Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  The dominant strategic view was expressed as early as February 1944 by the Foreign Office mandarin Alexander Cadogan, who wrote: ‘Any such attempt to abrogate French rule in Indochina cannot fail to react on the position of other nations holding possessions in the Far East, e.g., the Dutch and ourselves.’54 Some years later another British official warned that ‘the frontiers of Malaya are on the Mekong’ because, like the Japanese, the Communists might use Vietnam as a launch pad for the conquest of the rest of South-east Asia. Since the British were aware of their own economic limitations, they insisted that the US remain a member of Mountbatten’s SEAC command, despite US attempts to withdraw in late 1945, and thereafter did their best to drag a reluctant US into Indochina. That reluctance stemmed from the US perception that the line must be held at Japan, Formosa, the Philippines and Indonesia. In due course the British got their wish as the US formally recognized Bao Dai’s puppet government – something the British blithely forgot but the Americans coldly remembered when Britain later refused to participate in what became America’s long war in South-east Asia.

  Loser Twice Over

  Considering its abject collapse in 1940, France made an impressive post-war recovery, whether in terms of regaining great-power status, a goal on which most Frenchmen could agree, or fitting its economy for rapid growth through judicious planning, modernization and nationalization of the major banks and key industries. Part of that recovery involved the restoration of an overseas empire, for ‘La France n’est rien sans ses colonies.’

  Wartime and post-war relations between France and the US were extremely fraught. Backed by Churchill in the teeth of Roosevelt’s intense hostility, the relatively obscure Charles de Gaulle had made himself the only plausible representative of France in Allied councils. Devoid of Gallic charm, de Gaulle used hauteur and stunning ingratitude to play a weak military hand exceptionally well, gaining a French-occupied zone in Germany and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, not to speak of large tranches of US economic aid and covert CIA funding for what would be his personal political party. His government swiftly neutered the grassroots activism of the wartime resistance which gave birth to a leftist mythology about the Liberation in 1944 as a revolutionary moment betrayed.55

  Post-war France was torn by labour unrest and economic problems. Coal production in 1946 was a third of what it had been in 1938, itself not an outstanding year for the industry. Nineteen-forty-seven was a nadir in terms of food supplies, when in June the government cut the bread ration from eight and a half ounces to five per day. A very powerful Communist Party, which enjoyed the support of a quarter of the adult population, including the intellectual herd, repeatedly plunged the nation into industrial strife, at the loss of two million working days in 1947, with some violent strikes repressed with gunfire.56

  If the Communists were one destabilizing force on the left wing of the French political spectrum, the Gaullists performed an analogous role on the right, with the major caveat that they did not take their marching orders from an alien power. Indeed most of them despised the gum-chewing and informal Americans. Like Churchill, de Gaulle lost political power soon after the war, when he dramatically resigned as prime minister of the tripartite provisional government in January 1946, flouncing out after the Socialists insisted on defence cuts. Behind that issue was a more fundamental disagreement about the relative powers of a democratic assembly dominated by political parties, each ‘cooking its little soup, on its little fire in its little corner’, as he contemptuously described it. De Gaulle’s authoritarian vision was of a strong presidential executive soaring above a bicameral legislature. ‘A military man can never adapt himself completely to the business of politics,’ said the diplomat Jacques Dumaine.57

  After he retreated to Colombey-les Deux-Eglises in Lorraine, there ensued twenty-one governments in the years 1946–55, one managing to last fifteen months, while another only existed for hours. These were usually coalitions, involving the Socialists, Radicals and Progressive Catholics as the nuclear elements.58 Both the Communists, dismissed from government in May 1947, and the movement de Gaulle himself founded in April 1947 (the Rassemblement du Peuple Français, or RPF) played a spoiling role by seeking to overturn the Fourth Republic’s constitution. The Stalinist Communists banked on their (inflated) wartime resistance record – the party of the 70,000 dead – while de Gaulle’s appeal was that ‘he is not like the others’.59

