day, he insisted that the Vietnamese government hoped to avoid war, which could impose terrible suffering on both countries. “But if war is imposed on us,” he said, “we will fight rather than renounce our liberties.”71
By this time, however, General Valluy had concluded that Ho Chi Minh had no intention of removing radical elements from his government, and he appealed to Paris for a green light to take firm action as soon as reinforcements arrived, warning that delay beyond the end of the year could be disastrous for French fortunes in Indochina. But the new prime minister, Léon Blum, was reluctant to take military action; on December 12 he announced his intention to resolve the Indochina dispute in ways that would grant Vietnamese independence. Three days later, Ho Chi Minh gave Sainteny a message for the new French leader, with concrete suggestions on how to resolve the dispute. Sainteny sent it in a telegram to Saigon, requesting it to be forwarded to Paris.72
Whether Vietnamese leaders held out any hope that the formation of a Socialist government in Paris could lead to a political settlement is uncertain. In his own account, Vo Nguyen Giap declared categorically that although some of Blum’s pronouncements were progressive in nature, he was actually a tool of the United States and of French business interests, and a dedicated opponent of the FCP. As if to confirm Giap’s suspicions, Blum refused to select any Communists for his new cabinet, while reconfirming Thierry d’Argenlieu as high commissioner for Indochina. On the other hand, a cabinet meeting called to discuss d’Argenlieu’s request for reinforcements and immediate military action against the Vietnamese reached no decision on either matter, and Bidault warned Valluy in a private message that he should not count on reinforcements and should try to deal with the situation without recourse to violence.
Valluy, who shared d’Argenlieu’s determination to maintain a French presence in Indochina, had decided that it was necessary to provoke a break with Hanoi in order to initiate hostilities and present Paris with a fait accompli. On December 16, he ordered General Morlière (who continued to exercise military functions in North Vietnam after the return of Sainteny) to destroy the barricades erected by Vietminh units in the city. When Ho Chi Minh’s message for Blum arrived in Saigon, Valluy appended his own acid commentary, warning that it would be dangerous to postpone military action until the new year. The cable did not arrive in Paris until the nineteenth. By then it was too late.73
On December 17, French armored cars ventured into the streets of Hanoi to demolish fieldworks erected by Vietminh units in the previous days, while Legionnaires lined the streets from the Citadel to the Paul Doumer Bridge, en route to the airport. The Vietnamese did not react, so the following morning the French issued an ultimatum that no further obstructions should be erected on the streets of the city. A second ultimatum issued that afternoon declared that, beginning on the twentieth, French military units would take charge of public security throughout the capital. In response, that evening Vietnamese units began to close all routes into the city from the outskirts. The next morning, a third ultimatum from the French demanded that the Vietnamese government cease all preparations for war, disband all militia units, and hand over security in the capital region to the French.
To the Vietnamese, the situation was ominously reminiscent of events the previous month, when Colonel Dèbes had issued similar demands before the bombing of Haiphong. On the morning of December 18, Ho Chi Minh issued a directive to launch preparations for an attack on French installations the following day. At the same time, fearful that his message might not have reached Prime Minister Blum, he sent a telegram directly to Paris. The next morning, he wrote a short letter to Jean Sainteny, and gave it to his foreign policy adviser, Hoang Minh Giam, to transmit: “The situation has become more tense these last few days. This is very regrettable. Pending the decision from Paris, I hope that you, together with Mr. Giam, will find a solution in order to improve the present atmosphere.”74
Given the almost laconic tone of the letter, it seems highly doubtful that Ho Chi Minh expected a useful response. In fact, Sainteny had just sent Ho Chi Minh a more lengthy message the same morning, complaining about Vietnamese provocations that had led to the death or wounding of several French civilians and demanding that the perpetrators be immediately punished. Sainteny, who had apparently been apprised of Valluy’s decision to provoke a conflict, refused to see Giam, saying that he would receive him the following morning.75
