As Party strategists had concluded in the spring of 1949, one of the crucial prerequisites for a successful general offensive was to open up the border region to Vietminh control, thus enabling revolutionary forces to obtain easy access to material support from China. General Blaizot had already made Giap’s task easier by calling for a French withdrawal from exposed locations along the border north of Lang Son, while basing future strategy on control of the region from Lang Son to the Tonkin Gulf. In the summer of 1950, however, Blaizot’s plan had not yet been formally implemented, and a series of isolated French border posts was strung out along Route 4 from the coast at Mong Cai to the district capital of Cao Bang.
The French would soon have reason to regret their delay. In April 1949, Party leaders had first decided to focus their primary attention on the western portion of the frontier, where the French military presence was negligible. In July 1950, however, the Party Standing Committee decided to shift its focus to the eastern sector, which was more accessible to the Red River delta and to major transportation routes into China. As Ho remarked to his colleagues at the time, it was “easy to defend during a withdrawal, easy to attack during an offensive.” Vo Nguyen Giap was put in charge of commanding the offensive, and General Chen Geng, a widely respected troubleshooter for PLA military operations during the Chinese Civil War, was ordered to travel to the Viet Bac to help Vietminh leaders plan the campaign. When Giap visited Ho Chi Minh, now settled once again at his old revolutionary base at Tan Trao, Ho alluded to the importance of victory. “The coming campaign,” he said, “is extremely important. We must not lose!” Ho promised to travel to the frontier to observe the campaign in person. General Chen Geng was invited to accompany him.45
In mid-September, Vietminh units launched a series of sharp attacks on exposed French installations throughout the border region. When the French post at Dong Khe was attacked by eight thousand Vietminh troops, French intelligence sources reported ominously that the enemy now possessed bazookas, mortars, and recoilless rifles, and was able to concentrate its forces at regimental strength for the first time. Caught by surprise at the intensity of the attack, the French were thrown into disarray, and the retreating forces left behind hundreds of dead and wounded, as well as more than ten thousand tons of ammunition. A French reserve force sent north from Cao Bang to rescue their beleaguered comrades was likewise decimated. General Marcel Carpentier, commander of French troops in the region, suddenly ordered the abandonment of all other posts on the frontier, except for the coastal town of Mong Cai.
In Hanoi, High Commissioner Léon Pignon was growing increasingly skeptical of General Carpentier’s judgment (Carpentier’s attitude, remarked Pignon to a U.S. diplomat, was “so passive and defensive … that his qualifications for supreme military leadership must be questioned”), and at the end of the year the general was replaced.46 But the change in command took place too late. By the end of the border campaign in late October, the offensive had opened up a vast area north of the Red River delta to virtually total Vietminh domination. Panicky French officials ordered the evacuation of French dependents from Hanoi, and warned Paris that more than half the population of the city now sympathized with the Vietminh. With the border region under enemy control, the French could no longer delude themselves that there was any possibility of a total victory in the war.
The sense of panic over the military situation was not limited to the French. Donald Heath, who had just arrived in Saigon as chief U.S. envoy to the Associated State, warned that the situation in Tonkin was perilous. The entire northern region, except for the Hanoi-Haiphong corridor, must be written off, he reported, even in the absence of Chinese intervention, which he described as not unlikely. As for the new Vietnamese government in Saigon under Chief of State Bao Dai, Heath declared that it possessed neither dynamism not the confidence of public opinion. Bao Dai himself lacked both energy and the know-how of leadership. The U.S. military attaché, however, weighed in with a note of sobriety, predicting that there would be no Chinese invasion unless the Vietminh met with serious reverses.47
Chinese advisers were intimately involved in the planning and execution of the border offensive, a role that would become subject to controversy between the two allies following the end of the Vietnam War. Vietnamese sources credit Vo Nguyen Giap and other Vietminh military strategists with coordinating the campaign. According to Hoang Van Hoan, however, it was General Chen Geng who counseled Ho Chi Minh to open the attack on Dong Khe rather than on Cao Bang, a strongpoint that was heavily defended by the French. Cao Bang, Chen reportedly advised the Vietnamese, should be placed under siege and occupied later. Ho Chi Minh agreed with the advice, and took charge of the campaign from a command post in the mountains above the town. With his consent, Chinese advisers were placed in all Vietminh units at battalion level and above. That claim has recently been countered by General Vo Nguyen Giap himself, who insists that he had reached the decision to attack Dong Khe rather than Cao Bang independently, and that both Ho Chi Minh and Chen Geng had given their approval to the plan.