  France still retained an overseas empire second only in scale to that of Britain. Indochina alone was much larger than metropolitan France, though we are accustomed to think of it as small because of the war with the mighty US. In January 1944, de Gaulle had convened a conference at Brazzaville in the French Congo, where promises of administrative reform were coupled with refusal even to contemplate independence. As the provisional Colonial Minister René Pleven said: ‘[France] refuses all idea of autonomy, all possibility of an evolution outside the French bloc of empire; the eventual, even distant establishment of self-government is rejected.’60 Parallel with the British substitution of Commonwealth for empire, the French dropped the term empire in favour of the federalist concept of the French Union. This included the pre- and post-Revolution colonies, not least Algeria, but excluded the protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia. The French President was president of the Union, and French politicians were generously represented on both the Supreme Council and in the Assembly of that entity. As school textbooks explained: ‘European France is a medium-sized power, with overseas France she is a great power, the French Union.’61 Although France would fight two terrible colonial wars in Algeria and Indochina, it is worth noting that it also managed the decolonization of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa with as much skill as the British did in West Africa, although bluntly linking continued close association with future aid.

  As we have seen, in Indochina the French piggybacked to precarious power on British Indian Army troops and their rearmed Japanese prisoners. The withdrawal of Chinese forces by the hard-pressed Chiang Kai-shek enabled General Leclerc to get a grip on the north by using a nuanced form of counter-insurgency warfare whose objects were the hearts and minds of the population. De Gaulle’s resignation inclined Ho Chi Minh to believe that a political settlement might be possible and he concluded a ceasefire in March 1946. Leclerc acknowledged at the time that ‘since we do not have the means to break Vietnamese nationalism by force, France should try by every possible means to align her interests with those of Vietnam’.

  Unfortunately Leclerc’s realistic appreciation of French possibilities was trumped by the fanatical High Commissioner d’Argenlieu, who compared Leclerc’s dealings with Ho and his Defence Minister Giap with Chamberlain’s and Daladier’s meeting with Hitler at Munich in 1938, an analogy which ensured Leclerc’s abrupt recall to France. It is hard to say whether there was ever a possibility that an independent (Communist) Vietnam might remain within the French Union, but if there was the opportunity was lost, and in purely military terms Leclerc’s successors, Generals Jean-Etienne Valluy, Roger Blaizot and Marcel Carpentier, were not of his calibre.

  Ironically the tripartite French government that replaced de Gaulle pursued a more implacable line, despite the Minister for Overseas Territories being the Socialist Marius Moutet, who might have been expected to view Ho more favourably. The French Communists were also initially opposed to Vietnamese independence, fearful of losing the patriotic vote and dreaming of a Communist Vietnam within a Communist French Union. In early 1947, on orders from Moscow, the Communists left the French government over defence appropriations, weakening the remaining Socialist component vis-à-vis their Progressive Catholic (Mouvement Républicain Populaire, or MRP) coalition partners. In opposition the Communists became vociferous opponents of the ‘dirty war’. The ruling coalition tilted to the centre right as strikes and riots disrupted France throughout late 1947. In November the MRP’s former War Minister, Paul Coste-Floret, replaced Moutet as colo
nial minister. History virtually locked him into a losing position since he claimed that withdrawal from Indochina would be tantamount to another 1940. While French troops vainly battled the Viet Minh in terrain ideally suited to guerrilla warfare, Coste-Floret sought to build Bao Dai into a national figure. An agreement was eventually reached in 1949, which left Bao Dai as the nominal ruler of an ‘independent’ Vietnam within the French Union, although France retained control of the country’s defence and foreign affairs.

  At home the Indochina war became progressively more unpopular. In the summer of 1947, 37 per cent of French people favoured continuing the conflict, with a similar percentage wanting negotiations with the Viet Minh. Two years later those favouring the war had fallen to 19 per cent, with nearly 50 per cent advocating complete withdrawal. As the domestic will to win collapsed, so did the morale of the troops in the field. This was despite the fact that they were overwhelmingly regular soldiers, including paratroopers, Foreign Legionnaires and North African and Senegalese tirailleurs, for only volunteers were sent to Indochina. Their numbers rose from the 60,000 commanded by Leclerc in 1946, to 100,000 under Valluy, and then 150,000 when Carpentier was in charge, still too few to do the many things the French attempted.