Informed by his secretary, Vu Ky, that Sainteny had declined to meet Hoang Minh Giam, Ho drafted a directive calling for a meeting of the Party Standing Committee. Shortly after, Truong Chinh, Le Duc Tho, and Vo Nguyen Giap met with Ho Chi Minh, who declared that in present circumstances, it was impossible to make further concessions. His colleagues agreed on the necessity to mobilize the entire country to wage a war of protracted resistance again
st the French. Truong Chinh was assigned responsibility to draft a declaration calling for a war of “national resistance” (toan dien khang chien), while Giap was instructed to prepare an order to initiate hostilities. The group then examined an appeal to the populace that Ho Chi Minh had drafted that afternoon and suggested a few changes in wording. After setting a time for the attack at eight that evening, the meeting adjourned.76
Early the same evening, December 19, Jean Sainteny prepared to leave his office for his private residence. Like everyone else in the city, he was aware of the rising tensions, and expected hostilities to break out between the two sides at any moment. An agent had warned him that a Vietnamese attack was imminent. But when the clock at the Yersin Hospital struck eight, he remarked to a colleague, “Apparently it’s not for tonight. I’m going home.” Just as Sainteny entered his car, he heard a muffled explosion, and the streets were immediately plunged into darkness. Sainteny hurried to his home and climbed into an armored car that General Morlière had dispatched to transport him to the Citadel. En route, however, the vehicle struck a mine, and Sainteny was badly wounded. For the next two hours, he lay bleeding on the street, surrounded by dead and dying comrades.77
According to their plan, the Vietnamese had opened their campaign with a surprise attack on the municipal power station. Then militia units launched assaults on French installations throughout the city, while terrorist squads roamed through the European section attacking civilians. Giap had three divisions of regular forces near the race course in the suburbs southwest of the city and beside Le Grand Lac (now West Lake), but he decided not to use them just yet.
The French were taken by surprise by the scale of the attacks, but by late evening French troops had begun to establish their control over the central portions of Hanoi. One French unit attacked the Northern Palace, and Ho Chi Minh was reportedly barely able to escape. The First Indochina War had begun.
The events that took place in Hanoi on December 19 aroused outrage in France, where many viewed it as an unprovoked Vietnamese attack on French installations and civilians in Indochina. But a closer look at the evidence suggests that the French role in precipitating the conflict was substantial. Although the government in Paris had been reluctant to take decisive measures that might have led to war, French representatives in Indochina took matters into their own hands. General Valluy’s decision to provoke a rupture was based at least partly on his assessment that Ho Chi Minh could not, or would not, take action to control radical elements in his government. If so, he calculated, war was inevitable and it was essential to act before French military capabilities in the region began to weaken. His ultimatum on December 17 demanding that the DRV turn over all security functions in the city to the French was obviously calculated to provoke a response.
Was Ho Chi Minh sincere in his effort to avoid conflict, or were his maneuvers designed simply to postpone the day of reckoning to enable Hanoi to make adequate preparations for a military struggle? It is not necessary to choose between these alternatives. As a disciple of the fourth-century Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, Ho was convinced that the best victory was the one that could be won without the use of military force. To obtain an objective without violence, among the most effective methods were (again according to Sun Tzu) the use of diplomacy and propaganda techniques to divide the enemy and reduce his capabilities. By December 19, Ho and his colleagues had concluded that further compromise was impossible. It had become necessary to decide the issue on the battlefield.78
XII | THE TIGER AND THE ELEPHANT
In his interview with the New York Times correspondent David Schoenbrun during the summer of 1946, Ho Chi Minh had warned that if full-scale conflict broke out between the Vietnamese and the French, the Vietminh would crouch in the jungle like a tiger and then come out of its lair at night to tear the French elephant to pieces. That, he said, is what would characterize the war of Indochina.