Whatever the truth of the debate, after the campaign was over, Chen Geng returned to China and was assigned to command PLA units operating in Korea. Before his departure from the Viet Bac, he sent detailed criticisms of Vietminh battlefield performance to his superiors in China. As Chen reported to his Chinese superiors, Vietminh troops lacked discipline and battlefield experience and were not ready to engage in major operations, while their commanders did not have sufficient concern for the welfare of their troops and were reluctant to report bad news to their superiors.48
Vietminh strategists were pleased at the success of the 1950 border campaign (Ho Chi Minh reportedly said that it had been a greater triumph than he had expected), a result that encouraged some of them to argue that it could be used as a launching pad for the long anticipated general offensive in the heart of the Red River delta. Although some Party leaders remained skeptical that revolutionary forces were prepared for a major confrontation with the enemy (Ho himself advised one of his headstrong commanders that a major offensive, like a woman’s pregnancy, must await its proper time), a consensus emerged that in the more favorable conditions brought about by the successful border attack, a new offensive to bring about total victory had a reasonable chance for success. During the final two months of 1950, Vietminh planners, with the concurrence of their Chinese advisers, put their final touches on plans for the next year’s campaign. At a joint conference held in December, Chinese representatives agreed to supply sufficient equipment to enable the Vietminh to reorganize their forces into larger units capable of carrying on a war of movement against their adversaries.
Giap’s plan was to strike successively at three separate locations on the fringes of the Red River delta: at Vinh Yen, the market town northwest of the capital, just south of the forbidding Tam Dao Mountain; at Mao Khe, on the eastern edge of the delta not far from Haiphong; and finally at various points on the Day River directly south of Hanoi. If these localized attacks at exposed points in the French defenses should be successful, the next stage could begin, a major offensive to open up the route to the capital region. Vietminh Radio optimistically predicted that President Ho would be in Hanoi for the Têt holidays. If Party strategists were correct in their optimistic predictions, the end of the war was near.49
XIII | A PLACE CALLED DIEN BIEN PHU
The prediction that Ho Chi Minh would celebrate the Têt New Year’s holiday of 1951 in Hanoi was premature. Although the early stage of the Vietminh offensive started out in a promising manner—with Vietminh units rushing out from the jungles at the foot of Tam Dao Mountain in a Chinese-style “human wave” offensive against enemy positions in Vinh Yen—their commanders had underestimated the determination of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, who had just arrived on December 19, 1950, as the new high commissioner and commander in chief of French Expeditionary Forces (FEF) in Indochina. De Lattre proved himself to be a worthy adversary for Vo Nguyen Giap. A war h
ero and a man of supreme self-confidence and military bearing, de Lattre immediately took action to shore up the French position. To bolster morale, he canceled his predecessor’s order to evacuate dependents from the city of Hanoi. To blunt the Vietminh offensive, he brought in the strategic reserves from elsewhere in the country, while ordering French aircraft to use a shipment of napalm bombs recently received from the United States.
The results were stunning. Vietminh troops, who had never before encountered the effects of the burning gas, fled in disorder, and the town of Vinh Yen remained under French authority. As one member of the attacking force later wrote:
Our division had attacked since the morning. From a distance three hirondelles [swallows] grow larger. They are airplanes. They dive, and hell opens before my eyes. Hell in the form of a large egg container falling from the first plane, then a second, which lands to my right.... An intense flame which seems to spread for hundreds of meters, sows terror in the ranks of the fighters. It is napalm, the fire which falls from the sky.
Another plane approaches and spews more fire. The bomb falls behind us and I feel its fiery breath which passes over my entire body. Men flee, and I can no longer restrain them. There is no way to live under that torrent of fire which runs and burns all in its route.1
According to a U.S. intelligence report, the Vietminh forces suffered 3,500 to 4,000 casualties out of a total attacking force of 10,000. French losses were listed as 400 killed and 1,200 wounded. The later stages of the offensive at Mao Khe and on the Day River proved even less successful for the Vietminh troops, and eventually after suffering high casualties, they withdrew into the mountains. With the threat to Hanoi now at least temporarily relieved, de Lattre confessed that his decision to cancel the evacuation order had been just “whistling in the dark” and a grandstand play to restore public confidence.2
Far from opening the road to Hanoi, the general offensive had been a bruising setback for Vietminh forces, and an especially humiliating personal defeat for Ho Chi Minh’s prize war strategist Vo Nguyen Giap. During the next few weeks, the high command began to rethink its approach. At a meeting of senior Party leaders held in mid-April, Ho Chi Minh called for a bout of self-criticism to learn from recent experience and prepare for the next battle. A broadcast by Vietminh Radio in May remarked that major military attacks should be launched only when victory was certain. Official sources stopped using the slogan “Prepare for the shift to the general offensive” and began to emphasize the importance of protracted war. In his writings and speeches throughout the remainder of 1951, Ho made the same point indirectly, alluding to the crucial importance of guerrilla techniques in carrying out a long-term struggle against the enemy. Chinese advisers extricated themselves from possible responsibility for the debacle by reporting to their superiors (after the fact) that Vietminh troops lacked the necessary experience to carry out such an ambitious military campaign. They too counseled a return to guerrilla war. Giap himself performed a mea culpa, conceding that it had been a mistake to confront better-armed French troops in a conventional battle with his still inexperienced forces, who sometimes failed to exhibit the required amount of aggressiveness and determination.3
While China’s influence on Vietminh war strategy became increasingly apparent after 1950, its impact was equally visible in changes that were taking place in Vietminh internal policy. Beginning in mid-1950, Chinese cadres clad in Mao suits and spouting Chinese revolutionary slogans began to arrive in large numbers to advise their Vietnamese comrades on all aspects of administration and correct behavior. Prior to their departure from China, Liu Shaoqi had carefully instructed members of the advisory team not to force Chinese techniques on their hosts, but some ignored that counsel, arousing sharp resentment among rank-and-file Vietnamese officials and cadres, long sensitive to the condescending attitudes of their cousins to the north.