  Events in China in 1949 also had an adverse impact on the French position. Defeated KMT troops who fled over the southern border usually sold their weapons to the Viet Minh, while once Mao had taken charge southern China became a useful bolt-hole for Viet Minh guerrillas operating in northern Tonkin. In July 1950, the Chinese sent military advisers and opened training camps south of their border, by which time the Viet Minh had 20,000 regulars of their own, organized in divisions and battalions. Whatever villages the French army appeared to control by day were usually forfeited during the night, as Viet Minh cadres slipped in to reimpose their iron brand of discipline. The French gradually lost their nerve in isolated bases that were subject to constant nocturnal attack, consoling themselves with drugs, whores and copious amounts of beer and wine while in the front line, and more of the same along with frenzied gambling when on local leave.

  By contrast the Viet Minh subsisted on rice, with rat meat considered a delicacy, and their free time was occupied with political indoctrination sessions. Ruthless internal discipline was accompanied by the torture and assassination of real, potential or putative collaborators. Systematic brutality occurred in a context where every civilian, regardless of age or sex, was potentially an enemy fighter. The conduct of this ‘dirty war’ in which only French brutalities were publicized by the French press further undermined domestic support among liberal-minded people. Left-wing celebrities from Picasso to Jean-Paul Sartre did their best to subvert the war effort.62

  Algerian nationalists closely followed the course of the war in Indochina. In the wake of Sétif, French reforms were modestly cosmetic. An Algerian assembly was established to deal with local questions. Dominated by colon members of the right-wing Union Algérienne, the Assembly exercised a veto over any reforms initiated by Paris, which required a two-thirds local majority to be passed. Such arrangements meant that the more liberal assimilationist Muslim alternative represented by Ferhat Abbas lost ground to the more extreme nationalism of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). By the late 1940s the FLN had taken their struggle underground, with their own regionally based structures to collect funds and to administer (rough) justice, and the beginnings of an army called the Organisation Spéciale (OS). In the Kabyle region this consisted of 500 men under a formidable commander called Belkacem Krim.

  Other members of the OS would go on to lead the FLN, whether based in Cairo after fleeing French captivity like the decorated war veterans Ahmed Ben Bella, Mohammed Khider and Hocine Ait Ahmed, or like Mostafa Ben Boulaid, Larbi Ben M’hidi, Rabah Bitat, Mourad Didouche and Krim himself within Algeria. These were physically tough and implacable men, with an average age of thirty-two at the time.63 Algeria was on the brink of a protracted war, whose outbreak required events in Indochina to take a further turn, with the French bowing out and the US coming in.

  That would require a significant dilution of the hostility towards European colonialism that lay at the heart of the founding myth of the United States. The rapidly growing perception that colonies were essential to the ability of weakened European states to resist Soviet expansionism – an argument also applied to the future immunity to Communism of a democratic Japan – meant that criticism of imperialism would become little more than a muted grumble under Truman, before reviving with a vengeance in the era of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles.

  5. ‘POLICE ACTION’: KOREA

  The Master’s Last Throw

  The US and the Soviets only once fought directly and openly during the Cold War, save for a few aerial clashes on the inner German border, when Soviet MiG-15 jets clashed with US F-86 Sabres over North Korea and the Manchurian borderlands. But the Korean War could have led to a far greater clash between the superpowers, for the US might have used atom bombs to take the war to China, activating China’s mutual defence alliance with the Soviet Union.