Ho was as good as his word. As the French engaged in mopping-up operations in Hanoi and other major industrial centers in northern and central Vietnam, the old revolutionary and his colleagues abandoned their temporary headquarters in the grottoes of Ha Dong province, a few miles south of the capital, and took refuge at their old mountain base area at Tan Trao, in the heart of the Viet Bac, where they prepared for a lengthy conflict. With the encouragement of Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese had appropriated elements of the Chinese model of people’s war into their own strategy as early as 1941. On December 22, only three days after the opening of hostilities in the capital, the Vietnamese government issued a public statement announcing that the coming conflict would take place in three stages. The announcement forecast a scenario straight out of the military doctrine of Mao Zedong. During the first stage, Vietnamese forces would remain on the defensive in order to build up their strength in their mountain redoubt; in the second, as the strength of the two sides became roughly equivalent, the revolutionary forces would begin to emerge from their lair for sudden attacks on exposed enemy installations; and the third phase would be a general offensive, when the Vietminh would launch the final assault to drive the enemy forces into the sea.1
Even as they withdrew, however, the Vietnamese sent a clear signal to the French that the struggle would be a bitter one. As government officials abandoned Hanoi and embarked on the route through the flatlands delta to the northwest, militia units remained entrenched in the narrow streets of the picturesque Chinese sector, home of more than thirty thousand residents of the city. Here they fiercely resisted French efforts to evict them. General Valluy proposed an aerial attack to wipe out the defenders, but Morlière opted instead for a street-by-street advance that would restore French control over the sector without incurring the risk of massive physical destruction. The operation was painstakingly slow and costly in terms of French casualties. Not until mid-January 1947 did French troops finally reach the market on the northern edge of the Chinese sector, while Vietminh units, accompanied by much of the local populace, abandoned the area and fled north across the Red River. Even as the troops left the city, Vietminh supporters scratched the words “We shall return” with charcoal or loose bricks on the walls of the old Citadel.2
In his account of the exodus, U.S. Consul O’Sullivan reported to Washington that the Vietnamese had fought with “unforeseen courage and stubbornness” reminiscent of the Japanese in the Pacific War. He estimated Vietnamese casualties in the hundreds. About one hundred French soldiers were listed as dead, and about forty-five European civilians lost their lives, with two hundred still missing. After clearing the suburbs, French troops began to move into the countryside, where they found that the Vietnamese had followed a scorched-earth approach to reduce the enemy’s access to provisions. In other parts of the country, Vietminh militia units waged a delaying action in urban areas, while main-force units scattered to base areas in the countryside.
But Ho Chi Minh was apparently not yet ready to give up the search for a peaceful settlement. On the very day of the beginning of hostilities, Vietminh tracts appeared on the streets of Hanoi, informing “the people of France” of the willingness of his government to live peacefully within the French Union and blaming the outbreak of war on “reactionary colonialists who dishonor the name of France and who seek to separate us in provoking war.” If France would only recognize Vietnamese independence and national unity, the tracts declared, an attitude of cooperation and mutual understanding between the two peoples could be immediately restored. The following day, Vietminh radio began to launch periodic appeals for a renewal of negotiations. On December 23, Ho wrote Marius Moutet, the minister of overseas territories, and General Henri Leclerc, proposing a meeting of representatives of the two sides. Moutet and Leclerc had just left Paris on a fact-finding mission to Indochina at the request of the new Blum government. A few days later, Ho formally proposed a cease-fire and the holding of a new peace conference in Paris within the framework of the Ho-Sainteny agreement of the previous March.3
But the
French were not quite so eager to bring the hostilities to a close. In an address to the National Assembly on December 23, Prime Minister Léon Blum echoed the rising spirit of patriotism that affected all political factions in France in the aftermath of the Vietnamese attack on Hanoi: “We have been faced,” he declared, “with the task of responding to violence. I declare that those who are fighting there, that French residents living in Indochina, and that friendly peoples can count without reserve on the vigilance and the resolution of the government.” In closing, Blum left the door open to a peaceful settlement, affirming that once order had been restored, he would act “to take up again with loyalty the interrupted task, that is to say the organization of a free Vietnam in an Indochinese Union freely associated with the French Union. First of all, however, order must be restored.”4
Marius Moutet was described by the French newspaper Le Populaire as “a messenger for peace.” But although Moutet was well-known as a sympathetic observer of the Vietnamese struggle for independence, he too shared the common sense of French outrage at the surprise attack in Hanoi. Shortly after his arrival in Saigon on Christmas Day, he declared to the press that “before any negotiations, it is necessary today to achieve a military decision. I regret it, but one cannot commit with impunity such follies as those committed by the Vietminh.” To press home his point, Moutet made no effort to contact his old socialist colleague Ho Chi Minh prior to his return to France in early January and spent much of his time in discussions with French officials in Laos and Cambodia. For his part, Ho Chi Minh had sent Moutet a letter on January 3 with a set of proposals for instituting a cease-fire based on antebellum conditions and a resumption of negotiations, but the package was seized by French colonial authorities before it reached the Minister and was returned.5
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