For many Vietnamese, the most onerous manifestation of growing Chinese influence was the establishment of an ideological training program for Party members. In conformity with Maoist theory, the goal of the program was to encourage the ideological reeducation of Party members, but it often degenerated into humiliation and punishment and was frequently marked by bitter class conflict, as cadres from poorer backgrounds exacted their revenge on colleagues from elite families. According to accounts by participants, the tactic of self-criticism that lay at the heart of the program terrorized many Vietminh cadres, most of whom had read few Marxist-Leninist writings and whose motives for joining the movement were often more patriotic than ideological.
The results of such ideological training were sometimes tragic. According to Georges Boudarel, a French Communist who served with a Vietminh unit in the early 1950s, some tortured souls had their razors confiscated in an effort to prevent them from attempting to commit suicide; the lights in the barracks at some training camps were left on at night, presumably for the same reason. Vietnamese political commissars were assigned to all units in the army to watch over the ideological motivation of the troops. In the event of a disagreement between a political commissar and the commanding officer of a unit, the former had the final say.4
Boudarel notes that such policies had a double negative effect. In the short run, they drove many patriotic intellectuals out of the movement and ruptured the solidarity that had previously existed between moderates and radicals within the Party. In the long term, the consequences were equally pernicious, as the fear of criticism and reprisal stifled the creativity of writers and artists. French intelligence sources obtained numerous captured documents that reported friction between Vietnamese cadres and their Chinese advisers; deserters from the Vietminh often cited excessive Maoist influence as a reason for their decision to leave the movement. Even Vietminh supporters who accepted the need for Chinese strategic advice sometimes balked at the virtual takeover of Vietnamese units by their foreign advisers. Defectors reported that a number of senior- and middle-level Vietminh officials had been purged as the result of Chinese pressure. According to French sources, it may have been as a result of Chinese pressure that Nguyen Binh, commander of Vietminh forces in the south and an alleged critic of growing Chinese influence in the movement, was relieved of his position in September 1951 and ordered north to undergo “orientation.” Official DRV sources declare that he was killed in a skirmish with Cambodian royal troops while en route to the Viet Bac; unconfirmed reports said that he had been traveling under arrest and “happily met predestined death in combat rather than execution.”5
Chinese influence also began to extend into rural villages, where the DRV gradually introduced more stringent land reform regulations that focused on eliminating the economic and political influence of the landlord class at the village level. Since the outbreak of war in December 1946, the government’s land policy had reflected Ho Chi Minh’s decision to assign priority to the anti-imperialist struggle over the antifeudal revolution. The program therefore called for reduced land rents, but limited the confiscation of farmlands to the holdings of French citizens and Vietnamese collaborators with the Bao Dai regime. The land of patriotic landlords and rich peasants had not been seized, in the interest of enlisting their support for the movement.
By the early 1950s, however, there was growing criticism from militants that many of the provisions of the program were being widely ignored at the local level, where many landlords successfully evaded rent reduction regulations. Party leaders like Truong Chinh now contended that by failing to mobilize the fervent support of poorer elements in the countryside, the program was not adequately serving the interests of the revolution. Chinese advisers, fresh from their own experience with the more stringent land reform program still under way in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), began to urge Vietnamese cadres to confront “feudal” elements in the countryside more directly. As a result, regulations calling for rent reductions and limitations on the participation of landlords in village councils began to be enforced more stringently.
The most significant
event that underscored the government’s decisive shift to the left occurred in mid-February 1951, when the Party held its Second National Congress—the first to be held since the conference at Macao in March 1935—at a secret location in Tuyen Quang province, deep in the heart of the Viet Bac. A total of 200 delegates, representing about half a million members, were in attendance.
There were persuasive reasons for holding a congress. In the first place, despite its formal abolition in November 1945, the ICP had grown rapidly during the late 1940s and many of its members—the vast majority of whom were peasants or petty bourgeois in origin—had little ideological training. Many cadres were infected with what Party documents labeled as “feudal attitudes” (comprising such alleged social ills as religious beliefs and superstitions, putting on airs, and male chauvinism), a “guerrilla mentality” (implying an attitude of secretiveness and a suspicion of outsiders), and a low level of political awareness. In his report to congress delegates, General Secretary Truong Chinh declared that it was crucially important to combat the high incidence of individualism, arrogance, bureaucratic attitudes and practices, and corruption and loose morals among Party members. Only a publicly visible and highly disciplined Communist Party, he insisted, could play an active role in combating such ills and play the vanguard role in guiding the Vietnamese revolution.
Ho Chi Minh Page 61