  The fuse for the Korean War was lit between 4 March and 7 April 1949, when the North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung visited Moscow, cap in hand, after the failure of North Korea’s first two-year economic plan. The North had only half the population of South Korea, and was losing people in droves.1 During these talks, after Stalin had casually inquired, ‘How’s it going, Comrade Kim?’, the Korean replied that ‘the southerners are making trouble all the time. They are violating the border; there are continuous small clashes.’ Of course he was doing the same; both sides had mounted cross-border incursions, using up to 1,500 troops at a time. Stalin was outraged on Kim’s behalf: ‘What are you talking about? Are you short of arms? We shall give them to you. You must strike the southerners in the teeth. Strike them, strike them.’2

  But while Stalin encouraged the thirty-seven-year-old Kim to strike hard, the US warned the aged Syngman Rhee that it would not come to his aid unless the North attacked in strength. Stalin provided Kim’s forces with heavy weapons and fighter aircraft; the US denied such arms to Rhee, whose forces had only a week’s supply of ammunition. The disparity in armaments was an opportunity not to be missed. In the first half of 1950 Kim persistently lobbied Stalin to green-light a North Korean onslaught. He claimed that his well-equipped army of 100,000, called the In Min Gun, would destroy Rhee’s 60,000-strong Republic of Korea (ROK) force. In a boast to a French Stalinist journalist after his invasion was under way, Kim claimed to have predicted that he would celebrate the liberation of Korea in Seoul by the end of August 1950.

  The North Korean leader knew how to play on Stalin’s sensitivities as paramount leader of the world Communist movement. In January 1950 Kim entertained Terentii Shtykov, the Soviet Ambassador, to a well-lubricated lunch during which he casually remarked that ‘Mao Zedong is his friend and will always help Korea,’ words which were relayed back to Stalin.3 The victory of the Chinese Communists in December 1949, and Mao’s oft-repeated desire to foment revolution throughout East Asia, suggested to Stalin that he might be able to sanction Kim’s war plans while shifting the burden of dealing with any negative consequences on to Mao. However, it seemed most unlikely that the US would intervene in Korea, a view indirectly confirmed on 12 January 1950, when Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in unscripted and unwise remarks to the Press Club, publicly excluded Korea and Taiwan from the US defence perimeter in Asia.

  That was also the considered view of the US Chiefs of Staff, Eisenhower, Nimitz and Spaatz, who in 1949 got their way in withdrawing the majority of US troops from South Korea. The newly established CIA predicted that a North Korean invasion was unthinkable. Lastly General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of Allied forces in the Pacific and de facto Shogun of Japan, was uninterested in Korea, which he regarded as a satrapy of the hated State Department. The feeling was mutual, as Acheson was outraged when MacArthur halved the number of occupation troops i
n Japan without even consulting the State Department.4

  Although it seemed that the US cared little for South Korea’s fate, the earlier loss of China to the Communists and the Soviet testing of an atom bomb in August 1949 prompted a thoroughgoing restatement of US policy in a document known as NSC 68. Written in early 1950 by a committee chaired by the former banker Paul Nitze, this sought to calibrate foreign and defence policy at a time when the administration was trying to reconcile increased Soviet threats with defence expenditure cuts, to be achieved by what many regarded as an over-reliance on nuclear weapons. NSC 68 was a powerful attempt, largely on Acheson’s part, to concentrate minds on the huge disparity (approximately thirty Soviet to seven US divisions) in conventional forces.

  As George Kennan might have argued, had he been invited to this party, this was to conflate capabilities with intentions, for the policy document was strong on alarmist statistics of Soviet military power but weak on what Stalin intended. The strength of the Soviet air force was extrapolated from the floor space of aircraft hangars and factories; ominous numbers of divisions were counted without regard to their actual operational strength, leading to an overestimate of overall Soviet troop numbers by around two million. The fact that the Soviets had torn up the railway lines linking Germany to Russia went unmentioned, as did their lack of a transcontinental strategic bomber force, the biggest gap in their arsenal. The policy document recommended that the US must not only have the capacity to deter a Soviet nuclear attack but also the wherewithal to fight non-nuclear wars in a flexible manner.5